One of the things that stuck out to me in the book, one line, there's a line in the book that says,

the last time the earth was four degrees above the band we've been in, there were palm trees in the

Arctic. Yeah. That's some, that really hammers at home for me. Yeah. That's a good mental shortcut

for me. Four degrees means palm trees in the Arctic. Hello and welcome to Why is this happening

with me, your host, Chris Hayes. All right. You guys know how much I like to try new stuff here on

the podcast, experiment, new guests, new topics, things we haven't done before. Today is a topic

that we have done before and it's a topic I think about a lot. I'm fairly obsessed with. Yeah.

I think it's the single most important issue we face, probably the most important issue in the

history of civilization. And it's with a book author, a book that I flew through, an incredible book

that I'll tell you a little bit about. But I try to think about, well, what's the best way to do

the intro for this? Because the topic itself is so intense and the conversation is here is probably

one of the most, I don't know, what's the right word? Like emotionally intense, spiritually intense

conversations that we've had. It revolves around some of the most profound questions of what our

purpose on this planet are for the brief time that we get to inhabit it. Why, why we're here and what

we can or can't do during that time. And so I was trying to think about the best way to intro it

and then got an email from Brendan McDonald who is the brilliant producer who edits our interviews

and he'll sometimes he'll send an email after he's taken a pass from an interview and edited it

down with some notes about the intro saying, oh, you may need to set this up or you mentioned this,

but you never say what it is. So think about this. So I'm just going to read a portion of Brendan

McDonald's email about this episode that you're about to listen to with David Wallace Wells.

And he gives me some there's some logistical stuff and he says, now the trickier part which seems

both unavoidable and impossible to deal with. There is no amount of setup, no amount of rationalization,

...