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Home » TRIGGERnometry: w/ Ex-Climate Activist Lucy Biggers (Transcript)

TRIGGERnometry: w/ Ex-Climate Activist Lucy Biggers (Transcript)

Here is the full transcript of former climate activist Lucy Biggers’ interview on TRIGGERnometry podcast, May 13, 2026.  

Editor’s Notes: In this episode of Triggernometry, hosts Konstantin Kisin and Francis Foster sit down with former climate activist and video producer Lucy Biggers to discuss her journey out of the progressive movement. Biggers opens up about her time at Now This News, where she interviewed figures like Greta Thunberg and AOC, and explains how groupthink and social media fueled her early activism. Now a writer at The Free Press, she shares her insights on “deprogramming” from ideological bubbles and why she believes the current climate narrative can be more destructive than helpful for younger generations. It is a candid conversation about the intersection of media, identity politics, and the pursuit of human flourishing.  

Lucy Biggers: From Climate Activist to Free Press Journalist

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Lucy, welcome to TRIGGERnometry.

LUCY BIGGERS: Thank you so much for having me. I’m so excited to be here.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Oh, it’s great to have you. You were a climate activist and you are not anymore. You have a very interesting story to tell. So why don’t we just get started there? What is your story?

A Career Built on Climate Activism

LUCY BIGGERS: Yeah, so I was a climate activist for half my 20s, so that was from 2016 to around 2020. And I fell into it because at that time I was a video producer at a very left-wing news company called NowThis News, which some people know it, some people don’t. But we were one of the first news companies to get videos to automatically play on the Facebook feed. Back in the 20-teens with subtitles.

So I moved into that newsroom as a 25-year-old and my job every day was just to be scrolling on my newsfeed, which now we know about this, right? It’s like doom scrolling and our algorithms. But that was where I first got exposed to this modern climate movement in the form of actually this Dakota Access Pipeline protest that happened in 2016, which was very viral, where there was Native Americans protesting a pipeline going in. And all these people commenting would say, “Cover DAPL,” D-A-P-L for Dakota Access Pipeline.

And so I just started covering that as a 25-year-old, kind of bought it hook, line, and sinker that there was this narrative that these evil fossil fuel companies were building a pipeline on indigenous land. I started covering it and all the videos that I made went really viral. And so there was a feedback loop of, I’m getting a lot of professional success from this. And so I just made climate change my kind of whole personality and beat for my 20s.

Eventually growing my following to 50,000 on Instagram by like 2019. I interviewed Greta Thunberg. I gave AOC one of her first interviews when she was running for Congress in 2017, and that went very viral. So I was very much entrenched in the very progressive political movement, and then also the climate stuff, from the center of this newsroom essentially.

So that was how I basically spent half my twenties, kind of just buying everything as it was sold to me. Never really investigating. Watched a few documentaries that honestly convinced me that this was an existential threat. And did not have a deep understanding of the science. And to the point where I’ll just anecdotally say, in 2019, I learned that CO2 is only 0.04% of the atmosphere. Up until that point, I’d been covering the climate for 4 years and I didn’t even know what percent of the atmosphere CO2 was. So that was how turned off my critical thinking was, because I was getting so much support from being part of this movement that I just pushed it, right? And that was 5 years of my career.

The Psychology of Groupthink

KONSTANTIN KISIN: And you know, I’ve listened to a bunch of interviews Frances has as well that you’ve done. You’re clearly an intelligent, very intelligent person.

LUCY BIGGERS: I mean, I feel a little naive.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: No, no, we didn’t bring you here to humiliate you. I actually—

LUCY BIGGERS: No, it’s important though, because I think it’s showing how someone, even if you’re intelligent, can turn your critical thinking off when you’re in groupthink.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: So this is what I was going to ask you. Why do you think you were, and people are, susceptible to this thing, even if they are smart and are capable of thinking things through and using critical thinking in other contexts?

LUCY BIGGERS: Yeah. So I think there’s a confluence of things, of timing and my generation and technology and politics, because again, I’m a millennial. I was born in 1990, so this is my mid-twenties. It’s the 20-teens. Social media’s picking up. I’m scrolling on my algorithm, which we did not really understand how those things worked then. I feel like I was like patient zero of some of this stuff.

And I was also at the same time working in a very left-wing newsroom, which cannot be separated from my story. Because while I was at that newsroom, it’s 2015, I started, and then 2016, Trump’s rise is happening. We’re all Bernie supporters. Trump gets elected and kind of everyone goes crazy, right? We’ve now been living with this for 10 years, especially on the left. And it became a lot about identity politics. That kind of came into the newsroom over the Slack, over social media. And so I’m—

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Give us some examples. Like, what do you mean?

LUCY BIGGERS: Just like the idea of everyone who’s white is a white supremacist, even if they don’t know it — you’re racist. So you should really question what you believe because more often than not you’re racist. You have cisgender privilege.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: And did you think this when this was happening? Were you like, actually, I must be a white supremacist?

LUCY BIGGERS: I literally was just like, I guess this is what is true. I was just like, I’m going to listen to BIPOC, which is POCs, people of color.