Grant Ennis

This interview with Grant Ennis made me so angry. It’s going to blow your mind! Fascinating chat that raises some incredibly important issues.

“I was having an enormous amount of trouble getting anybody to think about the environment beyond the carbon footprint.And I realized that it was really the carbon footprint itself, which was reducing support for political action.And I found that the fossil fuel industry had been supporting that narrative and the plastics industry before that.”

“So like while we would never believe that if we saw a stone rolling down a mountain, that if we all just stared at it and willed it back up the hill, it would do that, we do tend to believe that if we all individually do our part for the environment or ask people to just individually act that because people want that to be so and want that to work, that it just will, we believe that if we give people more information than then somehow just spontaneously they will change their behaviour, which really is quite fanciful.”

“So like when you tell women that they just need to lean in more, that they’re responsible for their own success, they just need to try harder, women are then less likely to demand political changes. We know that that’s true. The evidence is really clear.”

“And what I wish everybody would know about data is most of these meta analyses are based on data environments of such extreme publication bias that it’s all false. And there’s an incentive to do that.”

TRANSCRIPT

TRANSCRIPT

Linda: Welcome back to another episode of Make Me Data Literate.

One of the things I love about making this podcast is the incredible diversity of people and the wildly different ways of working with data that we learn about.

And today’s guest is another fascinating shift in direction.

He’s the author of a book that radically changed my perspective on the way we tackle the big problems.

So thank you so much for joining me, Grant.

Can you please tell us who are you and what do you do?

Grant: Pleasure to be here, Linda.

I’m Grant Ennis.

I’m the author of Dark PR, How Corporate Disinformation Harms Our Health and the Environment.

And I researched the ways that corporations influence politics in ways that harms our health, environment and our society.

Linda: How did you get into that?

‘Cause that, and it’s a fascinating field and you can see immediately how important it is, but how does that, did you kind of trip and fall into that or get angrier and angrier as you…?

Grant: Yeah, definitely angrier and angrier.

I, in 2010 was working for an environmental organization and we were trying to get support to do more like political activities, to do more engagement with politicians and to really look at what government was doing.

And I was having an enormous amount of trouble getting anybody to think about the environment beyond the carbon footprint.

And I realized that it was really the carbon footprint itself, which was reducing support for political action.

And I found that the fossil fuel industry had been supporting that narrative and the plastics industry before that.

And then in my work, later on in public health, I saw that the tobacco industry used the same tactic for smoking.

They said it was a matter of individual responsibility.

And I just, I guess it kind of snowballed this interest I had in the way that corporations manipulate debates.

I was indirectly targeted by a Russian disinformation campaign at one point.
And then you really think about the way that corporations, governments all use disinformation with the same playbook.

So somehow it just, it came into my life and I just became more and more interested in it over time.

Linda: A moment of insight led you right down the rabbit hole.

Grant: Yeah, exactly, exactly.

Linda: That’s really cool.

What did you have to learn to do this work?

Cause I imagine there’s no kind of courses teaching you how to research corporate disinformation and PR and stuff.

So what was missing from your formal education?

Grant: I think I had to, well, there was a deliberate process I went through to get up to speed on the literature.

And for that, I just kind of looked for all the books that existed on disinformation, propaganda, misinformation, you name it and tried to kind of read and just get up to speed.

I think in terms of my formal education, what I realized now is probably missing that would have helped me earlier on to understand the stuff was more focus on what they call materialism.

So rather than what is idealism, more materialism would have been really good for my education.

So what I mean by that is idealism in sociology is this idea that the reality around us comes from inside of the mind.

It’s kind of like Luke Skywalker and the force, you know, like that he can just kind of move stuff around with his mind.

And that is nonsense.

We don’t use that in science anymore.

We don’t believe that people can levitate things or bend spoons with their mind, but somehow in the social sciences and political science, we’re still stuck in that.

We believe that human willpower can overcome structural incentives that disincentivize people from doing certain things.

So like while we would never believe that if we saw a stone rolling down a mountain, that if we all just stared at it and willed it back up the hill, it would do that, we do tend to believe that if we all individually do our part for the environment or ask people to just individually act that because people want that to be so and want that to work, that it just will, we believe that if we give people more information than then somehow just spontaneously they will change their behaviour, which really is quite fanciful.

And so the alternative to this idealism is what’s called materialism.

Materialism is this idea that if you banned guns, people will stop shooting guns because they don’t have any.

Whereas like-

Linda: That can’t be right!

Grant: (laughing) – I mean, and the idealist example would be if you just put a warning label on guns that says if you take this to a school, children might die.

People won’t take those guns to schools and kill kids.

And yet we do that, we do that with food labelling rather than just stop selling junk food.

We say, let’s make sure people know what that is.

Rather than not selling fossil fuels, which would be the materialist solution to stopping global warming or one of them, the options for a materialist solution, we label products as environmentally friendly or not environmentally friendly.

And so my formal education in political science and anthropology tended towards idealism and I think most education today tends towards that in the social sciences.

Linda: The friend who first told me about your work and who introduced us, he told me that you said something in class that provoked considerable outrage, which is this very idea that you’re talking about now, that the idea that individual action on things like climate change doesn’t make a difference.

And those of us who try really hard to minimize our impact on the environment and stuff, take it, it’s a really heartfelt effort.

And this was the thing that… there were many things in your book.

I kept having to put it down every time I picked it up because it was just making me so angry because of all these tactics and techniques.

Like once you start reading about them, you recognize them and you’re like, this is everywhere.

But that idea that the things that I do, that I’ve put so much effort into doing, the solar panels on my house, the bikes and all of the rest of it, actually aren’t particularly relevant in the big scheme of things and they’re not terribly effective.

That’s a big pill to swallow.

Why is it, first of all, why did we fall for that so hard?

And second of all, why can’t we get ourselves out of it?

Grant: So it’s a very well-funded narrative.

So we’ve fallen for it because we’ve been surrounded by media promoting that idea for a really long time.

Not only in the realm of the environment, but in other domains as well.

So like when you tell women that they just need to lean in more, that they’re responsible for their own success, they just need to try harder.

Women are then less likely to demand political changes.

We know that that’s true.

The evidence is really clear.

And so it’s not just global warming where these kinds of individualized narratives are harmful.

We’ve, going back to your question, we’ve fallen for it specifically because of a couple of large scale campaigns.

The first was started with the litter bug campaign.

So the litter bug was a term that existed in at least in the 1940s as I understand it, but wasn’t really a big deal until the bottling industry started promoting it.

So you used to have around the world this concept of if you bought a Coca-Cola bottle, you would then have to return the glass bottle to the supermarket or the place where you bought it and get like some money back, five cents or whatever amount of money.

And these laws that required that industry lobbied to end them in favour of single use bottling.

And they did that in tandem with a campaign to blame littering, blame trash all around us, resulting from single use packaging on the litter bug.

Linda: Wow.

Grant: So they did this huge and multi decade campaign to promote the individualization of trash.

And that then eventually rolled into the promotion of recycling.

So you have don’t litter, which became recycle, and then eventually led to reduce your carbon footprint.

And each of these was a campaign or an effort designed in focus groups by PR companies in order to fight political action on the environment.

So it’s been a long time coming in the environmental community that we’ve been manipulated, but I wanna make it clear that similar campaigns exist in other domains, blaming people for nutrition related problems, such as overweight and obesity, like blaming individuals for that.

It’s been a long time coming, blaming people for gun violence, you know, blaming like, oh, it’s just a crazy people that are killing people with guns.

So we need less crazy people.

Like, I mean, I’m using those terms in the way that we hear industry saying it.

I don’t think that’s an appropriate framing.

So I think that since we’re so awash with individualization and responsibilitisation on such a range of social issues, those, that narrative on all of these different issues helps to cross support one another in our own minds.

So when we hear it’s our responsibility to take care of the environment as individuals, not only do we believe that because of the environmental oriented media that we’ve been exposed to, but because of all of the other individual oriented media that we’ve been exposed to all around us.

And even in stuff that’s kind of, kind of a benign or seemingly benign, you can think of the Nike, just do it slogan.

You know, like just all of this messaging that says that we as individuals can act alone to change the world and not acting through organized groups to change politics to change the world.

Linda: So that any, any failing, any failure to achieve becomes our fault and not the company’s fault. So they’ve effectively declawed us using guilt.

Grant: Yeah, in many ways that’s a good way of putting it.

Linda: I can see that this is gonna be one of those episodes where I’m kind of gripping the desk and gritting my teeth the whole time.

I’m getting angrier and angrier.

I should have known after reading your book… to get back to the questions and give me a little breathing space.

Is there, is there one thing that you wish everyone knew about data?

Is there something that would kind of change, make your life easier or change the world if everybody understood it?

Grant: I think there’s, there’s a big thing I wish everybody understood, which was publication bias.

And then I think there’s part of it that I need to do some writing on to explain some of the, the research I’ve done and I haven’t gotten to it yet.

But I’ve got a pending paper that I’m calling the Avalanche of Publication Bias, which kind of explains both.

So the first of these problems is just publication bias generally this idea that sometimes called the file drawer problem.

Researchers are incentivized to only publish positive results.

So the result, the studies that end up not having positive results get stuck in the quote unquote, file drawer.

That’s why it’s sometimes called the file drawer problem.

And what this, what this leads to is, is a preponderance of only positive results in the research, even when those positive results are really weak.

So we might find that an intervention has a 1% impact.

So you do like, imagine you did a hundred studies or collectively academia does a hundred studies.

And then only one of them has a positive result of 1% impact.

Only that one study will get published.

And then you wait, and that’s how it’s framed.

That’s people say, oh, that’s the publication bias problem.

But I say that it’s an Avalanche.

It’s a snowball and it’s an Avalanche problem because similar to compounding interest on an investment that you gain over time, if you invest your money, your investments will compound, which is an incredible thing.

You make people make a lot of money because of compounding interest on their investments.

We have a compounding effect on publication bias.

So yes, one study in a hundred is positive and that one study gets published is bad.

But what about the collective effect of that?

Because after 10 years, you’re gonna have 10 positive results studies and all of those, however it is 900 or whatever studies that were done that had negative results were never published.

But you have 10 years worth of positive results studies published.

And those positive results studies are then used for systematic reviews and meta analysis.

So somebody does a meta analysis and says, hey, of all of the research out there, what are the findings?

And then they go and they look and they say, wow, okay, of 10 years of research, we have 10 years of positive results.

So authoritatively, we can say that this one intervention really does have a positive impact.

You often see it written as something like a small but statistically significant impact.

You read this all the time in these meta analysis.

And what I wish everybody would know about data is most of these meta analyses are based on data environments of such extreme publication bias that it’s all false.

And there’s an incentive to do that.

There’s an incentive for the people that are writing the studies for publication bias.

There’s an incentive for the people that are doing the meta analysis and the systematic reviews to be inclined towards this.

And then it gets even worse.

And this is when it really starts to snowball and it really starts to avalanch.

Once even the negative results that are published that because it does happen sometimes, they are basically never cited.

They’re never cited relative to positive results studies.

So over time, you have more and more citations for positive results studies.

In addition to more and more publication of them than negative results.

And then you have this meta analysis problem.

So it just, it compounds.

And as time goes on, academia is not only awash with publication bias and positive results studies and very few negative results studies, but it’s also only referencing historical studies that are positive.

So we just have this preponderance of what’s essentially fake news, but with more and more certainty of validity to that fake news.

There’s more and more people convinced that things that don’t work at all do work.

So if you were Coca-Cola and you wanted to make the argument that type two diabetes is genetic, all you need to do is start in the 1970s and start funding these studies slowly, slowly through front groups up until the 2000s.

And by the time the 2000s come around, you’re gonna have hundreds and thousands of positive results studies saying that type two diabetes is genetic and it’s gonna look really authoritative.

Linda: Wow.

That’s horrifying.

I’ve just been reading a piece by Carl Bergstrom, among others about teaching science in a way that makes kids more able to make sort of educated decisions about science and to know who to trust and all this kind of stuff.

But this puts into question the whole edifice.

Grant: (laughs) – Yeah, it’s absolutely terrifying.

We have a lot of things that people claim to be established research that are actually fake news that have been just funded for so long by industry.

So it could be industry, industry funding Sydney University for the last 40 years or Harvard University.

And they’ve just been funding the research and the framing of questions in the way that’s convenient to them and not funding the research and the framing of questions that would be inconvenient to them.

And so you end up over time with just so much fake research that looks completely real and completely legitimate.

Linda: Wow.

I, yeah, this is not gonna be a happy episode.

(laughs) Just getting more and more enraged.

Okay, this is not gonna help, this question.

What are the worst data mistakes you’ve seen?

Grant: I think, I came up with one example for this question for you and it’s confounding is what it’s usually called.

This is when you have two variables that are not separated in a research design and then the results are falsely attributed to the weaker variable.

So Chile did a remarkable piece of legislation over the last few years where they banned the sale of food in schools, junk food, junk food in schools.

And they also, banned like price promotions and other kinds of things.

They did a lot of stuff that really changed the material food environment in Chile.

And what they did at the same time was they put warning labels on a lot of the food.

So warning labels don’t have any impact on human weight or diet related health.

They are great for making things transparent and making us aware of the awful food environment around us.

So I really like warning labels.

I think they’re good, but they don’t change human behavior.

So we should definitely have warning labels and they should be better and better and they should be message tested for political engagement.

But we need to be making clear they don’t work.

Unfortunately, warning labels as a solution to diet related health problems are very convenient for industry.

What the warning labels say is bad and what the warning labels say is bad and good is something that industry is gonna fight us on.

Industry doesn’t want their product to be framed as bad, but they do like the concept of warning labels.

And so in Chile, what happened was the school ban for selling junk food in schools, the price promotions ban for selling junk food, which makes it so that junk food is more expensive.

It’s kind of like a soda tax, you could say.

These things are never talked about because all of the research has been confounding with three intervention types and has been just saying that in Chile, labels have been reducing consumption of junk food.

And you’ve got the New York Times reporting this, you’ve got all these, this research that’s being done that say even the research says we were unable to dis, we, I mean, this has been quoting one study, but most of the studies on this say the same thing.

We’re unable to disentangle what it was.

Was it the food labels?

Was it the school bans?

But at the end of the day, they still say, oh, labels work.

And now you have people quoting these few studies saying labels on food will reduce diabetes by 10% or will reduce food related illness by 10%.

And this is confounding.

So we’re confounding what does work.

And we have lots of research to show that if you make it so you can’t sell junk food in schools, kids will eat less junk food and they will be healthier.

We have lots of research on that.

And we have lots of research that shows that when you, when these variables are independently analyzed that food labels don’t change human behavior.

And so the way an industry can say an intervention that doesn’t work does work is they confound variables together, they confound them.

And I think that’s the worst data mistake that I tend to see.

Linda: (sighs) Yeah, that’s a big one.

(laughs) I don’t even know what to say to some of these things.

Like I’m so busy thinking and kind of reeling at the implications of all of the stuff that you’re telling me.

There’s a Doctor Who episode where people are wearing little things in their ears that they’re getting news and entertainment from.

And it turns out that those little things were designed by the Cybermen to turn everybody into Cybermen.

And the Doctor’s like, people just, you just invite this in every time.

And I feel like we’ve kind of created this environment where these things work.

Grant: Yeah, absolutely, absolutely.

In terms of, I mean, this is something that I think you’re probably gonna ask this question later, but you would ask me, like, have I ever seen data deliberately misused?

And this is definitely one of the things that’s pretty consistently misused.

I’d also say that the misuse of data is often done around self-reported data and self-reported behavioral intentions data especially.

For example, I had a friend of mine in Ireland who contacted me recently and said, wow, Grant, take a look at this.

Somebody’s trying to do a study on the sugar tax in Ireland and the entire methodology is not whether or not this sugar tax is working, but do people think it’s working?

So rather than actually measure, is it actually working?

Industry can pay for research that polls people and asks people whether or not they think it’s working, which is, if you know that something’s working, it’s a great way of creating a research base that says something is bad very disingenuously.

‘Cause most people aren’t really gonna know from an individual perspective has the overall percentage of soda consumption in my country gone down as the result of this policy.

Nobody’s gonna know that, especially when it’s the soda tax is probably, I don’t even know what it is in Ireland, but like 10%.

Most people as individuals are not gonna even feel that on a day-to-day basis.

It’s only collectively on a population level that you’d notice any change.

So this kind of polling data is consistently misused to suggest outcomes.

This kind of self-reported or self-reported behavioral intentions studies is always misused.

So I think when people are looking at research, we really need to look at what was the underlying data that was collected for this study.

Because you’ll often see in the conclusion section of a study or of the abstract, you’ll see.

Our conclusion is that soda taxes don’t work.

But what was the actual data that was collected?

It wasn’t looking at population level diabetes rates.

It was asking people, “Do you think this policy worked?

Linda: Yeah.

Grant: And that’s a mismatch between the data collection and the data collected and analyzed, and then the conclusion where the researcher is giving a positive spin perhaps naively and without any malintent.

But quite likely that study was funded maybe by a university department, which is part of an alliance with Coca-Cola.

Linda: Yeah.

Grant: You know, so you have industry influence, sometimes three or four stages removed from a lot of this stuff, but they’ve been involved for so long.

Like the Australian Diabetes Association used to be called something else, but now it’s called Diabetes Australia.

You have their like 1992, 1993 Diabetes Treatment Guidelines funded by the Australian Sugar Association.

Linda: Wow.

Talk about conflict of interest.

Grant: And you have the Diabetes Australia.

Right now is still funded by Nestle.

So it’s really quite disturbing.

And I don’t think people realize the amount of money behind a lot of this research coming from industry.

So the deliberate misuse of data is something that’s very easy to do.

And it’s very easy to do in a way that even the researchers working on the study don’t realize that they’re being used essentially.

So I don’t like to blame the researchers or any individual.

We have structural incentives for this.

For example, why is Diabetes Australia allowed to take money from Nestle?

Why are there no laws against conflict of interest like that?

I wouldn’t be blaming the CEO of Diabetes Australia for taking money from anybody because they have an incentive to their board to fundraise as much as possible within legal limits.

And so if we legalize this kind of thing, of course people are gonna do it.

Grant: Yeah, but if we brought in laws against conflict of interest then the entire government would be sacked.

Speaking of conflict of interest, they have a conflict of interest in not making those laws.

Wow.

So to spot things like that, you’re looking, you really have to go look at what the underlying data is and what the questions were and things like that.
You have to look into the methodology.

Grant: And you’ll be, oftentimes you’ll find, oh, this study is so confusing.

I couldn’t figure out what the underlying data is.

Well, that’s a good sign.

You can ignore that study.

If you can’t figure out from a study, what was the actual data that they used here?

You can throw it out.

I mean, I find it sickening, the amount of studies.

I mean, I look at tons of this research, I can’t figure out a lot of the time, what’s the actual data?

I don’t understand how it passes peer review.

If it’s not clear where this data is coming from.

Linda: I have some questions about peer review.

Grant: Yeah, yeah.

What’s it like?

It’s the least bad solution kind of problem.

Linda: Yeah, yeah, it’s the worst solution except for all of the others.

Grant: Yeah, exactly.

Linda: (laughing) – What’s the first question you ask when you look at graphs in the media?

Grant: I look to see who funded the study as quickly as I can.

Yeah.

Linda: Show me the money.

Grant: Show me the money.

Exactly, exactly.

Linda: So you said that you don’t blame researchers and that they often don’t even know, how they’re being manipulated.

Is funding, is the problem with funding that it kind of creates some level of unconscious bias that people want to find the results that they think will make their funders happy?

Or is it just that the way the funders set up their funding to shift the research that gets done?

Grant: I think it’s, all of the things you just said are correct.

There’s also a, there was a good study that came out that says found that researchers simply don’t like to ruffle feathers.

And so you get a lot of publication bias and bad research that’s supportive of the status quo simply because researchers are kind of conflict at first and tend to want to, I guess, be like positive within their community.

I think a lot of people are like that.

You imagine a large dinner party where people just kind of try and avoid sensitive topics and not be engaged in topics of conversation that’ll ruffle feathers or make anybody feel bad when they go home at night, talk like you want to talk when you’re in polite company.

This kind of discussion style happens in academia quite a lot.

So it’s possible that there are some researchers that are like, man, I don’t care if I destroy the planet, I just want to make money.

That’s possible.

But I think it’s easy to be angry with researchers that are taking money from industry.

I guess when I say I don’t blame them is I don’t put the locus of responsibility for fixing the problem on the individual goodwill of researchers.

We need to be changing the incentive structures around the researchers.

Linda: In the same way that carbon footprint isn’t the solution, making individual research has changed their behavior is not the solution.

Grant: Yeah, like I researched diabetes, but if you locked me in a room with a bag of cookies, I would eat those cookies.

They would be delicious.

And I would want more.

Linda: (laughing) Yeah, you wouldn’t really need a locked door.

Grant: You could just put them in my house.

I would eat them.

Linda: Yep, yep, I can relate.

Grant: Yeah, so we need to be talking about changing the incentive structures around people.

There’s no way to make better people.

Humans are fallible.

Linda: Yeah, my friend Nick always says we have to build for the people we have, not the people we wish we had.

Grant: Yeah, well said.

Linda: So the solution for you is policy.

Grant: It’s policy, it’s changing the way what government’s doing.

I mean, I think maybe I wouldn’t frame it as the solution is policy.

Right now, policy is creating the problem.

If we do all of the other mumbo jumbo we want to do in the world, let’s just for a hypothetical say that all that stuff works.

We’re still going to have the policy undoing all of our good work.

So if you don’t get rid of these policies that are creating these problems, those problems are going to persist.

There’s a saying I’ve heard quite a lot in Australia, actually, people say the system is broken, capitalism is broken, democracy is broken.

I hate this framing.

I saw a billboard the other day that said the system isn’t broken, it was designed this way.

And that’s such a better framing.

The system is working exactly as it was designed to work.

It’s not broken at all.

It’s serving the people in power and the forces of power.

And if we want a better world, we need to be working to change that system and to change those incentives and redesign that system.

If we think we can just somehow operate outside of politics, we’re denying the existence of the politics that are already around us.

Which is, I mean, it’s like climate denialism or science denialism.

We’re just like ostriches with our heads in the sand to the actual data.

Linda: Richard Dennis, who’s been on this podcast a couple of times, is fond of saying, it’s really complicated, let me break it down for you.

If you want more of something, you subsidize it.

If you want less of something, you tax it.

It’s not rocket science, but the politics to make that happen.

Grant: Exactly.

Linda: Really hard.

Because you’re asking the people in power to lessen their power and that’s not gonna happen.

Grant: But I think you’d have to take things as they are in front of you.

So why is it really hard to change that politics?

Well, principally because we don’t even know what’s going on.

In Australia right now, there’s no transparency on lobbying.

So how would you even know?

A lot of people in Australia think that lobbying is not even happening.

They don’t realize there’s corruption in politics because there’s so little transparency laws.

Now transparency doesn’t actually solve anything, but it makes you aware of what’s going on.

So once you’ve got a little bit more transparency, then you can say, oh my God, how is this happening?

And then take action on those things.

So there’s a lot that can really be done.

I think one thing that really should be done in Australia is you shouldn’t be allowing tax breaks for media and for public relations.

I don’t think it’s right that Coca-Cola can get tax breaks for its advertising.

Linda: I didn’t know they could.

Grant: yeah, definitely.

Coca-Cola pays almost no taxes in Australia.

They have tax write-offs for everything.

Yeah, so they write Coca-Cola, Nestle, Rimmington rifles, and any industry in Australia, automobile industry, they write off their advertising expenses.

They can write off all of their public relations consultants.

These are all operating costs.

And so

Linda: So it’s subsidizing PR and marketing.

Grant: Yeah, you’re subsidizing PR and marketing.

So I mean, arguably, you could say a good case to be made for banning all media because if you are allowing for media to be paid for, then you’re, and we know that media influences political perception and voting patterns, then what you’re really saying is, we’re allowing the people with the most money to run our political system.

So there’s a good argument for banning media, but I don’t think that’s where I wanna go right away.

I think we should stop subsidizing corporate media.

I think that would be a really good start to evening the playing field between civil society and large industry.

Yeah.

Linda: Wow.

How do we get there?

The people in power are invested in not making it happen.

How do we change?

Grant: Well, in Australia right now, I’d recommend people don’t organize and don’t register as charities.

Don’t register as charities.

In Australia, if you’re a charity, you’re limited increasingly in what you can say politically.

I think it’s still not quite so bad like other countries, but I mean, you had this alliance, I don’t know if it still exists.

It’s called the Hands Off Our Charities Alliance in Australia that was doing pretty amazing work to fight against the regulation of charitable organization political speech.

Linda: Actually, those regulations were at least partially undone by the Labour government late last year.

Grant: That’s great to hear.

That’s really great to hear.

Linda: I didn’t realize that until recently, but it’s progress.

Grant: But I think if you are a charitable organization, you’re always gonna face that threat.

So I would suggest you stay, just an organized group of friends or ally outside of the charitable registration system with other organizations.

And you meet with your policy makers, you write newspaper articles together, you organize protests occasionally, but the key is really gonna be to organize.

The key of underlying it all is people need to see each other much more often in person, in groups, and discuss these issues and discuss how they can influence politics best, and then go out and do that.

And I think that’s the real challenge in Australia in making that happen is the land use policy in Australia has made people so spread out.

According to a recent Australian study, Australia has less walking trips per capita per day than any country on earth, and I think in human history.

It’s something like 2.5%

Linda: That astounds me.

Grant: Yeah, yeah.

It’s something like 2.5% of all trips in Australia are walking trips.

And walking trips are where people meet with each other, interact with other human beings.

If you’re in a car all the time, you’re not really connecting with other human beings.

You’re seeing other metal boxes driving around.

You’re not seeing the people inside of them.

You’re not smiling at them.

You’re not frowning at them.

You’re not engaging with them in small conversation.

You’re not saying, “Oh my God, did you read in the newspaper what just happened?

” So Australian land use policy is really disincentivizing political organizing – any kind of organizing – but very importantly, it disincentivizes political organization.

So I think right now what Australians need to do is take extra steps to really be proactive in coming together and meeting with other people.

Invite four friends out for a meal or have them over a couple of times a week or at least once a week and meet with others more often.

Discuss these political issues and discuss how you can take action on them.

Linda: I hadn’t ever made the connection between the car culture and the difficulties in organizing.

But when we were in lockdown and we had these limits on how far you could go when you exercise and stuff, we talked more to people in the neighborhood than we’ve done in the 20 or so years that we’ve lived here.

We suddenly had this – 20 years? 30 years! – Wow, feeling old now.

But yeah, we suddenly had this sense of community and talking to the neighbors and recognizing people.

And I had really bad hips at the time and I had people stopping me because they’d noticed that I was walking better.

And people, I’d never seen them before as far as I knew, but they’re like, oh, we see you pass every day.

And suddenly you’re having these conversations that when you’re driving in and out of the neighborhood, aren’t possible and it’s interesting to make that connection now with the ability to build, I guess, community.

And that’s the fundamental building block of organization, isn’t it?

Grant: Absolutely.

And I would push back on you on the term car culture.

‘Cause culture, most people understand it to mean that’s just how we are.

That’s what’s a unique feature of our identity.

But Australians didn’t always have cars.

And Australians used to not use cars so much.

Australians drive much more than they ever have in Australian history.

So the car culture of Australia is something that’s been amplified and promoted by the collective industries that make money off of that kind of narrative.

You have laws in Australia that are increasing car dependency.

You have laws that are called minimum parking requirements.

So they make it so that when you build a house, you have to have a garage and a driveway and street parking in front of your house by law.

You can’t not do that.

You have laws that say when you build apartment buildings, you have to have a certain amount of parking spaces per building.

And you have all these laws that say you have to have a certain road width.

Like every road must have four lanes.

You have laws that say you can’t build over a single story.

You have laws that say you can’t build bars and coffee shops and bookstores wherever you want.

You can only build them in designated areas.

And all of these laws spread people out.

So we’ve legislated a land use pattern that prohibits people from walking.

It’s not that people are actively choosing this.

It’s that the laws are actually, and in the Melbourne, there’s some researchers at Monash.

There’s one guy named… I’m blanking on his name, Graham, something that promotes this term called forced car ownership.

And that’s a really great way of describing what many Australians are suffering from is forced car ownership, forced car dependency.

When they don’t have any choice, there’s nowhere to walk to.

Linda: Yep.

Yeah, my son is going to university next year and would be old enough to drive.

And the university is 20 minutes away by car, but it’s gonna be probably an hour away by public transport because of the connections and the, you know, walking to the stop and….

Grant: But I don’t think in the current land use of Melbourne, from what I know, I don’t think public transport is ever really gonna be able to work.

You’re too sprawled out.

If you don’t fix the sprawl by allowing for accessory dwelling units in people’s backyards in ending these requirements for parking spaces, in ending bans on commercial use of residential properties, you’re gonna be stuck with a sprawled out system that’s never gonna be viable for public transportation.

You actually need to have more things closer to people’s houses.

you need to have people’s houses not be so spread out from one another.

Linda: 15 minute cities.

Grant: Yeah, 15, I mean, if you look at the example you just said, it’s 20 minutes driving to the university.

So you’re at right now in a 20 minute driving city.

Linda: Yeah.

Grant: So I mean, even if we were in a 30 minute walking city in Melbourne, that would be radically better than what it is right now.

I don’t think most people, there’s one way of measuring this is how many activity centers do you have around you?

And this is measured by the fifth most distant activity center.

If you look at the fifth most distant activity center, how long does it take to get there?

And then see that as a circle around your house.

That’s kind of how bad is the state of affairs around you.

And that’s something that would be improved greatly in Melbourne or in Australia if we got rid of a lot of these really authoritarian laws that are making it so that people can’t use their properties how they want to.

And at the same time, sorry, taking us back and we’ve now gone down quite a tangent.

That would greatly improve people’s ability to be involved politically.

Linda: Yep.

Grant: If they had the ability to walk to this stuff, as we were saying earlier, they then would have much more interact, similarly to what you experienced during COVID.

People that you didn’t even know because they could see you visually were able to be concerned about you.

Linda: Yeah.

That activity measure of the fifth most distant activity center, that would make a great school project for kids to calculate that around their houses and stuff.

I’m gonna have to write that up.

We have gone way off track, but it’s been so interesting.

I could do this all day.

What is it that excites you about data?

Grant: I get excited about the prospect of fixing some of these problems with publication bias.

And I mean, maybe I’m overly ambitious to say fixing, but working in that direction.

I think something has happened with the internet and scholarly research.

And generally having more information at our fingertips that I feel like within the scholarly community of experts, we are now at a point where it’s easier than ever to connect and to be aware of studies we never would have heard of otherwise.

So I feel like there is an element within the research community of truth seeking that is greatly enhanced by better research, better research on methods.

And better exposés and critical thinking on this problem of publication bias and other things I talked about today.

So I do have hope there.

And I am quite excited about that.

There’s a saying that I wrote down for you today that it’s by Antonio Gramsci.

And I’m gonna paraphrase it.

I think it’s hard, and maybe before I do, I think just to paraphrase, it’s hard to remain positive with all this stuff.

And I really like how Gramsci put this.
He says, He aims to live without illusions, without becoming disillusioned, to be a pessimist of intellect, but an optimist of will.

And I think that’s really beautiful to somehow be aware of just how bad things are and to be incredibly pessimistic, but then not be disillusioned.

And it’s a struggle to do so, but I think that’s the thing we should all be aiming for.

Linda: Yeah, we can’t, if we’re not at least a little bit optimistic, if we’re not a bit hopeful, then we can’t achieve anything.

Grant: Yeah, somehow maybe we can call it cynical optimism.

Linda: I’ve always described myself as a, a naive, no, a cynical idealist.

Grant: Ah, I like it.

Yeah.

I like it.

Linda: It’s a tricky route to walk.

Grant: Fine line.

Linda: Thank you so much.

This has been so interesting.

Yeah, as I said, I could do it all day.

We might have to do another one.

Grant: I’d love that.

It’s a pleasure.

Thanks for having me on the show, Linda.

Linda: It’s been awesome.