Brian Lehrer Weekend: Kalshi Suit; Europe's Fires; Our Social-Media Lives

Hi, Brian Lairer here. Up next, Brian Lairor Weekend, three of our favorite segments from the week, packaged together, for you to listen to on the weekend. So enjoy, and I'll see you back on the radio Monday at 10 a.m. on WNYC and WNYC.org. It's the Brian Laira Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. We've talked on the show before about prediction markets like Kalshi and Polly Market, places where you can bet. And bet is actually a controversial word here, we'll explain, but we'll say bet. on things like whether or not the price of Bitcoin will rise or who will attend soccer player Cristiano Ronaldo's wedding. You can also bet on things like whether or not a bill in Congress will be signed into law or whether or not the Strait of Hormuz will open or the release date for Grand Theft Auto 6. Yes, that's a real bet on Calci's website right now. A lot of listeners might wonder if... Is there really a difference between these prediction markets and traditional casinos or sports betting sites where you're also putting money down on various outcomes that you think may occur? Well, it looks like the state of New York is inclined to say, yes, it's betting, and that matters legally. This week, New York State Attorney General, Letitia James, and Governor Kathy Hochul announced a lawsuit against Kalshi. for running what they see as illegal gambling operations, seeking as much as $36 billion in penalties from the company. A Kalshi spokesman called the lawsuit, quote, political theater from the leadership in our own state. We have a guest on this. To explain, Joshua Mitz, a professor at the Columbia University Law School who specializes in corporate business and transactional law. These days, he's got a special focus on prediction markets, and he is here to help us understand this case. Professor Mitz, thanks for joining us. Welcome to WNYC. Thank you, Brian, and thank you for having me. So Kalshi allows people to make bets on future events. I just gave a kind of weird array of examples, I guess. Sounds a lot like gambling. You win money if something happens and you lose money if it doesn't. So at least to that point, what Kalsi said makes its business model different from a regular gambling company might need some explanation. So can you explain it? Sure. Well, at some level, there is lots of activity under that definition, which could be considered gambling. Think about the stock market where you make money if a stock price goes up and lose money if a stock price goes down. So there has to be some difference between just taking a risk and making money or losing money. And what New York State is really zeroing in on.

is that Kalshi offers these contracts, which are connected to the outcome of sports and other kind of gaming-like activities. And this has really been the area of state regulation. So if you think about sports betting, casinos, these are areas where states have traditionally said this sort of activity, this kind of gaming activity, where money is risked. That's really different. from the broader category of risking your money in a financial market. And Kalshi's response is to say, we're not actually the equivalent of a casino. We're a lot more like the stock market. We're a place where you can go on and buy and sell and trade. And the fact that some of these things happen to be related to sports outcomes or sort of traditional gambling, betting activities, that's really beside the point. One of the arguments that Kalshi makes as to why it shouldn't be regulated like sports betting is regulated, for example, is that the house doesn't make money. There's no house, right? People hear this claim in the commercials for Kalshi and others. There's no house. You're trading. They use the word trading rather than betting. You're trading against other individuals. So can you explain the difference between betting and trading as they're trying to convince us that that exists and how you see it in reality? Well, that's why I use the stock market as an analogy, because I think Kashi's argument does boil down to what people are doing is buying and selling contracts. And we're just a platform. We're just a facilitator. We're just a matchmaker between buyers and sellers. It's not exactly, I think, 100% accurate because Kalshi is benefiting from trading activity on their platform through their fee model. And so they are involved. They do have a financial incentive to encourage trading. The fact that they're not on one side or the other is really... beside the point when it comes to their financial incentives. But they are correct that the platforms at their core are a two-sided market. And by that I mean, for every dollar that someone is willing to bet that an outcome will happen, there's going to be a dollar on the other side where someone is betting that the outcome will not happen. And so it is true that these contracts reflect essentially zero sum. transfers, one, there's always a loser for every winner. And that act of transferring risk, if you will, from some people who think an event is going to happen or not happen to the other group.

That is really what makes this market a lot like other financial markets. The challenge for Kalshi is that the same can be said for many traditional gambling establishments because while the house is involved as a formal matter in those transactions, oftentimes the house is not actually taking a directional position, but offloading that exposure to someone else who has the opposite view. So it's kind of a thin basis to distinguish Kalshi from traditional gambling activity. Their better argument probably is that the architecture of these platforms at its core is fundamentally one of trading. It's one in which all kinds of contracts are traded, many of which have never. been within the purview of state gambling regulation. Listeners, do you use Kelsey or other prediction market sites? If so, do you also use more traditional sports betting sites? Do you experience a difference between them? Or do you have a question or opinion about the lawsuit being brought by the state of New York that seeks to subject? Kalshi to regulation like more traditional gambling sites and seeks damages from them at the same time. 212-433. WNYC, 212-433-9-692. Call or text for Joshua Mitz, professor at Columbia Law School, who has been focusing on prediction markets recently. Professor... How far does the lawsuit go? I read one version that says the state of New York actually wants to put Kalshi out of business. The problem is that New York is demanding the imposition of a fine in many billions of dollars, which would essentially make it impossible for Kalshi to continue with its operations. The thing also to remember here is that New York is not the only state that's coming after Kalshi. Their business model essentially was to launch in all 50 states and more or less dare the state-level regulators to come for them. And to be fair, they had some federal support. The Commodities Futures Trading Commission has more or less stepped in and said prediction markets are our jurisdiction. So if you look at this lawsuit, it looks like it's New York versus Kalshi. But I think what's actually happening here is this is the federal government versus the states. And Kalshi is essentially wrapping itself in the cloak of the federal government because The real war that Kalshi would like to see would be between the CFTC in Washington and the individual states, because Kalshi knows that if the CFTC prevails, then all they have to do is comply with the CFTC's rules. And under this administration, the CFTC has been fairly pro-p prediction markets. They have not really come down hard on prediction markets like some of these individual states.

most notably, Democratic states, I mean, blue states, states where the attorney general may have a very different political view than the Trump administration. We have a, you might say, a local celebrity, as one of our listeners just put it in a text, who has a little Kalsi scandal of his own. And, of course, he has had a few other scandals of his own, and that's the former member of Congress, George Santos, who basically got kicked out of Congress for making up so much stuff and other things that were related. But he apparently paid a fine because he bet one way on whether he would attend the State of the Union address last year and then made money on, you know, when he fulfilled that prediction. So... Can you talk about that case in particular and whether it suggests a more systemic problem as opposed to just a George Santos problem? Yeah, the problem with these prediction markets is that, you know, anyone can participate, including people who may have control over the outcome. In this case, George Santos, I believe he skipped the state of the union. So he took advantage. He essentially took a position that he would not show up and then profited from not showing up. And that's the kind of thing that. you know, anyone can really do if the market is small enough. It's supposed to be against the platform rules, but in some cases, it's hard for platforms to enforce those rules. We've been talking about Kalshi, but this problem is much worse on polymarket, because polymarket, which is a much larger platform globally, polymarket is completely anonymized. So it's very difficult for regulators to crack down. This is what we studied in some of the research. that you referred to earlier, which is how much of this sort of insider trading or informed trading is happening where people are placing bets because they have an edge on the rest of the market. And this is really damaging to the platforms themselves because who wants to participate in a market when folks like George Santos might be. using inside information. And there were other very, very famous cases in the headlines like the Special Forces soldier who traded on the Maduro operation. There have been other corporate employees who've traded on information, on prediction markets that they learned through the course of their employment. So this is a problem for these platforms because it undermines confidence. And this has actually been the one area. abuse of these platforms where we've seen really a crackdown by federal prosecutors, regulators, and the platforms themselves. Listener asks, are these states in the lawsuit simply looking for a piece of the pie?

I think there's a question what the goal here really is at the state level. There's definitely an ideological difference that is animating some of this. State consumer protection regulators, particularly in blue states, tend to be much more concerned about what some might say are paternalistic instincts worrying about consumers essentially wasting their money on activity that. they would regret after the fact. There's no doubt that gambling activity more broadly has become increasingly popular. You mentioned sports betting earlier. These platforms have grown in popularity online. And you can think of Kalshi and Polymarket as essentially the latest iteration. You can also say this isn't the only place where people are taking these kinds of risks. Think about crypto, another big area. And I think it's fair to say that some of these states. are much more concerned with the phenomenon of people engaging in activities that may be harmful to themselves, that later on they would regret. And so there's a degree of aggressiveness there that you're not seeing from Washington, D.C. So others might say the problem is that in Washington, D.C., there's an administration which is benefiting in some way. from this sort of activity, from a kind of embrace of gambling and speculation and is personally, even members of the Trump family, for example, maybe personally benefiting from this sort of activity. So we need these state regulators to step up and do what Washington's not doing. I think that's probably a more plausible explanation of how the states see it rather than just a kind of money-hungry story of trying to get a piece of the action. On something you just mentioned, listener writes, don't forget to mention that Trump's sons are behind the creation of Kalshi. Corruption, corruption, corruption, writes that listener. Another text says two major issues with Kalshia off the bat, unregulated, so it effectively lowers the gambling age to 18 and starts gambling addiction earlier, therefore, when it's more likely to stick. Let's take each of these. What about the Trump family and alleged corruption? So I think it's hard to separate the ideological position of the Republican Party, which tends to be more laissez-faire, more sort of loose with individuals taking risks that later on turn out to be financially or otherwise harmful. It's difficult to separate that from the Trump family's personal financial incentives. I believe they're invested in Kalshi or one or two of his sons are invested in Kalshi. But I don't, you know, these platforms rose up on their own. They have dedicated user base. And the link between that and kind of the free market ideology that's that's in Washington right now, it's a loose link. It's an ideological connection. It certainly feeds in.

to the perception. There's definitely a public perception that this administration is not eager to clamp down on financial speculation. And crypto is a similar example of this, the Trump coin, these sorts of activities that are encouraging people to take financial risk. Washington seems to be endorsing some of it, seems to be at least looking the other way. On the broader questions concerning gambling, I think this is really important. I mean, we have to ask ourselves as a society how comfortable we are with this. Gambling has a long history in the United States of America and other countries, and there's always been a wide range of opinion on whether we should step in and prevent people from risking their financial future. financial economist, and I would say the stock market is also a form of gambling. But we've told ourselves, I think sometimes legitimately, stories as to why it's a good thing to have people taking risks like this in certain settings. It's a lot harder to tell yourself a story why it's a good idea for people to take risks on prediction markets. This isn't the kind of speculation that has... benefits to the economy, for example, and helping companies go public and things like that. So I do think we need to ask ourselves as a society if we're comfortable with this amount of risk taking and whether there should be some limit. Studies have shown that over 99% of traders on Kalshi lose money. And here's somebody who lost money. William and Lindenhurst calling in with an anecdote. William, you're on WNYC. Hello. Hello. Can you hear me? I can hear you. Okay, well, what happened was I got an offer online for a $50 coupon from them, and I figured that what have I got to lose? So when I went on to the actual site, it turned out there was another path to get the coupon. So I didn't get the coupon, so I gave them $50 of my own money to put, and I made one of their bets. that was presented to me, will a Gulf of Hormuz still be closed at the end of the month? And I said, yes, it will be closed. And then when I actually saw what they entered as the bet I made, it was not worded in that way. It was set up almost like some kind of option on a future or something like that. And the value of the bet just went down, down, down, down, and finally just canceled the whole thing and lost the 50 bucks. But everything about that site was duplicitous and not as represented. It was my experience. Interesting. William, thank you, Vimerich. Well, that's an allegation. Does that sound familiar, though?

What he's describing, apparently, at least the way he sees it, he was trying to place a straightforward bet or trade, and then it got converted into some kind of option that made it more obtuse. I think the challenge with these platforms is that they're really moving quickly, you know, the data are moving quickly. It's not always clear what a user is doing when they're interacting with the platform. And I think what the caller is describing. sort of gets to the point we were just discussing around how much regulation there should be of these platforms. So should we have state regulators stepping in, looking at these stories and saying, look, you need to make the process clearer or potentially if in fact something went wrong going after the company and saying, hey, what happened here, Kalshi? I mentioned earlier, A statistic, I just want to clarify the Wall Street Journal, this is in a May article, that 67% of polymarket profits go to the top 0.1% of accounts. And there have been similar studies that essentially at least 70% of accounts are on these platforms are losing money. And I think if you look at who makes most of the money, it is, as I said, something like 0.1%. at least on Polymarket. How does that happen? Who are those people and what is it they know that the rest of us don't know? That's just it. They know something the rest of us don't know. And what my research has found is that there are, there's this small number of people. And you can see this on Polymarket because their blockchain identities are visible. And this is the concern with both Polymarket and Kalshi. Kalshi, we don't have quite this level of granularity with the data. But there's no reason to think it's any different. These are people who have. connections or access to inside information or who might have put something together. And so I think what the bottom line for your listeners is if you're going on these platforms, based on all the research we've seen, your expectation should be that you're going to lose money. And you probably will lose, if not everything that you wager, the data suggests you're going to come out, you're going to come out with a loss and that only a very, very small fraction of the participants on these platforms. are walking away with significant profits. Is that different than sports betting sites?

Well, we know that gambling activity in general, you know the phrase the house always wins. I think part of these platforms allure is that they're making it seem that for some people at least, you know, there's a realistic chance of winning or you might think you know what's going to happen in geopolitics. When you get beyond, you know, will this horse win the race or who's going to win the World Cup and you start looking at some of these other areas, people walk in with a lot of confidence. And yet they still lose. And I think this is an important message for everyone listening to this, that you're probably not as smart as you think you are. You probably don't have information that you think you do. And you probably are going to lose money. Yeah, somebody suggested to me recently that because I know a fair amount about the world, because of the nature of my job, that I should go on the prediction markets and predict, you know, bet on some political outcomes, which I have never done and have no interest in doing. And I think the rules of my news organization prohibited anyway, you know, so that I don't slant coverage to help bring about an outcome that I might profit from. But here's another text that's concerned about young people. It says as a high school teacher and parent, the youth engagement is shockingly high for this stuff, which is categorically not the same as some kids at school betting on the NCAA basketball tournament, for example. Do you agree? Well, Kalshi, to its credit, has more of a customer verification system than polymarket, but people can go on polymarket essentially anonymously. And there are ways to get around identity verification. It's not supposed to be happening, but it can happen. And I think the youth exposure is, in fact, one of the biggest, personally, one of my biggest concerns being a parent myself. apps are colored and designed and styled, marketed with kind of flashy, you know, it's very easy for young people to be drawn to them. I remember commercials, the various sports games. We were watching as a family, and there was Kalshi and my kids, younger kids, but they turned to me and said, what is Kalshi? And I had to explain this to them. So I think this is a concern on parents' minds. And this is an area where you might think, We need state regulators exactly for this purpose because Washington is really not focusing on underage use of these platforms. Maybe we need New York and other states to step up. Then what would it, if they win the lawsuit, or let's say if the prediction market sites were regulated the same as sports betting sites, what would change? Well, there's a licensing process the company would have to go through and regulatory oversight. And that oversight might get complicated because you have 50 states and it would start to get quite thorny. But at the end of the day, it might be a better outcome for consumers. As you said, there are online sports betting platforms which do register and are with the states and are regulated by the states. So it is a possible model. It might take away some of those profits.

it might be better for consumers in the long run. And we're just about out of time, but I'm still thinking about that stat you gave, that such a tiny percentage of the people who use the prediction markets actually profit from them, it really goes against the image that they're trying to portray by saying there is no house, you're trading against other individuals. Because in theory, If this is individuals trading against each other on whatever prediction, then somebody's going to win and somebody's going to lose each time, and you would have roughly a 50-50 split in winners and losers, wouldn't you? Well, I encourage everyone to look at the Wall Street Journal's report from May. What they talk about is the use of algorithms and highly sophisticated traders who are building statistical models. And so the reason why such a small number of accounts capture the profits is that it's not another person on the other side. It's a sophisticated algorithm. Sometimes it's a small number of individuals with access to information that the rest of the market doesn't have. So it's really quite dangerous. You have to go into it knowing that unless you have an algorithm with you, unless you have access to information that others don't have, your expectation should be that you will lose money trading on these platforms. Right. I'm going to throw in one more because I can't resist, because this is so interesting. A senior vice president of the Cato Institute, the libertarian think tank, told the New York Times that he actually wants people with insider information, I guess like the guy in special forces who bet on when Maduro is going to be. leaving office in Venezuela, that this guy at Cato actually wants people with insider information to make these bets. Do you understand even the thinking behind that? I guess he thinks it would be good for public policy for some reason. There's an economic justification for these markets and that we can look and see the price or the probability and learn something from it. Lots of people think there's going to be a ceasefire with Iran so that probability, that price goes up and we learn something from it. That argument may have some force in the political or geopolitical context. It's really quite hard to translate that to sports or other settings when it's really coin flip, what's going to happen. Nobody knows the future. Nonetheless, even if this is valuable for sophisticated market participants, there's a real question whether that's how it's being used by most people out there in the marketing to kind of the general public is not based on this idea that

there's a small handful of people who are using these markets to convey sophisticated information. It's rather the exploitation of your average teenager or your average young person. And that's why the statistic of 0.1%. capturing most of the profits on polymarket, why that statistic is so important is because it says that, sure, maybe there is a small group of people who are making money and using these systems in this way. The vast majority of you are not, and you should be aware of that. And certainly in sports and these other markets, it's really a coin flip. All right. Well, we'll see how the trial of that soldier in the Venezuela-Muduro incident turns out. We'll see how this lawsuit by the state of New York turns out and whether Calci and maybe other prediction market sites continue to exist after that. Joshua Mitz is a professor at the Columbia Law School who specializes in corporate business and transactional law with a special focus on prediction markets. Thanks so much for joining us today. Thank you for having me.

It's the Brian Lara Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. Okay, people, listen up. Before we get today's show, really started with the content and everything. I want to share some joyful behind-the-scenes news. Our longtime producer and sometimes guest host, Amina Serna, welcomed her first baby last week. In fact, she was born just about a week after the last time Amina held down the fort hosting this show. We literally didn't know if we would have radio's first live on-air birth back on July 16th, but the baby did her mom her first favor and waited until her actual due date. Thank you, baby Zohran Mamdani. That's the baby's name Zohran Mamdani. And she and her mom are both doing great. We're so happy for Amina and her husband, Paul, and just wanted to give Baby Zohran Mamdani a hearty and public welcome to the world. Now, On Tuesdays, as many of you know, we've been reserving a spot for health or climate topics on the show for a few years. That's to make sure that with all the other fast-moving headlines that grab everyone's attention from day to day, you know, that we don't let health and climate issues fall through the cracks, especially with climate, as I've said before, the climate doesn't change at the speed of the news cycle, right? So a commitment to revisit it on a regular basis is, we think, a public service. Today we'll begin with the latest outbreak of extreme wildfires. It was Canada a few weeks ago when those fires caused dangerous smoke conditions here in New York and even further south, as you know. Now we turn mostly to the record wildfires in Europe. The way we'll try to go beyond the headlines is this. Wildfires are not new in human history, but the intensity and frequency of them suggest something more systemic is going on, even as One country's government, the one you're probably in right now, that country, is back to going full throttle on promoting fossil fuels and limiting renewables. Here are some of the recent headlines from Europe if you haven't been following. This past July... was the driest July in almost 200 years of recorded history for the UK and Wales. In France, a wildfire burned about 420 square kilometers, making it the country's largest wildfire on record. That was in Lepours near Bordeaux in the south. 420 square kilometers of roughly 162 square miles. The city of Paris... just by comparison, is just about 40 square miles to let you get a sense of how big that fire was four times the size of Paris. France saw what was described as the largest civilian evacuation outside wartime as more than 224,000 people fled the region. The total number of people displaced from all of southwestern Europe is a lot higher because wildfires have forced evacuations near Madrid, too.

Crews are also trying to fight fires near Athens, Greece. And those are just a few examples. It's scary, obviously, and climate change is undeniably a factor here. So to help us make sense of what's happening in Europe and also compare it to the United States and elsewhere a bit, we'll talk to Chico Harlan, global climate correspondent for the New York Times, usually based in Rome. Chico, thanks for some time today. Welcome to WNYC. Thank you so much, Brian. Where have you been reporting from these last couple of weeks and what does it feel like on the ground? Where was I? I mean, I guess putting the global in my job for better and worse. I was in France and then Malaysia and then Pakistan and then back to Europe. I was not on the ground for the wildfires, but I was on the ground for the heat waves that were the first domino that led to them. So basically in the last week, where had I been? I'd been in Rome in my home, but collaborating with the Times colleagues in... France and Spain and trying to like wrap our arms around the on the ground stuff and then more from my perspective like the science and the climate change aspect of of that story. So talk about the heat wave first. That cracked the news headlines in the United States to some degree, but how hot was it and how unprecedented was it? Right. I mean, it's basically the beginning of the story of the wildfires was these heat waves. First, there was one in May, late in May. I mean, school was still going on. And it was described as unprecedented for that period of the year in France, in some places that even touched like 100 degrees, which never happens in May. Then about a month later, late June, it was kind of the big one. This was the hottest heat wave that Francis had ever, not just in, not just in June, but ever. It had back to back to back days where each of those days was the hottest on record. And it was also exceedingly hot in Spain. That alone wouldn't have been such a terrible thing in terms of creating wildfire conditions, except that that heat, like, it receded a bit, but never really returned to normal. It was hot for weeks, upon weeks, upon weeks, and there was almost no rain. So at that point, heading into late July, you had the conditions that were primed for... huge fires if just a single spark happened. And they did. So that's what happened last week, these huge fires unfolding simultaneously in France and Spain. And yes, they have been brought under control now, but it took extraordinary resources and the fire season normally is just starting now in Europe. So it's not over.

And listeners, maybe some of you can help us report this story with a phone call or a text. Are you in or do you have any ties to any of the places in Europe where these wildfires have been raging? 212-433. WNYC, 212, 433, 9692. If you're in the United States or anywhere other than Europe, what are your contacts in those places experiencing and reporting to you? Also, your questions, welcome for our guest, Chico Harlan, Global Climate Correspondent at the New York Times. We're definitely going to get into European climate policy compared to the United States, and even there. as he reports, they're not going as full speed ahead on climate mitigation practices as they had been before, apparently. So we'll get into that as well. Anybody from Europe listening right now or with ties to Europe want to comment on the politics of that or ask a question, you can do that too as well as the actual heat and the actual fires. 212-433. WNYC, call or text, 212, 433. 9692. Chica, I gave some of the stats in the intro. What would you add to how much death and displacement these wildfires have caused across the continent? Well, the displacement was huge. Hundreds, I mean, 300,000 or more people had to flee their homes during these wildfires just in a week. You know, to put that in perspective, all of last year, in all the wildfires that were tracked globally, the number of evacuations was less than 500,000. So you had these two events, not just as huge fires, but fires that were, and this is, I think, what made them stand out. near population centers and in areas that were, you know, where cities were threatened. It didn't reach Madrid or Bordeaux, but those were the two cities that were close by and where, you know, you would feel the air quality suffer for periods. Those events were surprisingly not deadly, not so deadly, which is incredible and as a testament to the fact that there was a lot of firefighting resources thrown at these issues. A few weeks earlier, there had been a wildfire that was in Spain that about a dozen people died. The real deadly event in Europe this year has been the heat. And that heat wave that I was describing just a few minutes ago. It leveled a death toll across Western Europe that is conservatively in the tens of, like, you know, 10,000. There's been another study that said 20,000 excess deaths. So, you know, we're talking about mammoth casualties, which never get the same amount of headlines that they should because these numbers are kind of estimates and abstractions. You're not putting, there's not a list of names. It's not like a plane crash.

where there's this immediate sense. But it's looking at population scale changes in what does an average leak look like and what did that week look like. But, you know, if you just step back and consider that, you're talking about, you know, developed Western Europe where a heat wave comes in and 10,000 extra people die. That's astonishing. We can get into why that would happen. But yeah, the wildfire, suffice to say, pales in comparison to the heat in its ability to be lethal. Well, maybe it's worth saying. How do people die from heat? Well, it depends. You know, not every place is equally vulnerable. We can start by saying that. And for example, if you had a couple back-to-back days above 100 degrees in Phoenix, which happens all the time, you're not going to have 10,000 extra deaths. It's a city that has built itself for weather like that. And of course, air conditioning is not the only part of the answer, but it is a big part of the answer. Also, just what do people's houses look like? How equipped are they to shield from the sun and to stay cool? Europe, especially Northern Europe, was never accustomed to heat like this. And, you know, they often don't, these buildings were built for colder climates and they are built to trap or retain heat. France and on Paris specifically, you know, you think about the beautiful pictures of Paris with these kind of grayish, bluish, grayish roofs. Those roofs are made out of zinc. And that conducts heat almost like an oven. So people who live on those top floors are roasting. Now, yeah, and as we know, especially in France, but many European, northern European countries, air conditioning, the rates at homes is extremely low. It continues to be low. So now if you have this combination of hot days back to back to back, apartments that hold the heat and no air conditioning, the homes can be. so hot that over some days it can become deadly. Now obviously if it's you know if you're a young person you have some mobility you go to a mall you jump into a pool and you go to a friend's house who does have AC you take emergency measures but if you're somebody who is old has health disabilities you might not be able to do that. And that is the population that suffers the most, people who were already frail, who had pre-existing conditions or were elderly. So you have people living by themselves on those top floors, dying alone, and those deaths are hard to note in the moment oftentimes, but they are a marker of heat waves like this in northern Europe.

One thing that you didn't mention, but we've seen elsewhere when you talk about how northern parts of Europe often don't have air conditioning because I haven't needed them in the past, I've read that that even includes in many hospitals and nursing homes, for example. Do you know that to be true? Yes, it is true. And schools too, you should mention because... Though once you get into July and August, it's not a problem. You know, there were schools in France in late May where it was, you know, in the 90s, every day inside the classroom, 95 degrees. And kids were suffering tremendously, like just as elderly are more vulnerable to the heat. So are children. But yes, it's true that some hospitals don't have AC and some nursing homes don't have it. This has become a political issue where some politicians, especially Marine Le Pen, who's kind of the vanguard or one of the vanguard of the far right in France, has talked about the need to create a national air conditioning plan such that all of these public facilities are equipped. And, you know, I think that the more that France and other northern European countries experience these heat waves, the more it becomes hard to argue with the need to lay out air conditioning on a more... massive scale because these are places that were, yeah, they would experience some heat, but maybe just a couple days where it was really unpleasant. You start to plan differently when a couple days turns into a couple weeks of unrelenting heat and you just can't feel comfortable. You start to go crazy. I've had those summers too, myself in Rome, more because of outages, not because of not because of lack of AC. at all just because the AC wasn't working and you you go crazy after a while the day-to-day stress and and the worrying about your health or more in my case my kids health you're giving them and dunking them in ice baths everybody looks unhealthy it's 100 degrees in your house and that's just a couple days in my case so like I can't imagine how difficult it is even for somebody who's healthy to just spend day after day after day in a hundred degree house that's what happened in France this summer Chico Holland, global climate correspondent for the New York Times, based in Rome, is our guest as we talk about the heat. The wildfires, we haven't even gotten to the smoke from the wildfires in places where the wildfires themselves were not burning. We're going to get to that. And the climate policy debates going on in Europe as a result and before this summer. But we're getting some good calls and texts, Chico, from people with connections to various parts of Europe that we've been referencing. So let's hear from some folks. Michael and Manhattan just got back from France, it looks like. Michael, you're on WNYC. Hello. Hi, Brian. This is Michael, the fashion designer from Hawaii who would go to the movie and flip-flops. That's great. There should be no dress code in movie theaters, in my opinion. We haven't had that debate on the show, but I'm with you, Michael. Anyway, go ahead.

Anyway, I just got back from France for the second time, you know, in a couple of months because I'm doing business there. And I want to say that when I've moved to France in 1988 to study fashion there, I had two apartments that were on the last floor, which we'd call the Somme de Bonn, are the maids quarters. And they're the ones that have the slanted roofs and, you know, you can't stand up fully in the whole apartment. You know, they were fine for a student, and I walked up six floors without an elevator, and it was fine. I had plenty of old neighbors that walked up, and I think it kept them healthy. But now that I'm looking for a pietere, since I'm traveling so often to France to do production for my work, I'm looking for an apartment, and my friends are telling me, don't touch the top floor because of the zinc roofs. I was there, you know, in June just as the big heat wave where they went to like over 105 or 110 a weekend, just as it was starting. It was tough. I mean, I wore very light clothes. I walked around with a spritzer to cool myself off and had carried a bottle of water. But it was tough. And my friends, you know, in Paris State, one of their mothers lives in the Bordeaux region and was on one of the forks where the fires occurred and she was fine. But she had places she could go if she had to leave. And I understand it's a fork, and so there was only a single road out of there, and people were having to be evacuated by boat. Every morning I would go down to my hotel, and it was the fire on the news, day after day, after day, after day. And it was really scary. And I was looking at apartments and talking to the landlords about the possibility of air conditioning, and there seemed to be all these rules about not... being able to put air conditioners in and that they're an eyesore and maybe you could have one if you hit it, sort of, you know, but, you know, it's contained. And also I've read that there are strict noise standards for air, for air conditioners in France that we don't have here. Yes, yes. There are so many rules against it. And some people, like a friend of mine who's a health enthusiast and all that, they just think it's unhealthy. And in summers past when I would go to France, you know, they just, you know, they think it's unhealthy. And they just deal with the heat. And that was before it was even that hot. Right. Now, Michael, one of the thing that you told our screener, before I let you go, that people now say that the real estate market has changed as a result of the fires, the evacuations from Bordeaux, the prospect of things like that happening again. What did you tell our screener about that?

Well, that, you know, I would never touch a top floor apartment. And I've been told by my friends not to. And when I have inquired about some, you know, because they looked really nice and they were, you know, reasonable, I asked about this and they said that they had done insulating treatments to make it, you know, better. But. Yeah, like you said before, because of the zinc roofs, which conduct heat. so well, as our guest was saying. Michael, I really appreciate your call. Really interesting story. Stay safe out there. Keep going to the movies and flip-flops and call us again, okay? Take care. Aloha. Aloha. Over for. Bye. That's right. In Hawaii, from Hawaii to France, the well-traveled, Michael, at the moment in Manhattan. What about the real estate market more broadly, if you have anything on this, Chico? Because it's a debate where any kind of disaster takes place, right? If 200,000-plus people had to evacuate this time from Bordeaux, what's to say that this pattern isn't? going to be more permanent and it's not going to happen in a lot of subsequent summers. And, you know, do we keep our home? Do we move away? You know that because of sea level rise from climate change, people are having these discussions along a lot of coastal areas in the United States and elsewhere. So do you have anything on that? You know, I think that the surest area where real estate has some jeopardy is along coastlines where waters would be rising, you know, over the coming decades. That has the ability to rewrite kind of the typical property valuations, plus you have insurance issues. You also see that on the west coast of the U.S. in Florida, where there's, you know, hurricane season, where the insurance also becomes an increasingly large variable. You know, if I was thinking about where the coming off of like a heat wave or just in Italy where I live and where the summers even over the course of 10 years have become noticeably hotter like to me moving and finding a place in a higher elevation is a very good real estate idea over the like you know if you consider like where would be a good place to live in 2050. I think altitude is your friend in this case. But of course, you know, that's not really why people move. They're not, but this is the human nature element of it. The moment passes. People are where they are. Changing the status quo is difficult. And wildfires and the heat waves are unpredictable where they strike because it happened in Bordeaux this year doesn't mean it'll be in Bordeaux next year. You know, cities that have advertised themselves as being. climate friendly. I think of Asheville, North Carolina as one. You know, nobody would have ever thought that Asheville, North Carolina was going to be in the crosshairs of hurricane-related flooding. But it happened. Pretty far inland. You wouldn't want to...

I think that it's probably the surest things that you can think about if you were going to use the climate as a metric for decisions about where to live, about where to purchase is sea level rise and altitude. Beyond that, I mean, these are global forces that we are all at the mercy of. During the worst burning in southwestern France, I see air pollution readings in Bordeaux spike to more than 20 times the World Health Organization's health threshold. And we have this text that says, my sister and her boyfriend live in Madrid. Last week, her boyfriend, a healthy 26-year-old guy, went to the doctor because he had a persistent cough and headache, and they told him it was from the smoke. The health outcomes of these fires are serious, writes that listener with that tie to Madrid. So that's besides ways that people die from the heat per se that you were describing before, there's all this, you know, kind of downstream to mix the nature metaphors, effects of the smoke. We saw increased hospital visits in New York when the smoke was that bad here a few weeks ago. And so that's, you know, yet another thing from the wildfires. I don't know if it's being measured very well. Yes, these days where the sky turns yellow and orange, they're eerie and they do seem to be coming more frequently, but they're still not frequent. And that is something where accumulation and daily exposure is something that drives the more long-term health outcomes. During this summer for me, I spent a week in Lahore, Pakistan, which is by some measures. one of the most polluted cities in the most polluted country on earth when you talk about air quality. And there, you know, the sky is, and this is the good time of year because it's the rainy time of year. I couldn't believe just, you know, you never see the sun. And the vehicles on the road by some accounts are emit 25 times more pollution, you know, per kilometer than an American vehicle. So some of it is quality, some of his industry. But those are the places where, you know, it has a true demographic change. You know, the average lifespan in Pakistan is shortened by six years because of air quality. A single wildfire isn't going to do that. Maybe if you're a firefighter, you know, but we are lucky living where we live that this is not a daily consideration in our lives because it's horrible. You can't breathe. You can't exercise. You can't be outside. You can't have kids move around with, you know, in a lighthearted way. is, you know, it's loss of a human right. And on your reference before to air conditioning, being key to public health in these circumstances, we're getting a number of texts. One listener writes is the electrical wiring in Europe capable of safely handling air conditioning. Another says there's a political argument in France that if they have more air conditioning, it will make the climate worse.

And another one, it's a cycle. The more AC, the more CO2 in the atmosphere and the hotter the planet gets. I fear we have crossed the Rubicon. I mean, this is a perennial contradiction with respect to air conditioning, right? Air conditioning is a legitimate public health tool in places like these. Business writer Catherine Rampel had an interesting article about this contradiction recently that, yeah, it's good that humans invented air conditioning and it's life-saving in, you know, so many circumstances, but at the same time, it does contribute to the global warming load. Did they deal with that contradiction in Europe differently than in the United States? I think that in the United States, we don't think about that contradiction quite as much. In France, it is shockingly present and really dominates the public conversation. Because I think for an American point of view, we almost look at a deadly heat wave in Europe and think, well, the solution is obvious, you know? Just put the, you know, let's do the Houston and Dubai treatment. Because it does, it does save lives. The air conditioning has been a shockingly successful lifesaver. But it's also a contributor to the very problem that makes it more important to have. So people in France seem to be, for reasons that I can't say I totally understand, very attuned to this. There is a, like in many of the conversations that I've had with French policymakers, politicians or climate experts, they talk about, okay, you know, if we just deployed AC rapidly, this would be number one, leading to more emissions. And number two, adding to the, you know, because they pump heat out into cities. it amplifies these so-called urban heat island effects where cities stay hot, they have a hard time like shedding the heat at night. And that is one of the reasons why these heat waves have gotten deadlier because these cities stay hot at night. If everybody's using AC and pumping the hot air out of their apartments, then the problem is amplified. And then there's an, I also hear for many French people an inequality aspect to it. So imagine a situation where, you know, people are using their air conditioning, making the outdoor spaces even hotter than they already are, making the emissions, you know, increase a little bit more. And then you have people who now are put in that environment that is even hotter and less sustainable. And that inequality expresses in various ways. There's a story on one of the New York News organization sites just this morning about how the temperature on different blocks within New York City can vary by as much as 15 degrees at a given moment. And a lot of that has to do with how many trees.

there are in the immediate neighborhood and the presence of trees tends to run, unfortunately, along economic lines. Dylan is calling from Stockholm, Sweden. You're on WNYC. Hello from New York, Dylan. Hello, hello, nice to, I mean, I'm with you every morning, but we're afternoon here in Sweden. I'm so glad, thank you. No, and no, thank you guys. No, and I'm a, you know, I keep up with the news and everything, and I have a French friend who has his uncle in Fontainebleau. And it was pretty much the same sentiment from him as in the media here in general that, you know, because I told him that like maybe you're... try to stop flying because he's a pilot and he sends his daughter on a flight every day. But anyway, so he said, well, yeah, it's sad, but it's sad that it actually started from somebody setting the forest on fire. And out of, we have summer news broadcast here, which is only 30 minutes that evening. Out of those 30 minutes, it was 15 minutes here interviewing like a shrink about arsonists. So, you know, the flashback is real against the climate. And I mean, this is the country of Greta. And it's just none of, none of wanting to be willing. And we have election year too. And none are just wanting to be willing to. to go for, you know, the unpopular vote, even in the media. So I'm just very, like, sad and that. When you say the country of Greta, just so everybody knows what you're talking about, you're saying the country of the climate activist Greta Toonberg, and to, you know, an American sensibility, let's say a progressive American sensibility, that, oh, if we only had the values that they had in places like Sweden, we'd have more equality, we'd have less poverty, we'd have less pollution. You're saying it's not that simple? No, and I'm just, you know, it's just, you know, it's one thing that politicians are going for the popular vote, but it's even like the media, you know, they're so afraid of, you know, losing viewers or whatever it is. But, you know, so it's very, and I know you're talking about Anthony Fauci later. And I, you know, this weekend's news said about, you know, Anthony Fauci, like the wording was that he refused to answer. He refused to answer as if. and never mentioning why he didn't want to answer the questions from the, you know, from the Congress about him taking a Fifth Amendment. So it's just about, I mean, it's very sad that the news broadcast here is really going for, you know, the, you know, having the MAGA approach.

Well, you're obviously paying attention. And thank you for calling. We really appreciate it. So keep listening and call us again, Dylan. Thank you very, very much. Yes, thank you. Bye. So Chico, she suggests that even in Sweden, it's... maybe not obvious that they would blame this on climate change. They want to blame it on the individual rather than something systemic, arsonists starting forest fires. Maybe it's worth asking, how do the forest fires, these wildfires, how do they tend to get started, even if the underlying hot and dry conditions are there to make them worse? Well, yeah, it could be a lightning strike or arson. In this case, I think arson is, at least in Europe, the starting point for the majority of wildfires. Or it could be something accidental, you know, like you're smoking and you drop a cigarette. The arson and like the elements of human behavior seem to me like more of a static variable. over time. I don't see any societal reason why people would be more prone to start wildfires now than they were 40 years ago. You're always going to have some, you know, some fools. But what has changed is the conditions on the ground that, like, influence the size and intensity of those wildfires once they start. Obviously, any wildfire can be destructive, even a small one. But when you have, like, you know, huge swaths of the country that are just tinder dry, then the ramifications of arson are much bigger. That is the fact of climate change. So, you know, people can deny it all they want. I haven't looked at any particular polling on the sentiment towards these wildfires. But my sense is that the view in Europe, is, you know, only a minority would deny the relevance of climate change to these discussions, particularly about summer conditions, because it is, like, as is often stated, Europe is the hottest warming continent on the planet. We can get into reasons why. Fastest warming, the pace of warming is faster than elsewhere. Yes, and we can get in the reasons of why, but let's just wait for now. Let's just skip over those reasons and say that it's warming almost twice as fast as many other parts of the world.

And I can say that from living there almost 10 years, like I notice it in not even a generation the changes season to season. It's not exactly linear, but the number of hot days is much higher than when I first arrived. The charts definitely bear out that if you were a child of the 80s or 90s and are now living as an adult in the 2020s, it is a completely different summer experience, completely different. I don't think people with sharp memories would tend to deny that. So the lived, you know, oftentimes the reasons that climate change can be difficult to, like, or easy to, easy to question is because the planetary scale moves very slowly. specifically with heat in Europe, the change is enough to notice over the course of generation. So I think that is what I wouldn't call it a good argument for climate change because it would be better if these arguments didn't have to happen. But I think this is a case where the scientific evidence is emerging quickly enough that people notice it in like the time scale of their own lives. One more call from Europe, and it's one more call on air conditioning. Terry calling from Germany. Hello from New York, Terry. Thank you so much for your call. No problem. So should I just tell you about air conditioning here? Jump right in. Yeah, it's very difficult. I'm American, but I've lived here for decades. And it's a lot harder to put air conditioning in here. You can't get central air conditioning because the walls are solid, so you can't put it in ducks. Our heating is usually done by radiator, and then the windows are completely different than American windows, so you can't get a window air conditioner to fit in. So your main option for a house, that's old construction, are those mini splits that you hang on the walls. And those are not very attractive. I mean, from the outside, there's a thing hanging on your house, which people don't like. And then the other cultural problem is, like the woman who called from France said, people think air conditioning is going to make you sick. Germans are terrified of drafts. And, of course, with air conditioning, you get a draft. In the winter, if you leave it in the window. Excuse me? You mean in the winter if you leave it in the window? No, you don't leave him. You can't put them in the windows here. It doesn't work. You have to put it on the wall. It's called a mini split. And you just turn on an air conditioner and you automatically get a draft from the wind that comes from the air conditioner. From the air conditioner itself, I understand now. And they are terrified of that. Go ahead, Chico. She's right about the fact that there's a widespread belief that air conditioning makes you sick. I mean, I've almost internalized that myself to a degree. But like in Italy, if you have a cold, any elderly person will blame it on what they call the cold bodaria, which is like a hit of air that generally comes from the air conditioning.

And they believe that like the vacillation, like, you know, here when you go to an airport or a supermarket, it might be 67 degrees inside. And they think that, you know, moving from that into a 100 degree parking lot back into a cold home is going to make you sick, guaranteed. Is there any science underlying that? I haven't looked. I always assumed that it can't be true. But, you know, Europeans don't need to use air conditioning the way we do. Like the people that I know who are, you know, friends of my parents, like elderly, like AC holdouts, they now get it, but they maybe use it for a half hour in the afternoon just to take the edge off. And then their apartment goes from being, you know, dangerously hot to just hot. To me, that's a great way to use an air conditioning. Because you are, you're not going to make yourself sick that way. You're going to avoid getting yourself sick. Few more minutes with Chico Harlan, global climate correspondent at the New York Times as we talk about this summer in Europe. So you reported recently. europe looks to be shying away even europe looks to be shying away from some of its most ambitious climate goals you have a story from july with a headline europe proposes weaker policy for reducing emissions what's happening Yeah, it's a proposal, so it has to be still debated by the member states of the European Union. This would be a change to something called the ETS, which is essentially like a cap and trade system where the cap shrinks every year for the allowable number of emissions that in certain industries, the EU's idea is to. lower the pace at which that cap shrinks. So essentially that would allow for slightly more emissions every year for a longer period of time. That's just one of the changes that has happened from Europe on kind of this theme over the last couple of years, like last year, Europe watered down a pledge to stop allowing new sales of petrol four-wheel cars from 2035. That was made under heavy pressure from industry where they see that their own European car dealers are not faring well during the EV transition, especially compared to China, which has a huge advantage in EVs. All these changes, I think they kind of come from the same theme, which is like, you know, the easy gains of making changes are kind of over now. this point of like if you're going to really hit your goals for a cleaner cleaner economy and societies and industries, you need to make big changes. And if you're not politically ready for that, then you start doing the stuff that Europe is doing.

The full context though is that, you know, since like the 90s, Europe has done a pretty good job of cutting emissions. Like it's a much, the amount of greenhouse gases that the EU puts into the atmosphere is about 40% less than, uh, than it was in 1990. And still on paper, their goal is for that 40% to become 90%, um, a 90% reduction by 2040. So. You know, there's still like some of the same climate backlash DNA that you see in other parts of the world, well, especially the United States. But I think that it's only to a small degree compared to you don't have, you don't have like the top political figures like in Europe vehemently saying that this is bunk or. The, you know, it's, it's, what they're trying to do is like this tricky middle ground appeasement of different political factions and industry and they always end up tweaking things on the margin and making things weaker. It's not pretty, but that is what's happening. But it's not an abject rejection either of climate change or of the goals that like we need to bring these greenhouse gas emissions down. So I think that's the best way to encapsulate it. It doesn't fit pretty, like it doesn't fit in a pretty way under denialism or under like embracing of the climate goals. It's somewhere in the middle. And I think we have one example on the phones of kind of Europe hitting a certain degree of climate policy wall. Selma in Brooklyn originally from Prague. Selma, you're on WNYC. Thank you for calling in. Thank you for having me. So I go to the Czech Republic regularly, and while the policies are being drafted and sometimes signed into law, there's a lot of pushback from local communities because we are, as in Russia, they call it Dacha country where people go to the countryside on weekends, their homes there. a lot of the sort of liberals, the same ones who push for these climate change policies, say, not in my backyard, because the windmills, no, they don't look good, the solar, you know, it's less bucolic. So that's one thing. But on the upside, what I want to say, Europe is so much more about prevention, like in health as well. And some of it is just by chance or by design, I guess, before World War. So the pre-war buildings in the Czech Republic are built very solidly. And if you're in one of those homes, if there's a heat weight, yes, there's some more heat. But generally, if you build houses out of stone or solid brick. There's no need as much for, first of all, the heating sticks a little bit better, and the coolness stays longer. And I notice here that even the new buildings, they are built like, you know, paper basically, just wooden sticks. And then, of course, you need air conditioning, you know, and more heat. So you're producing more and more. And finally, also the policies of bringing in...

better train service, cheaper train service, which is a huge thing for America, I understand the size of it, is a challenge. But even easy routes, like between, let's say, New York and Montreal, it's a 14-hour ride where it could be five hours, and it would save so much money, and the pollution would be much less. So that's what I have to say. Selma, thank you for all that. And you know what? We're going to let Selma have the last word as we will leave it there for now with Chico Harlan, Global Climate Correspondent for the New York Times, usually based in Rome. Thank you so much for this, Chico. We really, really appreciate it. Thank you. Appreciate it. WNYC Studios is supported by Odu. When you buy business software from lots of vendors, the costs add up and it gets complicated and confusing. Odo solves this. It's a single company that sells a suite of enterprise apps that handles everything from accounting to inventory to sales. O-Doo is all connected on a single platform in a simple and affordable way. You can save money without missing out on the features you need. Check out O-D-O-O-O-O-D-O-com. That's O-D-O-O-O-O-com.

It's the Brian Larry Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. So think about the last thing you posted. Maybe a photo dump from a vacation, a birthday tribute, a graduation. You probably gave at least a little thought to the caption, right? What to include, what to leave out, how it would land. Most of us have been doing some version of this for 20 years now if you're that old, and yet we almost never talk about it. My next guest. spent years asking strangers all over the country about their posting habits, and many told her they had never once discussed them out loud. But our argument goes further than how we post. He says social media has changed not just our attention spans or how isolated people sometimes feel or the way we get our news. We're always talking about those things, but also how we vacation. how we celebrate, how we parent, and how we tell the stories of our own lives. So with me now is Catherine Gesar Morton. You may know her best as a parenting columnist for New York Magazine, her really interesting column in New York Magazine's The Cut called Brooding. Now she's got a book called The Story of Your Life, How Social Media Shapes the way we experience everything. Hey, Catherine, welcome back to WNYC. Thank you so much, Brian. So right to that word, experience in your subtitle, not just how we tell the stories, but how we experience our lives? Yeah, I mean, that's what I found in my conversations with people is that, you know, we see these stories when we're scrolling, and it influences the way that we then kind of reflect back on our own experiences and then the types of experiences that we want to have and that we seek out because we're thinking, well, I want to replicate this thing that. I saw on social media, for example. Listeners, maybe you lived, if you're old enough, at a time before social media or before social media was ubiquitous. And you've seen a change in how you. experience things in your life compared to before you started posting about them. If anybody has a story like that, call in and tell it, or you can call in with anything relevant and ask a question for Catherine Gieser-Morton, her new book, The Story of Your Life, How Social Media Shapes the Way We Experience Everything, 212, 433, WNYC, 212-433. 9692, call, or you can text, of course, as well. I'm going to ask you to talk about kind of, what would we call it, a prelude or the prequel to this book that you reveal, because long before you even had a Facebook account, you were writing in collective journals on your Vermont commune. Everyone's lives recorded in one shared book in the kitchen. You lived on a commune? Yeah, my dad and his friends founded a commune in the late 60s, and that's where I spent, you know, a big part of my childhood. And, yeah, we had these notebooks that would be just out on the coffee table or on the counter, and people would write in them whatever they wanted. And it was really, I loved that. And, you know, I was a kid. I was in fifth, sixth grade.

And I just loved reading everyone's little entries. And then, you know, you could comment on people's entries. And then they might come back and reply to you. It was like a sort of a proto-social media technology. Was that, in a way, your first social media feed? I would say that it was, you know, looking back, and I really took to it. Like, I just loved it. I think a lot of people, when they started using social media, when it, you know, when it became kind of widespread in the early 2000s, it was really fun. And I remember finding it just super, you know, I just, I wanted to do it. I wanted to participate. Do you feel differently today, just with respect to your own life? I do. Yeah. I've become, I mean, I still use it all the time. But I'm a lot more ambivalent about it, and I don't, I would not say that I find it fun. No. Well, you do call social media your hobby. And, you know, most of us probably don't think of our use of social media that way. Hobbies are knitting or playing badminton. I don't know. Why do you call it a hobby? I call it a hobby because... We've been doing it for so long and for so many hours that you just develop an expertise in it. I think, and this is one of the things that I found in talking to people, is that people have a lot of very nuanced opinions and kind of practices and ways of looking at it that are developed over years, and they don't necessarily think of it as expertise. But anything that you're doing for this many hours, you develop a set of practices that constitutes a kind of expertise. You trace a turn somewhere around 2013 when people started narrating their lives like small companies reporting to shareholders, you say. What do you mean by that? Yeah, I noticed that people started kind of making statements. It started a little bit around politics. You know, there was a terrorist attack in Boston. This is when I first remember noticing this, the marathon bombing. And I noticed friends of mine who were just ordinary people. kind of posting like, you know, I condemn all acts of violence of this nature. And I thought to myself, are these folks running for office? Like, what is this kind of, what is this press release type of language? And this kind of press release type of language began migrating, you know, everywhere to announcements of, you know, life events, you know, and we just started having this kind of formal way of presenting ourselves. And it was really this message of, you know, you guys, here I am. I'm. I'm competent. I'm in control. My life is going well, and here's the proof in my photos and my posts. So to play devil's advocate on that for just a sec, haven't humans always curated, so to say, yourself? So like before social media, you know, families would send out Christmas cards with carefully selected... photo of the kids and carefully selected stories about, you know, what the parents and the kids were doing that year and what baby names they chose for you as a parenting columnist, all those kinds of things. Absolutely. And that's a very kind of...

it's a good analog, you know, the Christmas card, the brag-rag, here are all the great things we did this year. And we have always done this, but, you know, a Christmas card is a once annual piece of media. It's one piece of paper that you send out every year. And social media, in a way, it's like the Christmas cartification of your entire year. And it's like every day is an opportunity to send the Christmas card. And I think that that is where you start to see. unimpact in terms of how people are seeing what life, you know, should look like or should feel like, is that it's always this kind of, it's a pitch letter about, you know, what's awesome about you. Are you surprised that our phone lines are really lighting up a lot? Oh, good. And we're getting a lot of texts on this topic. Phone calls from such as Andrew on Staten Island. Andrew, you're on WNYC. Thanks a lot for calling in. Hi. Glad to have you back, Brian. You were gone all week last week. I was like, what the heck? Hey, I got to take a week off in July. But I just wanted to say that. Go ahead. Well, I listen to you all the time. Whatever. I just wanted to say that I'm, me personally, I'm 22. So I grew up with social media. And I found that, you know, it's not even just the posting, but it's like, every app you open it and now there's immediate short form content so like forget about even your own life like you don't even have time for any thoughts because you're just scrolling aimlessly and I found that amongst my friends where there's just this resurgence of going back to physical memories of you know Polaroids or doing these like just taking pictures outside of online keeping them for yourself you know and I find also that it just it's like wearing sunglasses and then you wonder Am I going to keep this memory through the lens of the glasses or through my actual eyes through the stat vision? I don't know if that makes sense. What an interesting analogy. Catherine, do you want to talk to Andrew at all? He's got interesting takes here on your subject. Yeah, Andrew, and you said you were 22, and I think younger folks, I'm a millennial, so I'm older, and I really wrote from the perspective of my generation, which I think... you know, we really embraced this technology when we were kind of in college. And I have noticed that younger people are really kind of leading the charge towards something different. And I think that's, I really admire that. I have a lot of hopefulness around the next technology of storytelling that we're going to adopt. And I think it's going to come from younger people. And I think it's going to be maybe something that feels quite different. Andrew, one more go after having heard that. Yeah. I completely agree. And I think it's like, you know, as I'm getting older, I'm thinking, man, if I have children, how am I going to...

handle their progression on social media because you know you you were at it during its genesis so it was it wasn't as oversaturated wasn't as dominant in your life but for us even for kids a little younger than me maybe my 16 year old cousins or something social media is their entire life like they don't even they don't even socialize in the real world at times they are on social media so Yeah, I don't know. It's honestly really sad. Andrew, thank you so much. Keep calling us. We really appreciate you being out there. And Catherine, I mean, he mentioned at the beginning of its call kind of backlash, if you want to call it that, where... you know, young adults really are drifting. I mean, he really mentioned both things, right? One is that social media is so ubiquitous that there are a lot of young people who don't have a lot of in real life experiences of other people. And at the same time that there's a trend to go back and touch grass, right? As they say, do things in the real world because a lot of people around, you know, his age 22. realize that they've been growing up this way. And after a while, it's just not satisfying. Yeah. And I think, you know, in time, I think the backlash is going to bring about something new. But even right now, like, sometimes I'll be at a dinner or at a gathering and there's this kind of spirit of, let's not take any pictures of this. This is never going to live. No one's posting about this. And so we don't. But even doing that, still, it's like we have the audience in the room with us. And so even though we're abstaining from it, we're still kind of under the influence of, you know, we feel as though we're withholding information. Like, you know, it's inside of us. And so, you know, I think it's very profound the way that we feel this technology in our daily lives. We have a few more minutes with Catherine Giser-Morton, New York Magazine. Parenting columnist, her column in the cut that you may know is called brooding. Now she's got a book called The Story of Your Life, how social media shapes the way we experience everything. And Ethan in Long Island City are on WNYC. Hi, Ethan. Hey, Brian. Thank you. Thank you for taking my call. So my observation, so I'm approaching my 60th birthday, and I've been very active in the street dance culture for decades. I grew up in the Bronx, and a lot of kids way back in the 70s, we were just...

dancing on the street. These days with a lot of kids, especially I think the advent of TikTok and also Instagram, a lot of kids these days as they come into the dance community, they post their dance videos. And in those dance videos, it's a very two-dimensional perspective. It's only what the video will capture, only what the onlooker will capture. Whereas... In the old tradition, the dancing was much more three-dimensional, even multidimensional, in that we would move around and different planes and dimensions of the movement. So I feel that because of the element of the presentation, the show, a lot of the dance styles have become very, very influenced by that perspective, by that onlooker perspective, especially from the video perspective, which, of course, for the purpose of posting online on these social media sites. So fascinating. Catherine, Ethan's talking about how the presence of social media affects what kind of dance people in the street dance community actually do. I find that so fascinating. And I can totally picture what he means this kind of, you're just facing one, you're facing the front, you're facing the camera. And it reminds me, too, of the way that. our vacation photography, and I write about this in the book, weddings themselves, the way that we are holding weddings with the kind of expectation that it's going to be documented and the way that that changes people's behavior at weddings. It really, I think it has transformed a lot of the social experience of celebratory events because you're kind of interacting with it with the thought of documentation and also while documenting yourself. Similarly, a text from Heather and Maplewood, who writes, I recently found some Christmas letters I sent to family and friends in my late 20s, early 30s, which was in the early 2000s. I was so surprised to read how much detail I included and how emotionally vulnerable I presented myself versus how guardedly and carefully I portray myself on social media now. So it definitely changed how I narrate and think of my own life. Another one. I'll note that you have a chapter in the book, bluntly titled Lies, the premise being we know everyone on social media might be lying to us at any given moment. And sure enough, we got a text. Listener writes, at this point, I just blatantly lie on social media for fun, saying I'm engaged or expecting. Neither is true. I feel like everyone is doing some version of embellishment, so I just treat it like performance art and go full-blown fabrication. I'm sorry that this is making me think of Donald Trump and how a lot of people just sort of accept that, you know, at the political level, but back to social media, there's a little... evidence that your chapter called lies is accurate. Yeah, I mean, it's just showbiz, right? I really think, you know, maybe not everyone's blatantly lying about how they're engaged, but it is definitely an approach of playing with the format. Jessica in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC. Hi, Jessica.

Hi, how are you? I wanted to say joyfully that my 20-year-old took a picture last night of us without a phone. And there are tons and tons of 20-year-olds out there that are actively taking a moment to step away from their phone and realizing their phone is a phone and that their photos are photos. So it's really a breath of fresh air. They're doing it without our intervention. but they are really waking up to tech addiction. But still carrying around, so you're saying in this case, your 20-year-old carries a separate camera, a physical camera. Yeah, very exciting. Took a picture last night of us and said, you know, I really want to start taking pictures and stop using. My phone is everything. So it's very exciting. Thank you, Jessica. You know, one other person told me that, too, about their lives, the camera, the separate camera now, instead of just the phone, even though the quality of... phone photos gets better and better all the time. Have you heard that particular one before, Kathy? Yeah, and it's younger people in general that I've heard it from, that they're really, you know, embracing, you know, analog photography and even just a digital camera that, you know, is not the phone. Totally. And I love that because I do think that it invites a different kind of storytelling and it really changes the relationship with an experience. So, no, I mean, I love hearing those kinds of stories. Before we ran out of time, you wrote a recent brooding column called Every Teen Should Work in the Service Industry. And coincidentally, this concept came up on yesterday's show when we were talking with the priest and public intellectual father James Martin, who talked about his own. teen menial service industry jobs that he thought kind of helped set him up spiritually to do, you know, what he was going to do eventually. And I thought of you because I had read your recent column called Every Teen Should Work in the Service Industry. So is a teenager's first service job, and I said that to him, I mentioned you, is a teenager's first service job in any way an antidote to... Anything in this book? That's so interesting. I really hadn't thought of that. But, you know, it's true. Like service is all about encounter with strangers and dealing with the kind of unexpected, just other people and all of their needs. And it's very unpredictable. And I do think that it can be an antidote because so much of social media storytelling is about... control and about sort of controlling narratives, controlling impressions. And it is a form of hiding for a lot of people, like was mentioned. And when you're working in the service industry, you can't hide. You know, you're on the floor with people and you have to respond to whatever comes your way, you know, with graciousness at the, you know, ideally. So yeah, that's great. I see that. Yes, I agree.

Just a few more texts relevant to the book. because they can't resist as they continue to flood in. Let's see. One person writes about the cameras. One day I was on the train with the kids heading to a Mets game, and we were all wearing Mets gear, and a young woman sitting across from us asked if she could take our picture with a Polaroid camera. We said, sure, and she did and gave us the picture. It was a sweet moment. And, of course, you can't do that with your phone. You can't print out the picture at the moment on the spot and give it to a stranger. And someone else writes on the lion. there's a viral video going around right now where this woman supposedly made her own wedding cake and documented the process, but the end result was a completely different cake. L.O.L. Yeah, no, it's, it's, there's so much, there's so many lies. And we all, the lies are tiny and big. You know, I'm more interested in the tiny lies, the almost imperceptible lies, but the big lies are interesting too. Why are you more interested in that tiny lies? Well, because I think that everyone is doing it, and we're not calling it lies. You know, even these are lies of omission. They're, you know, just you're shaping a narrative, keeping a lot of your own self out. You're doing it to just adhere to the format. And the end result is not accurate. It's not, it doesn't fit the true feeling of your life. And I think that's really common. Is there a call to action in this book? You know, my editor really wanted me to put one, and I really tried, because, you know, I don't think that the solution is throw your phone in the ocean. I don't think that it's realistic. I do think that we just need to recognize our narratives for what they are, that we're telling stories on social media. That's what we're doing. And it's a noble, beautiful thing to tell stories as a human being. And we've always done that. Always. So I think. We just need to dignify this act and see it for what it is. And then maybe we will cease to be satisfied with this technology as a storytelling technology. Because to me, it's not adequate to the task of human beings telling their stories. Catherine Giza Morton's new book is The Story of Your Life, How Social Media Shapes the Way We Experience Everything. Thanks for sharing it with us. Great to talk. Thanks so much, Brian.

Thanks for listening to Brian Lairor weekend. We're back on the radio Monday morning at 10 a.m. In the meantime, follow us on Blue Sky at the Brian Lairer Show, where there's always a conversation 24-7.