Ibn Yamin's ān kas ké bedānad va bedānad ké bedānad

Leyla: All right. Well, Alan Eyre, thank you so much for being on our poetry program again.  

Alan: I'm honored and surprised, frankly, to be invited back. 

Leyla: We got really good responses to our last poetry episode. So if you haven't listened to our last one, we did Khayyam’s rendee deedam, and Alan gave a whole introduction to his love of Persian poetry and himself and all that, so…

Alan: Love of myself? 

Leyla: Yeah, love of himself! 

Alan: Love of Persian poetry and myself! 

Leyla: He talked about how much he loves himself and how poetry led him to that self-love. It is very important. So everyone go back and listen to that! But Alan also, on his Instagram, posts a lot about books that he's reading, and he always reads, he reads these very doom and gloom climate books. I guess they're not doom and gloom, they're just reality, and so I wrote him recently and said, “How do you deal with this, and do you not just feel a sense of despair?” and he messaged me back with this poem. I said, “Let's talk about this poem,” so that's where this is coming from. So, just as a brief intro, tell me, you said in your message that you were obsessed with Iran, and now you've transferred that obsession to climate. So can you talk a little bit about that and what you've been doing with this obsession?

Alan: Yeah. I'm not a psychologist, but yeah, it really was pretty much from when I started learning Persian. So I think we talked a little bit last time; until 2016, it's all I did, books, this, all my free time. I just loved it, and I still do, but starting around 2015, 2016, I started reading more, not about climate. Actually, I was reading a great book by a guy called Colin Tudge, The Time Before History, and he talked about how we talk about history, but actually ancient man, what we call ancient man, people in ancient Rome. That's relatively recent in the sense that we've been around for 300,000 years. Civilization only started about… anyway, they started me on this whole thing of looking into anthropology and the history of humankind. Then I read a book, The Uninhabitable Earth, by David Wallace-Wells, about climate change, and you just realize that we're a species amidst an innumerable species on the Earth. What we've done, especially since 1945, is starting to change the bio-physical systems that regulate the incredibly stable climate we've had, which has allowed civilization to flourish. I think someone testified before Congress about 30 years ago, said we're conducting a vast experiment, the consequences of which will affect the lives of our children and their children. So anyway, I started spending all my free time reading about issues relating to climate change and tampering with these sustainable cycles that govern how we live and how we flourish. Yeah, there is a doom and gloom aspect to it, but also, this is not written in stone. We can change this, and the first step is education and becoming aware. 

Leyla: Right. Yeah, I've just been seeing all the titles, and I live in Texas, and things have really changed here. Yeah, yeah, it's been a difficult few years. We had a, I don't know if you heard about it, in 2011, we had this horrible summer where… My husband is reading The Ministry of the Future right now. 

Alan: It's a great trilogy. 

Leyla: Yeah. Did you read that? 

Alan: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh my God. 

Leyla: Well, it starts off. I'm afraid to read it, but it starts off, talking about looking at the sun and it being this harbinger of doom. Yeah, and I felt that that summer. The sky was clear, it was blue all summer, and then you just see this sun coming upm and you couldn't hide from it. There was just nothing you could do about it. It was very scary, I have to say. 

Alan: Oh my God. Yeah, yeah. 

Leyla: It was scary, and you always hear about like seasonal depression when it's cloudy outside, but this was like a depressing sun.

Alan: Yeah, that's a great trilogy, and also, what a great idea having a part of government that looks out for future generations because no one's doing that now! 

Leyla: Right, right. Well, in response to my inquiries about how you feel right now, if you feel a sense of despair, you said, “No, I don't feel despair. We need to do something about it. We need to know about it.” And he sent me this poem, which immediately reminded me of the old Donald Rumsfeld quote, so I thought I'd start with reading that if it's not too political. Those who were around a couple of decades ago will remember this very well. It made a lot of ripples in the world. Everyone was talking about it, and I wonder if you got it from this poem, so I'm going to start off with that. He says “reports that say…” This isn't too political, is it? Is it okay to talk about this?

Alan: Not at all, get it out, yeah, yeah! 

Leyla: Okay, so “reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me because as we know, there are known unknowns. There are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns. That is to say, we know there are some things we do not know, but there are also unknown unknowns. The ones we don't know we don't know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tends to be the difficult ones.” Okay, so he said that, and it was used to justify a lot of things that ended up being dumb and not true, basically, but that's where we'll leave that. If other people want to know more context about that quote, you can go check it out, but I thought that would be an interesting spot to start our discussion on this poem. Do you think he read that poem and he got that directly from the poem?

Alan: I think you get to be a certain age, and you sort of perforce gather a certain minimum amount of wisdom, and you realize that there's stuff you don't know, that you know you don't know, and there's stuff you don't know and you don't know you know. And I think it's Nietzschean in complexity or something like that. It's just, there's different types of ignorance.

Leyla: Right, okay, so should we get right into the poem? 

Alan: bereem! Where're we at? 

Leyla: Okay, so you're going to read the Persian, and I'm going to read the translation.

Alan: Okay, so we're doing it chunk by chunk, or am I reading the whole Persian and you doing the whole? 

Leyla: Sentence by sentence. 

Alan: Okay, here we go. We're starting the poem, but we got to say who it's by, for goodness' sake!

Leyla: Oh yes, you're right, sorry! Let's give context to the poem. Who's it by? I just have the Wikipedia of it, so I don't know if you have more information that…

Alan: You and me both, and there's lots of different versions by different people, but this is the one that I know. 

Leyla: So this is Ibn Yamin, right? Is that how you pronounce it?

Alan: You're asking me? You're the one native Iranian, for goodness' sake!

Leyla: I know I should know!

Alan: You know the saying “āb ké hast, tayamoom bātel-é”; do you know that one?

Leyla: No.

Alan: Yeah, 'where there's water, you don't need to clean your hands with sand', because in Islam, if you can't clean your hands before prayer with water, you do it with sand. And so if there's water, which is you, you don't need sand, which is me! 

Leyla: You're the expert on this one! Well, this is a poet that I'm not familiar with, but he… 

Alan: Neither am I; I don't know him, either! Yeah, yeah.

Leyla: Okay, so he is from Khorasan, which is…

Alan: He’s from Semnan actually. It's right now present-day Semnan area, Shahrud. Yeah. Nadvabuk, Mardumak, I think, right, or something like that? 

Leyla: Well, it says that it's part of, portions of Iran and then Afghanistan, northeastern Iran. Yeah, the eastern halves of Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, western Tajikistan, portions of Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan. But he was a Persian-speaking poet. 1286 is when he was born, so like a lot of these poems, they're so old, but we can still understand the language, which is incredible. And then at a young age, he became interested in poetry because his father was also a poet, and following his father's death, he became the court poet. So he was basically paid to write poetry, which is amazing.

Alan: Great gig, if you can get it, yeah! I don't think we have them anymore in the US government, you know.

Leyla: Agh, yeah, that’s right.

Alan: We had the national poet, so… 

Leyla: But yeah, these were paid thinkers of the time. 

Alan: Wow, thought leaders!

Leyla: So, yes, that's a little bit of history into him. I'm sure we'll have more on the website where you can read more about him, but this will be the first poem that we've done by him, so I'm excited!

Alan: Me, too! Are we ready? We doing this?

Leyla: Let's do it!

Alan: Okay, I'll start off.

ān kas ké bedānad va bedānad ké bedānad…

Leyla: One who knows and knows that he knows… 

Alan: asbé kherad az gonbadé gardoon bejahānad.

Leyla: His horse of wisdom will reach the skies. 

Alan: ān kas ké bedānad va nadānad ké bedānad…

Leyla: One who knows but doesn't know that he knows...

Alan: āgāh namāyeed ké bas khofté namānad!

Leyla: He is fast asleep so you should wake him up!

Alan: ān kas ké nadānad va bedānad ké nadānad…

Leyla: One who doesn't know but knows that he doesn't know…

Alan: langān kharaké kheesh bé manzel beresānad.

Leyla: His limping mule will eventually get him home. 

Alan: ān kas ké nadānad va nadānad ké nadānad…

Leyla: One who doesn't know and doesn't know that he doesn't know…

Alan: dar jahlé morakab abadoldahr bemānad!

Leyla: He will be eternally lost in his hopeless oblivion.

Alan: bah bah! bah bah!

Leyla: All right. Okay, so initial thoughts? 

Alan: Is it abadoldahr or abadoldor? Anyway, we'll leave that one. I guess abadoldahr. 

Leyla: We'll clarify later. As we do in these poems, in this one, we're just going to talk about the general ideas and some of the individual words, but I'll go through this poem line by line. We'll have two more lessons on this poem where we'll go over it line by line and learn all the words.

Alan: Okay, good. 

Leyla: Yes. So don't worry, listeners, we'll get all of it straight, but right now, we'll just talk about the general poem and a few interesting things about it, one of which, in a lot of these Persian poems, it's so interesting. When you translate it, it becomes so clunky, because we're using just these very simple words like “bedānad” and “nadānad.” So first, let's go over those two words that show up over and over again. What is “bedānad”? 

Alan: Yeah. It all comes from “dānestan” or, in colloquial Persian, ”doonestan,” like ”meedoonam,” ‘I know’. It's ‘to know’, so it's a basic verb. 

Leyla: ‘To know’, and then “nadānad”…?

Alan: ‘To not know’, so they're both the subjunctive form of ‘to know’, third person singular. 'He who knows and doesn't know', yeah. 

Leyla: Yeah, all of that, so we can just take ‘one who knows’. We can just condense it to “kesee ké bedānad,” ‘someone who knows’, so I’d say we don't need as many words, but the whole poem is constructed around these two things of ”dānestan” and ”nadānestan,” ‘knowing’ and ‘not knowing’. With that, I thought, let's go through, each two lines and kind of go through it more. 

Alan: That’s good. I like this. 

Leyla: Okay, so the first two lines again.

Alan: ān kas ké bedānad va bedānad ké bedānad… 

Leyla: Okay, so “ān kas ké bedānad va bedānad ké bedānad,” “kas” is a person. We always talk about how, in Persian, it's gender-neutral, so we don't have to say… In the English, they actually default to ‘he’ in the translation, of course, but we're not specifying whether this is a man or woman. “ān kas” is ‘one’, like ‘that person’. 

Alan: Right. ‘One’, ‘one who knows’ or 'that one who knows’, because “ān” is ‘that’.

Leyla: Yeah, “ké bedānad va bedānad ké bedānad.” 

Alan: ‘That person that knows and knows that he knows’, so you've got the same verb three times in the same sentence. The first is present, and the next two are subjunctive. 

Leyla: I love it. And what is the fate of that person? 

Alan: Yeah, okay, “asbé kherad az gonbadé gardoon bejahānad.” 

Leyla: ‘His horse of wisdom will reach the skies’. 

Alan: Yeah, which is literally the ‘dome’, “gonbad,” of ‘fortune’ or ‘fate’, “gardoon,” like ‘destiny’.

Leyla: Okay, so that is the best of all worlds, ‘one who knows and knows that he knows’. 

Alan: Right, right. Okay, we going on?

Leyla: Let's do it. 

Alan: ān kas ké bedānad va nadānad ké bedānad… 

Leyla: 'One who knows but doesn't know that he knows,' “bedānad va nadānad ké bedānad.” Okay, so what is an example of that, a person that knows but doesn't know that he knows? What is that? 

Alan: That's just someone who is unaware of his good fortune and knowing or her good fortune and knowing, right? There's no ignorance, but there's ignorance of knowledge, so the way this poem works, it goes to the best possible case downwards to the worst possible case. This is why, for the first, third, fifth, and seventh line, they're all variations, but they're just changing a variable. Here, he knows, or she knows, or he or she doesn't know, and then it's plays off of that. The fun lines are always the second, fourth, sixth and eighth. 

Leyla: Right, but then this person, they have the innate wisdom, but then they're not aware. 

Alan: They don’t realize it, so they're not able to use it. It's like having riches that you can't access because you don't know you have them.

Leyla: Got it. 

Alan: Yeah. 

Leyla: So what is the fate of this person? 

Alan: Fate of this person is “āgāh namāyeed ké bas khofté namānad,” so ‘needs to be aware’. Like ‘wake him up’, literally. “āgāh namāyeed.” “namāyeed” is ‘you should’, right? 

Leyla: Yeah, ‘let him know’, ‘let that person know’. 

Alan: ‘Let him know’, yeah. 'Tell him or her so he doesn't sleep anymore', so “bas khofté namānad” is ‘he slept enough’, 'he shouldn't be asleep anymore', right? 

Leyla: Right, like ‘wake up!’. 

Alan: Yeah, yeah, yeah, and this is who I associate with. This is, I think, the reason I sent it to you. This is the one I always quote from this poem. You know, every poem usually has what's called a “shāh bayt,” which is like the best part of the part that everyone knows, and then there's other parts. To me, this is the shāh bayt, the best part, the part that I use the most: ān kas ké nadānad va bedānad ké nadānad.

Leyla: 'One who doesn't know but knows that he doesn't know', so it's willful ignorance is what we're saying. 

Alan: This is the one who is aware of his ignorance, not willful in the sense that you want to be ignorant but he realizes he or she doesn't know, right? 

Leyla: Right. 

Alan: Yeah, yeah. 

Leyla: So then this next part, this is what confuses me a little. 

Alan: “langān kharaké kheesh bé manzel beresānad." Here, again, they say “kharak.” The “-k” makes it the diminutive. “khar,” as we all know, is ‘donkey’, right? 

Leyla: Right. 

Alan: So “kharak” is a ‘little donkey’! So not only is it a donkey, it's a little donkey, and it's limping, “langān.” It's like ‘limping’, “lang.” ‘His limping mule will eventually get him home’. This is the part I like the best; 'if you're ignorant and you realize you're ignorant, you'll get there somehow'. You won't get there riding a Benz with bells and whistles and smoke bombs and dry ice, but you'll get there. 

Leyla: But how? That's the part that I don't understand. 

Alan: Because you know that you don't know, which is the first step! This whole dichotomy plays all throughout. Again, I'm not a Persian scholar; we know that, but this is the reason why I like Persian poetry. There's this playful dichotomy between ignorance and knowledge, and if you're aware you're ignorant, then that in itself is a type of wisdom, as opposed to… You can't fill a full glass, right? You have to realize you're empty! It's like that last poem, “rendee deedam.” This person has nothing, but that is his power, so awareness of your ignorance all relates to “oftādegee,” to “tavāzo',” to ‘humility’. If you're humble… They have a great saying in Persian: “oftādegee āmooz agar tāleb-é…” I won’t do the whole thing, but basically, ‘be humble’. ‘Water never flows to the high point; it goes down to the low point’.

Leyla: Right. I think that the reason I was confused is because I was thinking it's willful ignorance, and now you correct it, it's not that. 'One doesn't know but knows that he doesn't know', so if you want to get home eventually, you have to have that realization of “I don't know” because then you can do something about it. 

Alan: Yeah, exactly, exactly! 

Leyla: Got it!

Alan: You know, what do they say? I remember that the old zamāné shāh, the time of the Shah, they said, “tavānā bovad har ké danā bovad.” ‘You can do it if you know’, but if you don't know, you can't do it, so the first step is knowing if you know or you don't know. 

Leyla: Got it, okay! 

Alan: Okay, now comes the gruesome part! Are you ready?

Leyla: Haha, yes!

Alan: Like a parental warning on this part! ān kas ké nadānad va nadānad ké nadānad… 

Leyla: Oh, 'one who doesn't know and doesn't know that he doesn't know', and I want to again contrast this with “ān kas ké bedānad va bedānad ké bedānad,” ‘one who knows and knows that he knows’, so “bedānad, bedānad, bedānad.” Now, this is where we've reached the iteration of “ān kas ké nadānad va nadānad ké nadānad,” 'one who doesn't know and doesn't know that he doesn't know', and that's a Donald Rumsfeld “unknown unknowns.”

Alan: And it's also the worst possible case. This is, again, sort of relating in the Persian context, someone who is very prideful and boastful and is so full of himself or herself and maghroor, just arrogant.

Leyla: Yes.

Alan: So if you don't know and you don't know that you don't know, and here comes the bad part, “dar jahlé morakab abadoldahr bemānad!”

Leyla: ‘He will be eternally lost in his hopeless oblivion!’.

Alan: And “jahl” is ‘ignorant’. “jahlé morakab” is ‘perfect ignorance’. It's absolute ignorance. It's like you can't get more ignorant, so that's not a good place to be! And “abadoldahr,” again, these are, bottom line, all Arabic root words. “abad,” this is ‘infinity’. “oldahr,” “dahr” is ‘fate’ or ‘destiny’ or ‘time’, so it's like ‘forever’, ‘eternal’. 

Leyla: Right, right, although the part that… I'm wondering your thoughts on this: There's also a Persian saying where if someone is asleep, you can wake them up, but if they're pretending to be asleep, then you can't wake them up. They're pretending, so then there's the… “ān kas ké nadānad va bedānad ké nadānad” to me seems like the worst case because they know that they don't know and they're not necessarily doing anything about it.

Alan: No, no, no, because they're aware of their condition! They're not choosing it; they just know that they don't know. 

Leyla: Right, right, right, right!

Alan: You’re thinking of the whole knowledge as ignorance. You can't fill a full glass, so to me, the bottom four lines are… you have two people who are ignorant. One knows he's ignorant, and because he knows that, there's a way out, but if you don't know you're ignorant, you’re stuck there forever. 

Leyla: Yes, but with climate change, there's so many climate change deniers. I mean, the data is out there, right? So a lot of people know that they don't know. Do you think that they will get there eventually, or is it just they're not going, you can't wake them up because they're pretending to be asleep?

Alan: Yeah. Now, I think at this point, everyone who pays attention to the issue knows it's real. There is a certain small minority of people who deny it's a real thing, but we don't need to convince those people in order to take action. You don't have to convince everybody. As long as you get a consensus, and polling shows most people, I think, or at least a sizable minority are aware of climate change. I mean, to me, this is like cancer, cigarettes causing cancer, or people who believe in flat Earth. There's still a few people out there, but instead of channeling your energy into convincing those people, it's more like mobilizing those people who are aware of the problem so something can be done. 

Leyla: So in what ways have you kind of mobilized, or what do you recommend? Or is there books that you recommend people to read? What is there? I understand what you're saying, but then it seems like if there's not action at the top, which I'm feeling like it's not hopeful that there's going to be action at the top, what is it that the individual person can do, and if everyone agrees, why isn't there action at the top?

Alan: Yeah, it's funny. When I was still a diplomat, I took a week-long class at the Foreign Service Institute, which is the State Department's own in-house sort of university or college for teaching different things, and it was a class a week or two on climate diplomacy. That week, a lot of the talk was about that. How do you talk to people about this issue? Because you look at his reports that come out by international federations of scientists or, say, the IPCC. It's called the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and they've been coming out for decades, documenting where we are, but most people don't read them. They said it's… because when you're talking public diplomacy, you always talk three, right? The three key points are: it's real, it's us… Actually, there's four points: It's real, it's us, it's serious, but there's something we can do about it. Everything is sort of organized around that matrix, so it's real. Like I said, check that box, right? It's real, and it's us. I think that's already been done, and it's serious. I think more and more people are realizing how serious it is. The book that really turned me on to how serious it was was written by a guy who's now a reporter for The New York Times called David Wallace-Wells called The Uninhabitable Earth. Again, it just talks about the consequences of escalating heat and climate change, and it's funny; I tell people it starts like a Stephen King novel. The first sentence is “it's so much worse than you think,” and then he goes on to describe it, and he's gone on to sort of modify his original thesis. He wrote in an article, I think The New York Times Magazine, a couple of years later, saying actually, worst case scenarios are better than they were due to the limited action we've taken. Still, I think this is where ignorance and awareness comes in. I do think most people are unaware of the severity of the consequences of what we call climate change, which is actually not just climate, and increasing the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and other greenhouse gases, but a whole other range of issues like acidification of the ocean, chemical pollution, decreasing biodiversity, all those things. There's nine systems that are sort of commonly referred to, geochemical systems that we call climate change, and we're already seeing that now. If you look at… I mean, pick up every paper and turn to page whatever, like, I was reading an article the other day about pollution in New Delhi and how great it is. 

Leyla: Right, but despite all this like being where you are, you see action taking place? 

Alan: No, not at all. I mean, no; for example, right now they're having COP29. COP29 is the Conference of Parties, and the 29 means it’s the 29th annual one. It's happening in Baku, Azerbaijan. It's funny because it's literally every year governments from every country in the world meet to figure out how to address climate change, right? That should be front page, right? You think? It's not, and most of the time, not much action has come out of it. We all know that. We talked about the one in 2015, in Paris, where the world agreed, though in a non-binding way, to limit pollution to under two degrees Celsius. I mean, to limit the projected increase in global warming to two degrees Celsius and ideally 1.5, right? Since the start of the Industrial Revolution, we've already gone up on globally on average about, I think, 1.1 or 1.3. Bad things happen for every tenth of a degree. The consensus back when they did this was at 1.5, really, you don't want to go past there, but if you have to, maybe go to 2.0 degrees Celsius. The higher you go, the more you risk getting into tipping points, which are worse than the climate in a non-linear fashion. Anyway, right now, we're having… I think tomorrow's the last day, Friday COP29, in Baku, Azerbaijan. Seems to be the case that people are having trouble agreeing on what to do. 

Leyla: Wow, and despite all that, I've asked you this question many times of if you feel despair, and you said no because why?

Alan: Because we don't have the luxury of despair. Hope and despair come after a sort of realizing the situation, right? If you're diagnosing a patient, the primary thing is a good diagnosis, right? How you feel about that diagnosis? That's another issue, and to my mind, we owe it to the future, the ministry of the future. We owe it to untold future generations not to screw up this beautiful, beautiful atmosphere or this beautiful climate that we’ve had since 12,000 years ago when we emerged out of the last Ice Age or a Little Ice Age. We're now in what's called Interglacial Period, where there are far fewer glaciers on the Earth and far less ice. The climate stability of this last 12,000 years, with very little range and an annual global annual temperature, has allowed agriculture and has allowed civilization to flourish, but when those patterns get changed and when the climate ranges and the functioning ecosystems that have created this climate stability over the last 12,000 years, if they change, then it gets a lot harder for us to live. Agriculture gets harder. Cheap food gets harder. Weather patterns change, so certain places become unlivable. Southern Iran, for example, you know, you look at the temperatures in the summer there. It's ridiculous, so you're going to see people moving to northern parts of Iran, right? Middle East, we talk about climate change and global averages. Middle East is rising just like the poles, far more than the global averages. The Middle East is already incredibly hot, and when you consider that 17 countries in the Middle East all are already water stressed, they don't have enough water, gets hotter, less water, desertification, more deserts. You know, this is not a place you want to be!

Leyla: Right. How was your experience living in Dubai? What was that like? I've never been there.

Alan: You've never been to Dubai? You gotta go. It's a great place. I mean, people go, they say to me, “Oh, it's so artificial!” and I'm like “yeah, but that's not a bad thing.” I mean, it's its own “natural.” Dubai has a certain physical reality, and they've made the best of it. Now, the problem is that it requires tremendous energy to do that, and those countries in the Persian Gulf like the UAE, United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, already, they're freakishly hot. They don't have enough water. They have to desalinate, but Dubai was wonderful. The beaches were warm. Again, the summer gets incredibly hot, and I left there in 2013. Those places will become, without intervention or adaptation, unlivable for a large… certainly, for anyone who works outside. This is why when you talk about climate change, there's two key functions: adaptation, which is getting ready for what's going to happen, and mitigation, which is trying to make it better by decreasing the amount of carbon dioxide we put in the atmosphere.  

Leyla: Right, but I guess I do hear in terms of hopeful things, we managed to all pull together for the ozone. We managed to save bees. That's a recent thing.

Alan: I missed that headline, the bee-saving one. Really? 

Leyla: Oh, yeah, that's the wild thing! There was so much talk about the bee collapse, and actually,  guess beekeepers have all come together, and there's been small beekeeping, like, backyard beekeeping done, and now that problem, they say it's reversed! 

Alan: Well, if that's true, that's great, because bees are essential to the food chain. Yeah, you don't want to be around a planet where bees don't pollinate. 

Leyla: Yeah, so I'm hoping that it'll all be just like that where we reach the edge and then we… 

Alan: But, and again, I don't want to rain on your parade here, you talk about the ozone depletion. That was pretty simple. That was one chemical, class of chemicals, chloroform, CFC, for which there was an easy substitute. It's like taking artificial sweetener because you can't use sugar. It was pretty easy to swap out, and that was a triumph. You know, the world got together, realized that there were these ozone holes, which allows dangerous ultraviolet rays to come down. They acted together in collaboration and, to a large extent, fixed it with the Montreal Protocol and all that stuff, 1971, but fossil fuels, they're the backbone of our modern civilization. Not just fuel but petrochemicals, plastics, still, over 80% of all our energy use is fossil fuels. Sure, the amount of renewables are going up. Solar power is getting cheaper as the number one state for alternative energy, you're living in it: Texas. Wind, solar, but that's being added on to use of petrochemicals, I mean, fossil fuels not taking its place, so that's what we can do.  

Leyla: Okay, so relating back to our poem, I still don't quite have the hope that if a lot of the people are in the category of “ān kas ké nadānad va bedānad ké nadānad”… I still go back to, I feel like the knowledge is all out there for people to get, but they don't want to know. 

Alan: But it's like they say, “nardebāné pelé pelé.” ‘Every little bit helps’. This is not where tomorrow, we're going to wake up, and “oh, we've won!” This is going to be a generational effort. It's going to be changing the mindset of people, and it's trench warfare. You do it a person at a time, an idea at a time. You don't vilify your enemy. You talk to him or her; you listen to them as importantly. It's not like there's… well, there are, but it's not primarily evil people who realize that they're befouling the future but want to make money. There's a lot of that going on in terms of corporate interests, but there's also just priorities. I mean, people need to make a living, right? They're more concerned about how much it cost to fill their tank of gas than they are about what's going to happen 50 years from now, and our political structure is such that there's really not any attention paid to these. We don't have a Ministry or a Department of the Future, right? Politicians tend to think in terms of three or four years and getting reelected.  

Leyla: Right. Okay, well, you keep taking me from like a little bit of hope to total dismay again, but what do you tell your kids, or what do you recommend people do at this point who are listening to this conversation and are inspired? 

Alan: Just read more about it. Despair and hope is as much a manifestation of one's personality, I think… I mean, to me… This sounds sort of perverse. There's a… pleasure isn't the right word, but there's a gratification knowing that I know more about the way things are than I did yesterday. I love reading nonfiction. Almost everything I read is nonfiction, just because to me, it's fascinating learning new stuff. And learning new stuff… this is why I like being a diplomat… about stuff that matters, right, is even better. This is why I spend so much time reading about climate change and climate justice, which is an important issue, because the pixels in the picture fill in. You're getting more and more pixels. You're getting a more granular feel for what's going on. A lot of it's just proselytizing. For example, I went to a college yesterday, a friend of mine, and he asked me to talk about climate change as a national security issue. I sat in front of a class of young people for an hour, and we talked about climate change as a national security issue, so you never know what's going to work. It's not like even with AI, we're going to get a print out that says to avoid bad things happening to ABCDE, right? You just have to know where you are, the time you have, like I've got a lot of time now. I'm retired, right. Oh, I got lots of free time, so I can devote a lot of time to this, so writing or talking to people. It's sort of flippant and insouciant to say it's fun because again, these are, like you said, these are things that are potentially very depressing, but you know, Robert Frost had a great poem. I forget what it's called, but he says, “When work is play for mortal stakes,” so you're playing for mortal stakes. It's something worth spending one's time on. 

Leyla: Okay. Well, thank you for talking to us about it.

Alan: I’m not leaving you in an emotional state right now, but I'll leave you in a good place. I’ll keep talking until you feel better. I don't wanna leave you!

Leyla: I don't know, because I do; I have climate anxiety. Even just when I was telling you about the summer of 2011 here in Austin, where it was just so, so depressing and so sad to see that sun coming out all the time, I spent, two summers ago in New York City, the whole summer. That was great, and the weather was good, but if I'm coming back to a city full of depressed people and they didn't all get to leave, I'm like “what's the point? These are my people, and I left them,” and so I had survivor's guilt, too. I read about Ahvaz that you're talking about. My family's from Ahvaz, so they talk about… my family who's in Texas now is like “it's not that bad. Ahvaz was really hot,” and I look it up. I have Ahvaz’s weather on my Weather App, and it reaches 120, 130. 

Alan: It’s crazy there, yeah, yeah. 

Leyla: Yeah, but I've been reading about the current state of the environment in Iran right now, and that's so depressing because first of all, they're jailing and killing all the environmentalists. That's a huge political issue in Iran, but then Ahvaz is becoming uninhabitable, like you said, the dust, the smoke, the pollution on top of the weather. Back then, they had coping mechanisms. They had these houses with courtyards and fountains. The heat was hot, but they coped with it, and they had weather systems in their homes that would ventilate the air really nicely. The coping mechanisms are becoming less, so it's like not only is the climate changing, it's like we're creating hell on Earth in so many different ways. To leave it on a positive note… and all the wars that we have right now that are creating so much pollution, it feels like there's so much happening outside of my control. I would love to feel empowered to do something, but I feel like personal empowerment, it's like everybody has to be okay for it to be okay. 

Alan: Do you know the Zen Koan Tiger's Above, Tiger's Below?

Leyla: No.

Alan: Okay, so I read a lot about Buddhism and stuff. There’s a guy walking out in nature,  and he sees a tiger behind him who's coming up on him. He's at the edge of a cliff, so he jumps over the cliff and grabs onto a branch, right? Now, it's not a deep cliff. He maybe survives. He would survive the fall, right? The tiger's leaning over the cliff, growling at him. He looks below on the ground where he would land if he lets go of the branch, and there's another tiger growling waiting for him, right? So then he looks at the branch he's holding on to, and there's a mouse nibbling at the root, which is getting more and more afraid, right? Tigers above, tigers below. Then he sees right next to the branch, there's a strawberry bush or something, and he takes out a strawberry, puts in his mouth and eats it, and it tastes good. He totally just focuses on the taste, and he enjoys eating the strawberry. That's one of the things I think about a lot. It's like this can be horrible before, they can be horrible after, but if you just focus on the present moment, you can derive joy or happiness, whatever. Tigers above, tigers below. 

Leyla: All right. I think that's really nice. I do appreciate that.  

Alan: Okay, hope that works!

Leyla: Also, it's better to know, bringing it back to our poem, “ān kas ké bedānad va bedānad,” so it's important for us to get the knowledge that we need. Well, going back to the highest form, “ān kas ké bedānad va bedānad ké bedānad.”

Alan: Yeah. We all have to strive toward that. 

Leyla: Exactly, exactly. All right. Well, like I said, we'll have two other lessons where we go over each of these words individually so that we can add to our Persian vocabulary, as always. Alan, thank you so much for talking with us and talking about something that you're really passionate about. I would love to hear more about climate change, and hopefully, people will listen to this. I'll have a link to that uninhabitable Earth, although I don't want to read it!

Alan: There are other books. There's tons of books out there. Maybe don't start with that one!

Leyla: Okay, with my climate anxiety, yeah! What should I start with? 

Alan: I'll send you a list. I got literally a whole wall of books on this stuff. 

Leyla: Okay, please send me a list! We're all on this earth together. 

Alan: Sure. banee ādam a'zāyé yek peykar-and. Yeah.

Leyla: Absolutely. That's actually the next poem I'm going to record again because we did that poem with our bootcamp about a year ago, and with everything that's been happening in the world, I feel like I've had to reiterate that poem over and over again. I feel like it was radical when it was written, and it's still somehow a radical concept now, and I cannot fathom how, I feel like that's the end-all be-all. It's just like, just read this poem! 

Alan: Exactly. They say that it's on the wall at the UN, and I've never really looked for it hard at the UN, I but I'd love to go see it at the UN. 

Leyla: Yeah, well, it's in the tiny part of a rug, apparently, so you really have to look hard for it!

Alan: I'm going to leave you now and go back to my limping donkey. 

Leyla: All right, thank you again!

Alan: Take care, bye-bye!