The Sweaty Penguin

More About The Sweaty Penguin

The show description is, Sometimes climate change is a laughing matter. Every week The Sweaty Penguin cuts through the noise and the doom and gloom of the climate conversation with late night comedy style monologues and in depth conversations with leading global experts on a variety of environmental issues through a nonpartisan approach, The Sweaty Penguin makes environmental issues Less overwhelming and politicized and more accessible and fun. The length of each episode is about 45 minutes to an hour long with episodes called Tip of the Iceberg that are roughly 20 minutes long. This series is ongoing with new episodes available on Fridays, and those tip of the iceberg episodes are available on Wednesdays. 

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Introduction to Ethan & The Sweaty Penguin

I’m Ethan Brown. I am the founder and host of The Sweaty Penguin, which is a comedy environmental podcast. We are presented by PBS’s National Climate Initiative, Pearl and Promise, and we’re trying to make climate change less overwhelming and less politicized.

Why The Sweaty Penguin Got Started

So, going back to high school, when I first learned about climate change, I found it to be really overwhelming and really scary and. I honestly just had no interest in learning about it because of that, and it really took until I was going to college for film and television, I felt like to be a storyteller, I needed a story to tell. This seemed super important. So I was like, All right, let me try a few environmental classes and see if I can handle it. And I ended up realizing through some of those early classes that climate change. One, it’s really nuanced. And also there are so many different solutions all across the political spectrum and solutions that have nothing to do with politics.

And so after getting that experience in classes, I started developing this Environmental communication style, where first off, I decided to get a dual degree with Environmental Analysis and policy as well. And at the same time, I was in charge of both my high school and college satire publications. I was learning a lot about comedy writing.

So once quarantine hit and I had some free time on my hands for the first time, I thought, How can I put all this together? And the Sweaty Penguin was born. 

What to Expect from The Sweaty Penguin

So, I hope people first off can reframe climate change a little bit in their heads, cuz right now I get the sense that a lot of people see the stakes of climate change as this extinction causing Event, And again, it’s more nuanced than that. We’re looking at the low lying areas in our cities getting flooded, people having to move.

Certainly there are deaths due to climate change if we wanna get dark. But it’s these extreme weather events that. Are just really damaging in other ways. And we think about our food security, our water security, our health, our economics certainly costs billions, trillions of dollars to clean up some of these disasters.

So, . Yes. I think all of that put together makes climate change a major cause for concern and something to take seriously. But we don’t have to think of it as solving climate change because climate change is here right now. And what we have to do is figure out what is our future gonna look like? How can we adapt to a future in which there is a changed climate?

Then how can we cut our carbon emissions and mitigate climate change today and in the coming decades so that it doesn’t get a whole lot worse from here? So I think by making that shift, we kind of make it a little less overwhelming. We can see, Find solutions to adapt. We can find solutions to cut carbon emissions, but it’s not this thing where, oh, this issue that’s happening today, we have to somehow vanish, Cause then it starts to get really hopeless. 

Humor & Climate Change

People will ask like, how do you Still take climate change seriously while being funny. But we’re not joking about climate change. We’ll make some pop culture reference or just notice a funny thing and a given story and comment on it.

But I think by making things Just a touch lighter in that regard. Trying to kind of smile through it and have some fun. And then also combining that with this nuance, with the reframing, with creating options for solutions rather than saying this is the one solution that we all have to agree upon. I think that put together, it makes climate change a lot less overwhelming, so that’s certainly our goal.

The Vibe of The Sweaty Penguin

I do think that our style of comedy is very different. Like I said, a lot of our goal is to create a show that people of any political viewpoint would enjoy. And so in doing that, our comedy is not as targeted per se. I mean, I’ll rip on like Tom Brady or Logan Paul, but I’m not gonna  rip on random politicians. Just trying to have a little more fun with our comedy, keep it a little lighter while at the same time talking about some really serious and important issues. So in terms of feel, it would be. Similar to those late night shows, but definitely a different comedy style.

Ethan’s Favorite Episode

So we did one recently called Rethinking Environmentalism. It was more a collection of thoughts I had been having throughout the last two years of doing this show that I kind of was able to get into words for this one episode.

It was the finale of season four and we were looking at The fact that, forgive me if I get the statistics wrong, but I think it was in 1991, over 70% of Americans classified themselves as environmentalists, and today that was down into the 40% range. So thinking about why would that happen when. Think about a clean air, clean water, and healthy climate, but how could you not want that

So we were looking at kind of where the environmental movement may have gone astray. May have put off some people. Our guest in that episode. So our episodes have a comedy monologue and then an expert interview, and we’ve interviewed professors from 11 countries across five continents. We’ve had some really cool people that were with Dr. Jenny Price who recently wrote a book on this and she actually had some things I disagreed with, which is rare for our interviews, but I thought that made the episode really cool. I could kinda say how I felt. She could say how she felt. I do agreed with her on 75, 80% of what she was saying, but I think that was a really interesting one.

If you want something more just specific and relatable as opposed to a high concept. I think our episode on chocolate was a really eye opening one as well. So definitely check that out. 

Climate Change Problems vs Solutions

What we try to get across with climate change is the problems and the solutions are really two different things. Often the politics and the facts just get jumbled together and we very careful. Separate them out and peel them apart.

We’ll talk about the problems, how it affects the environment, the economy, health, justice, et cetera. And then when we talk about solutions, we make that very clear and we present options and we discuss their pros and cons rather than advocating a specific idea. So sometimes I’ll talk about a solution that I’m personally not all that huge about.