Riel Schryer is a student of history, a gamer and … my 26-year-old son. In December 2023 we spoke about how history informs the present, ethical issues in science, gaming as a form of ecological awareness and his feelings about the theme of this 5th season of the conscient podcast 'preparing for the end of the world as we know it and creating the conditions for other possible worlds to emerge'.
You’ll also hear excerpts from a winter soundwalk we took around the block of our home here on the unceded traditional territory of the Anishinaabe Algonquin nation, in the city of Ottawa.
It’s especially interesting for me to start this 5th season with the thoughts from a young adult (such as this one):
Transcription of conscient podcast e154 riel schryer - the art of history and gaming
Note: This is an automated transcription that is provided for those who prefer to read this conversation and for documentation. It has been verified but is not 100% accurate (some names might not be quite right). Please contact me if you would like to quote from this transcript: claude@conscient.ca
[00:00:12 - 00:00:34] Claude Schryer
conscient podcast episode 154 historian Riel Schryer the Art of History and Gaming.
[00:00:37 - 00:01:11] Riel Schryer
[00:01:12 - 00:02:42] Claude Schryer
Riel Schryer is a student of history, a gamer, and my 26 year old son. In December of 2023, we spoke about how history informs the present, how ethical issues in science continue to inform us. We talked about gaming as a form of art and ecological awareness, and we talked about his feelings in relation to the theme of this fifth season of the Conscient podcast, preparing for the end of the world as we know it and creating the conditions for other possible worlds to emerge. During this episode you'll also hear excerpts from a sound walk that Riel and I took around the block here in the colonial city of Ottawa on the unceded traditional territory of the Anishinaabe Algonquin Nation. And I have to say this episode is particularly important to me because of the family connection, but also as an opportunity to hear from a young adult about how they are relating to the world that we are leaving them. So here's my conversation with historian Riel Schryer.
[00:02:47 - 00:03:08] Riel Schryer
Okay, well, my name is Riel Schryer. I'm the son of illustrious podcaster Claude Schryer. I'm currently a university student. I'm a graduate of Ottawa, the University of Ottawa. Lived in Ottawa most of my life, although I'm currently living in Montreal while I'm doing my master’s in history. Yeah, that's going well. Looking forward to that.
[00:03:09 - 00:03:21] Claude Schryer
So, Riel, tell me a bit about your why history is important. I know you've chosen to study it, but what does history teach us or what role do you think it plays in society?
[00:03:24 - 00:04:16] Riel Schryer
Not much, honestly. It's very confusing and very hard to figure anything out about it. It's. No, I don't know. I mean, it's a very difficult question to answer because at the level I'm doing history, most of what I. Most of what you're sort of realizing is how much of it is shrouded in uncertainty and myth. But I mean, so much of how we understand the world relates back to history. I don't know if this is a new thing, but I think especially in our more secular times, linking back to history is a very common way of sort of building understanding and structures of understanding around certain things. So I don't know, I mean, when you want to know how things are going now, you tend to look back and look at how things went before.
[00:04:18 - 00:04:26] Claude Schryer
Well, tell me about your thesis, what the topic is and what are some of the challenges in the issue that you've chosen.
[00:04:26 - 00:07:25] Riel Schryer
Yeah, so my thesis is mostly situated in the 1700s and is an examination of how certain Enlightenment philosophers discuss climate and the impact it has on the human body, specifically in the sort of developing concept of race. At the time, racial science, the idea of understanding human difference in terms of race is becoming much, much more popular. And what I'm sort of at least attempting to argue is that these climate racists, if you want, are trying to draw, are drawing on a much larger tradition of human humans understanding human difference through the ways that climate impacts and interacts with them. Right. So, for example, the Greeks have this idea that if you live in hotter climates that'll affect you in a certain way, you'll become, you know, sort of more free roaming and more lackadaisical and more, you know, creative. Whereas if you live in a harder climate, you'll become, you know, sort of more, more rigid and less creative and more likely to sort of stay in one place. And of course, them, the Greeks are the perfect mix of the two.
You know, being in a hottish climate, but that's not too hot and you know, but also being sedentary and having, you know, the structure that has. And of course that's, that's the, that's the common thread, right? Whether it's the Greeks or the Chinese or the Egyptians or the Arabians or whoever, they're always going to the, you know, the disparate climates as being in some ways an inferior version of their own. Right? That's, that's very common. The difference is, is that when they're talking about it, they tend to talk about it as a sort of malleable thing. If a person goes from one climate to another, they will change, right?
That, that will have an impact on their body and that will change their way of being in their way of thinking. What you see in Europe in the 1700s is a hardening of these categories, right? Where, as opposed to the, in the past when you would have someone, you know, moving from climate to climate, you know, changing around their behavior and their mannerisms changing with it. In the 1700s, you see more and more people arguing that the. The impact of climate is much more a physiological fundamental process that alters the. The, like the. The makeup of your body in such a way that you're not going to be able to think or move as well, or even in the most extreme cases, that these bodies were built specifically by God or maybe by evolutionary forces to live in these specific climates.
And this has shaped their physiology and their way of thinking in fundamental and unchangeable ways. So it's a shift from a sort of idea of inferiority, the inferiority of others coming from cultural. Cultural sources to fundamental biological sources.
[00:07:27 - 00:07:33] Claude Schryer
And it so happens that the ideal climate is in Europe where all those people.
[00:07:33 - 00:07:52] Riel Schryer
If you're European, if you're Arabian, it's in Arabia. If you're Chinese, it's in China. If you're Greek, it's in Greece. Right. Like, this is sort of. This is the thing I say pretty much universally, people think that their own climate is the. The perfect. The perfect blend of hot and cold and dry and wet and, you know, whatever else for the. To produce optimal thought. Right.
[00:07:52 - 00:07:57] Claude Schryer
But some were more forceful in determining which one was better than the other.
[00:07:57 - 00:09:15] Riel Schryer
No, I think Europe has much. Has more impetus to actually act on it. And again, there's the difference of it being fundamental. Right. There's not usually an idea that someone who's from a hotter climate and they're so. So to give an example, right. Early, early on in the sort of colonial project, you see some British officials saying that the English colonists in the Caribbean have become lazy because of the Caribbean climate, because food is just too abundant and the weather is just too nice.
And this causes them to become lazy. Right. That's an idea of inferiority that comes from environment. Right. But sort of the implication is that if you took those people and you put them in a different climate, they would behave differently. By the 1700s, it's hardened, it's become a solid thing. Where Immanuel Kant, for example, starts to argue that heat loosens the fibers of the body and the, you know, the ways of thinking and leads to an inability to have disciplined thoughts because literally the brain's chemistry is being, like, loosened by the heat. And that's much different to saying, you know, well, they just have so much food around them, they don't need to work because now it's a fundamental and maybe irreversible process.
And yeah, like you say, Emmanuel Kant thinks that Germany is the perfect climate because it's just the right mix of hot and cold and, you know, whatever else. Go figure.
[00:09:17 - 00:09:28] Claude Schryer
So as you write your thesis and work through these quite complex issues, how do you think they relate to the world today? What can we learn from your research?
[00:09:28 - 00:11:05] Riel Schryer
Well, most, the most the sort of over framework of what I'm studying, I think. And this is something. I didn't really even realize that this was what I was looking at until later. But it's a, It's a difference between viewing like there's a. There's a sort of view of the inferiority of others as being either cultural or fundamental. Right. So this is a inferior culture. Right. Which is. Or an inferior culture. You know, these people are, have them in the concert of the 1700s. This would be. They're heathens, they're. They're not Christian, they don't know God. They therefore are, you know, lesser than us. And that sort of morphs into a sort of strict biological reading of it. Right. This is where you might hear more of this about the context of slavery.
You hear them talking about Africans as if they know they're not truly human. They're, they're animals, therefore they can't really receive the gospel or understand Christianity because they're not really capable of understanding it in that way. And there's a sort of pulling back and forth between, between these two ideas. Right. Out of, out of the idea of fundamental inferiority comes slavery, and out of the idea of cultural inferiority comes things like residential schools. Right. These are the logics of that that fuel those two things are different, but they, you know, they both obviously have negative results.
And I think in modern world, sometimes we still fall into that trap of thinking that moving away from just beliefs of fundamental inferiority is enough. When, you know, beliefs of cultural inferiority can be similarly damaging.
[00:11:07 - 00:11:10] Claude Schryer
And I guess if they're combined, it's all the more problematic.
[00:11:11 - 00:12:02] Riel Schryer
Yeah. Although it's actually surprisingly difficult to combine the two. What I would argue, and I know this feels unintuitive because we don't think of, we kind of today think of just racism as racism. Right. And the idea of trying to parse out different kinds of racism is almost like offensive because it implies that one might be better than the other. That, you know, one of them might be legitimate and the other might not be. When. But when you're a historian, you have to try and understand the thought process of the people you're studying.
And sometimes that means you have to go into some pretty ugly places. And I think that this is, this is an important distinction, right. And that despite how we might just think, well, you know, like it's, it's all, you know, racism is racism and we don't want to, you know, engage with any of it. I do think that the, the difference in thinking about these things is important because it does lead to different outcomes.
[00:12:04 - 00:12:16] Claude Schryer
Now, you're a white male Canadian man. What is your particular interest in racism? You haven't necessarily experienced it directly, but where are you coming from?
[00:12:16 - 00:14:35] Riel Schryer
My first interest in this sort of thing was actually around scientific racism in the 1800s and the 1900s. The thing I found so interesting was a concept called phrenology was the first thing that sort of piqued my curiosity. This is a concept that gets very popular in the later half of the 1800s. So quite a bit later, from what I'm studying now, which phrenology, for those who don't know, is the study of human skulls. And the idea that this, the shape of the skull and other physiological traits are predictive and indicative of criminality, lesser intelligence, insanity, you know, general inferiority. And as you might imagine, this is, this is thoroughly debunked pseudoscience. But what's interesting about it, and we sort of tend to sort of hand wave it away as well, it was pseudoscience, right?
But it was extremely popular science in the, you know, the most respected scientists in the world took it very seriously for something like 90 years before it was. Before it was more or less proven wrong. That's very interesting to me because it sort of undermines the narrative of science as this sort of extremely powerful tool of truth determine determining truth, right. Which is a narrative that to me has been very important, right. It's been sort of a fundamental part of foundational part of much of my worldview. And yet you have this situation where this, this science that's pretty obviously wrong, like just for context, that when the science is eventually debunked, it's found that skull shape isn't even genetic, right. That in fact, you know, there's this dolichocephalic skulls and brachycephalic skulls, and it said that, you know, dolichocephalic was superior and brachycephalic was inferior.
And then they found that a guy named Franz Boa specifically finds that skull shit. Like a dolichocephalic mother can have brachycephalic children. It can sort of switch around all the time. And like, so there isn't even any hereditariness to it. And so that's, that's a really fundamental problem to your, to your science. And despite that, it managed to keep chugging for about 90 years. Right. So how people come to believe these scientific things for so long and then they turn out to be just, you know, fundamentally on sound. I think that's, that's really what I find interesting about it.
[00:14:37 - 00:14:43] Claude Schryer
So scientific misinformation, alternative facts, that's not a new idea.
[00:14:44 - 00:14:47] Riel Schryer
Nope, it is not a new idea. It's an old idea.
[00:14:47 - 00:14:52] Claude Schryer
But maybe in the digital world it's just that much easier to disseminate.
[00:14:52 - 00:15:06] Riel Schryer
I wonder. It's, it's because it was pretty easy to disseminate back in the day too, right. It's so, I don't know, it's hard to say if it was. If it's better or worse now. It's faster now one way or the other. I don't know if that makes it better or worse, but it's a lot faster.
[00:15:08 - 00:15:41] Claude Schryer
Well, it's interesting that you use the term climate and that we're in a climate emergency. It's not quite the same thing, but we are in a situation now where humanity is facing tremendous challenges and historians in particular. When I read about things that happened 100, 1000 or many more years than that, I see, I see parallels. I see parallels of the, the six in extinction, but I also see parallels of how humans have survived and overcome seemingly impossible odds. How do you feel about the future of the world?
[00:15:41 - 00:15:43] Riel Schryer
I'm not optimistic.
[00:15:44 - 00:15:45] Claude Schryer
Can you elaborate?
[00:15:45 - 00:16:59] Riel Schryer
Oh, I don't think that the. I think that the challenge we're facing right now is pretty unprecedented, I guess, like in terms of. I'm trying to think of what the parallel would even be. Maybe like the Black Death or something like that. Some sort of like plague that ravages things. So the problem is that the functioning when oil was discovered and it was discovered that it was, you know, really, really effective to burn the stuff for fuel. Right. It led to a sort of reshaping of the world and a massive population boom following that. Right. So shipping lanes, trucks, ocean liners, like all these things that let, let goods and products be transported across incredibly vast distance incredibly quickly. All that's all the entire world gets sort of reshaped around that speed. Right. And now living in, in, in this time when, by the time we sort of realized how destructive it was, we were sort of kind of already addicted. Right. And the, the process of turning that off is. It's kind of difficult to imagine. And yeah, I don't know, I don't think it will be.
[00:17:00 - 00:17:35] Claude Schryer
Yeah, it's a type of self destruction. Well, this whole season of this podcast is around those themes of how do we deal with that reality, but also how do other realities emerge. Right. Because we can imagine things differently. And, you know, arts and culture are really good at that, though arts and culture can also be part of the problem. So you're the son of a soundscape composer. Me. What do you hear right now?
[00:17:36 - 00:17:37] Riel Schryer
Cars.
[00:17:37 - 00:17:38] Claude Schryer
What else?
[00:17:39 - 00:18:45] Riel Schryer
That's it. Cars. It's a lot of cars. I don't know what to say. It's. I don't know if you want me to be specific. It's tires grinding against concrete and pavement.
The Doppler effect of the engines is whizzing, not Doppler. What's the. Yeah, Doppler effect of the engines whizzing by me when I. When the cars go away, I can hear a little yelp. I don't know if that's a person or a dog or something, but I hope they're okay.
Hear the slush, too. Slush being kicked around a bit. You only hear that in winter. You don't hear that in the summer. And then when the cars are completely silent, you can still hear the highway a little bit off in the distance. In fact, I've always been able to hear the highway a little bit. There's a thing that happens sometimes when it first snows where I don't know if it's like the snow absorbing the sound or something, but you actually can't hear the highway anymore. And it's.
It sounds weird. Sounds creepy. It sounds like very eerie. I think I hear like a. I don't know. Is that a heater? No, I'm not air conditioning.
[00:18:45 - 00:18:46] Claude Schryer
It might be our heat pump.
[00:18:46 - 00:18:48] Riel Schryer
Yeah, maybe a heat pump, something like that. I don't know.
[00:18:49 - 00:19:07] Claude Schryer
I want to switch now to gaming because I consider gaming an art form, at least some of them. But talk to me about some of the games that have either an ecological or a social storyline or utility. I mean, it's not a functional thing, but it does have. Does explore complex issues.
[00:19:08 - 00:20:58] Riel Schryer
Yeah, it's interesting. I would say that there's been a recent, relatively recent emergence of. It's not ecology games exactly, but sort of resource management games that are done in a different way than they used to be.
So there are games called City builder Games. Right. And city builder games used to be about sort of harvesting resources, using those resources to build up your cities and build up buildings. And those buildings would then achieve Various goals like, you know, population happiness, food production, water, water management, that sort of thing. Right. And more recently you do start to see these games putting more emphasis on, on over harvesting. Right. Because back in the day you could, you could just harvest them as much as you wanted. Right. You could like there would be a part, a pit in the earth or something and as long as you had miners mining in that pit, it would just sort of keep, you know, metal would just keep popping and you could use it to build your buildings. Right. I'm thinking specifically a game called Timberborn where you play a bunch of beavers who chop down trees to build up their wooden huts and stuff in a world where humanity has long since died or something.
And if you chop down too many trees too fast, you'll run out of trees and you won't be able to build anything anymore and you will surely die. And I don't know, I think generally there's more of a, more of a thinking around like how to manage that sort of thing. But the tricky thing about video games so much is that usually that you come up with the mechanics and then you put a story on top of them.
It's not usually done the other way around. Right. At least I don't think so. So it can lead to sort of weird mechanical message or very unintended messages because you know, they're just trying to make a narratively or a mechanically fulfilling game.
[00:20:59 - 00:21:20] Claude Schryer
But do games have. What are they? How does it affect the user to say, deal with an apocalyptic or a dystopian storyline? Does that. Is it meant to increase their awareness and their empathy? Or is it just like another weird space in which to explore?
[00:21:21 - 00:22:07] Riel Schryer
I guess it depends on the person playing it really. It can be both, but I think very often it's the second. Right. Like there are a lot of games that sort of take place in post apocalypses and they will have sometimes like anti-capitalist messages or sort of messages around over consumption. You know, I'm thinking of Fallout specifically here. But very often those messages are lost on the player base who are just, you know, trying to have fun with the game. And that's, that's sort of the challenge a lot of the time I think, is that with video games you don't really have to engage with the story if you don't want to.
You can just sort of glide by it. So I don't know what exactly to do about that from a game design perspective and then just say, you know, you can't save everybody and just sort of, you know, do what you can with it.
[00:22:08 - 00:23:00] Claude Schryer
But maybe new worlds emerge from the imagination of gaming programmers and gaming players. And it's such a popular forum and platform for people to escape in a way, which is also a good thing in the sense that if you're feeling oppressed by the world, you know, you kind of have to take a break and go somewhere and blow something up or whatever it is you do. But I'm interested in gaming in relationship to the ecological crisis because I'm seeing, I'm seeing mostly through you because I see some of the games you play, some very interesting scenarios that are, that are unresolvable or like the one where you, the person goes through a disaster and looks at cadavers and people who are dying. You know, it's, it's not fun in the traditional sense, but it's also, it's, it's like a film that you. Where you have interactive film in a way, right?
[00:23:01 - 00:25:13] Riel Schryer
Yeah. I mean, you can, you can push a message pretty effectively with video games if you do it right. I think part of the problem with the climate crisis, specifically in video games, is that it's, it's hard to gamify the solutions to climate because it's so much about not doing things as opposed to doing things right. There's, there's a lot of metaphors for climate or what I think would feel like kind of climate metaphors in video games and in other mediums actually. But almost always those metaphors take the form of something that is receptive. Being shot by a cannon, you know, relatively speaking, or, you know, if we build a sophisticated enough weapon, we can defeat this enemy. Right. Like, you know, there's a game called Mass Effect, which is a trilogy of games which in briefest summary is about you discovering that there's going to be a massive invasion of what are essentially giant killer robots, hell bent on eliminating all sapient life in the galaxy.
And you trying to convince everyone in the galaxy that this is a threat that's coming, that, you know, everybody needs to, you know, put aside their differences and work together in order to fight it. Right. So you can sort of see, you know, existential threat. Everybody sort of knows about it, but it's ignoring it. You trying to push, you know, this is not something to be ignored. You can sort of see the parallels between that and, and the climate crisis. But again, the difference is then this game, the, the thing that's coming to kill us is big and very obvious to see once it's arrived and is receptive.
Being shot in the Face with a gun. Right. Whereas the climate crisis isn't really like that. So I think that's another, that's another struggle is like if you want to push and push a message in video games, it still kind of has to be fun if you want people to show up and play it.
And for that you need mechanics. And for mechanics you need, you know, you need enemies or you need, you know, more direct threat, a storyline or like, you know, something that isn't just like, well, you gotta, you gotta just reduce your quality of life. You can't drive a car anymore. You can't have these foods that come from, you know, other parts of the world. You know, like it doesn't make for very compelling story. And I think actually that's, that's part of the problem with the climate crisis too. Right. Is that fighting it is just so banal and uninteresting because you don't get.
[00:25:13 - 00:25:15] Claude Schryer
A short-term result, you don't get.
[00:25:15 - 00:25:24] Riel Schryer
A short-term result. And, and the reward is not, you know, victory over an enemy. It's. It's just like, well, I guess, I guess we weren't, we were going to die. Now we're not. But.
[00:25:25 - 00:26:32] Claude Schryer
Well, you picked up. Yeah, I mean, I'm just in what you said about. It's more about what you stop doing and as opposed to what you do. But there's so much more that we could do differently. Transportation, food, all that kind of thing. But getting back to history, because you're studying history and eventually you'll be using it as a tool to make a living or researcher or whatever you end up doing. How do you see yourself as a historian playing a role in society?
What would you like to bring as a skill set or as a contribution to society with your historical knowledge? Yeah. One of the interesting things about soundscapes is allowing the time to notice patterns. Right. Not just the objects, but the relationship between sounds and the cycles and what comes back and all that interesting.
[00:26:32 - 00:26:49] Riel Schryer
This is the kind of stuff that's very hard to pick up from historical records. Right. Because nobody bothers to write down what things smelled like or you know, how very mundane things sounded. But they're pretty radically different, you know.
[00:26:50 - 00:26:54] Claude Schryer
Well, I think they did, but only in bits and pieces and it wasn't the priority or maybe.
[00:26:54 - 00:29:15] Riel Schryer
Yeah, exactly. So it's just a hard time having survival historical record. Like back in the day, one of the things I heard about that was very interesting is that people were terrified of lightning. Thunder. Thunder, I suppose, more specifically. Yeah, because. And this was used to sort of shock people out of atheism. Right. Because you know, who doesn't cower when they hear God's thunder and that sort of thing?
And that was because back in the day, thunder was the loudest thing you would ever hear in your life unless you were in the army and heard cannons or something like that. If you live in a small village in the 1600s, there aren't just things as loud as cars or excavation cranes or wrecking balls or, you know, just a movie theater with a big ass speaker, you know, so that's interesting to think about how like fun because I don't think, I don't. Nobody's scared of thunder anymore. In the same way, I don't think at least, right. It's, it's just not loud in the same way. The problem I'm thinking as I think about it right now is that so often the problem with history is that makes you so much less certain about things, not more certain. And so I think the role of history has to in some way be.
To help find a path, guide some sort of path forward. Right? That's, I think, sort of the obvious one. Because we can say, well, you know, these were the challenges that people face to the past. These were the ways they tried to fix them. This is how these, these solutions they come up with were successful. There are the ways in which they were not successful.
Here's the thing in which, you know, the way in which it worked out, in which it didn't work out, but as a, as a way of guidance, it's. The promise is just so uncertain because there's so much, there's so much more failure than success and so much in its own political content and its own context that it can be very hard to transfer those lessons over. But ultimately, yeah, I think it has to be, it has to be something like that, something.
[00:29:15 - 00:29:47] Claude Schryer
But it also depends on the point of view, right. If we're coming from a set of assumptions that are problematic, then history, from that, you know, the victors write history. You know that, that old saying, I've never heard of it, no. Anyway, I'll continue to read and experience history. And of course, the line between fiction and fact is pretty thin, as you say. That's actually what you said. What you said was that it's ambiguous, right. Because it's never definitive, it's interpretive.
[00:29:47 - 00:31:34] Riel Schryer
Yeah. Well, especially. And the thing is, people, generally, what I find is when activists move into history, generally they're going to be looking to prove a particular point or make a certain case or argue that something is good or that something is bad. And you can do that in very broad ways. But history is often not that helpful for political narratives because it doesn't provide the certainty or the definitiveness you really want when you're doing political activism. Right. Political narratives kind of need heroes, or if not heroes, villains.
And if not villains, at least victims of some sort. And you can find victims, of course, villains you can find as well, but oftentimes not as.
Maybe not as. Not as explicitly as you'd like. And this can oftentimes lead to a sort of. So cutting off a few toes to make the foot fit in the slipper, if you know what I mean. And it's. It's because you. You. When you're.
When you're just looking for a political narrative, you're. You're gonna, you know, disregard the information that doesn't quite fit. And there's always gonna be information that doesn't quite fit because it's too complicated for there to ever be a clean narrative unless you're arguing things like incredibly basic, like, you know, slavery was bad or something like that. So, yeah, I mean, it's really, really, really hard to use history in a way that's actually productive to a political movement. But you kind of have to a little bit. And currently it's one of the only ways to do it that's secular and more or less universally agreed upon as being useful, sort of.
[00:31:34 - 00:31:56] Claude Schryer
Yeah. Well, another thing that you do well is humor. And I'm wondering what your thoughts are about parody. You know, the different types of ways of making fun of ourselves and of situations, making light of very. Almost unbearable things. So what do you think of the role of humor?
[00:31:58 - 00:32:28] Riel Schryer
I'm not particularly optimistic about the role of humor. I think that the problem with gallows humor, which is. I think sort of what you're talking about, is that the trick is to make light of a situation that's incredibly heavy in order to make it seem a little less light, seem to make it seem less heavy. And so that you can, you know, you can better bear the brunt of it. The problem is that also. That also kind of takes away some of the emergency of it. Right? Because if you're. If it's not as serious, if it's not. If it's lighter, it's not as serious. You don't. You're a little more comfortable not, you.
[00:32:28 - 00:32:30] Claude Schryer
Dealing with it.
[00:32:30 - 00:32:37] Riel Schryer
Not dealing with it. And the thing about gallows humor is that you're gonna get hanged in about 10 minutes and there's literally nothing you can do about it. Right, so.
[00:32:39 - 00:32:48] Claude Schryer
Well, I'll think about that. I. I've seen comedians, you know, poke away at the most delicate topics and somehow it makes it a little bit easier to talk about things. Yeah, it's.
[00:32:49 - 00:33:03] Riel Schryer
I just. I'm doubtful of its ability to actually generate significant emotional action in people because I think mostly what it does is comfort, which I guess is fine. I guess that's not bad. But.
[00:33:06 - 00:33:21] Claude Schryer
Well, to end. You're 25 in 2023, and, you know, you have. You're part of a generation that's very fortunate in the sense that there's lots of resources at this time and who knows what will happen in the future. What makes you hopeful about the future?
[00:33:22 - 00:33:23] Riel Schryer
Not much.
[00:33:24 - 00:33:26] Claude Schryer
Well, thanks for the honest answer.
[00:33:28 - 00:34:16] Riel Schryer
No, I don't particularly think that the subsequent generations are going to have a higher quality of life than mine. I don't think that things are really going to get much better. Things are at least going to get much worse before they get any better. Big enough. I don't think there's going to be any serious response to the climate crisis until real catastrophes start happening. That tends to be how it works. And once you start seeing that, then you'll start seeing very, very serious action being put.
Although we'll see if at that point if it's. If it's too late or not. But, yeah, I don't think until we start seeing like wet bulb events in cities with millions of people or something, I don't think there's gonna be like, really serious action taken.
[00:34:18 - 00:34:29] Claude Schryer
Do you feel like your generation is, like, anxious about these things to such an extent that it almost inhibits, you know, life?
[00:34:30 - 00:34:54] Riel Schryer
No, no, I don't think it inhibits life. The thing. Because the whole problem with it, right, is that it feels so intangible in a lot of ways. Right. It's so. It's. In those ways it's actually pretty easy to ignore.
It's just sometimes you just think about it, you know, and, and that. But it doesn't. I don't think it inhibits ability to think. Like, I don't know, like you were alive in a time when, when nuclear war was a pretty real possibility, the.
[00:34:54 - 00:34:55] Claude Schryer
Cold war in the 60s.
[00:34:55 - 00:34:57] Riel Schryer
Did that inhibit your ability to.
[00:34:57 - 00:34:59] Claude Schryer
It did. Well, it didn't inhibit. And it scared the shit out of me.
[00:35:00 - 00:35:04] Riel Schryer
Yeah, exactly. Right. But, like, you know, you just are like, damn, that's scary.
And then you move on. Right. Like, it's.
[00:35:04 - 00:35:24] Claude Schryer
Yeah, I'm still here. Papa, Mama, what's going on. What kind of world did you bring me into? And you know, that's always been. People have always had this. You know, I sometimes dip into doomism a bit, which is a problem because it doesn't help. And there's a bit of a dopamine rush from.
I don't know why, but from. From indulging in this sort of doomist world.
[00:35:24 - 00:35:28] Riel Schryer
Well, because it's. You don't have to fight if it's inevitable.
[00:35:28 - 00:35:29] Claude Schryer
Right, Right.
[00:35:29 - 00:35:30] Riel Schryer
It's easier that way.
[00:35:31 - 00:36:00] Claude Schryer
Easier. But yeah.
I don't know where the dopamine comes from though. But I. I've. I've experienced it and I've read about it. I want to end the way There's a. One of my favorite podcasts is Camille Chain at Green Dreamer, and she always asks people for recommendations of things that they suggest people read. And I won't get as elaborate as she is, but I would like to ask you if there' that you suggest people see experience that you think would be worth doing from your point of view.
[00:36:00 - 00:37:24] Riel Schryer
There's a game I really like called Terra Nil. Terra Nil is, I guess you call it like a puzzle game set on some sort of desolate planet that has been ravaged by toxins and sort of nondescript ecological catastrophe. And your job, you're playing some sort of robot or something like that. It's not quite clear what you are, but you. You place down wind turbines and the wind turbines power toxin scrubbers, and the toxin scrubbers clean up the toxins. And then on top of the cleaned-up earth, you can put grass, and the grass gives you more the solar power green resource of whatever it is. And with those, you can continue to expand.
You make more windmills, more toxin scrubbers, more grass. And then eventually you can turn the grass into rivers and the rivers become forests. And with the forest, then you can create flower fields, and then you can put bees in the flower fields and all sorts of stuff like that. So, sort of like. It's sort of like a growth game but like in reverse almost. And is a. Is a really good way for me, it's a really fun way of imagining what might come after a climate crisis, even if it's like, you know, total devastation.
And the really fun thing about it is that once you've restored the ecosystem, then your final job is to pick up all the machinery you have, recycle it and fly away somewhere else and do it somewhere else there.
[00:37:25 - 00:37:28] Claude Schryer
And is it an interactive game where you're playing with the computer?
[00:37:28 - 00:37:30] Riel Schryer
Yeah, exactly like I said it's a…
[00:37:30 - 00:37:36] Claude Schryer
Puzzle game, so it's one individual Terra Nil. Well, thanks for that, and take care.