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A lot of marriages in the U.S. today are radical by grandparent standards. Women as breadwinners. Stay-at-home dads. Gay marriages. Polyamorous marriages! Yet despite all these evolutions, the ritual that ushers in those marriages—the American wedding—has hardly changed at all. Weddings are constantly evolving, but often in the direction of more elaborate, more luxe, more wedding-like. Why are we obsessed with perfecting what is essentially a 19th-century artifact?

In this episode, we talk to Xochitl Gonzalez, who wrote a confessional for The Atlantic about her years as a luxury wedding planner, and authored Olga Dies Dreaming, a bestselling novel about a luxury wedding planner and a cast of obnoxious clients. Gonzalez tells us about the out-there demands of the uber rich. (Preview: monks; pizza; an orchid bear.) We talk about how those demands trickle down to the average couple, with delusions of a celebrity-style wedding, done on the cheap. And we puzzle over the big question: Why are we so fixated on this grand old tradition?

Listen to the conversation here:

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The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: I watched The Wedding Planner last night. Just, I was like: Oh my God.

Xochitl Gonzalez: Can we talk about it? Because I know that movie like the back of my hand.

Rosin: I mean, I love J. Lo, but I have not dipped into a rom-com from that era in a while. Every moment of it felt kind of manufactured and awkward.

Gonzalez: Oh, so completely. That is like the era of the cultural stereotype.

Rosin: Yes. Yes!

Gonzalez: Of shorthand, right? Like one trope after another. Although there’s a great line when the boss of her little wedding-planning operation is like: “I’ve done things no innocent planner should ever have to.”

[Laughter.]

Rosin: Right. I did think of you when I heard that line.

Gonzalez: Right. It’s a good line. That’s actually a good line.

[MUSIC]

Rosin: I’m Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic. If you’re getting married this summer, I pity you. Not because of the marriage. I’m sure that’ll be fine. But because of the wedding. Social media seems to have changed the game for the average couple. Every wedding is now supposed to look like a luxury wedding and yet somehow cost a lot less than an actual luxury wedding.

But the weirdest thing for me is that weddings still exist at all. Marriage is totally different than it used to be. Women’s roles are totally different. And yet the wedding just keeps getting more … wedding-y.

Why do we keep innovating and improving on what is basically an artifact from the early 19th century?

So because surely some of you out there are attending a wedding or 15 this summer, we are going to talk about weddings with someone who has lived through many, many of them: Atlantic writer Xochitl Gonzalez. She just wrote a confessional for the magazine about her years running a luxury wedding business. And before that she wrote an exceptional novel called Olga Dies Dreaming about a wedding planner, that was way more intense about the class and race dynamics of the American luxury wedding than the Jennifer Lopez movie. Why do we have to mention that movie? Hi, Xochitl.

Gonzalez: Hi. It’s so nice to talk to you.

Rosin: Yeah, it’s nice to talk to you. So I wanted to go back to a time when you were first starting out planning luxury weddings. What year was that?

Gonzalez: It was 2003 when I started. But I should say: You kind of have to work, unless, I always say, unless your name is Bronson Van Wick. Who’s a real person who’s extremely successful, and you have that kind of name—where it’s like, Oh, Bronson Van Wick. I think you have to sort of work your way up the ranks.

Does that make sense?

Rosin: Yeah. Like in the movie.

Gonzalez: Yeah. So it probably took us maybe two or three years before we were really doing luxury weddings. Which at that time, probably anything over 75 was considered luxury.

And then you get into ultra-luxury, which then was probably anything over a quarter of a million dollars. Which I know sounds like a lot, and to my jaded wedding-planning eyes, it’s like, Eh, it doesn’t get you that far.

Rosin: Oh my God. All right, so let’s say around 2005 you start planning some serious weddings. What is the first request someone made of you that you were like, Oh, okay, okay, okay?

Gonzalez: I mean, then I’m going to say that it was relatively reasonable, right? It was like: “Could you get me this celebrity singer to come to the wedding?” Like: “I want every table to have an ice sculpture, with the flower arrangement frozen inside of it.”

You know, it was just weird stuff that they maybe had seen in a magazine. Or [since] this is the dawn of wedding TV, that they might have seen on wedding television. Everything was very celebrity and upscale-emulating.

At the time, Preston Bailey was like the pinnacle of weddings. And he was doing this thing where he would make animals out of flowers. So, like an eight-foot-tall bear made out of orchids. That kind of thing. And so people would be like: “Could I have little animals made out of roses?”

So it wasn’t that creative in the beginning. And then as it went on, you started to get weird gag things. Like: “I want to bring up this pony during a toast.” Or I had somebody that was like: “I want to have tattoos set up at the after-party so that my granny can get a tat at my wedding.”

And so you have a remote tattoo artist coming into town. But the first area that I’d say things started to get unusual, really, was the ceremony. We had a couple that was like: “You have to fly this monk in from Tibet. And then you have to help our rabbi get a visa because we need this one particular rabbi, because he was famous for being like the first gay rabbi in a particular denomination.”

We had one couple that didn’t want to leave a carbon footprint for their ceremony. That was a big deal at one point. Nobody wanted to leave a carbon footprint. So we used real trees that then we had to find a place to replant them.

Rosin: God, Xochitl. I have to stop you and say, like: This is insane. I mean, this is not what I was expecting. I thought it would be like a cute little story and, no, it’s like: fly a Buddhist in from Tibet…

Gonzalez: Oh yeah.

Rosin: Transplant trees! I mean, this is like the things that you have seen are extra. I mean, what was the thought going through your head? When somebody calls you and they’re like: “I would like a Buddhist flown in from a different country,” what is going through your head?

Gonzalez: Well, it was kind of a frog boil. So I always feel like I don’t do that well with these questions, because at the time, you just were like, “Oh, okay. Of course.” Because, the week before, you had just gotten a slightly less crazy request. So they just sort of kept escalating, and you’re like: “Well, obviously we’ve gotta get the monk from Tibet here.”

And then, you’re like, “Well, is he willing to fly commercial?” That’s like your first question.

Rosin: Oh my God. I could hear that in your voice. I could hear that you were lapsing into normal mode where it’s just like, Sure, I’ll do this, and I’ll do that, and I’ll do that. Like as you’re telling me, I’m realizing how otherworldly this is. But for you, it just registers as another thing on your checklist.

Gonzalez: Yeah. I think that the hardest part about writing about it is sometimes recognizing when things were strange. Do you know what?

Rosin: Yes. Yes.

Gonzalez: You’re like, Wait, okay. That was strange. Now that I’m away from it, I can see how that was strange.

Rosin: Right. So what I understand was at first the wedding requests were derivative because there were a lot of wedding magazines. And so people just saw what other people had, and they wanted those things.

Gonzalez: Totally. And you had more wedding magazines, which I think is so hard for people to even wrap their heads around.

But there was Inside Weddings, In Style Weddings, Modern Bride. And then you had The Knot, and then you had Martha Stewart, and then you had regional versions. like, so you would have Brides and then you’d have New York Bride. You’d have The Knot and then you’d have The Knot New York.

You just had so much bridal content on newsstands. And then—’06, ’07—you start getting blogs.

So now you’ve got digital media. You’ve got print media still happening; you have books. You had Pinterest. You could be doing wedding stuff. You could be watching a wedding movie. You could be going crazy on blogs all night. You could be reading magazines on the subway on your way to and from work. You could be buying advice books and etiquette books and design books. Like, you could spend a small fortune just on bridal media.

Rosin: I mean, there really was a wedding-industrial complex.

Gonzalez: There was!

Rosin: That’s not a made-up term.

Gonzalez: No, you know,—I think there was a rebellion against the “traditional wedding,” right? There was this overtaking, of like: How can I make this feel like only we would have this wedding? Right? I think that there was like a chicken and the egg.

Blogs came about, and kind of really drove that. Because suddenly it’s not Darcy Miller at Martha Stewart determining whether or not this is good enough to be in print, right? It’s like, I need content. To go up like 10 times a day, right, on this blog.

And so you were sort of like, Well, what are we going to do? You know, we did this one thing, and it was like pinwheels and calico prints. [Laughter.] And I think that was like one of the first weddings—it was like a phase, I call it “The Bunting Years,” where everybody had bunting everywhere. And we were sort of like pioneers in bunting. And I’m obviously quite proud of that.

Rosin: [Laughs.] Congratulations.

Gonzalez: Yes, I know. Really I was very, very proud of that. And that wedding—I remember again, I was so proud of this—we had custom-made yarmulkes in denim and calico.

Rosin: Mm-hmm.

Gonzalez: It was so cute. It was very cute. But like, you know, I think what ends up happening is the ’00s—the era when I got into it—was sort of an era of growing flash. And it just kind of kept increasing and increasing and increasing throughout that decade, until the recession. And then we sort of merged into like—weird, I don’t want to say that it was “quiet luxury,” but it was more whispered. It was spent; it was quirky luxury. Quirky luxury.

Before the recession, finance was a bigger section of the luxury wedding market, but not necessarily people with inherited wealth.

You know, like they’re probably middle-class people that ended up going to business school, and, you know, they’re spending their Goldman money on a wedding. And they wanted to have nice weddings that would impress their friends.

And then after the recession, what happened was almost all the clientele in the luxury sector shifted to people with inherited wealth.

So like: They may have done well themselves, but their parents had also done very well. And that was who then felt comfortable, I think, after this giant shakeup in the economy. These were the people that still felt comfortable spending that kind of money, but they didn’t want people to know they were spending that kind of money.

So you start to get that twee aesthetic: where everything’s super-custom, but at the same time, it’s not the Plaza with orchids splattered all over the walls, right? It’s like flowers grown on a farm that only grew these flowers for your wedding, right?

I think we did the very first wedding that Roberta’s ever catered, and we had to bring up all of their pizza ovens. And, you know, it sounds really casual, right? You’re like, “Roberta’s is catering my wedding.”

And then it’s like: No, they’ve never catered anything before, and we are basically recreating their kitchen in a field. So it’s actually not cheap at all. But the couple wanted to be able to tell people “Roberta’s is doing my catering.”

Rosin: Right, right. We should say: Roberta’s is a famous hipster pizza place in Bushwick, Brooklyn. And so what are you learning about the ultra-wealthy as you’re going through this? Because it sounds like they go through eras. One era of conspicuous consumption moves into the next era of understated elegance.

I mean, we like to flatten the motivations and desires of the ultra-rich, but what do you think they wanted? I mean, partly it’s to get into a magazine or a blog?

Gonzalez: Well, actually, I would say that I think that is a more middle-class desire, to be honest. Like, I think that the ultra-rich are much more content with the people that were there seeing it. There’s a bit of social media, but there’s a remarkable amount of privacy around this stuff.

And especially I’d say that trend has even increased since I’ve left. Like in talking to different people still in the business—you know, when I say “ultra luxury,” I’m saying $2, $3, $4 million on a wedding. Like, there is a desire to not necessarily have every single thing sprawled over, and the sense that that makes it more exclusive to the people that were there.

Exclusivity is a big thing. It’s probably part of the reason why you see so many very wealthy people having tent weddings—because they want to go to a location that nobody has gone to before. Right? So maybe that’s like: You’re housed at a hotel, but you’re going to be down by a lake that no one’s ever used for a wedding before. Exclusivity and rarity, and giving guests access to that, is a big part of what I think the ultra-wealthy are trying to achieve with their weddings.

Rosin: Got it. So for the ultra-wealthy, it’s an air of mystery. Specificity. Exclusivity. And then how does that filter down to everyone else?

Gonzalez: So what’ll happen is—and you know, I spoke with this wonderful photographer, Alan Zapata. He charges I think around $40,000 and $50,000 for a wedding weekend.

And he’s like: “The No. 1 thing I have to do is get like 10 or 12 images ready to put on social media.” So it’s not that they’re not sharing; it’s just that they’re sharing very selectively. So what happens is these will go out. And in the olden days, maybe a wedding would go in a magazine—like you might see, let’s say, Chelsea Clinton’s wedding, right?

And People then might do an interview with the person who planned it, Bryan Rafanelli. And Bryan will say, like: “Oh, here’s a way to get Chelsea’s look for less.” And you know, he’ll do a little editorial thing. What happens now is that people see this on social media, and it’s given without any context, right? So you see, let’s say Kim [Kardashian]—I’m thinking of a famous image like Kim and Kanye [West]’s floral wall. You see it in a magazine; it’s like: “How to Get That Look for Less.” And [it’s] like: Do it with carnations. You know, it was done with roses and orchids, like whatever. And now you end up just seeing it with no context, with no information, with no kind of like, quote unquote, wedding education.

And so it creates desire in people that are soon to be brides and grooms, and it creates desire without any attachment to knowledge. It’s like, I could see a Chanel gown and know, Well, that’s a very nice gown, but I’m not buying that.

Right? But there’s no sense that this is the Chanel of wedding flowers, right?

Rosin: So because it’s appearing in your feed, it feels utterly attainable. You’re like, Oh, there’s a picture. It’s scrolling down my feed. Yeah.

Gonzalez: It’s like the next thing you see. Like your college roommate’s baby shower. It’s mixed in with content of people that are real-life people, but then these are not necessarily even people that you exactly know. And so I think it sort of makes a scramble in the brain, where it’s like, Well, I now need to have this—because it becomes detached from any reality of the wealth that’s supporting that.

Rosin: But you know, the mania just keeps transforming, and it doesn’t change anything for the actual couple. It makes it worse, because at first you have all these standard-bearers, like the magazines and the central blogs. And then it just becomes democratized. And so everybody has to do it for themselves.

So everybody has to create their own perfect photo shoot. That would’ve been, say, a bridal-magazine photo shoot. But you’re expected to somehow do it, create it, and pay for it yourself.

Gonzalez: Yeah, you know, I’d written a piece about this ages ago about my bra fitter—like the lady where I buy my bras on Atlantic Avenue. And this woman’s been in bras for 40 years, right?

And I was like, “I go to her because she’s an expert.” I think what has happened in the democratization of imagery, because it’s not really information necessarily, is the demise of expertise. And I don’t know that that’s helped people. I think it’s created more confusion. I think that there’s not necessarily reliable sources to even know what to ask.

So I always am curious: In that sort of middle tier, how good are those experiences that you’re seeing? Like, I think that people are performing on Instagram and taking out money—you know, for the things that are going to get them attention on the Gram.

To spend money on choreographies [so] you can do a choreographed dance that’ll get you hits on TikTok. Like, I wonder what these guests are eating. I wonder what they’re drinking. You know? I wonder what the experience is on the other side, and I wonder how much people care.

Rosin: Right. Because you have to skimp somewhere.

Gonzalez: Right? And that’s also the stuff that really costs the most. Giving a very nice meal; making sure people have transportation to and from the ceremony, back to the reception, back to the hotel after they’ve been drinking all night. Like, that’s the stuff that starts to really add up. But you don’t see that on the Gram, right?

[MUSIC]

Rosin: After the break, we check in with a bespoke pyrotechnics expert on how to give your wedding the grand entrance of your dreams…

Just kidding. We’re going to discuss why we can’t seem to quit the ever-bigger, ever-fancier, and ever-more-expensive wedding.

[MUSIC]

Rosin: So, we’ve talked about how couples see these luxury weddings on Instagram. And then, how does that have real effects on their typical wedding?

Gonzalez: So I think it sort of trickles down, and then people want. You know, I discovered this did not exist when I was still in the business. But two kinds of cottage industries have come up.

Wedding styling. You know, like in terms of the way you think of a stylist that’s going to get you ready for a runway if you’re a celebrity. Wedding styling has been around for maybe 20 years or so, but it was a very exclusive service, right? Like it was really for the upper tier of the market.

Rosin: When you say “wedding styling,” I just think someone comes in and does your hair—

Gonzalez: No, so this is like: “I’m going to help you find the dress, the shoes, the accessory.” Now it’s expanded to the look that’s going to coordinate that for your engagement photos, for the rehearsal dinner. What are you going to wear for the day-after brunch? Like, if you have an excursion during your wedding weekend, what are you going to wear for that? So it’s like a whole series of “bridal looks.”

And then the other little strange thing that I wasn’t expecting at all is: Social-media professionals to come and sort of document your wedding specifically for social media.

So they will be on TikTok; they’ll be making reels. They’ll be posting up select photos like in real time. And one of the services will “develop a strategy” for your wedding. And like their tagline was: “Because the day you spent 14 months planning should be seen by the world.”

Rosin: Oh my God. No. I mean: Is this trickle-down luxury to you? To someone inside, [is] it a good thing or a bad thing? To me, it’s very stressful. Just hearing you lay it out. I’m really glad I’m not getting married right now, but what do you think?

Gonzalez: To me, I think it’s pretty stressful. I guess I could say I get worried about society, right? And what living virtually has done to us in terms of our priorities, about real life versus appearances, if that makes sense. And so I’m not against weddings—you know, I had a relatively low-budget [wedding]. I’m not married anymore, but I never regret having that wedding because, you know, my grandfather walked me down the aisle. We did the dance. I have those memories. I have these great photos of me and my best friends who were still my best friends. I remember I have these memories of us getting ready together, and doing the whole thing.

And this was great. But it was not only a different time economically when I did that—that was around ’04 or ’05—but it was also a different mindset. And that sense is certainly not pervading the general population of the economy right now.

And so I think that’s why I’m sort of shocked at the way in which money’s getting spent sort of flippantly. More people are taking on wedding debt now than ever before, and through personal loans too. Like, it’s not even just credit-card debt; it’s taking out personal loans to finance or supplement their weddings at sometimes up to 30 percent interest rates.

And knowing that—is it for people’s experience? Is it for the memory, or is it for the Gram? And that part makes me a little nervous or uncomfortable, I should say.

Rosin: Yeah. I’m really confused by why we just cling to this tradition. Like as you’re talking, I’m thinking: Has not one single couple, when you were wedding planning, just said “No”? Like, “This is not us. This is nothing to do with our life. Like we’re putting ourselves in aspic, like getting this perfect old tradition, and to the max—but this is not us, and I don’t want to do it.”

Gonzalez: Well, probably. It’s self-selected by the people that came in the door, right? I will say, I did have one couple; they called off their wedding because the mom of the bride was so particular and worried about what people thought and how things were going to be perceived. And they started to bicker. And they ended up, they were like, “We don’t want to do this. This is terrible. We don’t even want to be together anymore.” And they called off the wedding. And I remember running into them, separately, like a year later. You know, they were not together. And like: “I think it’s probably the best thing that we did. The wedding was just too much.”

And then after that, like two years later, they ended up just eloping. They got back together; they eloped. And the desire to have this perfect wedding that represented “them as a couple” just was too much. Literally, they were like, “I can’t do it.”

But I think it was also money that everybody had, right? So the calculus was different. I think I’m sort of just disconcerted to a certain extent at, like: What is the point of making it a visually stunning event if you know that you’re going to be kind of paying that back for forever?

Rosin: Because you just get one second of—

Gonzalez: It’s a dopamine hit, right?

Rosin: Yeah. Well, what do you think? Like, marriages are so different. Fewer people are getting married. Women’s roles are so different. And we keep injecting this one tradition with so much money, so much importance. Like, so much perfection. It’s really odd.

Gonzalez: So, you know, the wedding in America the way that we think about it, right? The white dress and the reception. That sort of all emerged in the ’50s post-war, right? Like, when we had a middle class.

Rosin: Yeah.

Gonzalez: And it was this kind of way to say: “Here we are as a family.” Right? Like for the bride’s family to be like: “We are in the middle class.” And so the niceness of the wedding was a performative way for your neighbors and your community, your church community, your residential community to see, like: Oh, okay. Like: Look what they were able to do for their daughter. And there was a certain aspect of the lady’s hurrah, right? The bride’s hurrah of showing herself off.

And I think what’s funny is that as we’ve been able to sort of let go of ... like, I think the number of people that anticipate buying a home has declined, right?

We’ve let go of so many “middle-class American aspirations,” but we haven’t been able to let go of the wedding. It’s not perceived as a luxury. Weddings, period, are a luxury. Whether you are in the luxury end of the market or not, they are a luxury start to finish.

But there’s something that we have not accepted as a luxury. They feel like an entitlement. Like: If you are going to marry, and by that I mean legally do it, then if you are an American and you consider yourself middle class, you should be able to have a nice wedding.

And I think that’s where a lot of the resentment of the cost comes in. It’s like, “You running your business is stopping me from having my nice wedding that I’m entitled to.”

And I think that there’s a real reluctance to give up the dream.

It’s one of the few middle-class dreams that I think people don’t want to give up. People have given up on college, and I don’t think that they want to give up on weddings.

Rosin: But I mean, we have definitely transformed the traditional marriage. Like, if you had a friend who had a very stereotypical 1950s-style marriage where the gender roles were very rigidly prescribed, you might be confused. We just don’t do that anymore. Like, women’s roles are dismantled. But—we refuse, we will not dismantle the proposal, the wedding dress. The wedding. So many things about the wedding are so traditional.

Gonzalez: One of the things that I think is probably the funniest to me is that we did a pop-up wedding chapel with The Knot the weekend that gay marriage passed in New York. Okay. And we had two or three little ceremony setups, and I think [something] like 20 couples got married in Central Park that day. And I remember being like, This is so cute.

Like, this is bad for business. But I was like, wouldn’t this be great if in expanding what marriage [is], who can get married, we expand what could be a nice wedding. And then instead you fast-forward 20 years, and it’s just like: Everybody’s still having these super-traditional weddings.

[Laughter.]

Rosin: I was going to say, I’ve been to many a gay wedding—

Gonzalez: I was going to say: I feel like the gay weddings that I’ve been to have been just as, if not more, elaborate—right?—than any of the hetero weddings. So I almost think it’s hilarious that when you think about the total deconstruct of that 1950s stereotype of what a marriage is like, we still can’t get away from the wedding.

And I think it’s got romance attached to it. And I think there is sort of this idea, again, of in a funny way, it is not the right to live together in relationship.

And you know, it’s that great Sondheim song like about marriage. Like, “It’s the little things you do together.” It’s not about that part. It’s literally about the right to have a wedding.

[Laughter.]

It’s like the fight for your right to party: like literally. And so I think that in some ways we’ve conflated a good wedding with good marriage.

And I do think we’ve become obsessed, in this country, with celebrity. And I think it’s sort of a performative way to now have both. You know, show off some class status. But more than anything, I think people are like: It’s a way to sort of have celebrity [status] for a day. Like, attainable celebrity for a day.

Rosin: So in the way that you’d want to, you used to want to be a princess for the day, or royalty—

Gonzalez: Yes. Now you’re like a Kardashian for the day, right? And what does that come with? It comes with luxury: It comes with designer clothes, it comes with a glam squad. It comes with a camera following you around the entire day. It comes with all these things. And like, people don’t want to give that up.

So it’s a tiny version of celebrity. I think what’s funny to me when I kept thinking about it is people will sit and like hem and haw about like, “Oh, can we afford to get a car? Can we afford to do this? Can we afford to like, send our kid to this school?” And in the meantime, they’ll be like, for no hands down, “Just borrow $50,000. Let’s have this wedding.”

Rosin: Oh my. Right. You know, in the Jennifer Lopez movie, which I just rewatched last night, she herself is chasing the dream. Like, she wants to have her own wedding. And in your novel Olga Dies Dreaming, which I loved, Olga ends up with a guy, and there’s no wedding in sight.

Gonzalez: No.

Rosin: And she seems, like, way more herself. Is there some message I’m supposed to read into that? Like, just forget the wedding?

Where did you land, because you wrote this novel when you’ve essentially exited wedding planning, right?

Gonzalez: Yes; I’d exited. And you know, I think she was commitment-phobic in the beginning of the novel and ends up with somebody, but she’s got serious commitment issues. And I think I’ve landed on: The relationship is so much more important than the performance of the relationship.

I love a good party. I think, if you’ve got the cash—who doesn’t love a good party? But I don’t know that the wedding has to be the reason for the party. A party for no reason’s also kind of fun.

Rosin: So: Skip the wedding; just have a party. That’s your mantra now?

Gonzalez: Yeah. I still support parties.

Rosin: Yeah. Pro-party. Okay! Well, you are working on a new novel. There’s going to be a cover reveal soon. Is there anything else you want to say about it?

Gonzalez: Oh, it’s about power and creative couples. It’s a first-generation art-history student in an Ivy League school who discovers a forgotten female genius artist who was murdered by her husband 20 years before. And I’m very excited about it. It’s a little bit of a mystery.

It’s a little bit of a campus novel. It’s a little ghosty. And it’s called Anita de Monte Laughs Last.

Rosin: Ooh. Amazing. Can’t wait. Thank you, Xochitl, for joining us today.

Gonzalez: Thank you.

[MUSIC]

Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Kevin Townsend and edited by Theo Balcomb. It was engineered by Rob Smierciak and fact-checked by Yvonne Kim. Our executive producer is Claudine Ebeid. Thank you to managing editor Andrea Valdez and executive editor Adrienne LaFrance. If you like this episode, leave us a review wherever you’re listening. I’m Hanna Rosin, and we’ll be back with a new episode every Thursday.

In recent months, many, many researchers and computer scientists involved in creating artificial intelligence have been warning the world that they’ve created something unbelievably dangerous. Something that might eventually lead humanity to extinction. Paul Christiano, who worked at Open AI, put it this way: “If, God forbid, they were trying to kill us, they would definitely kill us.” Such warnings can sound bombastic and overblown—but then again, they’re often coming from the people who understand this technology best.

In this episode of Radio Atlantic, host Hanna Rosin talks to The Atlantic’s executive editor, Adrienne LaFrance, and staff writer Charlie Warzel about how seriously we should take these warnings. Should we think of these AI doomers as street preachers? Or are they canny Silicon Valley marketers trying to emphasize the power of what they’ve built?

In Europe, there is already a broad conversation about limiting AI surveillance technology and inserting pauses before approving commercial uses. In the U.S., coalitions of researchers and legislators have called for a “pause,” without any specifics. Meanwhile, with all this talk of killer robots, humanity may be overlooking the more immediate dangers posed by AI. We talk about where things stand and how to orient ourselves to the coming dangers.

Listen to the conversation here:

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Google Podcasts | Pocket Casts

The following transcript has been edited for clarity.

Hanna Rosin: I remember when I was a little kid being alone in my room one night watching this movie called The Day After. It was about nuclear war, and for some absurd reason, it was airing on regular network TV.

The Day After:

Denise: It smells so bad down here. I can’t even breathe!

Denise’s mom: Get ahold of yourself, Denise.

Rosin: I particularly remember a scene where a character named Denise—my best friend’s name was Denise—runs panicked out of her family’s nuclear-fallout shelter.

The Day After:

Denise: Let go of me. I can’t see!

Mom: You can’t go! Don’t go up there!

Brother: Wait a minute!

Rosin: It was definitely, you know, “extra.” Also, to teenage me, genuinely terrifying. It was a very particular blend of scary ridiculousness I hadn’t experienced since—until a couple of weeks ago, when someone sent me a link to this YouTube video with Paul Christiano, who is an artificial intelligence researcher.

Paul Christiano: The most likely way we die is not that AI comes out of the blue and kills us, but involves that we’ve deployed AI everywhere. And if, God forbid, they were trying to kill us, they would definitely kill us.

Rosin: Christiano was talking on this podcast called Bankless. And then I started to notice other major AI researchers saying similar things:

Norah O’Donnell on CBS News: More than 1,300 tech scientists, leaders, researchers, and others are now asking for a pause.

Bret Baier on Fox News: Top story right out of a science-fiction movie.

Rodolfo Ocampo on 7NEWS Australia: Now it’s permeating the cognitive space. Before, it was more the mechanical space.

Michael Usher on 7NEWS Australia: There needs to be at least a six-month stop on the training of these systems.

Fox News: Contemporary AI systems are now being human-competitive.

Yoshua Bengio talking with Tom Bilyeu: We have to get our act together.

Eliezer Yudkowsky on the Bankless podcast: We’re hearing the last winds begin to blow, the fabric of reality start to fray.

Rosin: And I’m thinking, Is this another campy Denise moment? Am I terrified? Is it funny? I can’t really tell, but I do suspect that the very “doomiest” stuff at least is a distraction. There are likely some actual dangers with AI that are less flashy but maybe equally life-altering.

So today we’re talking to The Atlantic’s executive editor, Adrienne LaFrance, and staff writer Charlie Warzel, who’ve been researching and tracking AI for some time.

___

Rosin: Charlie, Adrienne—when these experts are saying, “Worry about the extinction of humanity,” what are they actually talking about?

Adrienne LaFrance: Let’s game out the existential doom, for sure. [Laughter.]

Rosin: Thanks!

LaFrance: When people warn about the extinction of humanity at the hands of AI, that’s literally what they mean—that all humans will be killed by the machines. It sounds very sci-fi. But the nature of the threat is that you imagine a world where more and more we rely on artificial intelligence to complete tasks or make judgments that previously were reserved for humans. Obviously, humans are flawed. The fear assumes a moment at which AI’s cognitive abilities eclipse our species—and so all of a sudden, AI is really in charge of the biggest and most consequential decisions that humans make. You can imagine they’re making decisions in wartime about when to deploy nuclear weapons—and you could very easily imagine how that could go sideways.

Rosin: Wait; but I can’t very easily imagine how that would go sideways. First of all, wouldn’t a human put in many checks before you would give access to a machine?

LaFrance: Well, one would hope. But one example would be that you give the AI the imperative to “Win this war, no matter what.” And maybe you’re feeding in other conditions that say “We don’t want mass civilian casualties.” But ultimately, this is what people refer to as an “alignment problem”—you give the machine a goal, and it will do whatever it takes to reach that goal. And that includes maneuvers that humans can’t anticipate, or that go against human ethics.

Charlie Warzel: A sort of a meme of this that has been around for a long time is called “the paper clip–maximizer problem.” You tell a sentient artificial intelligence, “We want you to build as many paper clips as fast as possible, and in the most efficient way.” And the AI goes through all the computations and says, “Well, really, the thing that is stopping us from building as many paper clips as we can is the fact that humans have other goals. So we better just eradicate humans.”

Rosin: Why can’t you just program in: “Machine, you are allowed to do anything to make those paper clips, short of killing everyone.”

Warzel: Well, let me lay out a classic AI doomer’s scenario that may be easier to imagine. Let’s say five, 10 years down the line, a supercomputer is able to process that much more information—on a scale of a hundred-X more powerful than whatever we have now. It knows how to build iterations of itself, so it builds a model. That model has all that intelligence—plus maybe a multiplier there of a little bit.

And that one builds a model, and another one builds a model. It just keeps building these models—and it gets to a point where it’s replicated enough that it’s sort of like a gene that is mutating.

Rosin: So this is the alignment thing. It’s suddenly like: We’re going along, we have the same objectives. And all of a sudden, the AI takes a sharp left turn and realizes that actually humans are the problem.

Warzel: Right. It can hack a bank; it can pose as a human. It can figure out a way through all of its knowledge of computer code to either socially engineer by impersonating someone—or it can actually hack and steal funds from a bank, get money, pose as a human being, and basically get someone involved by funding a state actor or a terrorist cell or something. Then they use the money that it’s gotten and pay the group to release a bioweapon, and—

Rosin: And, just to interject before you play it out completely, there’s no intention here. Right? It’s not necessarily intending to gain power the way, say an autocrat would be, or intending to rule the world? It’s simply achieving an objective that it began with, in the most effective way possible.

Warzel: Right. So this speaks to the idea that once you build a machine that is so powerful and you give it an imperative, there may not be enough alignment parameters that a human can set to keep it in check.

Rosin: I followed your scenario completely. That was very helpful, except you don’t sound at all worried.

Warzel: I don’t know if I buy any of it.

Rosin: You don’t even sound somber!

LaFrance: [Laughter.] Why don’t you like humans, Charlie?

Warzel: I’m anti-human. This is my hot take. [Laughter.]

Rosin: But that was a real question, Charlie. Why don’t you take this seriously? Is it because you think steps haven’t been worked out? Or is it because you think there are a lot of checks in place, like there are with human cloning? What is the real reason why you, Charlie, can intelligently lay out this scenario but not actually take it seriously?

Warzel: Well, bear with me here. Are you familiar with the South Park underpants gnomes?

South Park Gnomes (singing): Gotta go to work. Work, work, work. Search for underpants. Hey!

Warzel: For those blissfully unaware, the underpants gnomes are from South Park. But what’s important is that they have a business model that is notoriously vague.

South Park Gnome: “Collecting underpants is just Phase 1!”

Warzel: Phase 1 is to collect underpants. Phase 2?

South Park Gnome 1: Hey, what is Phase 2?

South Park Gnome 2: Phase 1, we collect underpants.

Gnome 1: Yah, yah, yah. But what is Phase 2?

Warzel: It’s a question mark.

Gnome 2: Well, Phase 3 is profit! Get it?

Warzel: And that’s become a cultural signifier over the last decade or so for a really vague business plan. When you listen to a lot of the AI doomers, you have somebody who is obviously an expert, who’s obviously incredibly smart. And they’re saying: Step 1, build an incredibly powerful artificial-intelligence system that maybe gets close to, or actually surpasses, human intelligence.

Step 2: question mark. Step 3: existential doom.

I just have never really heard a very good walkthrough of Step 2, or 2 and a half.

No one is saying that we have reached the point of no return.

LaFrance: Wait. But Charlie, I think you did give us Step 2. Because Step 2 is the AI hacks a bank and pays a terrorist, and the terrorists unleash a virus that kills humanity. I would also say that I think what people who are most worried would argue is that there isn’t time for a checklist. And that’s the nature of their worries.

And there are some who’ve said we are past the point of no return.

Warzel: And I get that. I’ll just say my feeling on this is that image of the Terminator 2: Judgment Day–type robots rolling over human skulls feels like a distraction from the bigger problems, because—

Rosin: Wait; you said it’s a distraction from bigger problems. And this is what I want to know, so I’m not distracted by the shiny doom movie. What are actually the things that we need to worry about, or pay attention to?

LaFrance: The possibility of wiping out entire job categories and industries, though that is a phenomenon we’ve experienced throughout technological history. That’s a real threat to people’s real lives and ability to buy groceries.

And I have real questions about what it means for the arts and our sense of what art is and whose work is valued, specifically with regard to artists and writers. But, Charlie, what are yours?

Warzel: Well, I think before we talk about exterminating the human race, I’m worried about financial institutions adopting these types of automated generative AI machines. And if you have an investment firm that is using a powerful piece of technology, and you wanna optimize for a very specific stock or a very specific commodity, then you get the possibility of something like that paper-clip problem. With: “Well, what’s the best way to drive the price of corn up?”

Rosin: Cause a famine.

Warzel: Right. Or start conflict in a certain region. Now, again—there’s still a little bit of that underpants gnome–ish quality to this. But I think a good analog for this is from the social-media era. Back when Mark Zuckerberg was making Facebook in his Harvard dorm room, it would have been silly to imagine it could lead to ethnic cleansing or genocide in somewhere like Myanmar.

But ultimately, when you create powerful networks, you connect people. There’s all sorts of unintended consequences.

Rosin: So given the speed and suddenness with which these bad things can happen, you can understand why lots of intelligent people are asking for a pause. Do you think that’s even possible? Is that the right thing to do?

LaFrance: No. I think it’s unrealistic, certainly, to expect tech companies to slow themselves down. It’s intensely competitive right now. I’m not convinced that regulation right now would be the right move, either. We’d have to know exactly what that looks like.

We saw it with social platforms, when they called for Congress to regulate them and then at the same time they’re lobbying very hard not to be regulated.

Rosin: I see. So what you’re saying is that it’s a cynical public play, and what they’re looking for are sort of toothless regulations.

LaFrance: I think that is unquestionably one dynamic at play. Also, to be fair, I think that many of the people who are building this technology are indeed very thoughtful, and hopefully reflecting with some degree of seriousness about what they’re unleashing.

So I don’t wanna suggest that they’re all just doing it for political reasons. But there certainly is that element.

When it comes to how we slow it down, I think it has to be individual people deciding for themselves how they think this world should be. I’ve had conversations with people who are not journalists, who are not in tech, but who are unbridled in their enthusiasm for what this will all mean. Someone recently mentioned to me how excited he was that AI could mean that they could just surveil their workers all the time and that they could tell exactly what workers were doing and what websites they were visiting. At the end of the day, they could get a report that shows how productive they were. To me, that’s an example of something that could very quickly be seen among some people as culturally acceptable.

We really have to push back against that in terms of civil liberties. To me, this is much more threatening than the existential doom, in the sense that these are the sorts of decisions that are being made right now by people who have genuine enthusiasm for changing the world in ways that seem small, but are actually big.

I think it is crucially important that we act right now, because norms will be hardened before most people have a chance to grasp what’s happening.

Rosin: I guess I just don’t know who “we” is in that sentence. And it makes me feel a little vulnerable to think that every individual and their family and their friends has to decide for themselves—as opposed to, say, the European model, where you just put some basic regulations in place. The EU already passed a resolution to ban certain forms of public surveillance like facial recognition, and to review AI systems before they go fully commercial.

Warzel: Even if you do put regulations on things, it doesn’t stop somebody from building something on their own. It wouldn’t be as powerful as the multibillion-dollar supercomputer from Open AI, but those models will be out in the world. Those models may not have some of the restrictions that some of these companies, who are trying to build them thoughtfully, are going to have.

Maybe you’ll have people like we have in the software industry creating AI malware and selling it to the highest bidder, whether that’s a foreign government or a terrorist group, or a state-sponsored cell of some kind.

And there is also the idea of a geopolitical race, which is part of all of this. Behind closed doors they are talking about an AI race with China.

So, there are all these very, very, thorny problems.

You have all of that—and then you have the cultural issues. Those are the ones that I think we will see and feel really acutely before we feel any of this other stuff.

Rosin: What is an example of a cultural issue?

Warzel: You have all of these systems that are optimized for scale with a real cold, hard machine logic.

And I think that artificial intelligence is sort of the truest sort of almost-final realization of scale. It is a scale machine; like it is human intelligence at a scale that humans can’t have. That’s really worrisome to me.

Like, hey, do you like Succession? Well, AI’s gonna generate 150 seasons of Succession for you to watch. It’s like: I don’t wanna necessarily live in that world, because it’s not made by people. It’s a world without limits.

The whole idea of being alive and being a human is encountering and embracing limitations of all kinds. Including our own knowledge, and our ability to do certain things. If we insert artificial intelligence, in the most literal sense it really is sort of like strip-mining the humanity out of a lot of life. And that is really worrisome.

Rosin: I mean, Charlie, that sounds even worse than the doom scenarios I started with. Because how am I—say, as one writer or Person X, who as Adrienne started out saying, is trying to pay for their groceries—supposed to take a stance against this enormous global force?

LaFrance: We have to assert that our purpose on the planet is not just an efficient world.

Rosin: Yeah.

LaFrance: We have to insist on that.

Rosin: Charlie, do you have any tiny bits of optimism for us?

Warzel: I am probably just more of a realist. You can look at the way that we have coexisted with all kinds of technologies as a story where the disruption comes in, things never feel the same as they were, and there’s usually a chaotic period of upheaval—and then you sort of learn to adapt. I’m optimistic that humanity is not going to end. I think that is the best I can do here.

Rosin: I hear you struggling to be definitive, but I feel like what you are getting at is that you have faith in our history of adaptation. We have learned to live with really cataclysmic and shattering technologies many times in the past. And you just have faith that we can learn to live with this one.

Warzel: Yeah.

Rosin: On that sort of tiny bit of optimism, Charlie Warzel and Adrienne LaFrance: Thanks for helping me feel safe enough to crawl out of my bunker, at least for now.

For months, more than a thousand researchers and technology experts involved in creating artificial intelligence have been warning us that they’ve created something that may be dangerous, something that might eventually lead humanity to become extinct. In this Radio Atlantic episode, The Atlantic’s executive editor, Adrienne LaFrance, and staff writer Charlie Warzel talk about how seriously we should take these warnings, and what else we might consider worrying about.

Listen to the conversation here:

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Google Podcasts | Pocket Casts

The following transcript has been edited for clarity.

Hanna Rosin: I remember when I was a little kid being alone in my room one night watching this movie called The Day After. It was about nuclear war, and for some absurd reason, it was airing on regular network TV.

The Day After:

Denise: It smells so bad down here. I can’t even breathe!

Denise’s mom: Get ahold of yourself, Denise.

Rosin: I particularly remember a scene where a character named Denise—my best friend’s name was Denise—runs panicked out of her family’s nuclear-fallout shelter.

The Day After:

Denise: Let go of me. I can’t see!

Mom: You can’t go! Don’t go up there!

Brother: Wait a minute!

Rosin: It was definitely, you know, “extra.” Also, to teenage me, genuinely terrifying. It was a very particular blend of scary ridiculousness I hadn’t experienced since—until a couple of weeks ago, when someone sent me a link to this YouTube video with Paul Christiano, who is an artificial intelligence researcher.

Paul Christiano: The most likely way we die is not that AI comes out of the blue and kills us, but involves that we’ve deployed AI everywhere. And if, God forbid, they were trying to kill us, they would definitely kill us.

Rosin: Christiano was talking on this podcast called Bankless. And then I started to notice other major AI researchers saying similar things:

Norah O’Donnell on CBS News: More than 1,300 tech scientists, leaders, researchers, and others are now asking for a pause.

Bret Baier on Fox News: Top story right out of a science-fiction movie.

Rodolfo Ocampo on 7NEWS Australia: Now it’s permeating the cognitive space. Before, it was more the mechanical space.

Michael Usher on 7NEWS Australia: There needs to be at least a six-month stop on the training of these systems.

Fox News: Contemporary AI systems are now being human-competitive.

Yoshua Bengio talking with Tom Bilyeu: We have to get our act together.

Eliezer Yudkowsky on the Bankless podcast: We’re hearing the last winds begin to blow, the fabric of reality start to fray.

Rosin: And I’m thinking, Is this another campy Denise moment? Am I terrified? Is it funny? I can’t really tell, but I do suspect that the very “doomiest” stuff at least is a distraction. There are likely some actual dangers with AI that are less flashy but maybe equally life-altering.

So today we’re talking to The Atlantic’s executive editor, Adrienne LaFrance, and staff writer Charlie Warzel, who’ve been researching and tracking AI for some time.

___

Rosin: Charlie, Adrienne—when these experts are saying, “Worry about the extinction of humanity,” what are they actually talking about?

Adrienne LaFrance: Let’s game out the existential doom, for sure. [Laughter.]

Rosin: Thanks!

LaFrance: When people warn about the extinction of humanity at the hands of AI, that’s literally what they mean—that all humans will be killed by the machines. It sounds very sci-fi. But the nature of the threat is that you imagine a world where more and more we rely on artificial intelligence to complete tasks or make judgments that previously were reserved for humans. Obviously, humans are flawed. The fear assumes a moment at which AI’s cognitive abilities eclipse our species—and so all of a sudden, AI is really in charge of the biggest and most consequential decisions that humans make. You can imagine they’re making decisions in wartime about when to deploy nuclear weapons—and you could very easily imagine how that could go sideways.

Rosin: Wait; but I can’t very easily imagine how that would go sideways. First of all, wouldn’t a human put in many checks before you would give access to a machine?

LaFrance: Well, one would hope. But one example would be that you give the AI the imperative to “Win this war, no matter what.” And maybe you’re feeding in other conditions that say “We don’t want mass civilian casualties.” But ultimately, this is what people refer to as an “alignment problem”—you give the machine a goal, and it will do whatever it takes to reach that goal. And that includes maneuvers that humans can’t anticipate, or that go against human ethics.

Charlie Warzel: A sort of a meme of this that has been around for a long time is called “the paper clip–maximizer problem.” You tell a sentient artificial intelligence, “We want you to build as many paper clips as fast as possible, and in the most efficient way.” And the AI goes through all the computations and says, “Well, really, the thing that is stopping us from building as many paper clips as we can is the fact that humans have other goals. So we better just eradicate humans.”

Rosin: Why can’t you just program in: “Machine, you are allowed to do anything to make those paper clips, short of killing everyone.”

Warzel: Well, let me lay out a classic AI doomer’s scenario that may be easier to imagine. Let’s say five, 10 years down the line, a supercomputer is able to process that much more information—on a scale of a hundred-X more powerful than whatever we have now. It knows how to build iterations of itself, so it builds a model. That model has all that intelligence—plus maybe a multiplier there of a little bit.

And that one builds a model, and another one builds a model. It just keeps building these models—and it gets to a point where it’s replicated enough that it’s sort of like a gene that is mutating.

Rosin: So this is the alignment thing. It’s suddenly like: We’re going along, we have the same objectives. And all of a sudden, the AI takes a sharp left turn and realizes that actually humans are the problem.

Warzel: Right. It can hack a bank; it can pose as a human. It can figure out a way through all of its knowledge of computer code to either socially engineer by impersonating someone—or it can actually hack and steal funds from a bank, get money, pose as a human being, and basically get someone involved by funding a state actor or a terrorist cell or something. Then they use the money that it’s gotten and pay the group to release a bioweapon, and—

Rosin: And, just to interject before you play it out completely, there’s no intention here. Right? It’s not necessarily intending to gain power the way, say an autocrat would be, or intending to rule the world? It’s simply achieving an objective that it began with, in the most effective way possible.

Warzel: Right. So this speaks to the idea that once you build a machine that is so powerful and you give it an imperative, there may not be enough alignment parameters that a human can set to keep it in check.

Rosin: I followed your scenario completely. That was very helpful, except you don’t sound at all worried.

Warzel: I don’t know if I buy any of it.

Rosin: You don’t even sound somber!

LaFrance: [Laughter.] Why don’t you like humans, Charlie?

Warzel: I’m anti-human. This is my hot take. [Laughter.]

Rosin: But that was a real question, Charlie. Why don’t you take this seriously? Is it because you think steps haven’t been worked out? Or is it because you think there are a lot of checks in place, like there are with human cloning? What is the real reason why you, Charlie, can intelligently lay out this scenario but not actually take it seriously?

Warzel: Well, bear with me here. Are you familiar with the South Park underpants gnomes?

South Park Gnomes (singing): Gotta go to work. Work, work, work. Search for underpants. Hey!

Warzel: For those blissfully unaware, the underpants gnomes are from South Park. But what’s important is that they have a business model that is notoriously vague.

South Park Gnome: “Collecting underpants is just Phase 1!”

Warzel: Phase 1 is to collect underpants. Phase 2?

South Park Gnome 1: Hey, what is Phase 2?

South Park Gnome 2: Phase 1, we collect underpants.

Gnome 1: Yah, yah, yah. But what is Phase 2?

Warzel: It’s a question mark.

Gnome 2: Well, Phase 3 is profit! Get it?

Warzel: And that’s become a cultural signifier over the last decade or so for a really vague business plan. When you listen to a lot of the AI doomers, you have somebody who is obviously an expert, who’s obviously incredibly smart. And they’re saying: Step 1, build an incredibly powerful artificial-intelligence system that maybe gets close to, or actually surpasses, human intelligence.

Step 2: question mark. Step 3: existential doom.

I just have never really heard a very good walkthrough of Step 2, or 2 and a half.

No one is saying that we have reached the point of no return.

LaFrance: Wait. But Charlie, I think you did give us Step 2. Because Step 2 is the AI hacks a bank and pays a terrorist, and the terrorists unleash a virus that kills humanity. I would also say that I think what people who are most worried would argue is that there isn’t time for a checklist. And that’s the nature of their worries.

And there are some who’ve said we are past the point of no return.

Warzel: And I get that. I’ll just say my feeling on this is that image of the Terminator 2: Judgment Day–type robots rolling over human skulls feels like a distraction from the bigger problems, because—

Rosin: Wait; you said it’s a distraction from bigger problems. And this is what I want to know, so I’m not distracted by the shiny doom movie. What are actually the things that we need to worry about, or pay attention to?

LaFrance: The possibility of wiping out entire job categories and industries, though that is a phenomenon we’ve experienced throughout technological history. That’s a real threat to people’s real lives and ability to buy groceries.

And I have real questions about what it means for the arts and our sense of what art is and whose work is valued, specifically with regard to artists and writers. But, Charlie, what are yours?

Warzel: Well, I think before we talk about exterminating the human race, I’m worried about financial institutions adopting these types of automated generative AI machines. And if you have an investment firm that is using a powerful piece of technology, and you wanna optimize for a very specific stock or a very specific commodity, then you get the possibility of something like that paper-clip problem. With: “Well, what’s the best way to drive the price of corn up?”

Rosin: Cause a famine.

Warzel: Right. Or start conflict in a certain region. Now, again—there’s still a little bit of that underpants gnome–ish quality to this. But I think a good analog for this is from the social-media era. Back when Mark Zuckerberg was making Facebook in his Harvard dorm room, it would have been silly to imagine it could lead to ethnic cleansing or genocide in somewhere like Myanmar.

But ultimately, when you create powerful networks, you connect people. There’s all sorts of unintended consequences.

Rosin: So given the speed and suddenness with which these bad things can happen, you can understand why lots of intelligent people are asking for a pause. Do you think that’s even possible? Is that the right thing to do?

LaFrance: No. I think it’s unrealistic, certainly, to expect tech companies to slow themselves down. It’s intensely competitive right now. I’m not convinced that regulation right now would be the right move, either. We’d have to know exactly what that looks like.

We saw it with social platforms, when they called for Congress to regulate them and then at the same time they’re lobbying very hard not to be regulated.

Rosin: I see. So what you’re saying is that it’s a cynical public play, and what they’re looking for are sort of toothless regulations.

LaFrance: I think that is unquestionably one dynamic at play. Also, to be fair, I think that many of the people who are building this technology are indeed very thoughtful, and hopefully reflecting with some degree of seriousness about what they’re unleashing.

So I don’t wanna suggest that they’re all just doing it for political reasons. But there certainly is that element.

When it comes to how we slow it down, I think it has to be individual people deciding for themselves how they think this world should be. I’ve had conversations with people who are not journalists, who are not in tech, but who are unbridled in their enthusiasm for what this will all mean. Someone recently mentioned to me how excited he was that AI could mean that they could just surveil their workers all the time and that they could tell exactly what workers were doing and what websites they were visiting. At the end of the day, they could get a report that shows how productive they were. To me, that’s an example of something that could very quickly be seen among some people as culturally acceptable.

We really have to push back against that in terms of civil liberties. To me, this is much more threatening than the existential doom, in the sense that these are the sorts of decisions that are being made right now by people who have genuine enthusiasm for changing the world in ways that seem small, but are actually big.

I think it is crucially important that we act right now, because norms will be hardened before most people have a chance to grasp what’s happening.

Rosin: I guess I just don’t know who “we” is in that sentence. And it makes me feel a little vulnerable to think that every individual and their family and their friends has to decide for themselves—as opposed to, say, the European model, where you just put some basic regulations in place. The EU already passed a resolution to ban certain forms of public surveillance like facial recognition, and to review AI systems before they go fully commercial.

Warzel: Even if you do put regulations on things, it doesn’t stop somebody from building something on their own. It wouldn’t be as powerful as the multibillion-dollar supercomputer from Open AI, but those models will be out in the world. Those models may not have some of the restrictions that some of these companies, who are trying to build them thoughtfully, are going to have.

Maybe you’ll have people like we have in the software industry creating AI malware and selling it to the highest bidder, whether that’s a foreign government or a terrorist group, or a state-sponsored cell of some kind.

And there is also the idea of a geopolitical race, which is part of all of this. Behind closed doors they are talking about an AI race with China.

So, there are all these very, very, thorny problems.

You have all of that—and then you have the cultural issues. Those are the ones that I think we will see and feel really acutely before we feel any of this other stuff.

Rosin: What is an example of a cultural issue?

Warzel: You have all of these systems that are optimized for scale with a real cold, hard machine logic.

And I think that artificial intelligence is sort of the truest sort of almost-final realization of scale. It is a scale machine; like it is human intelligence at a scale that humans can’t have. That’s really worrisome to me.

Like, hey, do you like Succession? Well, AI’s gonna generate 150 seasons of Succession for you to watch. It’s like: I don’t wanna necessarily live in that world, because it’s not made by people. It’s a world without limits.

The whole idea of being alive and being a human is encountering and embracing limitations of all kinds. Including our own knowledge, and our ability to do certain things. If we insert artificial intelligence, in the most literal sense it really is sort of like strip-mining the humanity out of a lot of life. And that is really worrisome.

Rosin: I mean, Charlie, that sounds even worse than the doom scenarios I started with. Because how am I—say, as one writer or Person X, who as Adrienne started out saying, is trying to pay for their groceries—supposed to take a stance against this enormous global force?

LaFrance: We have to assert that our purpose on the planet is not just an efficient world.

Rosin: Yeah.

LaFrance: We have to insist on that.

Rosin: Charlie, do you have any tiny bits of optimism for us?

Warzel: I am probably just more of a realist. You can look at the way that we have coexisted with all kinds of technologies as a story where the disruption comes in, things never feel the same as they were, and there’s usually a chaotic period of upheaval—and then you sort of learn to adapt. I’m optimistic that humanity is not going to end. I think that is the best I can do here.

Rosin: I hear you struggling to be definitive, but I feel like what you are getting at is that you have faith in our history of adaptation. We have learned to live with really cataclysmic and shattering technologies many times in the past. And you just have faith that we can learn to live with this one.

Warzel: Yeah.

Rosin: On that sort of tiny bit of optimism, Charlie Warzel and Adrienne LaFrance: Thanks for helping me feel safe enough to crawl out of my bunker, at least for now.

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Kaitlyn: As with any trend, it’s hard to tell whether the “indie sleaze” revival is real or imaginary, happening or being made to happen. There could be venture capital behind it. Or just regular capital. Last year, a photographer who was closely associated with the aesthetic back in the aughts was hired to document a fairly sleazy-looking party at a music venue in downtown indie-rock territory … hosted by, uh, Old Navy! But this newsletter isn’t about cultural criticism. It’s about going to stuff.

Recently, our friend Becca held an indie-sleaze-themed 31st-birthday party for herself in Prospect Heights, right in between Lizzie’s house and my house, which was very convenient. The invite said, “Come with the same energy as if it were 2010 and you were bringing your fake ID to a club on the LES that chloe sevigny went to once.” I didn’t relate to this, as I’m actually a little too young (brag) to have experienced the first indie-sleaze era in person. I only learned about it at the tail end on Tumblr.

Still, I was excited. I love a theme and I appreciate that Becca always provides one. I expected that she would execute it flawlessly, as I know that she went to NYU around the time of the Great Recession.

Lizzie: As far as I can remember, no one really called that whole thing anything the first time around, but now it’s been officially branded by a trend forecaster or whomever, which I guess makes it easier to talk about. Except it doesn’t. Even trying to define what “it” is feels like a losing battle, and that’s why Becca is braver than I am. Is it music? Disco shorts? 2007? 2010? Maybe, and I’m sorry, but … is it Terry Richardson?

Not saying I’m completely disconnected from the gist of whatever it refers to. The prematurely canceled and iconic public-access show New York Noise defined my high-school years, and I still sometimes wonder if Jeffrey Lewis did or did not see Will Oldham on the L train that one time.

Kaitlyn: I don’t get any of those references. Uh-oh!  

Day of the sleaze party, I was at Laundry City sorting out my whites when I had the idea that I should get Becca a copy of the 2009 Tao Lin novel, Shoplifting From American Apparel. I started my machines and then went on an hour-plus journey to five different Brooklyn bookstores, none of which had this historically significant text in stock. I need to work on my impulse control, I think. There was no reason to try five stores—the reference wasn’t even that good (alt-lit being only adjacent to indie sleaze), and a book is not a sexy gift. But once I got started, I was like, “Surely the Barnes & Noble?” I’m full of hope. After my sheepish return to Laundry City to put my long-finished laundry in the dryer, I settled for a gift the neighborhood could provide: a bouquet of Wet n Wild eyeliners and a sandwich bag of loose cigarettes.

When I got home, I changed into a skort and some tall socks and a T-shirt I got on Depop that says, in hot-pink lettering, My boyfriend is literally on stage. It was hard to wear that out on the street for the walk to Lizzie’s house in broad daylight.

Lizzie: Dressing was the most difficult part of the evening. I invited Ashley and Kaitlyn over for some sleaze-style pregaming (pizza, a Finger Lakes fizzy red, ’90s music videos) and to help me pick an outfit. The fit pickings were slim, but we landed on running shorts, a white Hanes T-shirt that I cut giant torso-revealing armholes into, and thigh-high tube socks with black stripes. Good enough if you don’t think too much about it and have no other options.

After we had covered the important topics of the week—HBO’s The Idol, corporate email-tracking systems, the superiority of Marcona almonds—Ash departed my apartment around 9, fully committed to leaving whatever indie sleaze was or is in her past. Kait and I walked our embarrassing outfits over to Becca’s and crossed our fingers that we wouldn’t see anyone on the way there except the rats.

PBR isn't bad, actually. (Courtesy of Kaitlyn Tiffany)

Kaitlyn: Everyone had a different idea of what “indie sleaze” meant. (In this way, the theme was actually memory …) Luke was wearing a Natty Light snapback. Becca was wearing a skinny scarf and dark eye glitter. There was a Kate Moss–inspired look, and someone in a bikini top had a silver iPod. A bunch of the girls drew X’s on their hands in Sharpie and did that classic MySpace-photo concept where you stick your tongue out and pretend to be lighting it on fire. Remember when Taylor Swift tried an indie-sleaze music video where she had pink hair and skinny jeans and dated a guy who hit someone in the face with a billiards ball? Nobody was dressed as that.

Lizzie: There was a Death Grips album (The Money Store) taped up on the wall. The references must have spanned at least 10 years! But they were 10 years of our somewhat overlapping youths, so no one was going to start a rumble over minutiae.

Kaitlyn: Becca led us to a big bowl of “Jungle Juice.” It tasted like Smarties and the past! We feared it. Nathan showed up a few minutes after we did with Rebecca (a second Becca) and Bayne and two six-packs of Red Stripe. The apartment was crowded and everybody was shiny-faced, dripping sweat (on-theme), so we moved over to the far side of the living room, where the air-conditioning unit was doing its best work. On a side table that was not part of the party decor, a lamp was sitting on top of a stack of books: a David Foster Wallace, a Jonathan Franzen, and my book, by me. Wow! Of course I took a bunch of photos of this, with flash (on-theme), and was pleased even if it was a joke I wasn’t getting.

“People love to be in the kitchen,” Lizzie observed. True, the beating heart of the party was the breakfast bar, which was strewn with PBR cans and half-eaten pieces of pizza—people were laughing across it and touching each other’s arms and stuff, taking selfies, etc. But where we were standing, there was room to dance.

Lizzie: So we danced! Becca’s playlist really had us wiggling. The Strokes, Azealia Banks, MGMT, Spank Rock, Daft Punk. It was the soundtrack to some period of time in the past, probably adhering most closely to the span of Bloomberg’s three terms in office. Is Mike Bloomberg indie sleaze?

Kait left the dance floor to go “mingle,” but Nathan, Rebecca, Bayne, and I continued to groove in a manner that would’ve made Gregg Gillis proud. My bottle of Red Stripe seemed to warm up to hot-tea temperature within seconds, probably because of the heat from my hand as I did electro-clash aerobic exercises next to the glass coffee table. At one point, Nathan returned to the dance floor munching on a pre-eaten piece of pizza that he’d found somewhere. He poured my Jungle Juice into Kait’s abandoned cup and started to chug. But he didn’t get far. Like, not more than a few gulps. That was probably for the best.

If all this talk of Jungle Juice and sweat and bodies is making you wonder what the room smelled like, it was actually quite nice, because Becca had a Balsam Fir Yankee Candle burning. Cory Kennedy x Christmas vibes.

The best song ever made! (Courtesy of Kaitlyn Tiffany)

Kaitlyn: What a beautiful scene. I told Luke I appreciated that his British and American passports were part of the coffee-table-scape, and that I was sorry about Brexit. Wouldn’t it be great for him if he were part of the European Union? I was also sorry about his hometown’s recent news coverage. As you may have read, the stepson of one of the passengers on the destroyed OceanGate submersible attended a Blink-182 concert while his family member was lost at sea and posted about it numerous times in a tasteless fashion. This kid, like Blink-182 and Luke, is from San Diego, and he was wearing a San Diego Padres hat in a photo he shared of himself at the show.

Luke said something inspiring about life’s ups and downs. When the Padres were beating the Dodgers in last year’s playoffs, the fans sang Blink-182’s “All the Small Things” in the pouring rain—a peak. And now, a valley. At this point, the Jungle Juice was doing its work, so, unfortunately, I started screaming about baseball. Mark Canha (a New York Met who inexplicably displays his email address in his Instagram bio) is on the cover of the new issue of The Atlantic!

Lizzie: All night, we had heard talk of a roof. Imagine how cool, literally cool, the roof would be. It was nighttime on the roof. A wide open space, high in the sky. There was probably a breeze up there! We had to see it for ourselves. Instead of taking the elevator, we ran up, like, four flights of stairs. In hindsight, I couldn’t tell you why we did this, but maybe it was to make that first surge of Mother Nature’s cool air feel even better against the skin.

Kaitlyn: There’s nothing like being on a roof after you’ve been sweating. The Manhattan skyline doesn’t get old, and neither do we. We looked at the view and had some typical roof talk—Bayne theorized that women are socially conditioned not to whistle and everyone strongly disagreed with him. After airing out our armpits, we went back downstairs to get a bit more dancing in. Becca declared “Good Girls Go Bad,” by Cobra Starship featuring Gossip Girl’s Leighton Meester, “the best song ever made,” and who could argue with her? Women are socially conditioned to be good and then go bad! [Flipping double middle fingers.]

Lizzie: We left before midnight, and Mariya said, “More like indie snooze,” which was a good burn and a fair point. But there comes a time in every sleazer’s life when the promise of mozzarella sticks and a bedtime weed gummy is more enticing than another round of hot beer and the existential feeling of time’s passage tracked by DFA Records releases. I scrunched my thigh-high tube socks back down to my ankles (disguise mode) and walked home.

Kaitlyn: Obviously, “indie sleaze” as a concept is pretty incoherent. (At the end of the “Good Girls Go Bad” video, Leighton Meester’s character is revealed to be a cop. PBR is owned by a holding company backed by a private-equity firm.) Historians still have no idea whether anything about it was meant to be ironic or if people just said that afterward because they were embarrassed.

Doesn’t matter! In Becca’s hands, a prompt is a prompt and a good excuse for a great night.

A heat dome in Texas. Wildfire smoke polluting the air in the East and Midwest. The signs are everywhere that our children’s summers will look nothing like our own. In this episode, we talk with the climate writer Emma Pattee about how hot is too hot to go outside. The research is thin and the misconceptions are many—but experts are quickly looking into nuances of how and why children suffer in the heat, so we can prepare for a future that’s already here.

Pattee grew up partly in a tent in the woods with the trees as her friends. And she expected her kids would do the same. But as a climate writer, she is realizing more quickly than the rest of us that we already need to let go of what we imagined summer might look like for our children.

“What climate change does is: It makes us realize that our blueprint is fantasy. It is no longer reality. And our children will not live the lives that we have lived. Our children are gonna live drastically different lives than we have lived.”

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The following is a transcript of the episode:

Emma Pattee: In the 30 minutes between when the bus drops off all the kids and the parent picks up their kid, they’re just pouring water consistently over these kids to stop them from getting heat illness.

Do I want that for my kid? These become the difficult questions.

Hanna Rosin: I’m Hanna Rosin, and this is Radio Atlantic. We have a lot of romantic ideas about childhood, and especially about what childhood should look like in the summer. Kids mucking around in ponds, finding tadpoles. Nature camp. City kids learning outdoor skills so they won’t be totally useless in the apocalypse.

But then, like a lot of romantic ideas, they sometimes run up against … reality. Which these days means it’s too hot to muck around in ponds, or even go outside sometimes. This summer: 107 in Texas. 105 in Louisiana. And a couple of summers ago, a freak heat wave so dangerous that Emma Pattee, who is a climate writer, got trapped in her house with a new baby for days. And her fellow moms in Portland basically never recovered.

Rosin: So Emma, you told me that you were on your Facebook moms’ group one day. And what happened?

Pattee: So, you know, I’m a mom. Obviously you cannot be a mom without being part of your local Facebook moms’ group. And last summer we would have these hot days, and I would just see these Facebook groups explode. You know, “How hot is too hot to have my kid outside?”

Or the summer-camp counselors saying that they’re sending the kids home because of the heat: “But I don’t think it’s that hot. You know, what do I do?” Or the opposite: “The summer camp is saying 104 is the cutoff. That’s too hot.” Moms are posting photos of their kids, you know, these sweaty little kids, like, “Is this heat stroke?”

And it just was this big moment for me; nobody knew what was happening. Nobody knew what to do. Something dangerous was occurring, and nobody had any answers.

Rosin: Well, it sounds like people didn’t know if it was dangerous or not. Like before they could even get to dangerous, they were just in information-less panic. Because people essentially have this idea in their heads: Well, it’s nice. Kids are supposed to be outside. It’s summer; they’re not in school.

And yet, there were all these indicators that that was maybe not the right thing to do. So you’re trapped between this idea you have of what kids should be doing in the summer—and your worry and panic that this is really harmful. So is that the first time you’d seen the moms’ group get activated in the summer like that?

Pattee: Yeah. And I live in the Pacific Northwest—we have a very outdoor culture. And I’ve just started seeing, year after year, that culture is changing. Now my kids get invited to indoor birthday parties. You drive by a playground in the middle of summer, and it’s empty. I started to see these kinds of indicators all around me. And it became clear to me this was a topic I was really interested in.

In places where it’s very, very hot, there are behavioral adaptations that have taken place over centuries and lifetimes. The culture itself has developed around extreme heat.

Rosin: You mentioned that you had a new baby during the heat wave. So can you say more? Like what happened?

Pattee: Yeah. I had a baby. A/C blasting. The issue was: Would the A/C be sufficient enough that I could stay home? It was 99 degrees, and the next day it was like 95 degrees, and the next day it was like 100 degrees. The next day it was like 102 degrees. And it just kinda went on like that.

Already, having a baby is a very intense experience. Big weather events can bring up really intense emotional and mental challenges. And I had this experience of having my second kid —I, as a climate writer, obviously had incredibly conflicted feelings about having a second kid.

I’m holding this tiny little baby, and I’m sitting in the dark, and all the shades are drawn and the A/C is blasting. It’s so loud. And I just sat that way all day, every day thinking, What have I done?

Rosin: Yeah. I mean, it’s been a while since I had my babies, but why can’t you go outside with the baby in the heat?

Pattee: Babies cannot regulate their own temperature, and they don’t sweat efficiently the way that older children learn to and that adults then obviously can. I could only go outside with the baby at 6 a.m., and we would come back in at 7 a.m. And we would not leave the house again until the following day at 6 a.m.

Rosin: Oh my God. That is very claustrophobic. Do you remember your state of mind during that period?

Pattee: Dark. Yeah. I mean, I think it was exacerbated by having this older kiddo who is like, I wanna go to the park. I wanna go play. And he’s in our living room, he is looking through the window, and he’s watching the neighbor kids jumping on a pogo stick.

And I’m having to explain to him, “You cannot go outside.” And he doesn’t understand. And I’m like, “It’s too hot.” Even now he does this—you know, he will open the front door and put his little hand out and say, “Mom, it’s not too hot.”

You know, I’m not gonna obviously exaggerate. People will go through a lot of worse things every single day. But it was not something I had expected. And I think that took me by surprise.

Rosin: Yeah, I mean when we had the smoke come in from the wildfires in Canada recently, we got an email from the school saying “All outside activities have been suspended.” So I guess we on the East Coast also had our first taste of Maybe our kids’ summer is not gonna look like the ones we had.

Can you tell me a little bit about how you grew up and what your relationship with nature in the woods was?

Pattee: Sure. I grew up on 40 acres in southern Oregon. I grew up deep in the woods, and for about one long summer, we lived in a big army tent on a wooden platform. And then, sort of slowly, my dad built a wood cabin. And at first there wasn’t running water. For a while there wasn’t a great working toilet.

So I spent my entire summer just kind of wandering in the woods, and I would go on hikes. I was really into tracking animals. Nature was very alive. I have this strong connection with this particular tree, and, you know, this particular field.

And I had this also this sense of like, Oh, this is my land. As everyone says in their Tinder profiles: “I love nature.” Instead of this kind of large, anonymous “nature,” it was so specific to this piece of land.

Rosin: You think of little kids having relationships with stuffed animals. Like, This tree has a personality. It knows me. I know it. Like, it was as intimate?

Pattee: Exactly. That it was like the stuffed animals of childhood.

Rosin: As you said, you had your own kids. And how did you transfer this upbringing to them?

Pattee: Now I live in Portland, in a pretty urban area. And it’s been very interesting, because I did not ever question that my kids would grow up the way that I had. I always thought, Of course they’ll wander alone in the woods. Of course they’ll run around barefoot, and we’ll go camping, and we’ll go hiking, and we’ll go swimming. But so far really that has not been the experience.

My [first] kiddo was born in 2018, and in 2020 COVID happened and we all went inside. And then we had our worst wildfire season. And I think since we have had a worse one, and I stayed inside for almost a week on end—like duct-taping the windows because the smoke was so severe.

And then we had, in 2021, the heat dome, and hundreds of people died. A heat dome is essentially when you have extremely high temperatures that do not go away—that stay consistently high. So, a key to surviving extreme heat is that it will cool off, and your body will be able to cool off before it gets hot again the next day.

And once again, children really could not leave the house at all. And then the following summer, I had a baby in a heat wave. So, you know, it’s been … not the childhood I had imagined for them.

Rosin: It’s not clear what you would’ve done without all these disasters, but it sounds like you didn’t even have the chance to ask yourself that question.

Pattee: Yeah; I sort of came to reality when I had my second child and realized, Oh, they’re gonna spend the majority of their summers indoors, and I need to prepare for that now emotionally and logistically. The question really is like: Who are we without nature? Who are my kids going to be if they do not spend their summers walking through trees?

And then I think you can expand that question to humanity at large and ask: Who are we going to be as we start to sever our relationship to the natural world?

Rosin: Okay; before we get to those big philosophical questions, I would like to take care of some of the basics. Because people are experiencing a heat dome in Texas this summer. Like: What do we actually know about “How hot is too hot for children?”

Pattee: So the data that we have shows that ER visits go up, obviously, during extreme heat. There’s certainly, you know, cognitive performance issues that come up in extreme heat. Medical professionals in emergency rooms and clinicians don’t always know what they’re looking at when they see heat illness.

It is possible that we are missing some heat deaths, because they don’t look how we expect. And I predict that over the next 10 years, our understanding and sophistication about tracking heat death is gonna change, and the numbers are gonna be higher than what we had understood.

Rosin: And so is there any data that gives us guidance on what to watch for or what to avoid?

Pattee: What I found was there’s so much that we do not know about kids and heat. And the pediatrician whom I interviewed described it as being in the dark ages, [with] what we understand about children in heat. And the main reason for that is just because it’s very hard to justify doing heat studies on children. Like, we cannot stick them in a sauna and see who comes out.

So much of our data is like being extrapolated from other areas, and that leaves a lot of room for confusion.

Rosin: Yeah. So have there been any studies done that we could look at?

Pattee: No, there have not been studies done that would give us an exact answer of how hot is too hot. I spoke with Dr. Aaron Bernstein, who’s a pediatrician and is also an expert on children and climate.

He talked about this frustrating challenge—when you know something is happening as an expert, but you cannot locate it in the data. He has gone back and looked through emergency-room visits through many, many, many heat waves. And he cannot locate what he knows is happening, which is that more kids are getting sick.

Is that because their parents aren’t taking them in? Is it because their parents aren’t identifying it as heat illness? Is it because they’re not getting that sick? And so, what’s best is for them to just stay home, and then there’s no record of it. So there is not, right now, reliable data around exactly what happens to kids during heat waves and during extreme heat. What we are starting to understand is that for a long time the medical field thought that only children who were athletes and only very ill children were sensitive to heat, and that you had to be running around outside to be sensitive to heat. That is not true.

There also was for a long time this idea that one size fits all: “If my kid did fine in 95 degrees, then your kid should do fine.” And really, what doctors are starting to understand is that there’s so much nuance in that. It’s like, What’s the humidity? Is the child walking through a city or a forest? How hydrated were they the day before? What was the temperature of their bedroom the night before? Like, that’s gonna play into if your child gets heat illness. And so, of course some children are going to be much more sensitive than others.

I didn’t realize if you were taking a stimulant, you are much more sensitive to heat illness. And you might think, well, what does that have to do with kids? But there’s millions of kids who are being medicated for ADHD taking stimulants every single day, and whose parents may not even realize that there is this sensitivity.

Rosin: Wow. I mean, listening to you, I feel simultaneously more educated and more confused. If I were a camp director, or even a parent of little children, is there any reliable guidance or line that they can stick to to make these kinds of decisions?

Pattee: Yeah; I was impressed by how the camp directors that I spoke with, even though they were not following any sort of government rule, they were all very savvy. They follow something called the heat index, and that combines the humidity level with the temperature to let you know when it’s too dangerous to be outside.

There is a lot of great knowledge about very dangerous heat: heat that’s dangerous for everyone. I think it’s the gray area where you start to get a little bit more iffy, like, “At what temperature are we gonna start seeing behavioral issues from kids?” Or, “At what temperature are 15 percent of the kids gonna be susceptible to heat illness, but the rest are gonna be fine? Is that enough to send all kids home early?” You know, these are very big logistics challenges.

Rosin: Got it. Is there a number, by the way? Like, is there a bright line at 104 degrees which is not good for anyone?

Pattee: There really is not a number. And I can see that my insistence on finding that number was speaking to my misunderstanding of this issue—that I think it would be more dangerous to have a set number.

Rosin: Oh, interesting.

Pattee: Because it would allow people to think this is a simple issue, and it’s not. What we need is more education around extreme heat and what heat illness looks like. I think that’s gonna be more important than trying to come up with a hard and fast number that will work across all situations, all ages, and all regions. Because we will never find that.

Rosin: Just as we’re talking about heat, we’re only talking about kids in nature — but actually the things I have read talk a lot about city kids. Particularly kids of color, kids who are poor, kids who don’t have air conditioning. That’s a heat issue, which is very relevant to what you talked about in terms of education and how hot is too hot.

Pattee: Yeah. Researchers have found something called an “urban heat island,” which is essentially what happens when people live in areas where there is so much asphalt, and there are no trees. And what they found is that in one city the temperature can vary as much as 20 degrees.

And so if in Portland we had a 95-degree day, there might be a child who’s being exposed to 20 degrees above that—and his parent is thinking, Well, it’s 95 degrees. Go out and play.

Rosin: So the question is: What’s the number on your street? Do you have air conditioning?

Pattee: I mean, air conditioning is a perfect example of inequality in action, because families of color are much less likely to have air conditioning. And so then you reach this double whammy—where you’re living in an area that is so much hotter than the rest of your city, and you don’t have access to air conditioning.

These are incredibly troubling things that are gonna become sort of the reality of our summers, if they aren’t already. And in these transition years is when things, I think, are gonna get pretty weird.

Rosin: You mean, climate change is already warping our reality? And our kids’ realities? But we just haven’t psychologically caught up to that yet?

Pattee: Absolutely. Yes. This is about adaptation happening in real time.

Rosin: Okay; so here you are, coming to consciousness that things are happening and things are changing. And that we’re just a little behind in adapting. And you visited a summer camp with an environmental educator. Can you tell us more about that?

Pattee: Yeah. So I had the chance to meet with Tony Deis, and he is the co-founder of Trackers. Trackers is one of the biggest summer camps in Oregon. And they had made the decision to rent out an empty department store in a large indoor shopping mall, into a summer camp haven.

Rosin: No!

Pattee: And we’re walking through the linoleum floors and the fluorescent lighting, and it’s completely empty. There’s still clothes hangers here and there, and some signage up and stuff. It was interesting, because I had gone to the shopping mall as a teenager with my friends. And so I’m walking through this empty department store, and I suddenly realized that it is the Marshall’s that I shopped at as a teenager and that I bought makeup at.

And I’m having this intense memory of being a teenager in this store. And of course, now it’s a summer camp. And he’s saying, like, “Here’s the ax-throwing range, and here’s where we’re gonna do art, and here’s the climbing wall.”

It was chilling, because I, at the same time, was looking for summer camps for my kid. So I was all too aware that I was going to be that customer who sent my kid to that camp.

Rosin: Ugh. I mean, I can just imagine the scene of like, he’s juggling and trying to make it seem fun—“And we’re gonna have art over here”—and you’re slowly dying inside.

Pattee: He’s in an impossible situation.

And I felt for him—this person who, you know, is a savvy outdoor survivalist. And I could tell that this was a very, very hard decision for him. And I respected that.

I think that he sees the future, and he’s trying to get ahead of it. And I think that it’s actually a really smart plan, which is, you know, “Let’s adapt.” Now they have this backup location—so they’re still gonna have outdoor camps, but if there’s bad wildfire smoke, their kids can go throw axes.

I mean, you got that message from your school last week saying there won’t be any outdoor activities. But what if they said, “Oh, we’re moving all of our outdoor activities into this awesome, giant play space.” Of course you would prefer that for your kid.

Rosin: I guess? Maybe?

Pattee: I think that there’s a part of us that does not wanna face what is happening in our world. And so we don’t face it by ignoring it, and we end up in much more dangerous and messy situations.

And it is incredibly painful to face it. And you get pushback from people who do not wanna face that summer is different, right? Like, if you host an indoor party for your child in August, which I have done, you will hear from everyone: “That is crazy.” And your own kid will ask you, “Why can’t I have it at the park?”

And so I think that it takes a brave person to say, This is the future. You may not like it, but it’s here, and I’m going to plan for it.

Rosin: When I read your writing about children and heat and summer camp, the first place my mind went, without even knowing you, was, Oh, Emma’s an environmentalist who’s looking for ways to make us all pay attention to climate change. Because she knows by invoking the children and worry about the children, we’ll all jump to attention.

True or false?

Pattee: I’m that mom at the playground who talks about climate change, and nobody will stand by me.

But if you talk about, you know, “My kiddo’s birthday is in August; are you guys doing indoor or outdoor parties?”—you can get into a one-hour-deep discussion that will end with climate change, that will end with a parent saying, “Man, I have an August birthday, and I always had an outdoor birthday party.” Or like, “Man, I wonder about the future.” And so I’m always looking for an inroad.

And if you meet people with the concerns of their everyday life, like summer camp, you can grab a moment of their attention.

Rosin: Oh, that’s so interesting. It’s absolutely true. You’re getting them at a place where they care and can pay attention, and where it’s really under their skin. It’s close to home. And then you can sort of tiptoe your way through the bigger issues.

You said earlier that you grew up in the woods and then moved to the city. When did you start to care about climate change as an adult?

Pattee: I mean, I’ve always been pretty aware of climate change. You know, I was a teenager in the years of the Prius. And my mom once actually backed our van down a hill trying to pick up a piece of Styrofoam and completely totaled the car, because that was her dedication to getting that Styrofoam off the road. So I grew up with An Inconvenient Truth, the documentary that Al Gore did about climate change, and this idea that we need to get off fossil fuels. And yet, climate change never really bothered me in the sense of—I never shed a tear about it. It didn’t keep me up at night. I didn’t spend a lot of my time thinking about it.

Rosin: Like it felt far away. Like it felt like a thing that, you know, you should rally—like picking up trash on the street—but not anything with emotional heft.

Pattee: Absolutely. And I think you can always compare it to your hair. Like, Do I spend more time worried about my hair or climate change? And when I look at that, nope: definitely cared more about my hair all those years. And so I think that’s always a good bar to know how much you care about current topics.

And then I had a child and I went to a moms’ group, a postpartum moms’ group. My kid was three weeks old. And a woman said, “I grew up in Miami, and I’m realizing that by the time my child is an adult, Miami will be underwater.” I was like, What is she talking about? That’s not true. These crazy moms.

And then that night I woke up and I thought, like, Is that true? And I Googled it, and I can say that within about five minutes, I found out that that was true. And that her concerns were not a mom being crazy, but were very legitimate, scientifically backed concerns.

And I felt such existential panic. I saw in this brief moment so clearly that climate change is completely real and terrifying. A very profound threat to our species. And that I had been doing lip service to it all those years.

And so I had this very profound wake up, and once you see it, you really can’t unsee it.

Rosin: Yeah; I’ve been around people who have gone through that. There’s just such profound loss in My children will not have access to the things that I had access to. Like, the continuity of generations is suddenly broken. And there’s just something really scary about that. Is that why it happened in that kind of atmosphere with other moms?

Pattee: I think there is something about having a child that can bring you very face-to-face with climate change. Because I think it gives you a context to think about the future. Like before I had a kid, I never thought about 30 years from now. What? Who even knows what’s gonna happen? That’s bizarre.

And as soon as you have a kid, you think, I wonder what the world’s gonna be like in 30 years. I wonder what my kid’s gonna be doing. I wonder where my kid’s gonna live. You have this urgency to thinking about the future, but you also have this blueprint for the future.

And I think what climate change does is: It makes us realize that our blueprint is fantasy. It is no longer reality. And our children will not live the lives that we have lived. Our children are gonna live drastically different lives than we have lived. And having a child can put that into sharp focus.

Rosin: Maybe we should end on the coyote story? I’m not sure if it will inspire people or depress them. For me it did both. So, can you retell the story that the camp director told you as you were walking around that fluorescent-lighting place that used to be a Marshall’s?

Pattee: So, you know, toward the end of our tour, I kinda sheepishly asked him, “You’re like this total outdoors guy. Isn’t there a part of you that kind of flinches at the idea of keeping kids inside this fluorescent-lit, air-conditioned indoor shopping mall?” And he said that at first he was like, Oh, no way. A team member had suggested it.

And he said, “There’s just no way that will ever happen.” And then he kind of came around to the idea, because of all this severe weather. And then he’d had this realization, which is that a coyote doesn’t look at things as “nature” or “not nature.” Right? A coyote looks at everything as nature. And so what he was gonna do is just be that coyote, and look at the Marshall’s as nature.

Rosin: Wow. It’s a really calming and beautiful idea. It has a lot of resignation in it, but it also has a little bit of optimism in it. And I don’t know how to feel about it. Have you thought about it more since he said that?

Pattee: Yeah. I thought it was beautiful. I instantly thought He’s right—but standing in that Marshall’s, you know, every cell in my body was saying “No.”

Rosin: Of course. I bet. I mean, the big, big philosophical question that’s in your head was, Who are we without nature? And so hearing that coyote story, I feel like that is an answer to that question. Like possibly, we’re people who live in a different kind of nature, or we have redefined nature.

And I wonder about these camps, thinking about adaptation, if you’ve landed anywhere with a “Who are we without nature?” question.

Pattee: You know, as part of my journey through climate grief to some kind of reconciliation, I think I have had to become very resigned and excited about the concept of adaptation and evolution. And to see that things that I thought of as forever—things like nature, things like walking in the woods—that I cannot really see as separate from my identity.

To see that those are just temporary states of being, and that things that I think of as absolute are not absolute, and to try to find some excitement about what the future might hold, even if it looks nothing like anything I’ve ever known.

Rosin: I love it, because I feel like it takes something natural, which is this idea of the cycles of nature. Like, everything changes; everything becomes other things. We’re obviously mutually inhabiting a very optimistic space right now, but it takes that “cycles of nature” idea and it rolls with it. So I feel like that’s maybe the best choice we have right now.

Pattee: Yeah. I mean it is, right? Like, I was thinking today about how we all think of adaptation as this kind of sexy thing some tech bro is gonna create for us. Like, This was the past, and now we’ve adapted, and this is the future. And they unveil whatever it is: the AI garden.

But this is adaptation. Adaptation is a summer-camp headquarters in Marshall’s. Adaptation is moms on a Facebook group saying, “Is it too hot to go to the park?” Like, it’s messy. It’s brutal. And we’re in it.

Rosin: Yeah. And it’s done day to day. And we’re in it, exactly. We’re in it.

The singer achieved the milestone without releasing a new studio album in over seven years.