December 12, 2023
Jefferey Lewis
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The following is an excerpt of the interview with Jeffrey Lewis from Outrider.
As a child in the 1980s, Jeffrey Lewis felt terrified, wondering if an atomic showdown was imminent, only much later discovering stories about private individuals who worked behind the scenes to decrease the risk that the United States and the Soviet Union came to nuclear blows.
Now a professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies on Nonproliferation and Terrorism, Lewis has launched a new podcast — “The Reason We’re All Still Here,” that tells the stories of these and other unsung heroes working to prevent global catastrophes, whether from nuclear arms races, space trash, tensions with North Korea, pandemics, or crimes on the high seas.
Upbeat and information-packed, the 30-minute weekly episodes tell the stories of these ordinary people, from scientists to those working at NGOs, and their efforts to improve the world.
Outrider: Referring to your podcast’s title, why are we all still here?
Jeffrey Lewis: The inspiration for the podcast, the reason that we picked the name “The Reason We’re All Still Here,” is that even though governments can seem so bad at cooperating, and even though people can seem so cruel to one another, as human beings, we also have this incredibly powerful impulse to make the world a better place. And we see people around us who are inspiring. Sometimes, we lose sight of that because we often fall short of our goals.
So we began collecting all these stories about people who are not part of any government, who are just private citizens, but who take problems that the world faces, problems that people normally think would be the business of governments, and they make it their own problem, and really try to do something special and positive.
Continue reading at Outrider.
