Episode 137: “Cars Are Done” with Adam McKay 

 

Sarah Goodyear: One of the best things about riding a bike is the freedom and control it gives you over your mobility. That’s also one of the things I love about the Sheyd Bag. A spacious double pannier that drops easily onto a standard bike rack, it converts into a sleek, stylish backpack with just a few quick zips, so that when you hop off your bike, it can come right along with you. The Sheyd bag is made of sturdy, water-resistant canvas and has plenty of pockets, a padded laptop sleeve, smooth zippers and magnetic closures. I’ve been going all over town with the original blue one for months, and now—great news!—the Sheyd bag is available in black as well. Plus, Sheyd Bags is a small, woman-owned business based in Huntington Beach, California. And did I mention the pockets? I love pockets. You can check out the double bike pannier backpack by going to SheydBags.com/waroncars. That’s S-H-E-Y-D-bags.com/waroncars.

Adam McKay: Cars are already done. They’re already a relic, and we just don’t know it and it hasn’t fully manifested. But they’re done. Like, we will never again have a car culture like that. Our relationship with transportation in the way it was formulated through the 20th century is already severed. We are now in a new geologic age, and that age does not include car culture.

Doug: This is The War on Cars. I am Doug Gordon, and with me is my co-host, Sarah Goodyear.

Sarah: Or not with you, actually.

Doug: I was about to say we are in far-flung corners of the world. You are in France for a bunch of weeks. I am in Los Angeles, where I’ve been doing a bunch of interviews and episodes for the show. So we are remote.

Sarah: We’re nine hours apart, and yet here we are together on the internet. Before we get to our very special guest, we are on Patreon. Go to TheWaronCars.org, click “Support Us“, and kick in what you can. You can join for just $3 a month, and as thanks we’ll send you stickers and a handwritten note. Thank you so much to everyone who supports us there.

Doug: Okay Sarah, let us get right to it. We’ve got a great guest for this show. He is the Academy Award-winning writer, director and producer of such movies as Don’t Look Up, Vice, The Big Short, Anchorman, Talladega Nights, lots of other stuff. He is also the founder of Yellow Dot Studios, which is a nonprofit production studio that raises awareness and mobilizes action on the climate emergency. Adam McKay, welcome to The War on Cars.

Adam McKay: Hello. Thanks for having me. I feel like there should be a sound effect when you say, “Welcome to The War on Cars.” Like, “Vroom, vroom. “Or like tires squealing. [screech] You know?

Sarah: We’ll see what we can do about that.

Adam McKay: [laughs]

Doug: I was gonna go with bicycle bell or something like that, but we’ll take that.

Adam McKay: Ooh, that’s good. You know what you could do? Screeching tires like the car is stopping, then the bicycle bell.

Doug: The bicycle revolution is gonna just be a lot of bicycle bells drowning out the car horns, we hope. Adam, thank you so much for joining our podcast. You’re the first Oscar winner to be on The War on Cars.

Adam McKay: Wow!

Sarah: Yep. It’s a milestone for us.

Doug: That’s a big one. Yeah. So obviously a lot of people know your films, and the way in which you use all kinds of comedy to explore serious subjects. Everybody loves The Big Short and its exploration of the 2008 financial crisis. Everybody remembers Margot Robbie in the bathtub or Selena Gomez at the blackjack table talking with the economist Richard Thaler to explain CDOs. That’s one of my favorite parts in the film.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Selena Gomez: Okay, so here’s how a synthetic CDO works. Let’s say I bet $10 million on a blackjack hand.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Richard Thaler: $10 million, because this hand is meant to represent a single mortgage bond.]

Doug: And of course, there’s Don’t Look Up, in which a comet is hurtling towards Earth. And basically nobody, except for activists and scientists take it seriously.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Don’t Look Up: Madam President, this comet is what we call a planet killer.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Don’t Look Up: That is correct.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Don’t Look Up: Mm-hmm. So how certain is this?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Don’t Look Up: There’s a 100 percent certainty of impact.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Don’t Look Up: Please don’t say a hundred percent.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Don’t Look Up: Can we just call it “A potentially significant event?”]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Don’t Look Up: Yeah.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Don’t Look Up: But it isn’t potentially going to happen. It is going to happen.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Don’t Look Up: Exactly. 99.78 percent to be exact.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Don’t Look Up: Oh, great. Okay, so it’s not a hundred percent.]

Doug: And obviously that is a metaphor for climate change. Why is it important to make people laugh about some pretty depressing and serious problems?

Adam McKay: Yeah, I think one of the things that’s lost in our popular culture or the public discourse, we’re constantly told that certain subjects are boring. I always hear from people in the news media, “Well, climate doesn’t get ratings. It doesn’t get clicks.” And it’s just patently false. [laughs] It’s an excuse to actually cater to advertisers, to corporate synergy, for bright colors and infotainment to avoid subjects that are unpleasant but that are really interesting and oftentimes yes, sad, infuriating, sometimes funny.

Adam McKay: And my experience has always been, and I go back to The Big Short, when I picked up that book, it just offhandedly, a friend of mine told me, like, “How have you not read this?” And I was like, “Oh, yeah. I’ll take a look.” And it was wildly entertaining, interesting, and yes, infuriating. So all of these subjects, in my experience, people really are hungry for, you know, the real truth, for lack of a better term, or at least explorations of the questions that are influencing their lives. And in addition to that, when you can laugh at something, laughter requires some degree of perspective. It’s impossible to laugh about a monkey attacking you if you’re the person being attacked and the monkey is actively attacking you. However, if you’re watching a trainer who’s a little bit of a jerk working with a monkey, and you’re in the audience at some safari park and the monkey turns on him, and let’s say it’s not killing him, you can laugh. It’s a perspective where you’re not overwhelmed. You’re processing different layers.

Adam McKay: And of all those subjects we’ve done deep dives into, you know, the Iraq War, the torture program, the financial crisis, destroying trillions of dollars of wealth for working people, and most of all, the climate emergency, which is without exaggeration, ending the Holocene, the era of human civilization as we know it, all of these things are not only really interesting and meaty and fulfilling, they all have elements that are quite funny, ridiculous, pompous. So especially with Don’t Look Up, we tried about five or six different approaches to a movie that wrestled with our collective inaction about the greatest threat that’s ever faced mankind. I mean, you could put nuclear war up there as well. The Black Plague for when it hit was pretty significant. But our inaction over climate frustrates a lot of people, takes away their autonomy, their initiative, their sense of power. But when you can actually laugh at the fact that the people in Washington, DC, the billionaires, the lobbyists, they’re actually killing themselves, and they’re doing it with this smug sort of worshiping posture of the economy, it can get kind of funny and sad and upsetting. So finally, when I said, “This is it. This is the idea for Don’t Look Up,” I realized it had to be a broad comedy if it was gonna connect with millions of people. I mean, we chose Netflix on purpose because they have that worldwide platform. So yes, laughter is key to processing the chaos, collapse and confusion of life in 2024.

Sarah: I just watched the movie. I had avoided watching it because it gave me a lot of anxiety to think about watching it, even though I cover climate a lot as a reporter. I found myself thinking as I was watching, can we harness that anxiety through laughter rather than numbing it with Xanax or weed or whatever? Both of which I was, like, totally wishing for as I watched the characters numbing their own anxiety. Like, how does humor help us deal with anxiety and the paralysis that can result from anxiety?

Adam McKay: Well, I think in your question you gave a pretty good answer, which is that it’s all about not denying the reality. And there are so many ways to do that. I’m a big fan of anger, too. I think anger is really important. I think profound grief is really important. I think curiosity, which—you guys, we can debate this. Is curiosity an emotion or a cognitive direction? I’m not quite sure. I’m gonna call it an emotion.

Doug: That works, I think.

Adam McKay: [laughs] And I’m gonna say curiosity is really important. So all of it goes towards processing the reality. And I think Britt Wray, the professor up at Stanford, wrote that great book Generation Dread, and she discovered through going through all of the data about mental health and diagnoses in different countries and age groups, that especially for younger people, we’re already feeling a tremendous amount of anxiety about the climate emergency. The trick is it’s not being processed, which increases the anxiety. So the relief I personally have felt once, I—you know, I don’t know if you could ever fully realize it, but once I started to grasp the enormity of the pickle that we’re in, I couldn’t sleep for three, four nights. But I was able to start processing it through curiosity, anger, laughter, taking action, supporting activists. Getting involved in that movement has brought me a lot of comfort. And it has allowed me to keep my feet on the ground, stay connected to reality. And quite frankly, in a time where there are a lot of economic forces pushing people away from reality, whether it’s the climate emergency, spiraling class inequality, our vicious predatory economy.

Adam McKay: And so I really think that range of emotions are key. And that was kind of exactly what we experienced with Don’t Look Up. We had a tremendous amount of anger and dismissiveness from, for lack of a better term, the kind of media class and the professional class. But when the movie went worldwide, it was an incredible experience.

Adam McKay: And whenever you release a movie, it always teaches you something that you didn’t see coming. And in that case, I realized for me, the movie was about climate, but for all these dozens and dozens of countries that it was playing so well in as, you know, diverse as Pakistan, Vietnam, Nigeria, the United States, like on and on and on, the real story was about being gaslit. And that’s really what the connection was. And the only way to confront that kind of gross institutional malfeasance is to laugh at the supporters of those institutions who will, you know, insist that they are the savvy class, they are the smart ones. And once you kind of see their naked hind flank and how no, they’re just serving the status quo, it gets really funny.

Doug: There is a lot in Don’t Look Up. It’s the Dr. Strangelove of its time. You’re poking fun at powerful people, as you just said, for kind of showing their rears a little bit, you know, and really exposing them for not knowing much more than the average citizen. In fact, knowing quite a lot less in many ways. There’s also a little bit—and this has been a big influence for me in how I approach the subject that we talk about on The War on Cars, Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, which is just always evergreen.

Adam McKay: Oh, great book. Yeah.

Doug: And I mentioned Dr. Strangelove. It’s funny because, you know, that movie, the scenes I think we remember most are in the war room with the President of the United States on the phone, you know, Peter Sellers on the phone with the Russian premier. And it is told entirely almost from the perspective of the people who will be safe. But your movie is told from the perspective of those people—you’ve got your billionaire Elon Musk character—but you also just have the regular citizens who are trying to break through. And I think that’s sort of what sets it apart. Are there other cultural influences that really came into your view of how you would tell that story?

Adam McKay: I found myself around the time of, believe it or not, when we were making Step Brothers, as Three Stooges silly as that movie is, we were really kind of like, behind the scenes kicking around the question of how our culture turns us into children. And then we would go on set and laugh like children all day.

Adam McKay: So I started to become really interested in the idea of when a collective culture can turn against the people that are participating in it, when a culture is out of time and out of place, and how deadly that can be. And two examples that I go back to over and over again are one of my all-time favorite movies, The Bridge on the River Kwai, which features a bunch of old school English soldiers who are forced to build this bridge for the Japanese who at the time they’re at war with.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, The Bridge on the River Kwai: One day the war will be over. I hope that the people who use this bridge in years to come will remember how it was built and who built it—not a gang of slaves, but soldiers, British soldiers, Clipton, even in captivity.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, The Bridge on the River Kwai: Yes, sir.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, The Bridge on the River Kwai: You’re a fine doctor, Clipton, but you have a lot to learn about the army.]

Adam McKay: And they get caught up in this sense of fair play and camaraderie, and they lose the whole narrative of the fact that they’re at war. And it’s a remarkable movie because it plays as a World War II action film. Meanwhile, you have William Holden escapes, and he’s trying to destroy the bridge that they’re building. And then the other movie, which is much darker, so I always say when I recommend it to people, “Get ready,” is the movie Dogtooth, which is like no other movie I’ve ever seen, in that it starts very absurd, you’re kind of laughing, and as you go deeper and deeper into it, you realize it’s darker and darker, until by the end, you realize it’s murderous.

Adam McKay: And it’s all about a culture that is created in this house with these parents and with these children. And the end scene to this day still haunts me. And I don’t want to wreck it for anyone. So you’ve been warned. The end scene is the daughter finally is ready to leave, and she starts acting out this sequence of events that are very bizarre. And one of them includes knocking out her incisor, her dogtooth, with a hammer. And then she goes and climbs in the trunk of her father’s car, and he just casually goes to the car and is going to kill her and dump her body. And you realize the culture he created was so complete that even the means of her freedom or growing up or independence had been captured and poisoned.

Adam McKay: And I remember when that movie ended, just three hours of walking around, just going, “Oh, shit.” So I’ve always been really interested in when a culture becomes befouled. That moment where Germany went from a country that was hurting after World War I to a country that became dangerous, murderous, where essentially an entire culture became a serial killer. I mean, we’re living through versions of it now, and especially with climate, you know, the fossil fuel economy. I mean, you’re talking about an economy, a culture, public discourse that is almost completely captured by those economic forces, and it is empirically killing us. Fun, right? [laughs]

Doug: [laughs] Yeah, lots of fun.

Sarah: This sort of unfunness of realizing that a lot of people are concerned that if they allow themselves to really think about it too hard, they’re gonna become fatalistic. Or, you know, there’s all this talk about climate doomers, and how do we avoid the knowledge turning us into fatalists who are just gonna throw up our hands and say, “Well, this is our fate, there’s nothing we can do?”

Adam McKay: I really think at some point it’s gonna come out that the whole notion of doomers in some ways was created by the oil companies. Because it is so crazy. I know plenty of people that are fully awake and aware of the science behind the climate emergency. None of them are saying, “Let’s do nothing, there’s no point to it.” What I really see are two opposing forces. One, the sort of conservative climate people or the moderate climate people called the doomers are saying it is much more urgent than what we’re being told, and we need larger global coordinated action now. Incrementalism has become part of the problem. The climate moderate side is the side that’s much more exposed, to use an economic term, to moral hazards, because that side fits with the prevailing culture in Washington, DC. It fits in nicely with corporate responsibility and sustainability initiatives, which many of them are just total BS.

Adam McKay: So yeah, I wholly reject the idea of doomer. I’ve been confused by it from the very beginning, and I would not be surprised if at some point you don’t see documents leak that. I mean, it just seems like oil companies’ dream is that anyone who’s acting truly alarmed gets called a doomer and dismissed. It’s made to order.

Adam McKay: As far as emotionally, what happens when you take in the reality of the earth system’s data as it exists today, yeah, the initial impact emotionally for me involved three, four nights of spotty sleep, a degree of depression, an anxiety which comes and goes, but also for me, a tremendous increase in the level of action that I take and involvement. And they’ve done study after study that shows that the road to creating action is not hope and advertising language about solutions and good cheer. It’s alarm. We are wired to respond to emergencies. I mean, it’s hundreds of thousands of years. Some horrible wooly mammoth rampages through our camp. For a second, you feel awful and confused, but people respond really well to emergencies when they have the truth. It’s when they’re denied the truth, or they’re confused or given pathways to actions by bad faith leaders that you see the kind of confusion and denial we’re in right now.

Doug: Another book that comes to mind, and we’ve mentioned this on the podcast before, is Rebecca Solnit’s A Paradise Built in Hell. And the thesis of that book is that people, when these emergencies do occur, like the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco or Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, people are good, and people rally and they respond and they help each other through crisis. And it’s actually what she argues is that it’s capital and power that creates the problem.

Adam McKay: Yep.

Doug: It’s the police turning people back from a bridge. We’re seeing this now in North Carolina a little bit. You’re seeing people in Asheville coming together and doing mutual aid. Meanwhile, cops are guarding supermarkets. So there’s a real split between the ways in which communities are coming together to organize and help their neighbors, and the ways in which media is saying, “Oh, could there be looting? Could there be disorder?” And it’s like, well, that’s actually not what happens. It’s actually when power gets involved that we see a bit more disorder.

Adam McKay: I mean, power is not dumb. [laughs] I mean, power is pretty smart, and power learns through the years. I think we tend to think of it as a much dumber creature than it actually is. And throughout history, you know, the Black Plague, World War II, all these giant, cataclysmic events do reorder the world. The world does change as a result. I just read this tremendous book called The Vortex, and it’s the true story of the most deadly hurricane in human history, which was the early ’70s. And this hurricane hit Pakistan, and what results is incredible and horrifying and scary and infuriating. Long story short, it leads to the creation of the nation of Bangladesh. So these huge natural disasters, or even like World War II, man-made disasters, which climate is both, they do reorder the world. The police who are guarding the food—I mean, it’s so absurd—from people who are just hungry. All the federal government would have to do is contact the owner of this supermarket and go, “We’re paying for everything. Distribute the food.” But the government never wants to show us that it can do that. Yeah, power’s right. Like, it is going to reorder the world. Climate already is starting to. I do think a lot of good things are gonna come from it. Unfortunately, it’s gonna be through a minefield of unpredictable calamities, shortages and a degree of chaos. But it is gonna take us back to our essential humanity, which in a way is what World War II did in many examples. Not entirely, but—so yeah, power’s right to be protecting capital, denying, creating professional doublespeak, any kind of delay. They know where this is going.

Doug: So Adam, I am not gonna look up. I’m actually going to turn our discussion away from these super serious things for a second, and I’m gonna deal with that denial of our reality.

Adam McKay: [laughs]

Doug: Let’s ask you a question. You know, we are The War on Cars. You are a big Hollywood director. I’m in Los Angeles recording this right now. This is the car capital of the United States outside of Detroit. Tell me about your relationship with cars and driving, you know, both as a kid and now as a responsible adult.

Adam McKay: I still to this day remember my first car, which I’m 56, so it was quite a while ago. It probably was 1984. I got a job washing dishes at the local hospital to save up money. And back then, you could get a fully functioning, not terrible car for $600, $700. So I found a black Gremlin with gold accents. And it was a stick shift. Then I saved up money to put two speakers into the car in, like, an okay stereo system. That was the big thing in the ’80s. You had to have that Pioneer stereo system. But I messed up and I put the speakers in, and I didn’t secure them enough, so they flipped so that they were blasting out of the car. [laughs]

Doug: [laughs]

Adam McKay: And this was when hip hop was hitting big for the first time. And my friends and I were very into all the new hip hop that was coming out. So we had, like, you know, LL Cool J’s first record, obviously Run DMC, Kurtis Blow, all that.

Sarah: Eric B. & Rakim, I hope.

Adam McKay: I mean, they came out when I was in college and they blew our mind. The big one was Public Enemy. When they came out, we were like, “What the hell is going?” I met Chuck D once, and I was like, “You’re my Bob Dylan.” [laughs]

Sarah: [laughs] Nice!

Adam McKay: And I’m like, “How many nerdy white guys have come up to you and said that?” And he’s like, “More than a few.” [laughs]

Doug: [laughs]

Adam McKay: So I loved my first car. But then when I went to college, and then when I moved to Chicago to do improvisation in theater, and then when I went to New York City to do Saturday Night Live, I became 100 percent public transportation. I was always taking the bus, the train for, like, almost 10 years. I let my license lapse. In my mind, I was done. I was never gonna drive again. And then I came to Los Angeles. So, you know, I’ve done the best I can. You know, all our family’s cars are EV. We try to avoid driving as much as possible. We try and drive together, give friends rides. We have solar panels at our place, so our charge is coming from the sun. But yeah, I mean, car culture sucks. You go to cities in Europe where the whole center of the town is just walking. And it’s beautiful. It’s trees and markets, and the vibe is so great. Cars really ruin New York City for me because it was just constant log jam. I mean, everywhere. So even if you’re taking the subway, it’s just still the cars honking, the smell of the exhaust. I mean, it’s the weekends would come and the traffic would lighten when I was in New York and it was like, “Thank God!”

Doug: And then some guy would drive by with his speakers facing outward blasting hip hop and just totally ruin the vibe. 

Adam McKay: [laughs] Actually …

Sarah: Or improve it.

Adam McKay: … I like cars a little bit.

Doug: Yeah. Got you on your toes.

Adam McKay: I love when the car goes by with the thick bass—boom boom—and it’s like rumbling your car. I’m like, you know what? Good for you. [laughs]

Sarah: We’ll be back right after this message.

Doug: Is it weird to look forward to rain? Because I kinda do. It means I get a chance to wear my Rover rain cape from Cleverhood. It’s practical, it’s stylish, and it always keeps me dry, whether I’m commuting by bike or just walking around the neighborhood. But there’s so much more to Cleverhood. That’s because our friends at this small, independent business support all kinds of organizations and individuals working to make the world a better place. That includes All Bodies on Bikes, Black Girls Do Bike, Streets for All in LA, the Somerville Bike Kitchen, and our friends who are organizing bike buses across the country to help get kids to school. This month, listeners of The War on Cars can receive 15 percent off everything in the Cleverhood store, from that stylish Rover rain cape to their very comfy anoraks. Go to Cleverhood.com/waroncars and enter code NOVEMBERRAIN at checkout. You won’t just look forward to rain, you’ll be supporting us here at the podcast, as well as some of the best advocates around. So again, that’s Cleverhood.com/waroncars, code NOVEMBERRAIN.

Sarah: So one of the things you’ve done in response to your three or four nights of complete existential dread that the climate crisis precipitated is you’ve set up a studio called Yellow Dot Studios. And the mission is to create entertaining, memorable and scientifically accurate videos and other media to challenge decades of disinformation pushed by oil companies and amplified by large swaths of elected leaders and the media. And in your work at Yellow Dot Studios, you made one ad that I just loved so much, Car Commercial 419. Maybe you could talk about that commercial in particular, and what it is that you’re trying to do with Yellow Dot.

Adam McKay: So the whole impetus for Yellow Dot came out of the same place that generated Don’t Look Up, and pretty much everything I’ve been working on since that moment where I woke up to what’s actually happening with the climate crisis, as opposed to what mainstream news will have us believe, and started actually talking to the scientists directly engaging with the actual data. And the big thing we discovered pretty quickly was that there’s a lot of these large NGOs obviously survive based on huge donations, like corporations, billionaires. And when we started Yellow Dot, we learned pretty quickly that they have a lot of power over what you do and say. And we had a couple examples of pieces that we made where we would get calls from the donors saying, “I’m withdrawing my donation.” And it wasn’t shocking. I mean, of course, course, but it was surprising that it was so overt.

Adam McKay: So early on we made a decision that we would reject that large NGO kind of professional speak which has evolved over decades to not get people emotional, not create urgency. So the whole idea behind Yellow Dot is we would show that we’re freaking out, we will curse, we will be silly, we will directly identify the villains, the CEOs of the oil companies, the elected officials that the oil companies own, regardless of which political party. Which a lot of people do not like that. [laughs]

Sarah: Yup.

Adam McKay: So the whole spirit of it was let’s not be quote, “professional.” Let’s not look for approval from those corners. Let’s throw some actual punches, let’s sweat and have pit stains on our shirt. Let’s be human. And boy oh boy, did it work. People really responded to it. Plenty of people were upset, but for the most part, really what’s turned out to be, relatively speaking, a shoestring budget, we’ve really seen tremendous reach, and just millions and millions of views, engagements, you know, all those metrics they use. And part of that equation is that sometimes we do things that don’t really make logical climate comms sense. So Car Commercial 419 is a great example of that, because you could easily say, “Who is this for? It’s not really funny. Who do you expect to post this?”

Doug: We’ll play clips of your work on this episode, but this one I really would encourage people to go watch maybe before they even continue with the episode, because it is something you need to see. So the premise of that short little video is it’s all of these climate-related disasters: fires, floods, all the stuff we’re used to seeing on television, but you don’t call it out specifically, there’s no voiceover or narration. But it’s cars. It’s wrecked cars, it’s flooded-out cars, it’s burned-out cars. And it’s just, you know, cars are so ubiquitous in our landscape that whenever there is a natural disaster of any sort, the image that floats across our social media feeds and our television screens is of wrecked cars. Sarah and I were in New York for Sandy, and some of the most vivid images were flooded-out parking garages in lower Manhattan.

Sarah: And it seems like the cars become kind of a thing that we can project a lot of other feelings onto. And they do come to symbolize sort of the wreckage of our society in a way, when they’re wrecked. And I actually was just watching a video of a mudslide in North Carolina that a woman was shooting at exactly the moment that this mudslide sort of started coming down the hill, swept past her house. You can hear her husband saying as this river of mud misses them by inches …

[ARCHIVE CLIP: I’m okay.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: My car is gone.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: I’m okay. It’s okay.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Everything’s gone. It’s all gone.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: It’s okay.]

Sarah: And she’s saying, “It’s okay, everything’s okay.” And it’s because they’re not gone. But even in that moment of panic, this guy—you know, I just think we project so much onto cars in that situation. And Car Commercial 419 for me really captured the sort of pathos of that.

Adam McKay: I’ve seen that video, and that is a perfect distillation of what we were trying to express with Car Commercial 419. And it made us feel good to make it. It did something for us in putting it together. So, you know, sometimes that approach gets lost in an era where everything is being measured by stats. And we had some incredible responses to it. So yeah, it’s funny because the team that runs Yellow Dot could not possibly be more professional and lovely and engaging, but what’s so cool about them, the day-to-day team, is they use all that professionalism and effectiveness in servicing an unprofessional approach.

Adam McKay: Yesterday I was just talking to Stacy Robert Steele, who’s the head of day-to-day Yellow Dot, and just marveling at what they’re able to do on a really small budget. So I’ll also take this time to say, if you’re looking for a group to give money to for climate, I promise you not a dime of it will be wasted. And yes, I’m also funding, and in case your response to that request was “Screw you, rich Hollywood guy,” but cars are the central carrot for mass buy in to the Industrial Revolution and all of the mythology around cars, of which I totally grew up in that mythology, has always been very close to buy in for war, to buy in for excess wealth.

Adam McKay: I remember in the ’80s when our culture started to turn, when it went from ’60s, ’70s. You could almost have described America as left wing at one point in the ’70s. Not extreme left, but definitely left of center. And I remember when, during the Reagan era when conspicuous consumption, worship of wealth started to just, it hit our country so fast. All of the sudden, I was in college and a lot of my friends had posters on their walls of Porsches, Maseratis, and the refrain was always “Someday I’m gonna get one of these.” And the whole buy in to that new approach to the world of just get rich, cars were the entryway. And the crazy thing about the climate crisis is it’s so huge, and it distorts time in such an interesting way and a frightening way.

Adam McKay: Cars are already done, they’re already a relic and we just don’t know it. And it hasn’t fully manifested, but they’re done. Like, we will never again have a car culture like that. Our relationship with transportation in the way it was formulated through the 20th century is already severed. We are now in a new geologic age. And that age does not include car culture.

 

Doug: There’s one last thing about Car Commercial 419. Basically, transportation is the number one source of carbon emissions in the United States, and private vehicles are the largest part of that percentage. And so there is a weird irony that the thing causing the climate crisis becomes the visual representation of that crisis itself.

Adam McKay: I remember the insane fires we had, like, four or five years ago. And there were huge ones off the 405 freeway. And one of the homes destroyed was a home owned by Rupert Murdoch. I mean, you would have to say one of the top 10 climate deniers in human history. But yeah, there’s gonna be a lot of those darkly ironic destruction images. You know, at some point Wall Street’s gonna flood. Like, it’s going to happen if you look at where it is. And you’re gonna see an image of the floor of the stock exchange with people in hip deep water.

Adam McKay: There’s an image out of North Carolina of a home that’s got floodwaters almost up to fully the first floor or past the first floor. And on the second floor they have a banner hanging off their top balcony that just says “Vote.” It’s a great image for this passive, incrementalist approach to change, which you hear a lot, which is people don’t talk about anything until it’s time to vote. And then you pick one of the two candidates and you shut up because you don’t want Donald Trump. And, you know, I’m old enough that I know that this has been going on for 35 to 40 years, and things have just gotten worse and worse and worse. So to see that image of water almost past the first floor with the “Vote” banner, you know, I’m sure it hits a lot of people a lot of different ways, but for me, it really hit in a profound way.

Doug: So Adam, I know you worked for Saturday Night Live. I have in my brain the old Chris Farley sketch. The Chris Farley Show.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Chris Farley: Remember when you were with the Beatles?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Paul McCartney: Sure, sure.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Chris Farley: That was awesome.]

Doug: In prepping for this interview, I’m like, how do I do this in a way that isn’t just like, “Oh, remember when you directed Don’t Look Up and you worked with Meryl Streep? That must have been awesome.”

Adam McKay: [laughs] It was, by the way.

Doug: I’m sure it was. It is really an incredible cast. And I think part of what makes that movie so powerful is the star power that is thrown at it. This isn’t just some little independent movie by activists. This is a real mainstream Hollywood film. It’s been—I think it’s still the second-most viewed Netflix film in terms of hours watched, which is pretty amazing. I will say it has one of the most affecting final scenes of any film I can remember of the last five to 10 years. It’s the scene, obviously, where the comet really is entering Earth’s atmosphere. Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence, their characters have done everything possible to alert everyone to the emergency, ramming up against this wall of everyone’s distractions. And up until that moment, everyone in the film is distracting themselves with total bullshit. I mean, there’s the great characters played by Cate Blanchett and Tyler Perry, sort of these Good Morning America talk show host-style things where they’re just bouncing from one subject to the next, making inappropriate jokes at the worst moment.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Cate Blanchett: It’s headed directly at Earth, and it really likely will hit.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Tyler Perry: So how big is this thing? Could it, like, destroy someone’s house? Is that possible?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, scientist: It’s somewhere between six and nine kilometers across. So …]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Cate Blanchett: It’s big!]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, scientist: It would damage the entire planet, not just a house. You know?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Tyler Perry: The entire planet. Okay. Well, as it’s damaging, will it hit this one house in particular that’s right on the coast of New Jersey. It’s my ex wife’s house. I need it to be hit. Can we make that happen? [laughs]]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Cate Blanchett: You and Shelley have a great relationship.]

Doug: But you get to this final scene, and they’re sitting around the dinner table, the climate scientists and all the people that they’ve been working with to alert everyone to the emergency. And they start distracting themselves. They start talking about store-bought apple pie and their favorite coffee beans.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Don’t Look Up: This coffee doesn’t taste store bought. Is it?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Don’t Look Up: I grind my own beans. Yeah.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Don’t Look Up: Yeah, Dad’s kind of a coffee nut.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Don’t Look Up: You’re serious? Every time you have coffee, you have to grind your beans?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Don’t Look Up: Yeah. Randall is very particular about his coffee.]

Doug: And there’s just a fantastic line that Leonardo DiCaprio’s character says.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Don’t Look Up: The thing of it is, we really—we really did have everything, didn’t we? I mean, when you think about it.]

Doug: I think about that line all the time. When I’m out in nature, when I’m walking around a city, when I see a play, when I’m in a museum, when I’m with my kids, when I’m sitting around having a cup of coffee myself. We’ve got something pretty special. You know, we don’t need to terraform Mars. It’s all right here. And we’re just fucking it up, basically. And that scene just remains so affecting to me, and really does speak to the way that we do at a certain point sometimes just have to sit back and distract ourselves with the comfort of others and our little pleasures.

Adam McKay: I think there’s a big difference between loving being present and distraction. I really think there is a difference between this limbic capitalism that’s just everywhere, this kind of buzzy, clicky slot machine economy that we’ve really innovated here in the United States, and the enjoyment of being with your children, a good meal that you cooked, and a great glass of wine, like laughing. Like, I find a lot of comfort in basketball. I’ve just always loved basketball. So, you know, I’m 56 now. My game is terrible, but I’ll still play one on one. I watch basketball. I don’t feel bad about it at all. The things we love on this planet, we’re here to play, to laugh, to eat, to love, to make a family. And it’s cold outside and we’re inside and it’s warm. There are all these things that are the reason that we live. What’s so sad is this imperative of—it’s so inhuman. It has no relationship to people, but this idea that the stock price must always go up. It’s really what’s driving 80 percent of the calamities that we’re seeing. It is not a human desire, and yet people, because of how well it pays and the status and the life, you just see people fall in line behind that. Yeah. No, it’s a beautiful world. The ocean, fish. I just—the part of that ending of Don’t Look Up that I even have a hard time watching is when the animals are shown it. Like, really. When we made it, it was emotional for me. Now if I look at it, it’s more emotional. That was a lot of credit to my editor, Hank Corwin. He kept just putting animals in—dolphins, fish, birds. Yeah, it’s a great, great, great tragedy. There’s still a lot of things we can do and be doing that can make it a lot less painful.

Sarah: I did cry at the end of the movie, and I’m not mad at you about it.

Adam McKay: [laughs]

Doug: So Sarah had just seen it. I’ve seen it a few times. I saw it when it was first released. Yeah, those quick cuts of nature, that is so affecting because it really is this, like, look at this beautiful world that we have created, and look at what we are doing to it. Look at what we have done to it. Yeah. I cried the last time I watched it.

Adam McKay: I didn’t realize ’til we put it out, because, you know, the whole intention behind the movie was let’s make a giant worldwide movie. Let’s get the biggest stars. Obviously, they have to be skilled and not just name recognition. But when the movie came out, I realized it was more personal than I thought, because my experience with the climate emergency has been mostly feeling like I’m in a slapstick comedy, that how can people ignore this? How can they be so ridiculous? Then with occasionally, like, profound grief and tragedy. So I was like—I was telling someone the other day, I was like, “Yeah, if you want to know how I personally am experiencing it, I feel like I’m in a Three Stooges movie, except for occasionally I’m in Breaking the Waves. [laughs]

Doug: Everything you’ve said is exactly my experience of being an advocate for safe streets and for bikes. I look at the world around me, and you have to laugh at the absurdity of car culture, at how big vehicles have gotten, how wasteful the form of transportation that we have chosen to dominate our lives actually is. I’m spending some time here in Los Angeles—it’s certainly true in New York as well. It’s just. It’s absurd that we’ve built our lives around this, and the thing that we’ve built our lives around is killing us both in the long term in terms of climate change, but in the short term, in terms of the daily carnage and wreckage. And I have that same experience, I think, that you demonstrated with the talk show in Don’t Look Up. We talk a lot on the show about every time a traffic reporter says, “You know, there’s a crash on the 405. You’re gonna be delayed by 10 minutes.” I think to myself, that crash on the 405, that could be a family that just lost someone. Right? You’re describing death is what you’re describing. You’re describing a tragedy for someone. But it is played as an inconvenience for people just getting to work.

Adam McKay: A lot of it goes back to theories and the science of brand loyalty, which is, you know, this complicated mixture of incentives, a sense of identity, convenience, the fact that it’s tiring to make a new choice, to reexamine an old choice. And when you talk about cars, oh my God. I mean, the roots behind the car economy are just so deep and embedded. And also, since money took over government, really, government recruits the most thoughtless, careerist idiots you can ever imagine. So we have the worst of the worst in these positions right when we need to be making choices. I mean, we haven’t even really unleashed our full ability to mobilize and take collective action. We haven’t unleashed our ability to innovate through science. Like, none of this has been fully funded, organized, set free. So there’s still a lot of things we can be doing. But there’s no question we’re in the next phase of climate warming. There’s no doubt about it. We have now lost some things that aren’t going to be coming back. But there’s still so much to save.

Doug: That’s a great place to end. Adam McKay, thank you so much for joining The War on Cars, and thank you for using your filmmaking as a force for good. We really appreciate it. Thank you so much for being with us.

Adam McKay: Thank you guys for having me.

Doug: You probably know where you can watch all of Adam McKay’s films, but you should definitely check out what he is doing with his team at Yellow Dot Studios, which you can find at YellowDotStudios.com. We will put a link in the show notes.

Sarah: We want to thank everyone who supports us on Patreon, including our top supporters: Charley Gee of Human Powered Law in Portland, Oregon, Virginia Baker, Mark Hedlund and the Parking Reform Network.

Doug: You can become a Patreon supporter by visiting TheWaronCars.org, click “Support Us” and pitch in starting at just $3 per month. We will send you stickers. You’ll get discounts on merch and access to exclusive bonus episodes.

Sarah: A special thanks to the Helen and William Mazer Foundation for all of their support.

Doug: This episode was recorded by Kaden Pryor at Third Wheel Podcast Studio in Los Angeles. It was edited by Ali Lemer. Our theme music is by Nathaniel Goodyear. Our transcriptions are by Russell Gragg. I’m Doug Gordon.

Sarah: I’m Sarah Goodyear. And this is The War on Cars.

Adam McKay: Welcome to The War on Cars. Vroom, vroom! [horns honking, bicycle bells ringing]