Telling the climate story with Adam McKay and Omar El Akkad: podcast and transcript

Y’all — this is a good one. Trust us. It’ll make you laugh, it’ll make you reflect, it’ll inspire… it might even give you that special WITHpod brand of existential crisis. Our second stop of the fall tour brought Chris Hayes to the stunning Theatre at the Ace Hotel with screenwriter and director Adam Mckay along with debut novelist Omar El Akkad.

The question at hand — how can we use art and pop culture to properly convey the urgency of the climate crisis? How can storytelling break through the noise and get to the beating heart of the collective struggle our planet is in? And how will future generations think about the way we are meeting this moment? Like we said, maybe a teensy existential crisis. But we promise, you’ll laugh a lot too.

ADAM MCKAY: I’ve actually had conversations with and gotten to know a lot of the climate scientists like Michael Mann and McKibben, Bill McKibben, and the one question I always ask them: Is it possible we’re so far outside the zone of what we know is going to happen or so far outside the zone of known science that there is a trigger moment with all of this and one day we do wake up and there are seagulls flying across the sky and everything is tipped? And every one of them says yes and that’s the scariest thing I’ve ever, ever heard.

CHRIS HAYES: Hello and welcome to “Why Is This Happening,” with me your host, Chris Hayes. We’ve got a special one today. I’m here in the studio in New York and I am very excited to present today’s live WITHPod from Los Angeles. It’s the second date on our fall WITHPod tour, the first one with Ted Cruz in Texas. This was live in Los Angeles at this incredible venue called the The Theater at Ace Hotel, which is part of downtown Los Angeles where there were a bunch of old movie theaters from the kind of like glory days of the cinema and I think a lot of them have sort of fallen into disuse. Some of them had been refurbished.

This is one of those, so if you can imagine just like you know one of those old style movie theaters with like an ornate facade and a big billboard outside and like these big plush red seats and there were a thousand people in the room and it was just an incredible atmosphere. Honestly. Like we’re all still kind of reeling from how great it was. And I will confess to you, WITHPod listener, I did not quite know how this was going to gonna go. The guests were Adam McKay, who I know pretty well, who’s an incredible guy, writer and director. He did “Anchorman,” “Talladega Nights,” “The Big Short,” “Vice.” He’s working on a few climate-related projects now and this novelist named Omar El Akkad, who is a really fascinating dude who I had not spoken to ever when I went to meet him backstage before the event, like we booked him because I loved his book. We booked Adam. Those two guys didn’t know each other at all. I didn’t know how this three way conversation was going to go. I didn’t know what it was going to be like in the temperature of the room. All these people would come out from Los Angeles and paid money to come see this and I wanted to put on a good show for them and I wanted to be engaging and moving and funny and I was just a little worried beforehand that it would come off and it did.

I think as you’ll hear, it was great, great conversation. I learned so much from it. I had a great time. I think the people there had a great time. Consider this an advertisement. If we’re coming to your town to come to one of our events and we have one coming up in Chicago that’s sold out, but we’ve just released a few more tickets, which I will talk about at the end of this episode, so I’m not gonna give too much setup here. You can hear I do a long intro monologue because I came out in the stage for a thousand people and because I’m a ham I probably could’ve gone 45 minutes. I went about nine, it was a long nine but I was sort of soaking it up and without further ado, please enjoy me and Adam McKay and Omar El Akkad in Los Angeles.

What’s up Los Angeles! Man, this is a trip. Now, I’m wishing I had like a tight 30 stand-up to give you guys. It’s so wonderful to see all you people here tonight. Thank you for coming out. Thank you! That is very kind. I love you right back. So I get asked a lot recently about, in fact Adam McKay and I were just talking backstage about like, well how do you keep up with all this? How do you keep up with everything that’s going on? And I always feel like I have bad answers cause I always feel like I’m failing, that I’m not — I’m not keeping up, that things are getting past me, that we’re falling down on the job, that there are such as sheer magnitude of things that require our moral attention and I can’t possibly in the time I have as a living human being or as the host of a television show and also a podcast possibly divert and attend to all of the things that I need to morally pay attention to and put other people’s attention to.

I got kids too, man. I got three kids, who are just phenomenal. I’m biased, but they are great. And I came across this quote that has been resonating with me. Ava DuVernay actually just posted it recently, but I just found it and it’s a Samuel Beckett quote and Beckett is a great intellectual, spiritual, moral hero of mine. And Beckett said in an interview in 1961, he said, “To find a form that can accommodate the mess, that is the task of the artists right now. To find a form that could accommodate the mess. That is the task of the artist right now.” And I’ve been thinking about that quote a lot because it has a deep resonance for me and in Beckett’s own personal life.

I don’t know how much you know about the biography of Samuel Beckett, but here we go, a quick 60 seconds on it. Beckett is this experimental writer and he doesn’t have a huge amount of success. He writes these novels, he’s friends with James Joyce. World War II happens. He joins the resistance. He is chased by the Gestapo. He flees from Paris into a town where he holds arms. He is a righteous, righteous courier in the battle against fascism. He emerges from the war and he has a kind of moment of inspiration in his mother’s room in Dublin where he realizes that he has to break out of the forms that he’s received and write something new that captures the mess in some ways. That can accommodate the mess. And he writes “Waiting For Godot.” Well first he writes “Krapp’s Last Tape.” Yes, “Waiting For Godot.” Woo! The classic applause line.

And he writes “Krapp’s Last Tape” and he writes “Happy Days.” And anyway, the reason I say all this is because Beckett, like so many artists and intellectuals of both Europe and the U.S. and in the West and the 20th century were completely formed by the war and by the wars. When you think about the literary canon that emerges in the 20th century, when you think about the pop cultural representations in art and in music and in literature, like the bloodshed that soaks the continent twice within 40 years defines so much of how people are struggling with answering the most elemental questions that are asked to us about who we are and why we are here and what it is our purpose to do. And you can’t but wrestle with that and the legacy of it, even if you aren’t writing about the war, “Waiting For Godot” isn’t about the Great War, but it’s about peering into something dark and wondering what’s out there, and when salvation will come. And that orders and structures so much of the representation and so much of the art that gets produced in the 20th century. And I’ve been thinking about that a lot because we’re constantly searching these days for the right analog for climate change, for the climate crisis.

What do we point to? What is a civilizational challenge that we have met on the scale of what is bearing down on all of us right now as the fires burn just a few miles from here? What do we point to as a touchstone? What do we point to as a precedent for the kind of thing that we’re gonna have to deal with, not just at the level of I cover it on my TV show, we vote on it as citizens, but I mean like at the level of what does it mean to be a human on this earth? What are we called to do collectively? What does it mean to be a human in love on a planet that’s burning or a human in an argument on a planet that is burning or a human who’s been betrayed or a human who is accreting with other humans in some sort of collective struggle against the vastness of this thing that we have done to the planet? And what I feel is that the only precedent we can find is war, analogs and precedents of war. But we don’t want to think about this as war, right? Yes, we don’t? You’re like, no, we love martial metaphors.

Well, that’s a good question. Why not? Well, because, no, that’s a good question. This is not gonna be interactive, by the way, lest anyone get too many ideas here, but why not, right? Because the problem presented as war presents solutions that can’t help but be bound by that metaphor. We’re trying to do the same thing. We all are on the same side and the thing we’re trying to do is to meet this civilizational crisis together and I become more and more convinced that part of meeting the civilizational crisis together will have to be about us talking to each other and ourselves about what this moment means and that’s where art and literature and film and television and pop culture come to play. What stories are we telling ourselves about the world we inhabit now and the world that in a very real way we’re fighting to save in its present state?

Those representations largely don’t exist. It is a hard thing to represent and the conversation I wanted to have tonight is precisely on that because I think it is as urgent a task for human endeavor as any of the tasks surrounding the challenge are. Just representing what it means to be alive and be fighting for this planet at this moment now and into the future. What does it mean? And that’s a question I can’t answer very well as cable news anchor or as a podcast host. That’s the kind of question that can only be answered in movies and drama and literature. And so there’s two people tonight we’re gonna talk to in this conversation who are both wrestling with this in a really profound way. The first is a man named Omar El Akkad and he wrote an incredible book. Do you guys know this book called “American War”? Raise your hand if you’ve read this book or applaud because again, here to podcast, applaud. Podcasts are a great, great, great visual medium. “Raise your hand.” What a doofus.

Thank you. He wrote this beautiful, powerful affecting book and I’ll give you quickly what the plot is, which is that it’s set in the year 2070-something, I think. Climate change has ravaged the country. The Eastern seaboard has largely gone. The capital has been moved to Columbus, Ohio, and it’s looking back on a civil war, the second civil war between the States that has happened after a move to ban fossil fuels by some of the northern states and some of the southern states have seceded and then lost quickly but that it’s resulted in a very, very, very, very bloody insurgency and counterinsurgency for years after. The book was put into my hand in Minnesota, I was at a book fair randomly by someone who just said, I think from the publisher said, “You might like this.” And it was one of those things where you’re like fidgeting on the plane. And I picked it up and started reading it and thought, Jesus Christ, this is good.

And Omar’s a journalist too, but he wrote this book and it’s really the first time that I felt in that way that I was talking about earlier, about the wars and what they mean and what it means to be human in their presence, that that weight was channeled through something that I read. And the other guest tonight is a guy named Adam McKay, who, yes, you can applaud. Yes, I think “Talladega Nights” is one of the great political texts of our time. I mean that 100 percent, like, it’s a fricking brilliant film. A lot of his films are brilliant, including “The Big Short” and “Vice.” And I thought about Adam and having him on this conversation tonight because, two reasons.

One is he makes movies where he tries to wrestle with the complexity of the world and tell big, difficult stories through film in a way that’s fun and accessible and gripping. And number two, we were at a dinner, I don’t know last year where like he spent 80 percent of it haranguing me for not covering climate more. I was like, buddy, I don’t know. Go make a movie about climate. Why are you giving me a hard time? But he was right. He was right. And so these are two people that I have enormous respect for and who are also operating in a register that I don’t operate in. They’re creating imaginary worlds and inhabiting those worlds and representing back to us the world that we live in. And I’m really excited to talk to them about how we do represent this moment of peril for all of us. So please join me in welcoming Omar El Akkad and Adam McKay.

ADAM MCKAY: Look at all these lovely people.

OMAR EL AKKAD: Oh nice.

CHRIS HAYES: Let me, let me start with you Adam, because we did have that conversation.

ADAM MCKAY: We did.

CHRIS HAYES: What was your light switch moment about climate? Not just as like, oh, it’s an issue and I obviously want the world to not heat past habitability, but that it’s something more, it’s something existential. It’s something at the core of who we are.

ADAM MCKAY: By the way, Chris is being very nice. When he said harangue, it was more than that. It was downright obnoxious and also Ira Glass was involved in the conversation and I’ve yet to hear him rise to the challenge. And I love “This American Life,” but every time I listened to it I’m like, what the f–k?

CHRIS HAYES: “Didn’t I just obnoxiously harangue him? Why did that not work?”

ADAM MCKAY: Yeah, I had a moment where, you know, I’ve been following global warming obviously since we all started talking about it. I think it was in the 90s when it first kind of came up. I think Al Gore’s documentary was a seminal moment where it brought it into our conversations, but it was really that U.N. report. When that came out, oh my God, it’s so much worse than you can believe. And I think that’s when we were filming “Vice,” and my wife can attest to this, I couldn’t sleep for two nights after I read that report. It scared the s–t out of me. And when-

CHRIS HAYES: Did you have that like, real panic feeling?

ADAM MCKAY: Yeah. Like the only other time I’d had that in my life was the Iraq War where it was like, oh, this is a really bad idea. I don’t know what to do. So we went and marched in New York City and yelled and waved our hands and it did nothing. And this was times five. This was like holy s–t. And I bothered everyone I knew, telling them for weeks and weeks, this is really bad. And then slowly you could see people stop making eye contact with you and starting to treat you differently. And I’m like, oh, this must be what it’s like to be a Scientologist. God bless them.

CHRIS HAYES: By the way, kills in this town. Just kills in this town.

ADAM MCKAY: God bless them. God bless them.

CHRIS HAYES: Know your audience. Well, it’s also-

ADAM MCKAY: We’re all doing in the best we can. I don’t mean to-

CHRIS HAYES: There’s something about it, about this aspect of like the prophet on the street corner, right? Who is like the thin line between the prophet and the crank. The end is nigh, right? Like saying to people even when the words come out of your mouth like civilizational challenge, unprecedented in organized human life on the planet sounds grandiose.

ADAM MCKAY: Yeah!

CHRIS HAYES: But it reflects our best understanding of the truth.

ADAM MCKAY: I mean I always go back to the thing from the New Yorker, which is for years we had those cartoons that would have the guy in “The New Yorker” saying the end is near. And we were all trained for decades to laugh at this because it was the sales pitch of the lunatic. It was, well how Jim Baker and Tammy Faye got us, it was how, you know, a lot of other people have gotten us through the years. So everything about us has been trained to be suspicious, but in this case it’s true.

CHRIS HAYES: How about you, Omar? Where did you, you are a war correspondent and journalist for years before you wrote the book. How did climate sort of seep into your consciousness at the level that you ended up grappling with it?

OMAR EL AKKAD: Well, I was at my weekly Scientology meeting. Not sure what you’re laughing at. So I was a journalist for about 10 years, and the last four of those, I was a foreign correspondent, but I was working for a Canadian newspaper. So I was a U.S.-based foreign correspondent. I was reporting on this country to readers who don’t live in this country. And that’s a very surreal experience.

CHRIS HAYES: Oh. Because I can’t imagine it’s particularly right now, but always.

OMAR EL AKKAD: Print reporting has what we call M copy, and M copy is the background paragraphs that you put. So there’s the headline, there’s the first paragraph telling you what happened. And then a few paragraphs down, there’s the M copy, which is just the background you need to know in order to understand the wider issue. And in the case of reporting on America for non-American audiences, the M copy always boils down to “no, no, this is really how it works here.” You know, you do a gun control story for Canadians and there’s M copies saying “no, no, you can walk across the street and get a machine gun, it’s fine.” Healthcare story, same thing. I did a lot of gun stories, a lot of healthcare stories. I also pitched a lot of climate stories. And at one point I went down to southern Florida and there’s a bunch of towns around Miami where the mayors are telling the residents that your grandkids are probably not going to be able to live here.

OMAR EL AKKAD: Maybe we can salvage as a shipping port, you know, something like that. And so I’m talking to this professor who’s been sounding the alarm on climate change for the past 35, 40 years to no avail. And what he’ll do is he’ll go to any community group, any organization that’ll invite him. He’ll go and give his lecture about why we need to do something. And he’s been doing this since the early 1980s, and every time he goes, he brings with him this overlay map that he, and it’s a map of that community and he says, this is what it looks like with one meter of sea level, two meters, three meters. And he told me that inevitably when he would do this, afterwards somebody would come up and point to a spot on the map and say, oh, my house is gonna be okay. And he would say, yeah, you live on a hill, you know, you still have to take a canoe to get groceries.

But it got to the central point around climate change as a really difficult problem. Maybe the most difficult problem, which is that in terms of space, we worry about the boundaries of our house. Maybe our community, maybe our town and in terms of time, we worry 30 years. The length of a mortgage. And in geologic terms, 30 years, 300 years, that’s a blink of an eye. But we’re trained to think in those terms and if we do, then climate change, who cares? That’s somebody else’s problem. And that was when I decided to make it a central component of the book. I think most of the people who applauded were my cousins. But if you read the book, climate change is a fairly central component of, of the landscape. That was a decision. It came around that moment of realizing that people will face very few short term consequences in this country for turning a blind eye to this.

CHRIS HAYES: It’s funny that when you even say it now, I come up against this all the time, just like my own conceptual bankruptcy with it, where I just can’t actually imagine it. Like I can try to get my head around very concrete things like the Chicago heat wave killed 800 people and it’s gonna be at some point 125, 127 degrees routinely in a city like Phoenix. Like that’s not gonna work, right? But even that, as I say those words, like the live reality of that, because it’s conjuring a thing in the future, and the worst effects are in the future. That is still so hard for me. It’s still hard for me, even as a journalist or as a person to fill the white space in my mind that I know with the facts to create like a human picture of what that would mean.

ADAM MCKAY: I mean, that was another moment for me was when I saw, mankind has never been alive with this much CO2 in the atmosphere. And then that led me to read about the atmosphere. And what you realize pretty quickly is the atmosphere is almost like the human eye in the sense that it’s a miracle that it exists and it’s one of the top three preconditions for life for the entire existence of planet Earth. Now at this point, when I’m reading about this, my wife is really sick of me. My daughters are now avoiding me at this point, but I’m scared. I’m like legitimately frightened. And I get to the place that you’re talking about, which is how do you express this without seeming crazy.

CHRIS HAYES: So you start off in comedy, right?

ADAM MCKAY: Yeah.

CHRIS HAYES: How did you, and why did move from comedy to, I mean “The Big Short” and “Vice” are comedies in certain ways, but they also have really deep dramatic feel to them. And how do you sort of think about your trajectory towards the kind of work you’re doing now?

ADAM MCKAY: I came out of a background, I grew up around Philadelphia and started doing comedy in the 80s when comedy was kind of taking off and media was really exploding. But then I went to Chicago and I studied under a guy named Del Close.

CHRIS HAYES: The legendary, yeah.

ADAM MCKAY: Who is connected to an entire Chicago theater and labor and political scene. So his whole approach to comedy was always that you’re not aiming for comedy, you’re trying to make larger points. So he used to always say, if you aim for comedy and you miss, you end up with crap. But if you aim for something higher like art or political statement and you miss, you could always get lucky and hit comedy.

And so the stuff we got to do in Chicago, we started the group, The Upright Citizens Brigade, which was always, yeah, we started that in a coffee shop and we would take the whole audience back to my apartment and pull them out of the theater and we would stage a murder in my apartment and we would do stuff like I advertised my own suicide and put posters all around town. And so there was this vibe in Chicago that culminated with us doing a show at Second City called “Piñata Full Of Bees,” which was a very political show. Noam Chomsky makes an appearance and yet at the same time, a bunch of great comics like Rachel Dratch, John Glaser, all these amazing people. So we were kind of trained to think that politics, social issues, real questions aren’t separate from comedy.

You pointed out “Talladega Nights.” I mean, Will and I wrote that in response to Bush America; that’s where it came from. So that was always kind of our approach and there’s certain points, stuff got so crazy, I was finally like, all right, I got to do a straight-up movie. So crazy. I was finally like, “All right, I got to do a straight up movie about the financial crisis.” And that was “The Other Guys.” And we released it and people were like, “Why did he talk about the banking crisis at the end in the end credits?” And I was like, “No, the whole movie was about that.” And then I realized, “Oh, I have to be much more obvious.” And that was “The Big Short.” So, that was the jump. Yeah.

CHRIS HAYES: I always sort of view novelists or people that can write a novel as people that ran a marathon. I understand it is a doable thing for humans, and that people do it; it just seems incredible to me. I don’t understand how it’s done. Why did you write this book and why did you move from chronicling things in a nonfiction way to conjure this world?

OMAR EL AKKAD: I was on assignment a few years back. I was in southern Louisiana, it was another climate change story. Southern Louisiana if you’ve never been, is one of the most beautiful places on earth. Culturally unique, geographically unique, also disappearing at the rate of about a football field of land every half hour. Every time I say that, somebody comes up to me afterwards and says, “You’ve got it wrong. You said every half hour.” It’s every half hour.

It disappears into the Gulf of Mexico. There is a famous drawing of Louisiana that you see on the state emblem and it’s a rectangle going this way and a rectangle going this way. The bottom rectangle is not a rectangle anymore. It’s shreds of land. Oil and gas pipelines, saltwater intrusions. A hundred years of this will tear away the land.

Anyway, I’m doing the story and I’m talking to a person who lives in one of the southern-most stretches. And we have this conversation afterwards. We’re just sort of shooting the s–t afterwards. And we have this conversation that I think will be familiar to any immigrants in the crowd where he asks me, “Where are you from?” And the answer I give him is apparently not satisfactory because he says, “Where are you really from?”

And then we do that song and dance. Where we go backwards in time-

CHRIS HAYES: Outside Toronto?

OMAR EL AKKAD: Yeah, about I think 15,000 miles outside Toronto is where we ended up. We finally go back to Egypt, which is where I was born, and when I tell him this, he nods and he says, “Oh yeah, I could hear the Egyptian in your accent.”

ADAM MCKAY: Wow.

OMAR EL AKKAD: I was like, “No man, you couldn’t. I’ve been working on this awhile.” But it was one of those reminders that I frequently get that I don’t have a good answer to that question. I’m fairly unanchored in terms of geography and my relationship with place. I was born in one country. I grew up in another, I’m a citizen of a third now. I live in a fourth. And fiction is a good place of refuge for people like us. Because you get to sort of shift the contents of this imagined world to fit whatever your contours happened to be. So I’ve been writing fiction long before I became a journalist. I wrote three novels before “American War.” There’s a literary term for them; “not good.” And so I never showed them to anybody and I never tried to get them published.

CHRIS HAYES: When you said three novels, I had a real panic moment of, “Wait, I called it your first and your debut. Did I just screw that up?”

OMAR EL AKKAD: Yeah, this is unacceptable. This is shoddy research from the folks at MSNBC. I don’t know-

ADAM MCKAY: Not cool, Chris. Really not cool.

OMAR EL AKKAD: -what kind of operation. Anyway, so that’s that. Fiction has been around for a while in my life and I lived there for a very long time, so it came naturally to me that way.

CHRIS HAYES: The book, obviously “American War” uses… And I think there’s some similarities, actually to “The Big Short.” Obviously “The Big Short” is this very complex and dramatic story of a thing that actually happened that is then written as a nonfiction journalistic book, and turn into a feature film. And American War is entirely a fictive world, but a lot of your reporting from the War on Terror ends up in the book. And I have to say that like there are sections that are clearly about Guantanamo. There’s sections about what it’s like, this life in a refugee camp. There’s sections about the insidiousness of foreign agents who will come and cultivate people to be weapons for them essentially, that a lot of that stuff hit me harder reading your book in a fictionalized form, than the thousands of articles that I’ve read on.

OMAR EL AKKAD: No, thank you. It’s really nice to hear, but it’s also sort of depressing, right? Because the work that I used to do and the work that you currently do is this stuff that’s supposed to impact people. You’re supposed to read the news about this stuff and you’re supposed to say, “Holy s–t, I should do something,” and then you’re supposed to do something.

CHRIS HAYES: But in some ways that’s what I mean, right? Like when I think about how important this moment is in terms of representation is precisely that, right? The financial crisis was not undocumented. It wasn’t like people didn’t write about the financial crisis. They wrote a ton about it! And in fact there were people that were sounding the alarm bells in some of the press. Not all of them. But we don’t understand these things until we hear stories about them. Don’t you think?

ADAM MCKAY: Yeah, you and I were talking earlier about the book “Sapiens,” which I think really has a key section in it, that — I just read it. I was late to the party on this book. Everyone was telling me to read it, but I just read it in the last-

CHRIS HAYES: I was too and I also loved it when I got it.

ADAM MCKAY: Yeah, and there’s a section where Yuval Harari talks about the idea that what separated us, homo sapiens, from all the other erect monkeys, was that we were able to have a larger group of us do things under a unified banner than other monkeys, because we were able to create mythology. And that is the sole reason that we defeated the Neanderthals and the Cro-Magnons. Although I’m sure they were lovely, upright monkeys and didn’t need defeating. Who knows, by the way? There probably could have been a whole different avenue of human existence if we had embraced them. But I read this and I was like blown away. Because the scientific certainty behind it, like saying, “That is the thing that separates us.”

And now we’re in this moment where our mythology, our group’s story has been rewritten. Where half of America to some degree, a large portion of the world, has become so cynical and so individualistic, that there’s no longer a belief that collective action can happen through government, that anyone who asks for a good government is weak. And that’s a rewriting of the narrative of America. Because before that we landed on the moon, we beat the Nazis. Government was strength; the union’s collective action. And I’m someone who grew up in the 70s into the 80s and I saw this change happen. And I’ve been confused for a lot of years by this. And I just read this book and was like, “Oh, that’s it. That was the change.”

CHRIS HAYES: It’s wild because the mythologies that we tell ourselves, like in “Sapiens,” he talks about it as literally our evolutionary advantage, right? It’s also the way that we mobilize societies for things like war. That’s what’s so awe inspiring and terrifying about this unique human trait. The mythologies we tell ourselves are able to mobilize coordination of humans on a scale that was not conceivable beforehand and has enabled all the kinds of things that we can do. But those mythologies can be utterly contemptible and vicious and evil. Or they can be transcendent and uplifting. And that’s the other thing I worry about, about this moment, which is like, it’s getting bad and it’s going to get worse on the climate front. And there is going to be an increasing appeal for stories about that. Particularly when you think about immigrants and immigration as we’re gonna see hundreds of millions of climate refugees. There’s going to be stories ready-made there that are going to play to the worst in people.

OMAR EL AKKAD: Yeah. We already have more refugees in this moment as a result of climate distress than we do as a result of wars. Very rarely is this mentioned in the case with Syria, but Syria started out as a drought. The first sort of culmination of the human misery that we now know as the Civil War started with an extreme drought. One of the real difficulties of storytelling in this particular moment is the certainty. The certain knowledge that we are currently living through, and as a result complicit in, some future generation’s shame. Which is to say right now we have the veneer of marketing and PR and political speak that lets us have some remove from the moment and its seriousness. When you look back, when a future generation looks back at us as history, we will be seen to have known what was happening, known what was going to happen, known what to do about it, and the consequences of not doing anything, and have done nothing. And so as a storyteller, how do you contend with that? Well, you can ignore it, in just saying, “That’s the future. I don’t have to worry about it.” You can acknowledge it and preemptively apologize, which is useless and yet still better than ignoring it. Or you can acknowledge it and try to magnify it while you still can. And that I think is the closest I can come as a storyteller to having any kind of impact outside of just telling the story.

ADAM MCKAY: Can I defend us right now?

CHRIS HAYES: Please. For the love of God.

ADAM MCKAY: L. Ron Hubbard had a vision.

OMAR EL AKKAD: You keep his name out of here.

ADAM MCKAY: By the way, once again, I’m Irish Catholic so I can’t ever diss on Scientology. The Irish Catholic, or the Catholic religion, is far more evil. So let me just say that. I mean factually right.

CHRIS HAYES: Hey, Tiffany, will you just check the time code and we’ll cut that out? Thanks.

ADAM MCKAY: Even Catholics know what it is.

CHRIS HAYES: Will you just write that down? What are we at? Okay.

ADAM MCKAY: Here’s the thing I would say about what we’re going through right now. Is that there is another power, and this is just me saying s–t, but-

CHRIS HAYES: That’s what these people paid money for.

ADAM MCKAY: But there is a another power that has been unleashed and I would recommend if anyone hasn’t seen it, check out Adam Curtis’s “Century of Self,” which is an amazing documentary about the power of marketing and advertising and propaganda and information warfare. This is the new power because I think what happened was people realize when you bomb a country, when you occupy a country, it doesn’t work, right? You destroy it, you lose capital based on that. You try and occupy it like Vietnam, like Iraq and you have an insurgency. And the new power is kind of what China realized centuries ago. Which is just that their culture was so great that anyone that tried to take them over would go, “Oh, you guys are awesome.” And like chill out and just want to hang out in China. And that’s now happening in a much more scientific focused and dangerous way. I just saw the documentary, what’s it called? “The Great Hack.” Has anyone seen this?

CHRIS HAYES: I haven’t seen it.

ADAM MCKAY: There’s a phrase in the end of that documentary, which is worth hearing, which is the woman who sort of becomes the whistleblower says, “What happened with Cambridge Analytica is it’s the first time that weaponized information warfare was turned on a civilian population.” And it led to Donald Trump becoming president. It led to the dictator of Hungary. In a way, it led to Netanyahu in Israel. You look at these insane leaders, that if you wrote this down and said a reality star bankrupted casino owner is going to become president, you’d go, “That’s insane.” But that’s the power of information warfare. And I think that’s what we’re contending with.

CHRIS HAYES: And you mean that also in when you think about the we in your statement, you mean that in a sort of exculpatory fashion, in so far as the collective we, which is the 6 or 7 billion people on the planet. A tiny sliver of them have power to change that, right? The basically democratic citizens in the developed world. And of that, a lot of them are not equipped or able to fight back in this sort of informational battle.

ADAM MCKAY: Yeah, if you talk to anyone, and I’d love to hear what Omar thinks about this with radicalization. But if you talk to anyone, they will tell you advertisements and commercials don’t work on them. “Oh, whatever. They’re just commercials.” Well guess what? It’s a $60 billion a year industry. It is working, and it’s working on me, Adam McKay, and it’s working on all of us in ways we can’t even imagine. This is a toxicity that is being released. A radiation that’s being released on us that we’re not even aware of.

CHRIS HAYES: I mean in the case of the fossil fuel companies, it is in the same way, not unlike what happened with tobacco and cigarettes. I mean it was a sustained multi-decade project of very explicit propaganda and informational warfare to stop us from taking seriously the science that ExxonMobil itself had internally in its own files in the early 1970s, when they realized that carbon was leading to the earth warming.

ADAM MCKAY: And full disclosure, I am paid half a million dollars a year by Shell Oil. Because they’re a great company. They’re actually trying to improve our environment. Exxon and the others are destroying our environment. But Shell Oil’s on the green side. I just have to say that.

CHRIS HAYES: Dude, you delivered that so straight, I had a f—–g heart attack. I was like, are you s——g me, Adam McKay? How did this get past our vet? Oh my God.

OMAR EL AKKAD: I don’t know much about the world of A-level celebrity, but do you now just get free oil from Shell for the rest of your life for mentioning them in a public forum?

ADAM MCKAY: I do. And once again, I’m still non partial. I’m still a human being. But, can I say that Shell balances our future with our current needs better than any company on this beautiful green earth that we all love.

OMAR EL AKKAD: Well holy s–t, if that’s the deal, I just want to say I really love Taco Bell. They’re also doing great. I don’t know, if we’re getting freebies. I don’t — I’m sorry, what the hell were we talking about?

ADAM MCKAY: Well, make a run for the border is an inclusive message. That’s not anti-immigration. Run towards the border.

CHRIS HAYES: What we were talking about is the insidiousness of the informational warfare. Such that when you said that joke, I had a second, I’m thinking it might be true. Because, the amount of work that has gone into distracting from the crisis and and throwing dirt in people’s eyes, has been so sustained for so long and has been asymmetric, right? Like, you’ve got a bunch of climate scientists who are out there doing their thing, and the people on the other side of it for four decades are literally the wealthiest industry in the world, that realizes that the entirety of their business model fundamentally depends on not letting people take this action.

CHRIS HAYES: Hey, it’s me in the studio again. And Omar has a great response to this idea of taking on the informational war. And it has to do with the way that we’ve actually done it before. We’ll hear that right after this quick break.

OMAR EL AKKAD: You brought up cigarettes as an analogy, which I think is a good analogy. And there were decades of public interest campaigns of people going out and saying, “Hey, this causes cancer, this causes cancer.” And of the industry saying, “We’re not sure.” What caused the single biggest drop in smoking of all of this was raising the price of the thing, was taxing it. And that is a government thing. And so when I talk about we, you know, this is a country of many we’s. And they’re very compartmentalized, such as one we doesn’t really understand the experiences of the other. And that’s how a lot of injustice in this country gets perpetrated. But you also have a government and so when I say we, I talk about the agency that can be enforced by a government and this is the same thing with climate change. One of our central problems in tackling this, is chronological; not only the fact that this is happening in the geologic blink of an eye, but in human terms too long to think about. But also because we forget really easily. Forgetfulness is a form of defense.

There’s this group that does interactive storytelling. They bring you up on stage and they do this thing and it’s a road show and very well funded. And they called me up and said, do you have any ideas? We’d like to have you on stage. And I said, “Well, I’m thinking a lot about the War on Terror, George Bush years right now.” Because at that time, it was the first round of George W. Bush dancing on Ellen and peddling his garbage art about the soldiers he sent to be maimed in an illegal war, which is a fun daytime show topic. I don’t know. Anyway, so I say “I have all these photos from the time I was in Gitmo. I can tell a story about that.” I finished saying this and the person on the other end says, “You know, that’s really great, but do you have anything more recent?” And that was a self-defense mechanism, right? So we did something really horrible. Now something different and really horrible is happening, let’s focus on that. Like, “Don’t also give me this to worry about.” That’s a big problem, right? This short term memory problem.

ADAM MCKAY: Can I once again defend us?

CHRIS HAYES: Yes.

ADAM MCKAY: People forget Milton Berle in the 50s had Himmler on, and they danced. And those were-

CHRIS HAYES: Wait is that true?

ADAM MCKAY: No. Chris, come on. No.

CHRIS HAYES: I don’t f—–g know!

ADAM MCKAY: God, I wish I had said yes. Why didn’t I say yes? Oh.

OMAR EL AKKAD: That’s getting cut out of the podcast, right?

CHRIS HAYES: You just made a film on forgetting.

ADAM MCKAY: Yeah.

CHRIS HAYES: It’s profound. And when you talk about like, I think about this a lot in the context of climate, when you say, “How will we all be remembered and this moment be remembered and the people?” I always have some desire there’s gonna be some cosmic justice, I think because I was raised Irish Catholic as well. And like there’s some St. Peter up there, there’s some ultimate scorekeeper, and they’re going to have their justice when it comes. But I’m watching the horror of the Bush administration being erased in real time right now. And that was only 11 years ago.

ADAM MCKAY: Yeah. I don’t know what to say. It was-

CHRIS HAYES: Well, you made a whole movie about it, because I feel like you feel the same way.

ADAM MCKAY: It was a horrifying moment to have to live through that, to have to see that all those mechanisms grind towards us killing, conservatively 700,000 Iraqis and by many estimates, a million. Not to mention the U.S. soldiers, 35,000, 40,000 that lost limbs, that were brain damaged, and thousands that were killed. It was a crazy traumatic period for me to go through. And the reason we made that movie was we were coming off “The Big Short.” And there was this moment where we couldn’t make a movie we really wanted to make. And I just saw Cheney and Bush and Rumsfeld and all those guys were almost over the horizon line. They were waving goodbye and everyone collectively wanted to forget this horrible thing, which I totally understand. And I was like, “No one wants this movie. No one is asking for this movie.” There’s no studio in town that is asking for a giant, multimillion dollar film about a killer vice president. That has never been asked for. And I was like, “Let’s do it.” And, and God bless Christian Bale, and Amy Adams, and Steve Carell, and these big stars that were like, “We’re with you on this.” And God bless Megan Ellison who paid for it. And ironically, her dad, Larry Ellison is on record as saying one of his heroes in life is Dick Cheney. And that’s true. And Megan Ellison still paid for this film and got behind it. So it was a moment where we had a chance to do that and there were plenty of people who didn’t want to hear it, or see it, and were annoyed by it. But you know…

CHRIS HAYES: But it’s also the case that like film memorializes this stuff as much as anything else does. To this day, if you say Mahatma Gandhi to me, in my head, I see Ben Kingsley, to this day. Because I watched that movie when I was a young kid. And like that was the picture that was seared into my brain of Gandhi. The memorialization that happens through how we tell the story and represent it, can eclipse a million biographies that are written or history textbooks.

ADAM MCKAY: Yeah, that’s the nice thing about making “Vice” was, you kind of go through the year of releasing it, but it kind of in a way doesn’t matter. The movie’s just there and you have to contend with it. And I think that’s the power of this narrative style, the re-mythologizing of what’s going on. And that’s why I loved Omar’s book. I thought Omar’s book did a great job of framing the current moment that we’re living in as a mixture of global warming, radicalism, indoctrination, culture. And there’s not a lot of things that have done that to me recently. I was crediting you for turning me onto the book beforehand, but it’s really remarkable.

CHRIS HAYES: Well, one of the things that book does, it’s really good. Yeah. [applause]

OMAR EL AKKAD: It’s just my cousins again. Thank you. Thank you very much.

ADAM MCKAY: It’s true. It’s true.

CHRIS HAYES: One of the things the book does to me is bring home a thing that I think we don’t contend with enough, which is that in this almost trite way, literally when you turn the temperature up, things get worse. Like tropical-

ADAM MCKAY: “Do the Right Thing.”

CHRIS HAYES: Right. Exactly.

ADAM MCKAY: “Do the Right Thing.” It’s a perfect example. Like everything is exacerbated because it’s hot.

CHRIS HAYES: It’s hot as hell. And everything from how far up do tropical diseases penetrate. They penetrate a lot further up when it starts to get warmer. Okay, we’re watching what happens when several hundred thousand desperate migrants from Central America show up at the border. Multiply that by 10, then multiply it by 100. Take all the places in the world that are growing food right now in habitats that aren’t going to sustain that food, and send them to other people’s borders. And the thing that your book made me think about, the terrifying thought is it’s separating what I was talking about in the beginning, about war as a sort of like, totemic, rallying, human experience that we represent back to ourselves, and the climate crisis. Like, it may be that we don’t get lucky enough to separate out those two.

OMAR EL AKKAD: Yeah. I mean, first of all, thank you both very much for that. That was very kind. There’s more people in this room than have actually, read the d— thing. So, this is really helpful. No, but thank you.

CHRIS HAYES: Shell Oils, your needs.

OMAR EL AKKAD: Yeah. I can’t pay you Shell Oil money for those.

CHRIS HAYES: Don’t even call it that, just let it be underneath the conversation.

OMAR EL AKKAD: Yeah. “American War,” brought to you by …

CHRIS HAYES: I mean, honestly, Shell is interested, that’s all I’m saying.

OMAR EL AKKAD: Which I think is actually, if you go look at the photo of George W. Bush’s most recent art exhibit in Washington DC, I think it says that.

CHRIS HAYES: It’s sponsored by Shell Oil.

OMAR EL AKKAD: It’s sponsored by Shell, or Exxon, or somebody.

ADAM MCKAY: For real?

OMAR EL AKKAD: Yeah.

CHRIS HAYES: It was an exhibit of paintings, George W. Bush painted of wounded service members, in the Kennedy Center, sponsored by Shell. Wow.

OMAR EL AKKAD: Yeah. It’s everything.

ADAM MCKAY: Oh my God. That is dark.

CHRIS HAYES: The fact that we’re not going to … the idea of war and climate, as essentially like, adjacent threats and risks?

OMAR EL AKKAD: Yeah. We are going to kill a lot of people at the walls of the most privileged part of the world. And again, I don’t want to sound like a pessimist saying this, but I also am very, very careful never to do the, “It’s all going to be okay,” because if we continue down our current track, it’s not going to be okay. I grew up, I was born in Egypt, and I moved to this place called Qatar. Qatar pound for pound, is the richest place on Earth. It is also a place that is warming faster than almost anywhere else on Earth, and it’s already pretty d— hot. It’s 120 plus, in the summer. There are built in feedback loops, to warming. For example, the warmer it gets, the more air conditioning you use, the more air conditioning you use, the warmer it gets. That is a central feedback loop. I cannot envision the government of Qatar, which is a monarchy, one day turning off the taps of the single thing that has made this country the richest place on Earth, and saying, “This is for our great-grandchildren.” The consequences of that, are in the short term, ruinous. In the long-term, they will save your grandchildren and your great-grandchildren’s lives. But we don’t live in that kind of timeline. And so, you’re in this situation where, there’s this really famous William Gibson quote, “The future is here, but it’s not evenly distributed.”

ADAM MCKAY: Wow, that’s a great …

OMAR EL AKKAD: You’re starting to see this, right?

ADAM MCKAY: Can you say that again?

OMAR EL AKKAD: He said, “The future’s already here, but it’s just not evenly distributed.”

ADAM MCKAY: Wow, that’s good.

OMAR EL AKKAD: So you know, the same way everything in “American War” has happened. I didn’t make that stuff up. It just happened to somebody who doesn’t have much of a voice. You can find out what the future is going to look like, if you go to certain parts of the world right now. It just might happen to this particular part of the world 50 years from now, and this other part of the world right now.

ADAM MCKAY: There’s a scary thing, through using the evil force called Twitter, which-

CHRIS HAYES: Never heard of it.

ADAM MCKAY: … is a virus. We all know that.

CHRIS HAYES: Yes.

ADAM MCKAY: But there are some good things going to it. And I’ve actually had conversations with, and gotten to know a lot of the climate scientists, like Michael Mann and McKibben, Bill McKibben. And the one question I always ask them, I always say, “Is it possible, we’re so far outside the zone of what we know is going to happen, or so far outside the zone of known science, that there is a trigger moment with all of this? And one day we do wake up, and there are seagulls flying across the sky, and everything is tipped?” And every one of them says, “Yes.” And that’s the scariest thing I’ve ever, ever heard. They really don’t know.

CHRIS HAYES: We don’t know. I mean, we’re veering out of the Holocene. I mean, we’re veering out of a period in the planets, and people may or may not know this, but we’ve been the beneficiary of a remarkably stable climate, that is in geologic time, extremely rare, and also rather short. And we’re now kicking the system out of this stable band, that all of what we would consider human civilization, has developed in. There’s been ice ages, there’s been hotter and warmer periods, but it’s all been within a band that’s fairly stable. And like you said about the atmosphere, kind of miraculously so. Like it probably isn’t an accident, that the stability that happened there, and what we call human civilization, flourished within it. And we’re now on the frontier of an experiment, in which we kick out of that. And so, everything is sort of up for grabs. And that’s the thing that’s so … again, it’s so wispy in my mind, what that up-for-grabs-ness looks like, and how, to be honest, like how you make meaning of it.

Because I think the thing that you talked about before, about the visceral panic, and I’ve talked to David Wallace Wells in the podcast about this, and I don’t know how many people in this room feel this way. This is a great thing to do when you have a thousand people in a room, is just talk about panic. But you know, you get that feeling, the prickle in the back of your neck, or that kind of tingling captured sensation you get, when you stare out to the cosmos, or picture of your own death, from thinking about it too much. And to me, it’s like, how do you resuscitate that sort of spirit of meaning, in what can feel like this sort of oppressive, vast meaninglessness, of what it is? And to me, that comes down to storytelling. That is what we do to make meaning. And I know that you’ve been like, how do you think about telling stories on this topic now? Because I know it’s something that you’ve been wrestling with.

ADAM MCKAY: So you know, we’re about to announce our new company, in a couple of days. I think it’ll be coming out Wednesday. And one of our main missions, is to tell this story. We’re in a time that has never existed for human beings. So how do you? And the answer of course is, I have no effing idea, but we’re going to try.

And there’s a couple of different things we’re trying. We’re working on an anthology series with David Wallace Wells, based on his book, “Uninhabitable Earth,” that’ll be kind of in the style of “Black Mirror.”

CHRIS HAYES: Love that idea.

ADAM MCKAY: … that’s based on different visions of the future, and what’s coming our way, whether it’s in 10 years, or 100 years, we’re about to take that out and sell it. I’m working on a feature film, with a very simple premise, which is a meteorite, it’s going to destroy the planet and no one gives a s—.

CHRIS HAYES: Wait, I can’t … I’m losing track of the allegory. I cannot compute that.

ADAM MCKAY: And we’re also working on a couple other projects. We have a podcast company that’s about to start, and I’m working with David Sirota, on a project that’s kind of a “World War Z” telling of the next 50 years and how we solve the climate crisis. So we’re kind of kicking that back and forth. He’s currently working on Bernie Sanders’ campaign, so it’s been a little slow going, but we’re … yeah. And then, we’re looking at other ways through our company. What are different ways we can reach out? Can we have retreats with speakers? I’m working with Ron Suskind right now, the journalist Ron Suskind, who’s written a lot of great stuff and done a lot of amazing stuff. We’re working on the idea of an action film that is about global warming, and how heroes want to chase cars and have shootouts, but it doesn’t work that way. It’s a slow grind. And so, we’re kind of kicking that around. These are all a bunch of things that we’re currently developing.

CHRIS HAYES: But it sounds like … like I love the David Wallace Wells’ “Black Mirror” idea. Have people… have you read David Wall Wells book? “Uninhabitable Earth”? Yes? It’s a really great book.

ADAM MCKAY: It’s definitely a must read. Yeah.

CHRIS HAYES: It’s a really amazing book, because it does this thing of forcing your mind into this place, it doesn’t want to go. But imagining the future, is a thing that we do to ourselves to get ourselves to act in the present, like you were saying about this time problem. And there are so many places the mind can go when you imagine the future, in this particular moment, that the force of the people that are in the streets, and in the sort of climate movement right now, are being driven by keeping their mind in that place, in a very tangible way. Like when you talk to them, it’s like “I’m freaked out,” and there was this long period of time of like, “Don’t freak people out. Don’t freak people out. Tell people it’s going to be fine. You’re going to make them paralyzed. They’re going to be numb. They’re not going to want to do anything.” It’s like, “No, freak the f–k out.” Like it’s okay to freak out if that is a motivating engine for you.

ADAM MCKAY: Well look at John Brown, with Harpers Ferry. John Brown was considered a nutbag, because he went and took over this arsenal and said, “No more slavery.” Well, John Brown was right. John Brown was way ahead of his time, and if what he had done had really rung out, maybe we wouldn’t have had the Civil War. Maybe we would have like dealt with this earlier. I think we’re now in an era, where we have to redefine what radicalism is. I mean, clearly, we have to stop the gears of production, and we need to do that in a peaceful way. Violence never, ever works. It just leads to more trauma and more violence. But I think we have to look at more aggressive ways to stop what’s going on. Except Shell Oil, except Shell Oil. They really do a great job folks, look into them. Really take time, look into them.

CHRIS HAYES: Yeah, I mean I think the John Brown example is interesting, because I think a lot, I wrote an essay a few years ago, about sort of abolition, and climate. And doing some of the math, and thinking about the fact that the last time that the state basically eradicated the amount of wealth that we’re talking about eradicating in fossil fuel on the book wealth, was emancipation. And the scale of that, took a war to deal with that amount of dispossession, and I think probably took a war that was unavoidable. I’m a believer in that part of the historiography of it. But it’s also the case that like there are other things that we have done, like I think about nuclear weapons, that didn’t take a war, but that we really did use that panic and mobilization, the Nuclear Freeze Movement, the fact that we did have a bunch of bilateral arms treaties that we signed. The fact that we are living here and talking to each other now, in a way that a lot of people hiding under the desk in the 1950s, thought might not happen, because of the existential threat. Like, it has been the case, that there have been people summoned to the challenge to sort of meet it, at least in the short term, the blip of geologic time that we live in.

ADAM MCKAY: Well, the hole in the ozone layer.

CHRIS HAYES: Yes.

ADAM MCKAY: That was a huge thing, and we really did have a giant hole, that CFCs were causing, basically spray aerosol cans, and everyone just went, “Oh, let’s not do that anymore.” And we got rid of them and it’s fine … within like 10 years. Right? I mean, it was really quick.

OMAR EL AKKAD: So, the hole in the ozone layer’s a really interesting example, right? Because it was in scientific terms, not a hole, it was a sort of thinning out, a seasonal thinning out.

CHRIS HAYES: Right.

OMAR EL AKKAD: But it could be displayed as a hole, right? You could show the visualization, and it looked like a black hole, and that was terrifying, right? So even the term, this was a storytelling victory.

ADAM MCKAY: It was a hole, by the way. It was a hole.

OMAR EL AKKAD: An absolute hole, I’m sorry.

ADAM MCKAY: It was a hole.

OMAR EL AKKAD: Yes. You and the scientists at Shell Oil, have conclusively … you’re going to have to add like a sarcasm tag to them, unless they think that this was a giant, like hour-long Shell Oil advert. So, it was a storytelling victory, right?

CHRIS HAYES: Right, because hole is such as such an evocative word from a storytelling perspective, and also has like a narrative forcing mechanism. Which is what do you do with a hole? You plug a hole.

OMAR EL AKKAD: Exactly.

CHRIS HAYES: Like we all know the next part of the story.

OMAR EL AKKAD: Yeah. And so, it worked. It worked. And whereas the Greenhouse Effect didn’t. It sounds kind of pleasant. This is the story … this is one of the storytelling challenges, right? A couple of years ago, I read this essay, it was an essay on Dostoyevsky, but as an aside, the author mentioned that the word empathy has a very short history in the English language. It’s only about a hundred years old. It comes from the German einfuhlung, which I’m sure I’m mispronouncing. But that literally translated, einfuhlung, means “to feel into.” And this is in large part I think, the purpose of literature, the purpose of storytelling at large, right? I think we turn to literature, we turn to fiction, to escape the crushing delusion that life makes sense. That is your job, as a storyteller. It is not to propose the right steps to take to avoid this problem, that is a policy arena. Your job is to make people feel into. Feel into somebody else’s experience. If you can do that, you’ve achieved your goal. And so, when I think of Cli-Fi, what they call climate fiction now, this new genre, Cli-Fi …

CHRIS HAYES: I’ve never heard that term before.

OMAR EL AKKAD: Really?

ADAM MCKAY: I haven’t either.

OMAR EL AKKAD: I hear it all the time. I mean, I don’t know how much I like it, but it exists. There’s this kind of, because it’s a new sort of genre, there’s the sense that what are the rules? And overwhelmingly, as would come naturally, is the idea that it has to include climate stuff in it. Right? You know, like, birds have to be dropping from the sky, the sea level is rising. And I’m not sure that’s true. I think our problem right now, is not so much describing to people what’s going to happen, because you can look at parts of the world, you can look at Kiribati, the Islands of Kiribati, and find out what’s happening right now. I think our problem is to make people feel into. And so, if you can write a novel that doesn’t include a single sentence about climate, but gets people to feel into the experiences of another, you have helped take a step towards ultimately solving this problem. I don’t think it needs to be rising sea levels and glaciers.

ADAM MCKAY: By the way, that’s the debate that we’re having, which is how overt should you be, in what you’re trying to make?

OMAR EL AKKAD: Right.

ADAM MCKAY: I mean, there is something to be said, that watching a movie as beautiful as “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly,” is as consequential as watching a movie that is “All the President’s Men.” And what is that line between the two? Are you awakening emotion? Or are you giving a clear mission? And that’s kind of definitely the debate that’s going on here in Los Angeles.

CHRIS HAYES: I also think it’s the case that the solution to the climate issue, is just the most profoundly human one, which is how we relate to each other as human beings. How much we are able to find transcendence and grace, and reach for the sublime in collective struggle. How much we’re able to order ourselves with each other, in a nonviolent and organized fashion, to produce a world that’s better than today. And that’s the most elemental human struggle. And the problem of climate change, is not a technical problem, and it’s not a problem with climate. It’s human, it’s about human beings. It’s about what human beings and what human beings mean to each other, and how they treat each other, and what they’ll do for each other. And I still think there’s something beautiful about being alive at this moment, for that reason. Sartre has a sort of controversial sentence he said, which is always sort of hard. It’s easy to take out of context, and he didn’t mean it in the literal sense, so I’ll repeat it with that caveat. Don’t cancel Sartre. He said, “We were never freer than under German occupation.” And obviously, he doesn’t mean that in a literal sense. German occupation was horrifying and it was literal death for millions. But he meant in some deep sense, that like the calling that he found himself in at that moment, was the highest possible calling he could imagine. And that because that calling was so high, it imbued some kind of freedom. That’s where we’re at right now. Like, the calling couldn’t be higher, for us to meet this moment. And I wonder how you each think about, and whether you think about like your legacy, or what your body of work, what your corpus is, when this is over in this moment, as it relates to this.

ADAM MCKAY: Yeah. I think what a moment like this really shows you, is how your own…like to me in the last 10 years, the word career became one of the grossest words. It really started to stand out. And the idea that you’re worried about your own resume, and your own perception, my wife can attest to this, because I’ve ranted and railed about it. And really what you see in this moment is, that it is so much larger, that it really gets in the ripples. It really gets into almost physiological sort of history. Not an on paper, two-dimensional history. So my question right now for myself, is just what’s the best way I can throw my flesh and bones onto this issue? Because I always think back, do you remember that book? “Three Cups,” I think it was called? Which was kind of discredited and there was a lot of questions about it. But there was this scene, there was a moment in that book, where someone had a T-shirt on that said, “When I die, I just want to be used up.” And I never forgot that, and it feels like that’s really applicable to this moment that we’re living in. I just want to make sure I’m loud enough, and I’m doing as much as I can. But at the same time, smart enough. In a way, it’s sort of like sports, because sports, there are certain coaches who say, “Be aggressive, attack,” But always the trick with sports is, you have to be smart at the same time, while you’re being aggressive. And I realize that that kind of relates to a lot of things. That’s really the question I’m asking myself with everything I do. Am I being aggressive? And at the same time, smart?

OMAR EL AKKAD: That’s a really good answer. Sorry. The pressure’s on now.

ADAM MCKAY: I hate to say it, but that was sponsored by Shell.

OMAR EL AKKAD: Shell Oil?

ADAM MCKAY: It was, they wrote that for me.

OMAR EL AKKAD: Maybe they do good work. I don’t know. I’m starting to change my mind now.

ADAM MCKAY: I’m not tired of this joke.

OMAR EL AKKAD: No, no.

ADAM MCKAY: It’s going to come back again.

OMAR EL AKKAD: We’re going to beat it until-

ADAM MCKAY: It’s going to come back again.

OMAR EL AKKAD: This is the editing they’re going to have to do. Take out all the 50-

CHRIS HAYES: No, they would have to edit all the laughter. It’s still slang. Once it stops killing, then we’re going to cut off.

OMAR EL AKKAD: Way too many callbacks in this. Well, I guess one callback over and over again.

There’s a premise in architecture that says that anyone who designs a structure, a building, should give some thought as to how that building will look as ruins … which is rarely followed, but I think is also applicable to anybody who writes or tells stories of any kind, for a living. When we talk about, and this is an area, obviously I’ve read a lot in, because it’s relevant to my work, but when we talk about politically engaged fiction, societally engaged fiction, fiction dealing with the problems of the day, every book eventually dies. Even “To Kill a Mockingbird,” which is now starting to be replaced on curriculum. People are saying, “Enough.” Okay. There is a kind of fate worse than death, for these kinds of works, and that is eternal life. Because it means that the lessons of the work, have not been heated, which is to say if people had actually listened to Orwell and what he wrote in “1984,” and said, “Hey, this sounds like a really crappy way to live, let’s do something about it,” we would not be buying copies of “1984” anymore. Right?

CHRIS HAYES: Right.

ADAM MCKAY: Wow.

OMAR EL AKKAD: And yet, it doesn’t get to die. It lives this undead existence as a result. And so you ask about legacy, which you know, I’ve written one book, nobody knows who the hell I am. It’s a big question to ask, and it’s a pompous thing for me to consider.

CHRIS HAYES: No, but for yourself.

OMAR EL AKKAD: But yeah, that’s what I’m saying is, ultimately speaking, with this and any work, the new thing I’m writing, anything that comes after, I want it to die eventually, because I write … I am engaged with the problems of the moment, which for me, are sort of passing problems, because I’m going to die much sooner than my daughter. For my daughter, they are not passing things. And what I want most of all, is for the work that I do around these topics, to ultimately become irrelevant because people listened and did something. And so, that’s what I want. That’s what matters.

ADAM MCKAY: Taco Bell, Taco Bell, make a run for the border.

CHRIS HAYES: I want to thank all of you tonight for coming here. This was awesome. Thank you for being here. Give yourselves a round of applause. You were awesome. And a huge, huge thank you to Adam McKay and Omar El Akkad. Give it up for them. Once again, my great thanks to Adam McKay and Omar El Akkad, and all of the people that came out. It was such a great crowd. People were so engaged in the best possible way. I talked to some folks afterwards, who said they had a really good time, so thank you for doing that. Thank you for coming out and being great.

So we released some new tickets for our live event in Chicago, which sold out very fast. It’s a smaller theater, so we’ve got a hundred standing room only tickets. That’s on November 12th at the House of Blues. It’ll start at 8: 30 PM central. Doors will open at 7: 30. I’m going to run over there, after I finish doing the show. And the guests are Nicole Hannah Jones, the amazing MacArthur winning journalist, who is the visionary behind the Times Magazine, “1619 Project,” on the effects and legacy of slavery in the United States, and author and historian Ibram X. Kendi, who wrote this incredible book called “Stand From the Beginning,” about sort of the history of race, and sort of racial categorization, and has a new book called “How to be Anti-Racist.” We’re going to be in conversation in Chicago, November 12th. Go to ticketmaster.com, search for my name Chris Hayes, and maybe there will be some standing room tickets left. Also, we’ve got a date in New York, and a venue, and we’re putting the finishing touches on the guest portion, and we will be announcing that soon, so stay tuned for that. As always, you can tweet us #withpod, emailwithpod@gmail.com. We’d love to hear from you.

“Why Is This Happening?” Is presented by MSNBC and NBC News, produced by the “All In” team, and features music by Eddie Cooper. You can see more of our work, including links to things we mentioned here, by going to NBCnews.com/whyisthishappening.

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