The climate crisis: What the data really say | Cooked? Ep 1

0:00Nature Reporter: I'm going to be honest with you, I worry a lot.

0:07Nature Reporter: I worry about all sorts of things. Money, friends, family, if my voice sounds weird as you're listening to it. But there's one thing I've been worried about since I was a teenager in the early 2000s. The climate. The world's going to hell in a handcart. It is a wake-up call. It's the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world, in my opinion. So how do we leave this pathway to disaster? Those anxieties have only gotten worse. In recent years, it has felt to me like climate action has stalled. In 2024, the world passed the 1.5 degrees threshold set in Paris for the first time. Shortly thereafter, Donald Trump returned to the White House and on the first day of his presidency, set about reversing climate policies of the previous administration, vowing to promote fossil fuels.

1:05Nature Reporter: In Europe, right-wing politicians have taken aim at climate goals, with the EU weakening previously ambitious environmental policy. All while it's getting hotter and hotter. In May, there were record-breaking temperatures in my home of the UK, then in June those records were broken again, twice in the same week in fact, with temperatures in some places across the continent more than 10 degrees hotter than they were between 1991 and 2020. That was the story all over Europe. Without climate change, it's extremely unlikely Europeans would have had to endure these heatwaves. And globally, scientists of all stripes have expressed doubts that any government has done enough to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.

1:55Nature Reporter: So it feels like we're failing on climate. Heck, I can even look outside my window and see evidence for that. But what's weird is that even as climate change is affecting me more, I find it harder to engage with. As things get worse, I'm having trouble staying optimistic that we, you, me and everyone can do anything about it. And that's an odd position to be in as a science journalist. Climate change is one of the biggest stories of our time. Every week we pick our stories to cover on the podcast, and I always want to report the latest climate science. And I do, but I find it hard. Sometimes it just feels like more bad news at a time where our audience, and I, could do with less.

2:40Nature Reporter: I feel hopeless.

2:45Nature Reporter: But is that actually right? Am I justified in that feeling? as the one thing I know about science is often the truth is a bit more complicated than we think. So while the narrative can feel overwhelmingly negative, is that really what the data says? To try and shake myself out of this climate funk, I've been talking to some of the scientists and campaigners on the front lines of climate research. And what I found was a story of tipping points. That has the potential to move this energy transition over the edge. Unpredictability. I don't think we've had this level of uncertainty about a technological shift before.

3:26Nature Reporter: Societal change. I think there's this positive feedback loop by which all of our individual level actions can lead to bigger collective actions. And snowballing effects. The system is changing at exponential speed. This is Cooked, a three-part miniseries for nature, where I try and find out whether we are, well, cooked. Is it game over for climate, or are there reasons for hope? I'm your host, Nic Petrucciol, and in this first episode, I decided to start with the data. And I had a good idea of who might be able to help me with that. I mean, as a data scientist, I'm biased and I would say look at the data to understand for these big problems, you know, where they're coming from, why they're happening and importantly, what we can do to solve them.

4:26Nature Reporter: I don't think it's just me that feels like we've failed on climate. there's certainly a narrative out there that it's too late. But not that long ago, a book came out that seemed to fly against this. As it stated, backed up with oodles of data, that we're really not at the end of the world. So I knew I wanted to speak to its author, Hannah Ritchie. What I wanted to do in that book was, I think, twofold. That's Hannah, the author of Not the End of the World and a data scientist at Our World in Data and the University of Oxford. One was I was trying to kind of write it to my former self, who was very, very pessimistic, wasn't sure if there was really a future there for me, and present, you know, where we are now.

5:11And the point is not that these problems are solved in any way, they're still huge problems. But we have started to make progress. And there's lots of opportunity for us to make more progress. My point is not that we should be, you know, complacent and optimistic that these problems will solve themselves. I think it's to kind of maybe get rid of a bit of the cynicism that there's nothing that we can do and actually no one is doing anything because I don't think that's true. And I think the second kind of motivation for doing that is to look at the data and understand if we want to solve these problems, what are the really key and big things that we need to do to solve them?

5:45Nature Reporter: The book looked at seven huge challenges that humanity faces, including climate change, and examined each one through the lens of data to understand the progress we have and haven't made on them and what we should do. So I was curious to hear from Hannah about how we're actually doing on climate change. If you go back 10 years, the alternatives to fossil fuels were much more expensive than fossil fuels. For solar and wind were way more expensive. Batteries were extremely expensive. Electric vehicles were basically not on the radar at that point. So it seemed very, very hard to me at the time to see how the world would actually progress on this.

6:23What we've seen over the last decade is this huge drop in the costs of these low carbon energy sources. And that now means that they're cost competitive with fossil fuels. So you have the kind of short term incentive of picking the low cost solution, now adding up and aligning with the long term issue we're trying to solve, which is climate change. These days, renewable energy is very cheap. Let's take solar energy as an example. Between 2009 and 2025, estimates from the investment firm Lazard suggest that solar energy prices have dropped to less than a sixth of what they used to cost on average.

6:59This number even includes the continued costs of running solar plants. Overall, this makes them, along with wind, the cheapest form of energy.

7:08Nature Reporter: This change has helped Hannah go from pessimistic to optimistic about the future of climate change. It's not just that the costs have tumbled. more and more of this clean energy is actually being implemented as well. We now also see that many countries are now rolling out clean energy at an increasingly fast pace. So it's not like it's just that the cost has dropped. You can actually now start to see that translating into action. Hannah also thinks that this electrification of the world has other benefits too. What's really key about that electrification lever, and I think is underappreciated, is how much you gain there in terms of efficiency.

7:44You know, it's not just we want to do this because it saves us carbon emissions, which it will if we are powering that through low carbon power. But also you get huge efficiency gains from this. So like driving in an electric car uses about a third of the energy of driving in a petrol car. Right. So you actually also get rid of lots of this energy waste that we currently have in the system.

8:05Nature Reporter: Worldwide adoption rates of electric vehicles are increasing. Around a quarter of every new vehicle sold is electric, and in some countries this rate is much higher. In Norway, 97 % of new cars sold were electric, while in China, 53 % were. Now many people are critical of electric vehicles for various reasons. Mining of lithium for use in batteries can be very environmentally damaging, for instance, and using public transport is better than having a personal electric vehicle most of the time. But when it comes to their climate credentials, electric cars are being conventional every time. The world has also been built in many places to favour cars, and in some areas, public transport just isn't a viable option.

8:54Nature Reporter: So if we want the most people to use the least climate emission-causing form of transport, electric vehicles are going to be part of the mix. But it's not just data on clean energy and electrification that gives Hannah hope. She also points to progress that's been made in making steel and concrete production more climate conscious. This is maybe a bit less obvious to our day-to-day lives, as most of us don't work in big construction projects, but these core components of buildings come with big emissions. Cement production, for example, accounted for around 6 % of global carbon emissions in 2024, according to the International Energy Agency.

9:36But this is down from a peak in 2021 due to slowed growth in construction and is projected to decrease further as improvements are made to the recipe for cement, or if alternatives to it entirely are created. These solutions haven't been scaled yet. They're at a very, very small level. But I think we still have made progress there. And there are actually solutions starting to come online and starting to get cost competitive. But it will take some time for them to build up to a kind of level where you would actually start to see dents in the data.

10:10Nature Reporter: as hannah said the point of her book and this examination of the data is not to allow us all to pat ourselves on the back and say jobs are good there's still a lot we need to do and in many ways some of these changes aren't happening fast enough rather the point is to not make us feel despondent and hopeless as that helps nobody and there are actually reasons for optimism Falling prices in renewables, increased electrification, and more climate-conscious construction are all starting to make dents in the data, according to Hannah. So maybe I don't need to be so worried after all. Assuming, of course, that we can keep this up.

10:50Renewable energy growth has continued in the US, but all it's doing is making the rise in emissions less bad.

10:58Nature Reporter: There's a new disruptive and energy-intensive technology out there that could stall climate progress, artificial intelligence. The level of debate about this technology is massive. It's actually really fascinating because I don't think we've had this level of uncertainty about a technological shift before.

11:23Nature Reporter: Whenever I open social media these days, I see a lot of scepticism about artificial intelligence. I don't have to scroll far to come across a video of someone pretending to be a large language model powered chatbot who says silly things while chugging litres of water. But the backlash against this technology is spilling out of social media and pouring into real world legislation. We've seen the first moratoriums on the building of data centres, the facilities that house the infrastructure for AI and other internet services. and the often cited reasons are environmental, water and energy use. So that got me wondering, if AI is so energy intensive, could it stall climate progress?

12:12Especially if many of these data centres are using fossil fuels to meet their energy needs. For the sake of this podcast, I'm just going to focus on energy demands, as that's what's more relevant to the climate, and put other environmental concerns to one side for now. To do so, I wanted to put those memes aside as well and find out what the data actually says.

12:33Nature Reporter: So I reached out to an expert on data centres and their energy use to go through some of the numbers. My name is Ketan Joshi. I'm an independent researcher and analyst working on energy and data centres and fossil fuel phasor. Ketan has been working as an energy analyst for many years, but more recently has been focusing on how much energy data centres consume, particularly for artificial intelligence. I wanted to know how a growth in data centres would affect the climate, but he explained to me that that's quite difficult to work out. We have thousands of projections of data center growth into the near future.

13:11But the level of variation that you see in these projections makes me almost want to never use them. And the reason behind that is really because some projections basically take a linear pathway, you know, it'll grow to maybe four to five percent by 2030. I've seen ones that are up to like 20 % of global energy consumption for data centers, you know, in the coming decades. And I find that to be a little bit silly. And the reason behind this wild skew of future projections is because there is an inherent assumption about the future of artificial intelligence and the shape and form that it takes in the near future.

13:49The way that we tend to formulate projections just falls apart with something like this, where there is an inherent uncertainty as to what the technology is, what it's going to be used for, whether it's hype, whether it's real, whether we go for high energy consumption models or low energy consumption models. There's like 10 crisscrossing vectors of uncertainty that make it really, really hard to say what's going to happen. The future is, unfortunately, unpredictable. It's hard to know what AI will look like in 10 years, or even 10 days for that matter. So it's tough to fit into our projections of the future and how it may impact the climate.

14:32As a result, Catan likes to focus on the here and now, and see what we can understand about the technology. To start, it's important to note that while AI gets a lot of attention, it currently forms a small part of energy usage. The International Energy Agency, for instance, estimates that data centres use, for everything, not just AI, around 2 % of the world's energy. As Ketan says, that may grow, perhaps by a lot, perhaps by not so much. It's part of the uncertainty with the technology. According to Kitan's analysis though, AI, and by that I mean the generative kind that powers chatbots, may be particularly energy intensive.

15:15Something that I've found having looked at some of the newer corporate statements, so for instance Microsoft analysed their latest statement, analysed Google and Amazon. And all three of those companies are using more energy to earn the same amount of revenue, if that makes sense. Rather than working towards more efficiency, as computing has done in the past, Catan thinks that companies are using more and more energy to try and make cleverer chatbots

15:41Nature Reporter: or autonomous AI agents. Google and Microsoft, for example, have acknowledged that they've increased their energy usage as they build out AI capacity. One thing to note here is that different use cases of AI have different energy demands. Techniques like machine learning, which often gets labelled as AI, don't use as much energy as generative AI, like large language models. And then within generative AI, things like a written response from a chatbot needs a lot less energy than generating an image or a video. But the concern for the climate is that all this energy needs to come from somewhere.

16:21And if there isn't sufficient renewable energy in place, it will come from fossil fuels. Figuring out how much data centres may be using fossil fuels, though, is not easy. Ketan explained to me that when companies report their power consumption, it's not quite as simple as them stating what proportion of renewable energy versus fossil fuels they've used. Similarly to carbon offsets, companies can purchase certificates from renewable energy providers and then use them to show that their emissions are lower than they are. Microsoft recently stopped using this method, which has been widely criticised, and in their most recent report, there was a large rise in their emissions.

17:02The companies could also have positive impacts on renewable energy. With their vast resources, they could fund new wind and solar farms. Microsoft, for example, has announced a US$6 billion agreement to build AI infrastructure powered by renewable energy in Norway. Deals such as these can then also be included in companies' reports on what kinds of energy they use.

17:30So untangling all of this is pretty tricky. With that in mind, Ketan explained how energy use has changed in the US, as that's the place where there are most data centres in the world. There's a new report from the Energy Information Administration updating on 2025 data. and of course, you know, emissions have gone up. They haven't gone up crazy. Like they haven't gone, you know, it's not like a skyrocketing, you know, right angle, but they have gone up and renewable energy growth has continued in the US, but all it's doing is just, it's making the rise in emissions less bad. The report Ketan mentioned says that US energy related CO2 emissions went up by about 2 % in 2025.

18:16That may not sound like a lot but it's against a backdrop of emissions falling so any rise is a cause for concern for the climate. And like Catan says renewable energy adoption has continued apace so the fact that there were more renewables but emissions still went up implies that more energy was coming from carbon emitting fossil fuels. This is backed up by a report from the Energy Institute, a UK-based professional body that monitors energy use. The report said that US emissions had increased in 2025 due to higher coal use, and that electricity demand had risen faster than supply, driven in part by data centres and artificial intelligence.

18:58An independent research firm, the Rhodium Group, also identified a rise in carbon emissions in the US, and cited a particularly cool winter, more coal use and increased demand in electricity from data centres as reasons. Of course, data centres could be powered by renewable energy, but building this supply takes time. And if we have a sudden increase in energy demand, due to AI for instance, then fossil fuels could be used to plug the gap.

19:26Nature Reporter: Google, for example, has acknowledged that it's expanding its AI development on a grid that is undersupplied with clean energy, but it still remains a large funder of clean energy projects. Google still plans to reduce their emissions, but right now they're using more fossil fuel energy. Kitan would like to see more transparency from the tech companies creating AI on its environmental impacts, so it could be scrutinised more easily, along with more regulation from governments. He also thinks that everyone has a role to play in deciding on what terms we use this technology. It's basically this like spectrum of power, you know, ranging from very little power, which is like I'm just one person who makes decisions about, you know, energy use to institutional power, which is pretty substantial, like, you know, an institution saying, I'm not going to subscribe to your chatbot until you can actually be transparent about where the energy comes from, how it's used, etc.

20:24And then to the most powerful, which is like, you know, an energy company saying, we will not supply you with energy unless you actually make it make sense. And you have like public support and societal support for the actions of your company. Catan is actually optimistic about the future, as it seems that the general public are beginning to understand that they do have power to demand better from these companies. Environmental cost and climate concerns are being raised against AI and politicians are listening. You can look at the growth of moratoriums and data centres to see that. To be clear, this isn't just because of climate.

20:59Opponents of data centres describe them as being ugly, straining local resources and not providing many tangible benefits to their residents. These are issues that affect people no matter what side of the political divide they sit on and this bipartisan opposition has meant that politicians have started taking action. But that touches on another thing I've wondered about. What are governments and nations actually doing?

21:25Nature Reporter: Are they meeting the goals they've set out for the climate? As it certainly felt to me like there's been some backsliding recently, with right-wing politicians taking aim at climate goals. So what's the data say about how the nations of the world are doing? Well, it's better than we used to think 10 years ago, but it's definitely not there where it should be.

21:49If you've ever engaged with climate change, you'll know it's a global issue. The whole world is getting hotter and that affects us all. Because of that, nations often get together and come up with various pledges on what they're going to do about it. What comes out of these pledges is ultimately what we as a global society are doing about climate change. And I knew a scientist who keeps close tabs on all of this, so I gave him a call. Hello, Niklas Höhne, New Climate Institute, calling in from Cologne, Germany. I met Niklas a few years ago at COP26, the enormous climate conference run by the UN.

22:28He co-founded the New Climate Institute, a non-profit that works on climate policy, where he oversees analyses on climate policy. I was there back then reporting for Nature, and I asked him if things were hopeless. I remember that he didn't coddle me or make me despair. He gave me a nuanced picture. So I caught up with him to see where we are now. So while 10 years ago, we thought global greenhouse gas emissions would rise forever and would lead to a temperature increase of three and a half degrees by the end of the century. We now think that with currently implemented policies, they will stabilize and decline and then lead to around two and a half degrees by the end of the century.

23:10So a full degree better than we thought only 10 years ago. So that's remarkable. That's really good. But it's not enough. The Paris Agreement says, well, below two or in the direction of 1.5. And there we are far away from it. And also, we have to say that in the past years, global greenhouse gas emissions have still increased. So despite all of the efforts, there is still more fossil fuels being burned each year. And therefore, we have more greenhouse gas emissions each year. And that means not only are we not stopping climate change, we are fueling climate change. So we are accelerating the speed of change each year by adding more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere than we had in the year before.

23:56The main driver of this drop in the projected temperature increase is something that Hannah already touched on, the speed of renewable energy production. Prices are falling and Nicholas thinks that this may push us to the precipice to start some exponential change. I think the last 10 years, we've been surprised each year about the speed of renewable energy electrification and the transformation that has been started. So I assume that also next year and the years after, we will be positively surprised because the end of that development of the technologies is not there. So prices still decline.

24:31New battery technologies are invented. Renewables are incredibly cheap compared to 10 years and are still declining. and what we as humans often underestimate is exponential change. The system is changing at exponential speed and that means each year more solar is implemented than we thought before or more batteries are implemented, more electric cars. And most of the models, they are still kind of assuming a linear change and underestimate the speed of the transformation. And that's why I think I'm quite optimistic about our future projections that this renewable energy transformation will actually win against the fossil fuels because it's simply exponential change.

25:19And that always has to win over a linear trend, which is the one described by the fossil fuels. You can see a similar exponential change if you look at the history of cars.

25:33at the turn of the 20th century there was a blight on cities horses according to the london transport museum in 1900 there were 300 000 horses in london but just 14 years later they'd all but disappeared this sudden departure of the city's workhorses helped humanity solve a pretty relevant problem for a climate podcast, pollution.

26:02Horses produced a lot of waste, you know the kind of waste I'm talking about, that was very literally clogging up the streets. The solution, ironically given the topic of this podcast, was cars. Motorized vehicles had actually been around

26:18Nature Reporter: for a few years by the early 20th century, but it wasn't until 1908 when the Model T Ford came out, the first car affordable to a large number of people, that they really took off. In 1910, there were 8 ,000 cars registered in London. In 1920, there were 190 ,000. And the next year, there were 250 ,000. And as cars took off, streets once clogged with horse manure instead became roads for motor cars. That may seem like a pretty inevitable change, but if you were a Londoner in 1900, you probably wouldn't have believed that the world could be so different in a few decades. Perhaps renewable energy will be the same for us.

27:04Nature Reporter: It may seem like we'll never overcome our addiction to fossil fuels, but as prices tumble, maybe we're standing on the cliff edge of that exponential change.

27:20Nature Reporter: so there are certainly positives for the climate the speed of the energy transition has taken many experts by surprise but there's still a long way to go and when it comes to how many countries are actually sticking to their climate pledges well this is a bit of a mixed bag we regularly look at who's basically the best which is the best country around the world and the places one, two, three are always empty. So no country is doing everything correct. But in each area, you can see quite positive things. We have electric mobility, which is shooting off and was shooting off in Norway because Norway supported it significantly with a lot of money.

28:00But now it's basically the better way of doing things. So even countries like Vietnam or Nepal have very high adoption rates for electric cars. They sell more electric cars than conventional vehicles in these countries. And that is remarkable because it shows that this is the most economic way of having individual mobility. Then there's other areas, buildings and industry, which really are a bit behind. And it's very difficult to find really good examples where countries are really doing well. But okay, I think also in buildings and in industry, this idea of electrification is something that will now take off as well.

28:40So in buildings, it's heat pumps for heating, which are the new normal. So there's a huge opportunity to do more in those areas as well. You may have noticed that some of the biggest emitters haven't been mentioned there. And to be honest, there were some of the ones I was most worried about, China and the US.

29:00Nature Reporter: China is the world's top emitter, according to the International Energy Agency, but it seems their emissions are finally starting to peak, meaning that the greenhouse gases they emit may be starting to reduce. According to some analyses, they have already peaked. This is likely because they have implemented a huge amount of renewable energy. Last year, China installed more solar capacity than the rest of the world combined, although this boom in insulation is slowing down a bit now. And as Nicholas explained to me, China has been instrumental in producing what the world needs for renewable energy.

29:37They're the leading manufacturer of solar, wind and battery technology. But he did impress on me that this wouldn't really have been possible without the policies of several countries, especially in Europe, promoting renewables and therefore creating the right market conditions for China. And then there's the world's second biggest emitter and the largest historical contributor to climate change, the US. There, I was worried about the influence of the most recent administration. Trump's team has dealt a severe blow to the world's ability to tackle climate change by walking away from the Paris Agreement on Climate for the second time.

30:14They also repealed the endangerment finding that set out that climate change is a public threat and has been used to enact climate policy. and they have spent billions trying to undo climate projects, giving the companies behind them refunds if they instead invest that money in fossil fuels. These actions, the administration say, would save the United States money by removing excess regulations, lowering bills and helping maintain the US's leadership. But they are counter to what climate scientists say we should be doing. We need to stop burning fossil fuels and rein in our emissions.

30:57So I was expecting a pretty negative response from Nicholas when I asked about how the US is doing. But he had a few surprises for me. So for the US as such, it's the second largest emitter and the Trump administration has basically dismantled all climate policies that were there from the federal government in the US. and that means now that the emissions in the US will still continue to decline, but will decline slower. This first surprise is that while the actions of the Trump administration will likely increase the emissions that the US will produce, this is against a backdrop of overall decline.

31:36Nature Reporter: Even though there's been a recent uptick in emissions in the past year, the US's emissions have been steadily falling since the early 2000s. And that will likely continue, albeit not as fast as it would if the Trump administration was more pro-climate. Ultimately, the economics of clean energy are hard even for the most powerful country in the world to fight against. It's getting harder and harder to justify the use of fossil fuels when the alternatives are cheaper. The second surprise was an unexpected way that the current US administration may have unintentionally pushed for a move away from fossil fuels.

32:13Which is the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. And that created a significant energy crisis with very, very high fossil fuel prices for oil and gas. And that created a push towards energy efficiency and renewable energy. And that effect will be significant. It's very difficult to quantify that right now. But from our point of view, it's very clearly that that has the potential to move this energy transition over the edge, so to say, and over the tipping point, that it will be self-propelling. because all the countries that currently suffer significantly from fuel shortage, it's not even a price, a high price, it's really a shortage, they simply have not enough.

32:56They will now really, really think about alternatives and have already. So some countries have already increased their renewable energy targets. China has reduced their oil consumption by 10 % to 20%, depending on which source you look at, within only 12 months. So there are significant changes underway that will reduce global greenhouse gas emissions. As Nicholas mentioned, data on this is hard to get. And this is still an evolving story. Time will tell what the impacts of the war in Iran may be. There have, in fact, been moves towards and away from renewable energy as a result of surging oil and gas prices.

33:35With nations like India and South Korea burning more coal in response to higher gas prices. while people in the Philippines have taken to installing rooftop solar panels at record rates to avoid the high oil prices. So a true accounting of the effect of the closure of the Strait of Hormuz will take some time. But Nicholas's assessment is backed up by an increased sale of electric vehicles and a record high in solar exports from China. And an analysis by Carbon Brief suggests that global emissions may fall in 2026. This has led some to wonder whether the war in Iran will be the tipping point for energy, that it will finally end humanity's addiction to fossil fuels.

34:21Overall, while there are clearly some areas in which the world is behind on its targets, it's perhaps not as dire as I thought. In terms of renewable energy, adoption is accelerating. True, the current pace won't be enough to meet our climate goals. We need to stop emitting carbon altogether and soon if we're to meet the 1.5 degree target set in Paris. And even then we'll probably have to take some carbon out of the atmosphere. But Nicholas, even with all these caveats, was optimistic about the future. We have all the tools at hand and even now it's economic and the obstacle is not technology, the obstacle is not cost.

35:00The obstacle is our inertia in the system and that some lose something and some others gain something and that is something we as a society really have to overcome. So while there's still a long way to go there are reasons for optimism. Renewable energy has outperformed many researchers expectations and continues to do so in spite of the backlash against it in some quarters. Which I'll be honest does make me feel a bit better. The data tell me it's not completely hopeless. When cities were overwhelmed by horses and manure, cheap motor vehicles changed things in a matter of decades.

35:41Nature Reporter: I'm hopeful that renewable energy can do the same here.

35:52Nature Reporter: But this is what the data says largely about what we've already done. I was also curious about what we should do in the future. What are some of the big ideas that can help tackle climate change? That's next time. We could sit here and say, well, people should just do this because they should just care about the climate and reducing their emissions. But I think having very good, affordable substitutes for people to switch to is just really, really crucial. show this episode was written and produced by me nick petra ciao dan fox was my editor and thanks to hannah richie katan joshi and nicholas herner for speaking to me for this episode