Julian Dorey Podcast - 🤯 [VIDEO] - Plastics Expert Breaks Down Whether Our Population is too Big | Eric Olsson • #119

Episode Date: September 29, 2022

(***TIMESTAMPS in Description Below) ~ Eric Olsson is a chemical engineer and sustainability expert from Austin, Texas. Currently, Eric is working on building the foundation of a “New Plastics Economy” that doesn’t exclude any industry. ***TIMESTAMPS*** 0:00 - Intro; Is The Population Too Big?; Human reproduction in the future; Japan 23:16 - The ratios of our population matter; Energy Access & Humanity; Austin and Growing Cities 43:33 - Japan Contraception Data; The 3 phases of healthcare development 56:18 - “Othering” each other; A New Normal?; Good vs. Bad & The Zero Sum Game 1:16:43 - The Fourth Turning; Millennials vs Gen Z 1:37:58 - Andrew Bustamante says “we need an enemy”; Other countries not helping us fix environment 1:53:56 - How climate change became a political issue; The origins of the term “Climate Change”; Shutting down opinions 2:19:10 - Gun Control Discussion 2:25:29 - Plastics & Carbon explained 2:36:44 - Eric’s early career in Big Oil and his shift to Sustainability 2:54:23 - What is the history of Recycling?; Paul Rosolie and the trees problem; How we can fix environmental issues ~ Get $150 Off The Eight Sleep Pod Pro Mattress / Mattress Cover (USING CODE: “TRENDIFIER”): https://eight-sleep.ioym.net/trendifier Julian's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/julianddorey ~ Beat provided by: https://freebeats.io Music Produced by White Hot Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Boom! It's here. It's fucking here. It's not about how many people we have. It's about ratios and where they fall in the population pyramid. Are they in their 20s? Are they at that lower level, rising up in the workforce? Or are they 65 and planning on a check coming their way? In my second podcast with Andrew Bustamante, the CIA guy, he said, and I quote, We need an enemy. Bustamante's right CIA guy, he said, and I quote, we need an enemy. Bustamante's right. We do need an enemy.

Why does it have to be someone else in this world that is also a human? So in our Lego set of life, carbon just happens to be the s***. Exactly. It happens to be the element with the highest affinity for bonding. I was going to say body count. Same thing, right? What's cooking, everybody? I am joined in the bunker today by Mr. Eric Olson, and this was quite the philosophical discussion. Eric is a guy who initially worked in big oil and then moved his way over to sustainability. So he has quite the experience across the spectrum here.

And it is also reflected in how he generates opinions on pretty much anything. So I very much appreciate the nuance that he has in approaching difficult discussions that have to happen in society. And I think we got to a lot of them today. So I hope you guys enjoy. If you're on YouTube right now, please hit that subscribe button. Please hit that like button on the video. And hit that notifications button, that bell, to make sure you get notified when a new episode is coming out.

Would love to hear from you guys down in the comments below as always. And thank you to everyone who has been sharing around the episode with friends. That's the best thing we can do to spread the word. To all of you who are on Apple or Spotify, thank you for checking out the show over there. If you haven't already, please be sure to leave a five-star review on either one of those platforms. And I look forward to seeing you guys again for future episodes. That said, you know what it is. I'm Julian Dory. This is Trendafire. And please welcome Eric Olson. Yeah, we'll get there. We'll get there. But listen, bro, thank you so much for your patience today and for coming into town to do this. I really,

really appreciate it. And I will fill people in in a second. But you're coming all the way in from Austin, Texas, and holy shit have I had a fucking day. Day and a half, two days at this point. Yeah, you and me both. I think we were both up until the wee hours of the morning last night. I'm on 30 hours, man. I haven't— Yeah.

I haven't—what time is it now? 4.11? I was last in bed at 9.45 yesterday. I'm on 30 hours man. I haven't yeah, I haven't what what time is it now? 4 11 It was last in bed at 9 45 yesterday. It's without sleeping. So yeah, yeah fucking day man I tell you but today I'm gonna be I'm gonna be as on the ball as I can actually I'm like riding a little wave There's been a lot of stress last shit going wrong I'm kind of like past it So I think we're in a good spot to be able to do this.

But if I got to pull you back on some details today, just bear with me. And the people listening out there, bear with me if I miss something easy once in a while. I'm here for it. But I'm so interested in speaking with a guy like you because you came from big oil. You moved over towards the renewable side. You have that perspective. You see a big oil. You moved over towards the renewable side. You have that perspective. You see a balance here. You have a lot of hope in the future and humanity and what we can innovate to be able to do.

So I'm very happy to give that platform. Now, I will say I'm not one of those we'll innovate our way out of everything guys. I actually started completely on a different perspective of this whole oil, renewable, sustainable development, climate change perspective. I started on the biological side. So I started kind of from a – there's a camp kind of named after Malthus or a Malthusian perspective we call it. But it's kind of a biological approach to understanding – Well, it's a biological approach to a worldview where you, you see things more zero sum like where there's a total input of energy that the sun gives to the planet in a day. energy you know we as life forms create all these cascading um orders and and uh we we harness energy we we do things in our life we make things we do work um we build this civilization in this life as this energy comes to a nut comes to us we harness it do things with it and it dissipates

i used to come from a perspective that was very much, this is zero sum. There are too many people. There are 7 billion, almost 8 billion today and counting. It's probably going to hit its max that Earth will ever carry in our lifetime. Why do you say that? Just because of the demographic trends, the way things are going right now in the world. We will not have more children than we do today at 2100. We have roughly 2 billion today. I think the estimates, at least at the UN and a lot of these bigger organizations are going off of are that those kids will stay 2 billion, but we're

going to fill in our population. So we're going to, to on average get a little bit older in countries where the average age used to be 40 50 60 you know that's going to creep up um just like it is in italy germany hell even even here in the us a little bit and that's something elon's been talking a lot about too is hey don't yeah don't transition quite yet america stay semi developing if you will I was talking with a couple people a few weeks ago who I do want to have on the podcast eventually but this was something I'm bringing up because this was something where they're like well this is something you could never talk about on a podcast and that makes me want to talk about it oh yeah what they said they were speculating on why elon was saying this stuff because as as brilliant as elon is obviously like i've been a big fan of his

throughout all the stuff he does but like as brilliant as he is it's not like he's right about everything you know he's also very aggressive with his timelines on stuff he's very aggressive with his hopes for innovation and on i guess you could even extend that to like demographic thoughts as as it pertains to technology and the future of the human planetary human species on earth for a long day like i said but with him making this point what these guys were saying is they think he's looking at it like oh shit there's not there's too many very intelligent people who are too career driven and they're not fucking and having kids and so we're losing overall intelligence to be able to spread to the rest of the gene pool which right away they're like oh shit now we're talking like biohacking and genetic engineering and i'm like

yeah that could be a dangerous conversation but if you're just speculating on like why he's saying it and maybe he's trying to say it from the right intention without considering what it actually is implying there that that's when does fast grocery delivery through instacart matter most when your famous grainy mustard potato salad isn't so famous without the grainy mustard. When the barbecue's lit, but there's nothing to grill. When the in-laws decide that, actually, they will stay for dinner. Instacart has all your groceries covered this summer. So download the app and get delivery in as fast as 60 minutes.

Plus enjoy $0 delivery fees on your first three orders. Service fees, exclusions, and terms apply. Instacart. Groceries that over-deliver. Sounds reasonable. If I were guessing why Elon Musk is suddenly like, trying to fuck everything with a pulse without a rubber,

you know, and he's like paying them to do it too like ahead of time, like we're gonna do this, like that would, that's probably where I'd put my money on what he's thinking. Yeah, and here's what I would say to that too is is um you know one i don't know his prerogative i don't know his goals and what a bad boy open yeah go for it um you know i don't know all of his drivers per se but i would say like i was just saying earlier i came from the biological perspective of uh demography and sustainability and you know can we make this whole project of human civilization work that what he's

been saying for the last six months is pretty much the polar opposite that is the the other camp of where i came from one was hey keep growing our economy depends on growth grow grow grow more people oh seven billion cute let's go for eight nine ten whatever um i came from the opposite of that i came from you know studying the deer population on christmas island or the people on easter island like the deer population on Christmas Island. It's just this example that biology textbooks use of an isolated population on an island that had no natural predators. I think I could be botching this, but essentially the population follows what we call an S-curve. It goes like this. Increases rapidly for a time.

Oh, there's a lot of resources. We're all having sex. We're all having sex. We're all having babies. And then you get to the top and this, let's call it a 20 square miles or something, right? Closed system all of a sudden is loaded with deer. Well, what happens then?

They starve. They run out of grass. They ran out of saplings to eat or whatever. And then that S curve hits what we call in math an asymptote, right? It's a line you approach, but never cross. That's what we call in math an asymptote, right? It's a line you approach but never cross. That's what we call carrying capacity in biology. Every system, this room,

if we were stuck in here forever, one of us would have to go, Julian. It has a carrying capacity. It's going to be you, but yeah. We'll see. You might know more about what's around you. I know my surroundings. Yeah, but I got hot coffee.

I do too. So think about that, right? The Malthusian perspective is systems can be closed. I can draw a line around this and say, okay, within this given area, I can support X amount of a certain type of life. Humans, deer, cows, whatever. If I exceed that carrying capacity, I become unsustainable, right? It's got a certain amount of shelf life we'll eat through

all that grass and then boom people well in this case deer start starving and the population crashed i don't know if it went to zero per se but yeah it crashed and like i biology is so interesting because we take for granted communication as humans even though we still fail in a lot of it like we have the most resources to be able to do it at least i guess like whales and dolphins are up there as well but i won't get lost now either way we're at like at the top of the food chain here it's like maybe maybe all right i'm an idiot so don't listen we're doing we're doing well yeah 30 straight hours no sleep over here like we're doing well it's not train wreck so far but like looking at what we take for granted there when when we if if i'm a couple who's on hard times and i live in a neighborhood and there's a lot of other couples who are on hard times the couples don't even really have to talk with each other but

like amongst each other but they'll talk between each couple and they may have the conversation like oh we're not gonna have kids right now right and then what what happens time goes on mating periods and you know you have your biological clock human beings right guys technically don't but women do and then i mean they still do you're right but they at least you know a guy can shoot a load at 80 and have a fucking kid and they still are and they do some of them they do that's very interesting but elon mustad did that i think he did that with someone who worked one crazy world anyway but like the couples will then it like nature will take its course so to speak because it was talked about but now take it to like a deer

is there like a thing like are do they have enough intelligence or is it just totally innate that they kind of realize oh there's there's fucking deer starving all over the place there's nothing to eat let's not fuck they don't have that off switch so why does it why does it go down i don't have that off switch. So why does it go down? I don't think we have that off switch either. We just are living in a different time now. So when we go from having five babies per woman on average, which many countries did 60, 70 years ago, how 30 years ago, to having 2.4 or I think in our case,

it's like 2.1, which is barely replacement, right? Because maybe 10% or sorry, 5% more, right? There's a certain ratio each couple needs to have to be at what we call replacement level. Where if I had my wife here and we had two kids and they both survived and became adults themselves and had families, we were totally at at replacement my wife and i had two we were two we made two um we both came out of a world where our peers our families and especially the ones a little bit older than us were having more than two kids on average per family. That was because in the post-World War II baby boomer era, those families were used to having three, four, five kids each.

And it wasn't that uncommon to lose one or to send someone off to war at 16 or 17 or whatever they used to sneak in, right? Hats off to that generation, by the way. Both the greatest generation and the baby boomer generation. Um, but anyway, back to the Malthusian piece of what he's saying with populations and the camp that I come from, I actually don't believe in the whole, we can innovate our way out of this. I do believe we will innovate our way through this, not out of it it we never get out of it we just live in a different time we don't face the same challenges we did once we've conquered a lot of the biological world we are our own worst enemies now we are we are like the one thing that stands in our own way um and so i would just say wow yeah i'm optimistic about all of. I think we do make it work when it comes to energy, when it comes to materials, and what I do in circular economy. I think we will build a lot of this, but we will do it in agreement he's basically saying, hey, America, don't go through the demographic transition full on just yet. And that transition is moving from a shorter lifespan, more baby society, which is what we used to call developing, right? To a long lifespan, healthy, fewer baby society, which is what we used to call developed.

Now, most of the world is actually in the middle. There isn't so much a developing world anymore. Most countries are in the middle or in the developed group now. He's simply saying, before we rush into that and lose all of the the tarnish that that will give to this crazy western liberal idea that america really is that the innovation that it that it brings about before we rush into that realize that this goose is still laying golden eggs hell his his work is is one of those eggs don't kill the goose that lays the golden eggs before we get all the eggs we need to get through this sustainable development period that we need, that his inventions are contributing to, his companies are contributing to. And countless more, countless others are that have both been inspired by the values we uphold here in this country and are also started and carried out here in this country and across the western

civilization and really globally it's happening everywhere there's all kinds of uh i would say hope um but it's it's more than just that it's actual hard science it's a global rising of understanding that's really powering all this to play devil's advocate on all that though is you're making me think a lot which is great today yeah i i feel you i remember we're both gonna be zombies hey it's we got it it's all good man we're working it out on camera but to play devil's advocate to that the idea i think everyone can grasp on the surface level fairly easily is that less kids living longer. Yes. Okay.

Before we even talk about the word population, you just mentioned that as a demographic trend, and people go, yeah, we're living longer. And also we're losing less younger people, and that's part of the reason we're living longer. It's not just like, oh, people that would have lived to 70 are now living to 80 which is true in in many cases but it's also there are there's not as many tragic deaths of a 10 year old thank god you know there's not as many crazy shit happening to a 23 year old who got some sort of weird virus because he didn't he left an open wound or something you know what i mean like something weird shit like that so with that coming down and people living older the population on the back end gets way bigger even if it's producing less on the front end but also the front end that's producing less is losing less on the front end and so as the population gets older this is where I'm extrapolating it. I don't know where technology goes.

I don't think anyone ever truly does. I mean we can have an idea where it may go. It may go to the point where time doesn't exist. But we don't know when that happens. That could be a billion years from now or it could be 200 years from now. Exactly. So I can't specify when, but it doesn't seem crazy to me that sometime in the next several decades, we're going to live in a world where people problems with righteously what we have is like the commitment that that is when you have to carry a child for nine months. There's a lot of emotional things that can now be taken away if you don't have that.

So that's interesting. And physiological. Absolutely. Absolutely. So there's a lot of good there potentially. But that could make the barrier to entry of having kids a lot lower. Unless, unless, now you can put on your little tinfoil hat here. Unless there's people controlling you from being able to do that.

And controlling you in ways where they run your life because you have a digital footprint everywhere. That's a very uh way to way to think about it um thank you for the red bull yeah the red bull's working for sure yeah yeah that was a good stop thank you wawa um absolutely it's been a long time i told the guy checking out it's been years since i've been there he's like oh welcome where are you from austin oh we were supposed to open there this year and it didn't happen. Greatest place on planet Earth. Yeah, it's a funny one. But anyway, you know, rolling back to that, if you knew that your kids were going to survive to 60 and you're a millennial and your generation holds what a third a fifth of the same wealth that baby

boomers did at the same age i don't know where it is now but that sounds right a lot less than they had at the same age would you want five kids no me neither i wouldn't either um so there's there's it's like a supply. I hate to break it down to that. No, that's exactly what it is. Do it. It kind of is that right. It's, it's kind of, uh, it's all these factors in our life. They all matter. The education of, uh, the education level of, of women, um, you know, rights amongst, amongst genders, uh, that that's a big big thing too that's a direct indicator of the health of a society you know how many women finish secondary school it's also directly correlated to

what he's trying to stop which is that demographic transition of going from 2.5 or 3 or 5 kids down to 1.8 where you know japan's shrinking now they'll be 30 what 30 million is gonna be gone at this rate there'll be 30 million people um potentially 30 million people less by 2100 something crazy like that it's just like they just like not fuck over there like what's the deal they just went through their transition earlier so we're every country's doing this this isn't some kind of like cycle that we oh we go around and around no no this is the first time through for the world the world has never gone through this transition of short lifespans many babies long lifespan few babies we've never done that before

hey guys hope you're enjoying the show so far let us know down in the comments below if you have some hot takes on the population moving forward whether you think it needs to be smaller bigger, bigger, or anything in between. And as always, continue sharing the show around with friends. That's been a huge help. Finally, if you have not used that link in my description to get your 8 Sleep Pod Pro cover for $150 off using code TRENDOFIRE at checkout, make sure you do that because you're going to sleep better than you ever have before. So check it out. Use that code TRENDOFIRE, T-R-E-N-D-I-F-I-E-R. And you'll get $150 off your own 8 Sleep Pod Pro cover today. I have a serious question that's not going to come out as a serious question, but it is. True.

Because Japan is a great example to bring up because, and I'll pull up the numbers in a minute, but you're spot on. We've seen contraction correlated with, you know, when we dropped a couple bombs on them that's neither here nor there but we've seen it contract in the three four generations since then and it's now at a point where a lot of couples don't even have kids there's and we're projecting numbers where it's like well they could disappear at some point is there also a correlated data point that shows that like a lot more women in japan have iuds than the united states i would imagine somewhere there probably is um i don't i'm not very familiar with japan to be quite honest that's such an interesting my google search history yeah yeah but check that out japan japanese women we're getting canceled for this one iuds iud count um or google this i mean google working ages uh average education level these

things are all correlated um and overall they're a very net positive thing for society. It's okay for us to go from little biological, you know, savannah apes like we are to this collective hive mind of different nodes, of 8 billion nodes around the world, all, you know, contributing to a global connected conscious. That's okay. I think we need to embrace it. I don't think we need to be afraid of it. So I would kind of, I would love to sit down and hear Mr. Musk's thoughts on that. You and me both. Yeah, I think we should go through this transition. I think he is right. And this is where the whole Malthusian background of me is, in my opinion, wrong. And I've told people

from that camp very recently, damn, I was wrong. You are right. We are not ready to go through this transition here yet as one of the stronger beacons of Western democracy in the world. We got to know the implications before we just jump through the door ourselves. We're seeing issues in Japan. We're seeing issues in Germany. You saw Italy earlier this, what, two years ago during COVID and some of the challenges they still face today, just having an older population. You've seen the pilot crises

where, oh, we ran out of pilots. What does that really mean? It just means that the proportion of our population that we used to bet on being 1.2 times bigger than the retirees is now equal or lesser than you also got to pay for them yeah and we didn't we didn't fight in war as pilots so we don't have this big workforce to tap on right so that all these when you hear shortages of workers this and that and you're like well how can that be there's more people now than ever it's not about how many people we have it's about ratios and where they where they fall in the population pyramid are they in their 20s are they at that lower level um rising up in the workforce or are they 65 and planning on a check coming their way um via paying into a system now right

via social security or retirement right Where are you in the population period is a more important question when you hear about shortages than why do we not have enough pilots? Why do we not have enough of this? Why do we not have enough of that? It's all about ratios. It's not about the ratio. I haven't looked this up yet, but the ratio of people who live in condensed urban places versus everywhere else and the ratio of the square mileage of each of those two environments. Yeah. So when you take a flight, which I never have, but if, if, cause I've never been out there, but I would imagine if I took off from JFK and went straight across the country to California and let's say it was on a private jet where we got to fly low and i could actually see shit the whole way i'm gonna be looking out at a lot of unused land but every time i see a city or a high-end center of a hundred thousand people or more living within somewhat condensed of an area well now i see x number of people per square mile yeah versus

last time i was like i saw one per square mile for fucking a thousand miles right there so it's also a matter of what spreads people out and one of the things that i was thinking about on something we were talking about i think right before camera when you were you said something to the effect of the energy that people live around and by energy you mean literally like oil natural gas resources stuff like that is completely correlated to their wealth happiness and the state of a society and my only thing there is that and i'll explain why this makes sense that i'm bringing it up in a second but like what does that mean for a lot of these countries around the world who have a fuck ton of oil and are disasters like venezuela or look in the middle east even in

saudi arabia which is like a supposedly well-to-do high-end country well they have an elite class and they got everyone else everyone else is not balling so it's like there are other factors and there's i feel like their point is there i feel like there's a lot of people who are blowing it and why i brought up that silo is because when I'm flying across America in this case and I look at the people living in rural areas, some versus the people who live in the city is also an economic and life opportunity type ratio, average person to average person. Meaning in the city, you're more likely to have someone who's like trying to be some sort of executive in this part of the bracket of taxes within the country. And in the rural population you're a lot less likely to have that and you're someone who's you're going to have someone who lives paycheck to paycheck more often it obviously doesn't always work this way but i'm saying on

average so maybe the people who are spread out among the land as well it goes to show you that if our planet has x number of square miles of space we really only have one percent of it that matters does that make sense it it does and it doesn't it doesn't but i think what you just said is very key right there right um about a certain percent that matters that shows up as a reoccurring theme time and again. It could be people tapping into a knowledge movement. It could be, hell, it was only a few percent of the people in the American colonies that even wanted to revolt. So it only ever is a small percentage of these things that swings the direction of our civilization a certain way um but it's not physical proximity to energy um it's energy access so access to energy meaning

how easily can i go illuminate my room uh that book rosling wrote he talks about a midwife in i forget what country, somewhere in Africa. What was that called again? Factfulness? Yeah, Factfulness. It's a great book. Highly recommended. A good fact-based way to be optimistic about our direction.

And trust me, we need that right now. But anyway, he's talking about how much a flashlight, when he asked this midwife, what's the number one thing my team of doctors from Sweden, who I'm bringing here to sub-Saharan Africa to get exposure to the challenges you're seeing, what is the number one thing we could get for you? It was a flashlight. A flashlight. So she could see snakes while she's walking village to village,

house to house to deliver babies on dirt floors. Yeah. A flashlight. Yeah. That is access to energy. That light eliminates some of her biggest risks, right? The snakes and the rolling your ankles and all these things going house to house. I see now.

So it's simply your ability to harness energy. That's all human beings do. And this big crazy thing we call life, we hear about entropy and chaos and physics and the thermodynamics and all this. All we do is harness energy as it's dissipating in the universe and make it do cool stuff for us. We want this microphone to amplify sound and be consistent and blah, blah, blah, blah.

Well, we designed it to do that. We used oil and gas, likely, probably some amount of renewables in the grid mixture, to mold the world around us into these bars, into these beams, into these wires and cables, into this foam. And we have it serve a job for us so that we can build this big, complex civilization

and talk about shit like this and talk about how a flashlight would change that midwife's life. So it's energy access, not necessarily physical proximity. And that means how easily can I turn my light switch on? So you can very easily be energy rich like Venezuela and just do an absolute shit job on managing that such that your population cannot go turn on that light switch so their ease of access to that energy has been mishandled and mismanaged and that is tragic i hate seeing that around the world and that is all too common a story for any uh not any but many natural resource rich countries well it's it's a typical sad story of the fallacy of human power and and

the desire for it that some people have i often talk about on here with different people whatever that gene is that lives in i'd say 95 of say politicians for example where they say oh i want to i want to power like i want i want to control of everything i wasn't born with that i i don't know what that feels like i'm very fortunate in my opinion that i don't know what that feels like it makes it all the more torturous though and hard for me to understand how the fuck another person could feel that way now yeah i don't like being told what to do right if you tell me now if you tell me something that makes sense you say julian don't go kill people that makes a ton of sense i'm not gonna do that right like so it's not like yo fuck the fuck the man on everything that's not what i'm saying but i don't like

telling people what to do i in fact i fucking loathe it and so it seems to me it seems to me who am i you look at human history it's all some version of the same story like we we're starting this talking about population and and how that's affected over time and we're kind of butterflying affecting it into all these other parts of society and things like energy and and how they control the wealth and health of a population and the future of people. It's like all of it comes back to being stopped by the same thing. Another human being are our own worst enemy. We are the one thing that can, we're the one being that can make this whole thing work. We're the one to want to jump right to that. But I think that whole, that phrase, the line between good and evil lies in, you know, every human's head. It's all, it's all in here, all between the ears. I think that's true. I don't think it necessarily means that I think the right intentions don't want to exert that control on others. And I think control

was the key word you said there. I mean, power, power is great. I, I, I, there are very few people that would turn down at least a temporary, um, access to power or control and outcome that they're passionate about. Right. Yes. That's a different thing. Yeah. Yeah. That's a different thing. That's not what I'm talking. Just to be clear, I'm talking about power when it comes to a human being, wanting power to exert that over other people for the joy that they get from doing that yeah that's what i mean there's other types of power totally agree good stuff that type of power is what i'm not about yeah i'm i'm with you there i don't i don't like that either i that's why i live in austin i feel like austin's the eject button these days it's like you know what fuck it i'm out

eject button and people think it's so you know one way or the other or it's all hippies or it's this or that and i mean yeah in a great way it is um but it's also very much like you like leave me alone don't tell me what to do um you know to each their own it's very in my opinion it's a very very classic western liberal city it's like a beacon of uh 21st century hope i think for western liberalism in the heart in the heart of fucking texas of course in the heart of texas i think texas is one of those beacons as well but i'm also biased so yeah it's but it's interesting because you know what the stereotypes can say, but then you have a city like Austin there that's – I mean, I'd argue right now I'm not sure there's a more important city in Texas than Austin.

Yeah. It's tough because it's number four in size and business influence. Well, maybe bigger than San Antonio in business. But look at the concentration of talent there. Yeah, absolutely. You San Antonio in business. But look at the concentration of talent there. Yeah, absolutely. You have tech going there. Tech in Austin, a lot of energy and finance in Dallas, a lot of energy and finance in healthcare in Houston, and then more energy in San Antonio. Yeah, I think in general, Texas is one of those places. And I love that there's a stereotype because that gives me the ability to go around the world, meet cool people, have awesome

conversations and then go, holy shit, I can't believe you're from Texas. And you're like, what do you mean? Like, this is Texas. Like, this is what it's like. Like, this is a lot of places. Where did you grow up again? Houston. So the big industrial kind of uglier one of our four cities but hey not that i know more than what i can really know about texas not being from there but like i feel like it's kind of different when you say you're from houston it's definitely different when you say you're from austin but like when you say you're from Houston, that's not – the stereotype of Texas does not go into people's minds when they think that. They think more like a city, like Philly.

You know what I mean? It's like Philly in the south. It doesn't come across like, welcome to Texas. You know what I mean? Yeah, yeah, yeah. No. It still is like that. Don't get me wrong. Rodeo is massive. Big, yeah, yeah. No. It still is like that.

Don't get me wrong. Rodeo's massive. Big, giant livestock show in Rodeo. That was like an event in high school you'd go to. And definitely later, I just left after high school. But, yeah, no. Houston's the third largest city in our country. Texas has four of the top ten are in Texas.

Yeah. Wait, wait, wait houston's the third largest city in america i think it's passing chicago right now it was fourth as of like the 2010 or is it really yeah yeah i think the the classic list was new york san francisco oh yeah oh yeah uh the classic list was new york la chicago, Houston, Philly. Then the rest. No way. Philly couldn't have been on that list. Philly was on the list. I promise.

Come on. Yeah. I mean, this was, again, a census. I love Philly. I'm a South Jersey guy, but Philly's a town. That's not a city. Oh, it's a city, man. It's a town.

It's a city. I love it. It's a town. I can walk around. New York's a city. Philly's a city. Philly, I go to the same four fucking bars every time. It's a town. I can walk around. New York's a city. Philly's a city. Philly, I go to the same four fucking bars every time. It's a small city.

Is that a city? Yeah. When I walk into a bar, I'm going to run into someone from every walk of my life. Every era of my life. Every generation. And this isn't great when it's every fucking time you go there. Right? Like if it's once in a while, okay, cool. That's visiting philly you know i was a new york guy because you can blend

in in new york yeah you know what i mean disappear a little bit um that's on y'all okay that's on that's on the group that got me introduced to you that's on y'all y'all you run into people that group runs into people everywhere you go to the coast in the summer uh everyone congregates they all know each other jersey shore is like all cousins yeah and it's just like jersey delaware um half of philly too everyone seems to know each other it's a very tight circle um but it's also huge it's massive like the network is huge. But I would say that's kind of on y'all's people. Philly's a city to me because you can not own a car for years, not think about it, not miss it, walk around.

You have 40 different types of cultural food in a four-block radius, and there's concrete everywhere and there's no grass. Yeah, I mean obviously obviously i'm exaggerating but still like i think i'm talking about it from the sense of where my i guess like starting point is and you know i came up as i was growing like into an adult in new york right so let's be real new y York is like one of the biggest cities in the world. That's here. Right. So-

You're spoiled. I usually think about it like Brooklyn is literally bigger than Philly. So in my head, because Brooklyn feels small to me. Like it doesn't feel like it's not, but it doesn't feel like that big. It definitely stretches a lot, but you feel like you can kind of cover it. Yeah. So then when I'm like, well, I forget what it is. Maybe it's like double the size of philly or something you start thinking about that you're like we haven't even talked about manhattan yet from a population standpoint we haven't talked about the bronx queens i mean shit even staten island wait is brooklyn more population than

philly yeah let me let me double check that okay so that population i think philly is like 2.5 or something philadelphia yep wow 2.5 million in brooklyn one underneath 1.6 in philly get out now look up the population in mississippi this is going to be my comparison coming from houston living in mississippi for five years you lived in mississippi for five years i did i went to old five years? I did. I went to Ole Miss. Sorry to hear that. Oh, no, it's a great place. I love Mississippi. I've never been there. I'm sure it's great. It's a great place. I think it was Faulkner.

I feel like they'd be horrified of me, but... Ah, nah. That's what we all thought about Philly before I moved here. 2.982 million. Okay, well, about the same size. Yeah. Now, how many... A neighborhood and a state. Yeah. No, it's true. That does put the same size. Yeah. Now, how many? A neighborhood and a state. Yeah. No, it's true.

That does put it in perspective. Yeah. I'm used to like, I freak out when I'm in really, really rural areas. I've heard you say that before. Yeah. That's why you need to come to Austin. Yeah. Go to the ranch.

Rom went recently. See space. Go to the what? Ranch. The what? Yeah ranch yeah exactly what are you doing on a ranch uh well me i know the dressing but you know yeah me not much me not much uh i am like if you talk to anyone that's a real rancher or a country guy this is a city guy right here me right um but yeah you just uh depends depends on what kind of ranch a lot of people have working cattle operations in austin outside austin okay i was gonna say it's not like in they're not no it's not fucking cattle operations down main boulevard there no but if you drive down west timer in houston which is a main road there definitely used to be some cow pastures still quote in the city um but you know that's a it's

a big space thing that's why i like philly's city feel because it's so condensed and small it is very condensed versus a city like houston where the neighborhoods are like the whole state of jersey which is kind of rural but kind of you know there's neighborhoods and then the city part is still you know mostly just strip centers and uh more mixed use coming now but you still have to drive everywhere i don't like that about about uh la i don't like that about houston i don't like that about dallas i like that i can walk around where i live in austin and i really loved being able to walk or use public transit in Philly maybe not so much the latter part in Philly but in New York and other you know European

cities and such that is a really good boost for quality of life I think getting that density up versus just a total complete urban sprawl drive everywhere live in a car. You know, there's two kinds of ways to build a city. You go LA style or you go. Yes. You're talking about LA. Yeah. Yeah. Well, LA, Houston, there's a lot of cities like that. Yeah. See, I can't really speak on that because I haven't been there. I feel those are two I feel like I know pretty well from the outside as well as you can, I should say. But like, I do. I want to get out there soon like i want to see la and see what that is i want to see houston see what that is but yeah i mean you're also a guy like to put perspective on it like you travel a lot i do for your work i do and you're going out of the country a lot too yeah i um i kind of grew up in a family that did that i I mean, my dad, my dad is from Sweden. He moved here to the States

when he was, you know, after 30. So, um, older than we both are right now, he was still over there in Sweden. Um, the Swedes as a people are, I think the most well-traveled, uh, population in the world. That might be something you got to check, check. Yeah, I will. I'm pretty sure they're one of the most well-traveled or dispersed populations in the world. And they're a very small country, but I love them because they really kind of punch above their weight in most regards. And I love those stories and everything, right? Before we get into that, though, I just remembered this because I forgot to bring this to you. I just want to say this for the record. But I had pulled up, there's a page on Wikipedia called Birth Control in Japan.

It turns out it's rubbers. 80% of them like condoms. They're doing like the 1960s shit here. Like or were coerced into using? No, that's what I'm saying. Listen, this is a free country. These women can make a choice for themselves i respect their choice but like 80 of them are using bags i was expecting to see like you know 35 40

percent got an iud going on or something i don't even fucking see that on here uh it is it might be dated no i don't know it is wikipedia you never know. But yeah, anyway, back to the Swedes. I'm sorry. Oh, I was going to say, Japan would have gone through this with or without that. There's a number of factors that lead into having fewer kids. Who's got the most, what do they call them, centurions? People that live past 100. What country's got the most of them in the world?

Oh, Japan does, right? What was the science behind that again oh there's a here's what we're learning right all these new fields like stomach health you know you hear the word holistic thrown around a lot of systems thinking really what that means is we're kind of entering a more complex era where issues can be solved that weren't a plus b equals c like we don't need to be so linear about our problem solving anymore we now have we now have wikipedia we now have ai we now have the world at our fingertips right we can solve a lot tougher and a higher level of challenges than we were previously able to. So that, that goes right back to this same, same kind of thing.

I mean, I don't know, are you referring to, if I could translate that just, and I may be making a stretch here, so correct me if I'm wrong, but are you talking about how it's almost like we went circle of life on this with, say, the approach to health and medicine because we got into the 20th century where now we started to create products to be able to investigate and attack certain things, viruses, stuff like that, heal or treat ongoing issues. And now that the world has access to those things, most of which are very, very good. Obviously, we pay attention to all the negative ones, but there's a lot of stuff that's incredible about medicine that's allowed us to get the numbers that we do.

But now we have all that that and because of the society and the progress that we live in in countries around the world that are fortunate enough to to be on a similar wavelength we now have things like a lot of people living even longer than they did even if they were always a healthy population now instead of 70 100 ago, they're living to 100. So are you saying that like the things that those people do, living in the same world that we live in, is leading to people to say, okay, I'm kind of – they're not saying this. But let's take for granted the fact that we have all this great medicine. For granted is the wrong way to put that, but you understand what I mean for the sake of argument. Like we have that cool now let's real let's see if we can like gamify it and avoid using all that and do things completely naturally because we live in a world where we have a lot of the like we can talk about the pluto fucking proteins which is not a real thing but you know

what i mean like all they try glycerides and shit like that that you can literally break down mathematically like you were saying like solve a problem to be able to to optimize your body over time to prevent health problems from arising is that what you're trying to say kind of yeah i'm basically saying that our level one, like our ability to solve one plus one equals two, but that level of health problem, right? You know, don't poop in the water and drink the contaminated water. Right. We're still battling that globally. That is still the leading cause of death for infants and children on earth to this very day. That is still number one, which is insane. Not when you think about it. To this very day, that is still number one, which is insane. And it's a major problem. Not when you think about it.

Well, yeah, right? But I'm saying in these countries where we are living to past 70, where we have robust healthcare systems, I'm not saying that ours is without many, many issues. But we still have a very, very strong, innovative field. We're still leading a lot of cutting-edge science in the health and wellness fields. I'm saying we've solved a lot of the simple problems. Now we are moving on to these more complex issues, like I have not the greatest gut,

and I have some issues with high fatty foods. If stress or anxiety is bad and i don't eat well you know and i drink alcohol this thing is done back in the day that was a treat treat the symptom you know just take one thing for that today we're saying whoa you know oh the gut is the second brain and it's got a lot of the immune system there and a lot of the nervous system there. And there are 25 different factors that all contribute to the instantaneous health and well-being of that organ system. You know, back in the day, if there was more than one or two, throw some leeches on them, bleed them. I don't know, you know, throw some smoke around them,

chant something, right? We didn't have solutions for everything. So we attributed those things to mysticism, to stories. Today, we've answered a lot of the simple questions. Now we've moved on to level two. I get it now. So now we're looking at things that have a complex system contributing to a complex system. And it's, I hate to say the very overused but it's a

lot of systems thinking it's a lot of um it's a lot of complicated math too so if if i could break this down into three generations so to speak three eras of our approach to health era one was the identification era someone gets a weird flu they want to figure out why they got it oh did i let someone cough on me oh shit let's not do that oh sorry we lost jimmy he died right because we don't have the things to to attack it yet right they were identifying it through the identification they start into era two, where now they formulate things that can attack these things, be it cancer, be it flus, be it whatever, ailments, afflictions, broken bones, whatever it is. Era three now is to prevent error. So now we have, I mean, you're always finding some new rare thing to come up, but we have a litany of the problems identified we have all

kinds of potential solutions we can use to attack them and now we can do things to prevent them from happening in the first place yes but in addition to that on the problem side we are now also identifying more complex problems problems where before we would throw our hands up and again i'm not a healthcare expert by any means or in the medical field for that matter. But our problem solving ability has greatly elevated as a to clean water. I mean, the genie's out of the bottle now. So now we have essentially fully unleashed the human mind to connect with other human minds and do something with it, right? Share knowledge, stand on the shoulders of giants together, solve more complex issues. This one, like my stomach thing, a lot of people our age have stomach problems.

They don't know what it is. They're not really diagnosed with, you know, I don't have a dairy intolerance or anything. I don't have all this, you know, a doctor that would look at all the systems contributing to that, you know, mental health, everything contributing to the health of the gut would say, hey, you got to manage eight to ten factors if you want to feel good. You can't just cut out dairy. It's not going to do it for you. I'm just saying that in addition to that piece, right, where we've moved to prevent and that's leading to to our us living longer we also moving to harder to solve problems um we're also moving beyond just the elementary level of one plus one equals two you know reverse solve that two minus one equals what now we're doing differential equations and crazy calculus and stuff instead of just linear uh you know linear

math linear algebra how i'm curious like how you think of these things because you're a very very observing guy that's that's clear you're you're somebody who you're walking into a room and getting used to your surroundings and figuring out why things are in a genuinely curious way and like with the best intentions but also being a guy who who travels to so many different places and see so many different things you're seeing i would imagine all different types of countries from poor to rich or middle of the spectrum whatever it may be do you the way you're talking right now i don't know if i can put this in words right but like the way you're talking right now about this approach to problem solving and stuff like that do you

naturally see places where you you kind of leave and you feel like oh they get it while also seeing places where you're like oh they're so fucked because they don't you know their environment is not it's not breeding an encouragement to think that way yeah or a platform or i don't even i don't even want to say the word safe space but yeah but a um yeah it's not conducive to problem solving or to nurturing minds or let's say for what it is, nurturing curiosity. Right. Right? Like, you know, I try to be an observant person. I need to be a better listener.

I definitely like to have my back at the wall at the restaurant just so the whole playing field's in front of me. Yes, I leave different places and sometimes you're like, oh my gosh, these challenges are going to be very hard to solve. Other times you almost break your chest because you're beating it so hard because they see the problem seems so solvable. The, the waste crises of a, uh, of, um, a favela in Brazil, they can be solved easier than we think. It's not as hard as we think. When you break things down to first principles and think, what are we doing? What could we be doing? How do we limit human suffering? Sometimes it's not that difficult. I would say this though, it's not so easy to paint country by country, city by city. It's really all the way down to the level of individuals now.

So there are people, there are minds in all kinds of different settings around the world that are doing their best to stay as in tune and as up to date with some of the leading arguments and leading fields of knowledge as they're unfolding. There are minds that are staying right up to date with that in, you know, rural parts of India, I'm sure, through this, through these things, right? We've truly unleashed the human mind in our lifetime. Like, this has happened in just the last few years. This is not something we've done before.

We don't know what the heck we're doing, right? We've never gone through a demographic transition globally. We've never had a country with more than 100 living people over 100 years old. I think there are over 1,000 now or 10,000, something like that, something crazy. It's crazy to be able to watch a video from Greece and identify with all the people there even if you've never been there before. No, I have. That was a poor example. But let's say from Germany or something. Greece and identify with all the people there even if you've never been there before now I have that was a poor example but let's say from Germany yeah and there's a place I've ever been it's crazy to see the reach you have you can go online right now and go to a random chat room and talk with

someone anywhere yeah minus countries that literally don't have the internet or most people don't yeah the access is insane but we even take it for granted on that part of it because let's look at it on a more micro scale and how insane it still is part of the reason we have such a problem online with opposites forming and getting stronger is because the opposites have a place to find themselves now find each other find the opposite find the other person that they can fight with that gives them meaning so you know 20 years ago the fucking dude in iowa and the kid in in new york they had no way of seeing each other or interacting or knowing what each other's reality

was and they didn't care and they got along with life they had a good time you know they they probably did a lot of the same things i'm sure they had differing opinions and views that's natural but like it didn't fucking matter fast forward to now well now that's that's not the case now you have people who essentially they they think they know everything about the other. They can go pick a fight from behind a keyboard at any time. They want to tell the other person how to live. I mean it scares the shit out of me when I get a CIA spy in here who was undercover in serious places. He's done some serious shit, and he says a lot of shit, some stuff that I certainly disagree with, that people out there will disagree with.

But this is a galaxy brain of a human being who doesn't see the world how he wants to see it. He sees it how it is. Like, yeah, in case you've never really boiled it down, it's not just that politics are extreme. It's that the two sides literally don't want the other to exist. That is because they can go find them. That is because of this access. shift happening globally for the first time. The words new normal have always been the two most dangerous words ever spoken because we then try to make assumptions like, oh, well, this is just how things are going to be. In reality, human beings come back to the traits that we always do that are both good and bad. However, from a standpoint of the reach of those given traits on a massive scale fuck yeah we are in a new normal we have never had a world that that lets you that lets you have this access and like i mean if you really want to think of it the most simple way and it's also the saddest way too these same people fighting online if they were

like if they got in a in a car crash on the side of the road the average one of them the other who they hate would come and fucking help them and they would help them with the with the they would help the other with the shoe on the other foot and yet even when those types of situations happen people leave the scene of the accident everyone's okay and they go right back to doing it fuck you die tweet because we separated them from their humanity yes uh when you put people you've just brought up a beautiful point when you put them in that car wreck scenario or hell a coffee shop scenario or a debate stage even you know you, that one gets a little crazy sometimes. But the better humanity comes out.

I believe the better humanity will win. I believe that we don't really have a choice. I agree with you. Go ahead. It's not that we don't make it work. And I don't think that's an option. Failure is not an option when it comes to our civilization. So we need to figure a lot of this stuff out. We have to lean into the better

parts of our humanity. That doesn't mean, hey, don't do a mean tweet. Do it if you're pissed off. I don't care. But when you're hanging out with your friends, this goes to everybody or your family. And we know we're all imperfect beings. We know we all have our own problems. We know everyone's got their shit. We all do. To think that you're gonna have some life where you're all good and there is no bad, there is no shadow self... Wouldn't be fun.

One, it would be boring as hell. Two, that shadow self, that is the battle that if we win internally, collectively, we will dominate externally. We have to win internally. Each one of us, each individual in the world has to understand that the light and the dark, the good and the bad, whatever you want to call it, whatever, you know, monotheistic religion labels you might want to put on that

to make it match your worldview, your upbringing, your story that your family or your friends also share, whatever you need to call it, understand that both of those things exist in your mind. And if we don't find our better humanity, both as individuals, but also as close relationships, right? With our friends and family, we need to lean into what's good in each other and bring that out and help each other squash what's bad. If we can just do that with the closest two people in each of our lives, we will build a clean economy. We will figure out this Europe energy crisis that's coming this winter. We will figure out a zero carbon economy. We'll figure all that stuff out. It just starts with leaning into the better parts of our humanity and by bringing out the best parts

of it in each other. And that's not a task of hey you know you know julian go bring it out for the world bring it out for your your two closest homies just do that just say hey man i noticed this stuff yeah i noticed you're going through all this i notice you know you have this too i love this part of you that that's the that's the one we want to bring out like what can we do to support that And then what can we do to talk through this other part over here? If we could all just do that, we're good. I agree. I just, I worry about how possible that is in the short term without conflict.

It's just, look, and that's, but you know what i'm talking about with that and i hate this i fucking hate this conversation the people who i'll tell you this the people who are fighting on twitter from the right and the left are the exact people who don't think about this because they trust me when i tell you those motherfuckers 99 of them they don't want the smoke at all when it comes to war when it comes to like actual real problems and i talk about those the reason i say i hate having this conversation is because i can't stand even the idea of being like oh my god there's gonna be an inevitable war of something but just unfortunately you have to look at the patterns of human beings and we are now in the fourth generation post-mass war. There was a draft. And it was also not a good war, right? But it was a war we don't like to remember because we didn't exactly win. What were we really fighting for?

Like, yes, we were fighting against communism, but like what else was going on there, right? It's not – we don't think about them the way we think of the Nazi enemies and the Japanese enemies and everything. So, you know, if you think past just that, well, that brings you to Desert Storm, which was two days, brings you to Iraq, which was an awful war and everything. But again, not a draft. It's people who chose to be over there we are removed from it we don't live in a world like the israelis live where they have to they're is it called conscripted is that the term conscription yeah i think if i got that wrong sorry but like they're forced to do whatever it is two or three years in the military when they come of age it's like well we don't have an appreciation for that because we've never had to do it it's a choice yeah it's all a choice i mean how switzerland

does some stuff like that i sweden at least did for a long time i think all my cousins have gone through military training uh male female men women wow yeah um and that mind you that's sweden the country we think is usually so neutral they don't even have a slingshot. No, they actually have special forces and have worked with us on several different... Isn't that Switzerland, though, that we think of that? Neutral? We think both. We do?

Because both were-ish. Switzerland, not so much in World War II. Sweden was because both sides couldn't afford to cut off the iron ore supply chain. Well, the Swiss bankers weren't neutral in World War II. Exactly. And nor were the Swedes. If you really look at it, their iron went into both sides. So I guess you can call that neutral, but it's not neutral from the fact of not participating.

Yeah. It's kind of like being on both sides, which... But still, imagine like technically not being in the fighting over there. You're in the middle. Forget the World War. That was where the battlefield was. How insane... They both deserve credit for that.

There were bad actors in both, but... I agree. I guess it's credit. Is it? I think it's credit i i was gonna say in sweden's i mean granted switzerland's down there landlocked with these countries right so they probably had banners in the streets and this and that and um you know armies rolling through to go over to france or whatever um granted you're in the mountains maybe not there

particularly but yeah sweden was never occupied by germany i do say credit it's that epitomizes that country they found a way to be liked just enough by both sides where both sides were and don't fuck with them yeah well and that's that's where the question becomes because it's you know you also brought up something earlier that's a topic. I don't know if the word is like but it's something good to talk about because it makes you think for sure and it's the concept of good versus bad. Now, the reason I think of that right now is because, yeah, like a thousand times out of a thousand, I feel really good about the fact that oh we were so net good in world war ii comparatively speaking right like and and even if even if you want to play cynic and say well we did a lot of shit too fine they were that bad though like the nazis were that bad and

we forget about this shit happening in japan too but like let's focus on the Nazis for a second Hitler was that bad and then you remember that like well good and bad is just a perspective so what can you really say I Struggle with that with the most extreme examples though because good and bad at the heart of it mine before you get in the middle Of borders and countries and religions and all the shit that we create as man which is at the middle of all this stuff before you get into that you still have man and man woman and woman and just like i said in another example earlier you tell me not to kill good idea yeah that's that makes sense to me like you shouldn't do that and here you have a regime that systematically executed i think that what

was the total number like 11 million in total they they murdered six million jewish people or yeah yeah yeah six million was the number that was thrown around for a lot of our lifetime for the jewish part of it yeah exactly and then there was also all these other people like they were anything they didn't like they were other exactly. Exactly. Us, them. See, that's bad. Us and them is always bad, no matter what. Even if it's, I was going to count on you this, right? Even if it's for the American side, right? Isn't creating an us and them just inherently going to get us apart and away from our humanity?

If there are them in the ditch when their caravan crashes and pulls over, there are them. If they're just a person like us, you're going to get out and help them. I don't care where you sit politically or where that caravan came from, right? Like, you're probably going to help them as long as they don't turn around and aim a rifle at your forehead. Fine, right? Us and them, always bad. Always bad. In my opinion.

I was going to challenge you, too, on the World War II point, right? Please. Why were we good and they were bad? Notice I said net good. Okay. Okay. Okay. I like that.

I like that. Because they were that – and that's what I'm saying. Like forget us for a second. Forget whether you want to label it good or bad overall. They were that bad. they were that bad they weren't you know you weren't making a mountain out of a molehill to prove your point with them they had the they had a mountain range and they had piles of dead bodies to show it. Literally mountains of bodies. There you go.

Yeah, yeah. No, no, they didn't help themselves in that case, I would say. I would say, I would try to flip it a little bit and say, I want us to look at the value set we fought for in World War II. Because we always forget about that. We didn't fight, like, what did we really win in World War II? We love to say that, right? In the States. You know, when we won World War II and this and that.

Okay, you know, did we? And what did that mean? What was the point? Do we all really believe that Germany had enough people to occupy all of the world? Where they can have one guy watching all of Texas? Good luck. With. No. No. people to occupy all of the world with they're gonna have one guy watching all of texas good luck with no no but with the ability to go demoralize and take control and get enough people again play to people's power and say oh you can be a part of us now so it's about a value set yes and that value set is the same thing that that man right there talks about when he's trying

yeah when he's yeah i should elon for those that's my job you're good yeah you're good um it's the same value set right it's it's that it's the same value set that people that want to rip our system down forget to to remember it it's that inherent belief in individualism and creativity that that there is a julian in your brain that there is an eric now that assumption might scientifically in the next 10 15 20 years have some chinks in its armor and that's okay how so we don't know if we will be able to um you know boil what's in here down to a physical single thing right it might be at its base unit it might be a minimum internet interaction of uh neural pathways that might mean i my core er Eric is 14 general feelings and memories or something that together, okay, now that blob of electrical impulses interacting, now that looks like Eric.

Okay. And then everything else, oh yeah, now that's definitely him. Whoa. You know, we got there. We don't know if we're going to be able to boil it all the way down to one single thing right um that's okay because for purposes of getting us from 1940s to today it was a damn good assumption and we still feel like that today we still feel like we have our little inner uh voice or we have um you know an individual in our mind and we have creativity and we built this whole economic system around it and this capitalist system where we bank on that innovation and creativity at the expense of being taken care of by the state so it's supposed to be a cruel system right it's supposed to be cruel you're supposed to be on the street if you if you fail i hate saying that i mean i don't want anyone to live like that but you don't get that upside to innovate a rocket ship at one tenth in order of magnitude the footprint and cost you don't get

that upside without that downside that's that is life that is there there is there it is the zero sum game of life you have there there's people that have to be on the losing side for there to be winners and that's you know maybe maybe no no i mean let me yeah let me before yeah yeah you're gonna make sure i say that right because you're i think i know what you're gonna say but like you can have things where there's just a winner and no one loses but for all of those things you are also going to have situations where they're in other ways where there is only losers and no one loses but for all of those things you are also going to have situations where they're in other ways where there is only losers and no one wins and so things even out overall across the full spectrum of society they even out and then within that yes you have a lot of like

one team wins the championship in a league at the end of the year for now apparently right you know you have the winner everyone else goes home they don't win you know so there's still that but it's it's an interesting way you put it talking about relating it to like creativity and the that expression and i'm putting words in your mouth here right now but it's almost like like when you're talking about people just kind of went with the flow after world war ii and those generations and we're like oh let's just ride this wave now we're at the part of the wave where there's enough conflict and problem where people are starting to wonder even if they don't recognize in their head are we at the last gasp of this is are we is creativity not gonna when we're reading each other's minds 20 years

from now who the fuck cares about creativity you can fucking draw something in the air perfectly that that's that's funny i like that that was a good one yeah um i would say this though i don't think we need a loser for every winner what i meant by that cruel system i just meant look when you have these big powerful states like we tried, look, when you have these big, powerful states, like we tried in communism, or when you have a lot of centralized control, well, to get to that ideal state in communism, you end up putting a lot of power and control with a few. And every time you do that, every single time you do that in human history, because that line between good and evil goes between every one of our minds. When you put people in those situations,

you're messing with their balance. That line that you might have seen them manage that evil side or that shadow self pretty well leading up to this position of power, put them in there and the whole thing changes. So, I'm just saying post-World War II, what we really fought for, value set we we sort of won was the western liberal ideals right the the individual uh beauties in the eye of the beholder

the humanist movement the modern humanist religion that they talk about that's all a product of post-world war ii uh you know western liberalism of, I'm not going to say booming and busting, but booming and flourishing and then running out to where we are right now, which you just said, kind of feels like it's a last gasp. It kind of feels like, hmm, was, you know, as Harari, that writer of Sapiens and 21st. Yes, yes. As he puts it, he says uh i think it was him yeah humans thinking stories and the western liberal story sort of united and kind of won out over fascism and communism post-world war ii and that was supposed to be it right like that was supposed to be our society that was the as he puts it and and

as they put it at the time the end of history we made it it's you know we're here now we just grow and run right off into the sunset well turns out that wasn't so so true right why is that because our baseline assumptions were probably not correct on the individual, on a number of these things. And you said it earlier. We both said it earlier. You've heard this phrase before. Hard times create strong people.

Strong people create good times. Good times create soft people. Yeah. Same kind of thing is happening right now, right? Where they have like steady generations. There's a terminology for it millennials happen to be one where it's like the crisis generation where a lot of these things talk about the fourth turning yeah maybe the millennials are the hero generation and then the heroes come of age in the crisis yes era yes and then the next generation is the revolution generation or something the next generation the generation below the millennials in this case in the the way the fourth turning

works it's a sociology book from the 1990s that is eerily eerily fucking accurate um but they went back and patterned human history over time and broke it down into what averages roughly 21, I believe it's 21 and a half year segments. And everything goes in fours. And so that means that there's four different types of generations. You have the prophets, you have the nomads, you have the heroes, and you have the artists. The prophets are children children meaning 0 to 21 years of age during the post-crisis era so think of it this way the prophets were the baby boomers who were born right after World War II the prophets will always be children right after a crisis when things are good or when things have a chance to now take a turn towards good or when you

settle on a story yes actually that's yeah that's good way I put it next is the nomads want people to think about the Gen X and their parents were the first generation that had significant rise in divorce rate it was the first time where we started to see some families to go back to what we were talking about earlier maybe have slightly fewer kids it was far enough past world war ii where some things were starting to be taken for granted and so the overall average connection parent to child parent to gen xer was not as tight as other generations after so they're the nomad they're kind of lost after that comes the heroes you could say things start to fray in the nomad generation things start to kind of

loosen up from that tight story we all had in the prophet that's a great fray is a great word i'm gonna use that that's good but yes it starts to fray next Next is the hero generation. The hero generation's parents can be the older Gen Xers or the boomers. And they will always come of age when, as I said, when the crisis is happening. So what that means is the four age brackets are 0 to 21 roughly, 21 to like 43, 44, whatever, whatever 43 44 to 64 and then above that is your twilight years they may need to add a fifth at some point here but that's the the point is whenever the hero generation is between 21 and 42 shit's hitting the fan so the last hero generation before the millennials was the greatest generation where shit was hitting the fan in world war ii now we look around now and go we're soft as fuck because in our society in the cycle of time we have created softer people because of all the

great comfort that we have won for ourselves post-world war i. So we talk about, ironically, the hero generation of millennials. I think part of the reason we see Gen Z so heavy in a lot of good things, and then like some, to put a term on it that I don't want people to take fully out of context, like a lot of activism and stuff like that that's not normal that's not normal for that generation gen z is supposed to be the artists the artists are children during the crisis that you know who the last artists were the kids being raised during the fucking great depression and the world war right so they're used to the darkness like my grandparents are still around they are children of the great depression the world war they still they're not missing any meals but they'll still look oh

is that orange 25 cents or 30 cents right well i don't know who's getting oranges for 30 cents but you get the point yeah yeah like that's what they know this generation gen z is growing up like they were born into the financial crisis the the fucking joke war in iraq the the false war in iraq i should say it's not a joke the 2010s of just political unrest and and just the wealth gap going like that like a v after the crisis fucking coronavirus you know whatever's happening right now where the things are supposed to come to a head by like 2025, 2026. I don't know what that is. I hope they're wrong about that.

Like they're growing up in this, but they have like a lot of that leadership gene. I think that's because there is a lot of that gene missing from millennials. I think millennials want to listen to directions and give directions more than any other generation ever. Okay. I would agree with you on that. I think though, you said there was a word you said in there about a minute and a half ago. Comfort. Yeah. Comfort is, it's how we forget our story. When we're comfortable, we forget that a hundred years ago, Great Britain, Spain, Germany, Sweden, the US, all of these places were like truly developing.

I mean, we didn't have easy access to energy. We didn't have great easy lives. I mean, people did die young. We forget that. We're so easily removed from the story that is ours through comfort that we forget our core values. And when we do that, which I think what you're saying, the millennial generation has definitely forgotten a lot of them, that fray turns into just a full-on rip, right? That turns into, it's not together anymore. And so I definitely agree with you.

I think millennials have, we have our work cut out for us, man. If we don't show Gen Z that there is a way to be America, to be a liberal Western democracy in a modern time with biotech with infotech all these things coming together with through the singularity through ai through all this stuff if we don't show them that there is a way to be us and build a sustainable economy you know and do clean energy if we don't show them that then i don't blame them for being that revolution generation you know i don't blame them for bucking the story altogether we're not doing a good job translating our this is like a four by four and we're the third leg don't screw it up millennials like we need to get this story right we need to

get gen z inspired we need them to realize we can be free we can be an individual respecting society that is capitalistic in nature, that has that crazy innovative upside that Elon taps into and still has some place, this crazy idea experiment called America, where we can still create the future they want. We don't have to rip the system down. Look how far EVs have come in a few years. Look how far a lot of things have come in just a short time, we talked earlier before getting on about how these windows have really aligned for the movement I'm working in, sustainable development, where. It's just, hey, do you want to win? Do you want to bring prosperity to your people, your family, yourself, your country, your communities? And do you want a cleaner world? I think most people would say yes to all those things. And do you like winning?

That's the other one. Because we can do that, too. It doesn't need to be a choice. It's not one or the other. It's actually all of the above. We need to have more of these win, win, win, win, wins. And I say that in the context of talking about zero sum and win-lose, I think macro, on the macro level, we don't have to have win-lose. We can create win-wins where we create a virtuous cycle versus a vicious cycle um that said we have to do a good job with the story we have to get gen z inspired we have to get them on board um you know everyone talks about the young people in the future and they always looked at us saying that right well now it's not us like no no it's not us anymore i feel like we have no i i feel like that horse

has left the barn though with millennials. Millennials are, they're grown up now and they kind of are what they are. It's like, and I'm talking about my own generation. It's not to say things can't change. Crisis changes things for sure. But there are inherent traits that we have that say the greatest generation didn't. And I don't mean that in a good way the greatest generation was was in their coming of age movement before they went and fought that damn war

they were fighting for survival at home because when they were 15 20 25 everything they lost everything they had nothing they had to figure out where the fuck to eat. You know, as bad as 08 was, and it was bad, and it was this close to being literally worse than the Great Depression. Thank God it wasn't. But people had enough, there was enough of a backstop in this country, even for people who then have been fucked since then that they still have a roof over their head they may be in debt up to their eyeballs but they still have a roof over their head they still have food they still may even

have a job that's where the guys in the 1930s and younger people i'm talking about here especially who became that great generation they couldn't say that so like you know to go to the gen z thing we talk about the activism maybe being like a form of the leadership and and the heroic quality which is which the millennials are supposed to have but gen z kind of leads away with that one devil's advocate i'd give against myself to that is that artists the reason they're called that is because their generation tends to be tends to be the most artistically creative as well because what's the great paradox of life great art comes from great torture and so they take their bad experiences and they become unbelievable artists and when you look at gen z perhaps that is happening through the mediums of

like fucking tiktok and shit i say no i say that's happening for millennials too you say we're already out there we're already set our clay hasn't dried yet we're we're still being molded i mean granted you and i are the youngest leg of what they would consider millennials so maybe maybe you're more right than i than i'm thinking right now um but we only need one percent would you not agree that probably one percent of millennials out there do have curious minds do respect individualism do love america and the values it brings but also agree with a lot of these more social uh i mean i think millennials just haven't found their mark yet i'm gonna push back

and say it needs to be more than one percent 1% is wishful thinking. I hear you. However, where I'm going to agree with your point, 15% of Soviet society took down the Soviet Union. So it may not be 1%. But to your point, no, it doesn't have to be 50%. And so that could be fair. Maybe I'm a little biased just because, you know, in a way, I'm a big kid. I'm always going to be that. You know, I don't really – I just never – there's parts of me that are very mature and there's parts of me that are very immature. And that's just kind of what it is.

I don't think girls like that, by the way. Yeah, I know. Sometimes they don't. But, you know, I think you got to find the right one but still like there's still like when you when you use that example of like molding the clay i constantly feel that way not always for the right reasons either just like holy shit i'm a blank slate whereas and i may be biased here but holy, do I know a lot of people in their late 20s who feel like they're 80 to me?

Maybe not 80, but they feel like they're 60. And it's like, they don't think like that. I notice because I have conversations with them. And that's sad. That makes me sad because they're choosing to dim their light early in life. Yeah. They could stay open-minded. They could keep that childlike mentality, that curiosity that wonder of the world those asking the big questions

Why are we here? How do we get here? What does this mean all this stuff? That makes me sad to hear that there are minds turned off But guess what? There are always minds that want to tap out. Yes, that's true. They oh and you know what? Okay I hear you. I love you. So I love people. I have many friends and family that are like, screw this, I'm out. My head's going in the sand right over here. You guys debate it out, hash it out, figure it out. Tell me what the future looks like.

I'll be over here. Yeah, there's always going to be a lot of people like that. I hear that. And that's okay. We have to carry them on our backs. They have to be represented by us somewhere out in this proverbial battlefield of ideals and values.

I think the millennial generation, yeah, we're definitely out there in front of Gen Z. Hopefully Gen Z comes up with some cool shit to preserve this cool train we have going of freedom and Western liberalism and these values that respect our ability to be individuals. So when we were talking about sharing knowledge earlier and all that stuff, and the guy in Iowa and the dude in New York, what is that really? That's freedom. What does North Korea try to control? People's ability to do that, to ask questions, to wonder things. They control vocabulary so you don't even know how to worry or sorry how to wonder about some things

but we are allowed to just talk to whoever do whatever search whatever hear whatever watch whatever i mean that's insane like that is so cool you know whoever wanted to control the world really fucked up when they let us out of the bag out west. They did fuck up on that. I'm with you there. They didn't see that one coming. No, they didn't. And now it's out.

And our job is to try to steer it. I would say that people think it looks doom and gloom and all this stuff. I think we look better than ever in many regards. We really do. I mean, we are smarter on average than the world has ever been. And we don't feel like that. We feel like we're just completely overrun with information and data and all this stuff. And we're watching the wrong things and we're listening to the wrong stuff.

Sure, that's happening too. Because remember, with with every upside with that freedom comes the downsides. But it also means that somewhere out there, there is an army of 20, what are we? Seven, eight, 28 to 44 year olds, millennials that are running forward in a front line. And yeah, maybe half of them will turn their lights off and give up and just write it out sure what was that thing you said a couple minutes ago just you reminded me of that where you said turn the lights off you said creativity questions curiosity wondering no after that but that that was that was it was on the same wavelength because you were saying something like along the lines of i'm sad to see their light dimming and then you explained why

that's happening and i can't i didn't listen to the rest of what you said i forgot what it was so i can't remember it but like i remember the the implication of that that i wanted to point out just to see if you saw a pattern here is that what you were talking about is whatever it was and i'm sorry if this is very confusing for people because i can't remember the exact thing but it was essentially saying that millennials are carrying out the duty of expressing their sadness through their own personal humanity art form if you will as opposed to being the quote-unquote heroes that they're supposed to be by example here you had the artists who were the kids growing up in the great depression world war ii they didn't go fight that war

they they didn't have to have jobs well actually maybe they did but they weren't the breadwinner when that shit was going down whereas the heroes were starting to bring bread home or they were right about to do that when the depression hit and then they're fucking shooting people on the beach in normandy in world war ii so they my point is they took it and fueled fueled that ability to survive and fight for something bigger the millennials are too many of us are letting our lights dim and packing up our shit and fucking going home and i'm not speaking for myself here and i'm not speaking for you and a lot of others but there are a lot there always are going to be many who do that but it seems to be excessive and maybe it's meant to seem that way

i don't know maybe but i would say that the millennial generation remember we're boiling down to very very simple mental models here and stories about hero generation artist generation we need to be that hero generation we need to show gen z that there is a way for a country with the ideals and the freedoms that we have here and across the west that we have there's a way for that to exist and value individualism and for that very individualism to foster the creativity that is required to come up with the solutions that we need to collectively get through this climate crisis, get through our $8 billion to whatever it's going to end up being, $10 or $11 billion, to get through all those challenges. We're not going to be able to solve the problems if we don't foster the individualism and creativity necessary to come up with the solutions.

And so our job is to be that hero generation. We don't need to be the artists. Let the Gen Z be the artists. Let them come up with the crazy biotech that takes genes out of nature and allows us to become multi-planetary. You know, let them. We're going to need them to come up with some really cool climate solutions. We're going to need them to come up with some insane, you know, space and time travel stuff. Who knows what they're going to do?

I don't know. It's going to be awesome. It's going to be beautiful. Can't wait to see it. I'm excited for what they're going to come up with. What we need to do first is knock that first wave down, kill the old school of thought that it's one or the other. Kill this us versus them thing. Kill this, you know, this, hell, I mean, the two-party system would be great to see go to.

Oh, my God. All of that. Anything that's one or the other. All these simple stories that need to be left in the 20th century and the more complex, connected, conscious sort of level of problem solving, we need to usher in as a millennial generation. We need to lay down and be a bridge by which Gen Z walks across and says, yeah, we're not afraid to buck trends and change systems that some of you older generations said would be here forever. You know why we're not afraid? Because those millennials, those guys in their 20s, 30ss and 40s showed us that they didn't give a damn they won't they saw a problem they saw a better way of doing things

they did they did it right they fixed that problem we need to show them that we can do that as a generation so that they can be those artists so that they can come up with all these solutions that we can't even fathom today so So I think we're doing an okay job. And I say, okay, I'm not saying it's bad, bad, definitely not saying it's good as a millennial generation, but we don't have a story. We need a story. We don't have a rally cry. We don't have a battle cry, right? Like we don't have that. We used to have that. We used to be able to control it through, what, four channels on all of national television nationwide. Sounds so crazy. Yeah, everyone tunes in at the same time and dials it in.

That wasn't propaganda. Yeah, right, right. But it used to be easy to spoon feed these narratives. And so it was controlled. It was all good. You knew that, oh, yeah, we have two factions. But, hey, they're all over here in this circle. Now, it's everywhere. So we need to fight over information, overload, as Harari says, with clarity, which means we need good storytelling. We need to be leaders for Gen Z. We need to be leaders so that they can come in and just kick ass and take names. Yeah, see, you're talking about that need for solutions and the need to lead the way and be the leader for Gen Z. And I hear the language behind that is from a positive standpoint of just trying to be the older brother for what's right below us and everything. But you're also still using.

Words like. We need a battle cry. We need something to rally around. I think is exactly what you said. Maybe like a minute or two ago. And it goes right back to that. Awful conversation. That I hate having.

But that I got to bring up. Once again here, which is that it's coded language, and you don't mean it this way. Like, it's the intention isn't there, but it's coded language for we need that crisis, i.e. we need that war, we need the enemy. And I will say this.

In my second podcast with Andrew Bustamante, the CIA guy, he said a lot of shit in there. I still haven't made a clip from that episode, but we're going to get that moving, I think, because there was a lot in there. But people were bringing up this point and that point, be it in DMs or in the comments or whatever. And they were – the fans were hitting it across the spectrum as far as things to to argue with or be like oh wow interesting point whatever there's one thing that to my knowledge i haven't seen anyone say maybe i missed a comment somewhere but i don't think so and i actually thought it was subtly perhaps the most stunningly open and showing the hand in what is not necessarily a good way of what the thought process is here in maybe intelligence leadership and and guys like him where he said and i quote

we need an enemy we need someone to rally around and when he first said it i thought he was we had been talking about domestic politics i'm like oh you mean like within like you know something to fight against which would be a negative connotation of course it was like no no like we need here to all rally around something that's not because we're all divided over shit and we need something to kick us into shape. Like, people always cite the September 11th example. Suddenly everyone was a fan of George W. Bush. That was like nine months after the most contested election ever.

Right? Because buildings went down, people died, we went on a war footing, and suddenly, oh, God bless fucking America. And that's great, by the way. I think I wish we had that but guys like andy are are literally exactly like you don't wish to get the thing that caused it you wish to get the thing afterwards the effect like people loved september 12th 2001 as far as like what it did for for yes

but they hated the day that caused it and they hated the feelings they had on September 12th because of what they had just seen. So you want the cake, but you don't want to have to bake it. And's filling in for that generational leadership rage. And I'm going to call it that, that you're talking about here. And you're obviously a very controlled, not rageful guy, but I'm saying like, there is a, there is that, that need for the action because biology of human genetics and domain and being passed down over generations, it is wired in our, into our patterns that this is the generation where certain people are going to get in touch with that inner thing because it's supposed to be happening. And so I don't want to see that, but I also live in a world where, you know, I strive for simplicity on everything. I strive for it in design and I respect the designers who do it the best. Steve Jobs and Elon Musk. Elon Musk has a Tesla that basically is like a zoop of a fucking of a shape. It's got

one computer screen in the middle. It's just a beautiful, simple, but complex, but simply designed thing. Steve Jobs created an infinity pool in your hand, right? Where everyone else uses a hundred words, these guys use two. We strive for that because we inherently i think realize that the world is insufferably complex and it's never going to get better so in the things we get to enjoy art and convenience we're going to make it simple but in the actual battles of humanity the battle royales that you're talking about the andy busamante is talking about we're never going to get that the human interfaces we like to create simple stories harari writes the same thing humans thinking stories the simpler the story the better yeah the more people get it um so those are the

the interfaces right the user experiences these guys uh jobs in musk have uh really put a lot of time and focus on mastering right um bustamante is right. We do need an enemy. We absolutely need an enemy. We're humans. We are still, regardless of how collectively wise we've become, regardless of the fact that we can have amateur scientists with a thatched roof over their heads, stand on the shoulders of, you know, physicist giants in the last 150 years and be technically more knowledgeable than any one of them on a 1v1 basis the fact that that is where we are today does not mean we don't that we've you know somehow surpassed the human jelly sacks we live in we're still humans we are dealing with 21st century hell you know jetson type problems now and and uh black mirror type

technology now but we're still savannah sapiens you know we're still we're still biological we're we're we have one foot in this infotech computer world of connectivity and collective conscious and one foot in this grab a spear and hit the closest guy next to you that you don't like. We have one foot in both camps. So Bustamante is right. If we want to be successful in one, we need to acknowledge the limitations of the other, of our biological self.

So you're damn right we need an enemy. But why does it have to be someone else in this world that is also a human? Why can't it be our emissions? Why can't it be our waste? why can't it be our emissions why can't it be our waste why can't it be shit why can't it be something that levels and raises all of humanity why does it need to be them oh my god you just took a that was a beautiful turn i did not see that coming despite your background i was not thinking that I was expecting you to be like China or like something next

I mean that's a close no I'm just kidding no that's a real conversation though but I'm saying like you know you look at the Russians you look at the Chinas like it's very obvious you see fascism you see communism not good okay they make sense but like you don't want to have to cause something but what you're talking about is upping the

upping the ingenuity of humanity to unite against an inanimate, an unliving enemy, but a killing one. All of our enemies are inanimate and are not real. They're not the guys holding the gun. There are stories about German soldiers and French soldiers sharing cigarettes on their bridge. Oh, sure. Yeah. That's true. What were the enemies in World War II? What were the enemies on one battle line?

You got France on one side and Britain. And you have, let's say, Germany on the other side. Any war. Pick any war in your head. What were the two factions fighting? Were they real or were they inanimate? Go. I know what you're getting at, and I actually think you're probably – you're definitely more right than wrong.

The people who were on the front lines may have been rabid dogs, some of them driven into actually believing in it at this point, but they didn't start there. They – on either side side in this case technically just to keep the the example obvious or balanced i should say but the the real enemies that you're looking for i think you tell me if i'm right or wrong are the bankers that finance the people that wanted to do this to be able to get their hands on a little more land and a little more power and a little more money than they had previously. Yes. Or to prevent someone from taking it from them.

Sure. And on paper also. Remember, it was these value sets we were fighting for behind the scenes. Thank God. Ours won. World War II at least. But there were countries, right? It was the U.S. versus Japan.

All right. Harari writes about this too. I think it's him. A country is not a real thing. there were countries right it was the u.s versus japan all right harari writes about this too i think it's him um a country is not a real thing a company is not a real thing it's simply it exists only in our minds there is no exxon mobil out in the world you can't go touch exxon mobil and poke it in the belly and make it laugh or giggle meaning it's not a living thing yeah well it's not even real at all it's just in our heads it's a way it's a mental constructiggle. Meaning it's not a living thing. Yeah. Well, it's not even real at all. It's just in our heads. It's a way, it's a mental construct as a way,

it's a battle cry, right? It's a way to organize however many employees they have. Let's say they have 50,000. I don't know how many they have. It's a way to organize 50,000 minds around a common goal. That's all it is. Same thing with these countries, right? When we have the US versus China, right? Or we have, you know, the U.S. versus China, right?

Or the USSR in the instance of the Cold War. Those are inanimate things. Those are non-existing entities that cannot suffer. The United States can't suffer. The people in the United States could suffer because those are real living things. Right. The United States is just an idea. Same with the USSR.

Now, there is a value set that that idea represents. So I'm not saying all these wars were for nothing, right? There were value sets that really allowed us this free conversation we're having right now. If liberalism doesn't win out, we're probably not talking right now, right? No. But I just mean it like that right so we're already every war we've ever fought was always even if you get a mad dog deranged guy on the front lines he's doing it for an an inanimate god i can't talk an inanimate idea behind him it could be his nation it could be his platoon it could be his uh you know whoever

right that i that idea has meaning yeah it formula i think what needs to be said is that for a subset of those people again not all of them it gets to a point where that idea has a larger than life meaning that is beyond just who they are and they actually get to that point even with the worst thing like nazism for sure and and that's the whole idea here is right how do you how do you go from ideas and in a human's mind to reality and in their actions um and so we can make that same vessel happen but for an enemy that is a 21st century enemy, like our carbon emissions or our waste. Anywhere there's waste. Waste is like a silly concept.

Why would we ever have waste? Just the word waste shouldn't exist. If I were, you know. It is called that. It's not trash. You're right. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, if I were, I i mean waste is a more general way to say for for everything right that's we'll get into it later but that's what that that means that's entropy on your cup yeah oh you know what someone else wrote that one time i think no way yeah you know a while ago uh this is the second law of thermodynamics it's basically saying that at any given time i it's my favorite one yeah um if were to get a tattoo, it would be something like about entropy, order, and chaos. I think Bill Fancy talked about it. I don't know if he wrote it on his cup, but he talked about it in episode 21. That's what it was.

Okay. You know the number. There you go. Photographic memory. There you go. But please explain this again. Well, essentially, I'm just saying that all we're trying to do, I'll bring it back. We'll talk about that in a minute. But bringing it back to this whole idea of war and enemy, Bustamante is right. We do need an enemy. We just need to pick that enemy wisely. Choose wisely. and pull ourselves back into the 20th century, right? And make it a nation state that is full of people

that are real, that will suffer. You know, that's one choice. That's one route. We can take that road if we want to. You know, I'm not going to claim I know the right answer in all this. But if we really want to see what this next generation of artists can do

to create these proverbial weapons and solutions to our problems, to beat our enemy let's empower them one and two let's pick the right enemy you know so my only like pushback there is that and i'm just thinking of this now so maybe this doesn't make sense again i'm getting a little dreary at this point but what's the term for like asbestos and stuff like that that hurts the environment where you dump it in uh just like environmental toxic yeah like biohazard stuff like that hurts the environment as well it's a very very complex conversation all right well without getting complex just pretend it's as simple as I want my mind to make it right now.

We can all say dumping asbestos is bad. Okay? Biological or environmental disruption, bad. Yes. Okay. So let's say that that had even way bigger implications than what it actually does for, like, the sustainability of the planet. Again, I'm making shit up here right now. Does it get bigger?

Don't take me too far down the road point being if we declared war on asbestos and made that the enemy well how do you not make in this case like russia and china the enemy too because there if it's the same argument like he made it in a very dumb way, extremely dumb way. But when Herschel Walker was getting all the shit on the campaign trail for talking about like where the wind blows, whatever the fuck. I watched it like four times. It was hilarious. But it made absolutely no sense what he said. However, he does have the point he should have been making that is fair is that well we're trying to lead the way on certain things okay that could be good i mean that's what i think but how much do we

really get done if china just dumps around and does whatever the fuck they want like if we're like oh look at us we're helping the planet over here well guess what we're only one piece of the planet if the other big fucking slab of the planet, Russia, China, is doing all this shit to harm the ozone layer, how much effect do our deals have other than just being a virtue signal because they don't actually bring about the change? Meaning if we declared war on whatever those things are, insert blank here, fill blank here of environmental problems, but other countries don't also declare the same war how do we not declare war on them maybe you have to but if you don't act first and say that i'm on this side on the virtuous cycle side versus versus the vicious cycle side like if you don't take the

right step forward to start with then what you're on their side too right i i don't think a bad actor somewhere excuses inaction here we are in my opinion still the greatest country on the earth to live in right and to to create in to start things in to take risks in to fail to try again We still have a lot of that. We really do. Why would we ever take shotgun or backseat to anybody on this stuff? When I hear people talk about renewable energy or EVs or all this stuff and go, oh, you know, we don't like that. We hate that, you know, fossil fuels or vice versa. You know, we hate gas plants and this and that it's like it's not one or the other you're fighting for nothing you're fighting each other for nothing we're all on the same team here we all do you believe that i believe that i'd like to believe that but

do you not really think that there are people who are just so set in their ways i mean like look at look at how the the global warming and climate change argument came about you know what the worst thing to ever happen there was it was an open-ended question i'm sorry but like but like yeah because like you're not going to come up with the exact example i have in my head but it's obvious after i say it al gore came out with a movie called an inconvenient truth yeah and he who was the previous democratic like a political party's candidate for fucking president he was vice president during one of the best presidencies effectively as far as like legislation goes bill clinton you know during the whole 90s and everything this known political

horse of a name he comes out and takes command of this issue therefore implicitly makes it an issue that falls on one part of the spectrum right is supposed to which now we're finding ways where it doesn't and that's good but we still have a lot of scars from that where it is still much heavier left than right absolutely and what else did he do he exaggerated the fuck out of the shit he said he told me that manhattan was going to be underwater in 2012, roughly speaking, something like that. You know what? It was for three days when Sandy happened. And then you know what happened?

The hurricane was over and the fucking water left. Obviously, there was a lot of damage. That wasn't what he was getting at. He was saying, like, it's literally not going to be there. And so what happens? Other human beings who also may, the ones who are predisposed are the ones who already come from an opposite political end from him. Other people go, well, there goes that fucking Al Gore. Everything he says must be fake. And so now what do they do? They form the same thing that Al Gore

formed in the people that want to agree with him. They form an attitude. And the first thing you learn in any marketing 101 class should be the first day of the class. I don't care what college you go to, what high school you go to and take it. The first thing they'll teach you is that the hardest thing to change in a person is their attitude. It is also the greatest thing to develop because once you got them, you fucking got them. So he came out and he developed these attitudes and now people are hopelessly stuck on these sides i don't think it's hopeless i think it's changing now i think it has already changed in a sense that the information i don't want to say battle but

the information landscape of our modern world has allowed for cracks in those two camps that are leaking people from one to the other but mostly to the middle where we say people with the dramatic stories you're not doing this environmental movement any justice you're actually robbing us of steam get this too too. On the activist front, bans. Oh, let's ban this and ban that and bah. That's not helping anything. That's actually eating up our carbon budget in a shorter amount of time than it would be

to just allow us to build off of the technologies we have, to build off of the convenient lives we have, and apply that energy toward the right solution finding, right? So let me roll it back. Al Gore didn't do any justice for this movement. Let me roll that back too. He did a lot of justice for the movement in a sense of getting awareness and information out. But building camps, building us versus them, it's dangerous. It's hard to dive into it all because I don't really come from a very hard left background at all. I come from the other side of the background. You're from Texas.

Yeah. Although, yeah, I'm saying like you're from Houston. Yeah. Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, Austin. I could go either way. Anyway, but the truth is always somewhere in the middle. Yes. That's what I like about your approach to this.

Yeah. It's always somewhere in the middle. There is a reasonable, and there's science. Like we have science. We don't have to rely on, you know, the seer over in that tent over there in our village. Right? We don't have to have someone go, oh, you know, you did this wrong and you'll be cursed for 20 years in this manner.

We don't have that anymore. We've explained most of our natural world through the scientific method. We don't have to do a rain dance for rain anymore. We can just pull up a radar and say, hmm, what does the cloud cover look like for the next two weeks or a week or whatever? And obviously it's not perfect. But as we get that clarity we need this is what i meant earlier by the better story we need to not be al gore we should not try to drive a wedge between the country or create such a

uh a dramatic uh worldview that it actually disillusions people when it doesn't come true we don't need to do that but in the same way way that Al Gore profited off that and kept his name relevant and created a second act of his career, you are always going to have people with access to resources, other powerful people, and levers to pull who are going to take advantage of that in what is in this case being an example of one of the downsides in capitalism, right? So just look at the same fight without Al Gore. And the years after that, there were two major things that happened from the right and left that have helped cement through repetition of words. The thing that none of us pay attention to, but has a dramatic effect on how we approach things when we say things over and over again. When when you look at these two examples that's all it was the first was frank luntz when this issue started to come up frank luntz is a right-wing political strategist who focuses on on political attitudes language messages motives of voters, stuff like that. He was responsible. I believe this is true. If it's not, fact check me in the comments, but I'm remembering right now, he was the guy

responsible for after, I believe it was after an inconvenient truth, deciding to instruct people, say on like Fox News, where a lot of people on the right wing get their news to say the words climate change instead of global warming because global warming gave people an image of fire red orange impending doom impending crisis let's bookmark that for a second whereas climate change gave the one thing that's most consistent about the world that never changes and that is that everything fucking changes the climate changes who gives a fuck so what so through people then repeating what they hear on fucking hannity every night oh this climate change shit that's what

there's it's they get to write that off when they're talking with the person fighting against them because they just say climate change It's just change. It's what it is and eventually even the person fighting them starts to say climate change just like people did So what happened then in? 2016 2017 2018 Well, you saw and I don't know who it was But now you saw equal but opposite reaction life now you saw the left side fight back and i get it and they said okay you have you have congratulations you have effectively changed the language from global global warming to climate climate change

we're going to tinker the second word there and we're going to keep it very similar phonetically instead of change we're going to say crisis so now we say you said it yourself maybe 20 minutes ago now we have a climate crisis when people think crisis crisis is worse than warming warming's hot and fire and a potential crisis crisis says boom it's here yeah it's fucking here. That's very interesting. I hadn't heard it put that way. I don't know who explained it to me or when or where, but for some reason my mental model on this is that they used climate change as a new term. I don't know who they is.

Yeah, yeah. The term climate change became popularized because global warming was too easily picked apart by the right in that trump would walk onto a podium and go oh my god it's freezing in here can we get some global warming like you know and warming was too simple of a story was was the notion i i had heard i don't know if it's right or wrong or true or what but i had heard that the notion warming was too simple because every now and then you just have a cooler year, you have a cooler June than last year, and then people go, oh, it's not real. So I had heard that they moved to climate change to be more of a broader umbrella term so that

they could still say it and still talk about it monthly or weekly on the news and it couldn't be so easily picked apart by the right that was my uh understanding of it which which uh you know yeah i just want to make sure we get this because this i could actually check while we're on here yeah so i know i'm not oh i've seen this guy i've seen him speak on some documentary or something yeah so oh man here we go. This is right off his Wikipedia page. There was another article I was looking at and then it got put behind a paywall before I could read it. But it was saying all this. He advocated use of vocabulary crafted to produce a conflict.

Hold on. That was about something else. He advocated use of vocabulary crafted to produce a desired effect including use of the term death tax instead of estate tax. See? He used the opposite there death destruction estate is like oh my estate right people don't get and climate change instead of global warming so and that's just a basic sentence in the top of his biome I don't know where the full explanation is but yeah he was the guy first paragraph yeah he was the guy who did that and then people adopted it and now

kudos to the left in this case they have very effectively i hear people say it all the time who find a crisis yeah yeah don't even necessarily agree with that they have they have phonetically inject same way that the cia injected conspiracy theory into our language after jfk yeah that's what you guys did there it's the same shit which okay quick aside we're gonna we got to get to this at some point though bustamante jim that guy is doing some seriously good work for the cia right now through talking about this yeah i truly know. So a lot of people in the comments going, God damn right, he's their PR person. But not just that, right?

I think he's doing a good thing for curious minds. He's saying like, look guys, yes, it is like this. Yes, somebody's got to break the rules for the rule setters of your country that is preserving your value set that literally went to global war 70 years ago to

defend you know yes it's a dirty world welcome to reality motherfuckers yes um i think he's going to put to bed a lot of conspiratorial minds by telling the stories i mean granted there's going to be some that flourish i know his words but i think in general he's he's doing a good job of addressing curiosity giving a more complex story which i'm going to link back to this climate change climate crisis global warming narrative um here's the thing if you give too simple of stories and a population grew up in an internet age. They feel like they're being treated like children. They feel like they're being treated like they're dumb and they're not dumb. They are smarter than 2 billion people or 4 billion people that ever walked the earth.

And I'm talking about half the population today alive right now. I truly believe that they're more intellectually inept than most of humans throughout human history. Scientific fact. Yeah. And so if you have two simple of stories, right? Oh, global warming. Well, to me, global warming is too simple of a story. Yes, it probably gets the point across that on average we are getting warmer and we are melting ice caps and we are, you know, potentially acidifying the ocean and it's getting warmer too.

Sure, it gets that fact across. But it's also very easy for Donnie to get up on the podium and say, whew, it's getting warmer too um sure it gets that fact across but it's also very easy for donny to get up on the podium and say oh it's freezing in here can i get some global you know it it's also too simple of a story simple stories get picked apart easily the the hard part of every storyteller and that means every ceo every founder, every politician, every podcast, everybody is telling the right story. So not too simple, but not too complex where your eyes glaze over, which I fail at all the time. It's hard. It's very hard.

You have to get a story that touches that middle wavelength of where the collective knowledge has, you know, since grown to. So Bustamante, I think, is doing that on behalf of the CIA. Like, you can listen to that guy truly believe that the CIA absolutely shot JFK and still walk away and go, yeah, maybe they did, maybe they didn't. But if they did, it's just a big, you know, weapon of influence and control. And it's run by humans. You're damn right some external forces at certain points have controlled different layers of that weapon

and hijacked it and turned it on our own system. You're damn right. There's bad in anything. Yeah, and it doesn't always mean that, like, it was a planned bad thing by our side. It's just a big powerful the way i've described it to some friends is think of like a cannon like a big barrel but with a hundred barrels in it right it's this big weapon that can go influence a hundred different parts of the

world at once well yeah every now and then some foreign power that's jealous of that influence or what have you might hijack one or two or ten of those barrels and turn it back at our side. Right? Every now and then. Or every now and then, because it's a human-run organization, there are certain, I don't know, bad apples or people that were influenced by external factors. I don't know. I just think in general, he's doing a really good thing on their behalf.

I don't know if he got their blessing or not, but they should thank that man. They should send him a cake or something. And you're going to cue all the conspiracy theories in the comment cone. He's making our point for us. I mean, true, but as a curious mind that myself was very dissatisfied with many simple stories we've been given throughout our country's history. I hate a simple story i hate when you just glaze over and go oh no no no you're dumb you don't need a mask two weeks ago you said i needed a mask no i don't need one but am i a toddler or am i an adult because if i am an adult lie to me better or tell me the truth don't lie to me bad and Bustamante is telling a better story

Bustamante even when there's a few really unpopular stances he'll take from the majority of people listening to him where they think he's just lying to them bad in my opinion it's just my opinion and I know the guy I like the guy a lot I know him off camera he's a lying to them bad in my opinion it's just my opinion and i know the guy i like the guy a lot i know him off camera he's a great dude but like he believes it there's nothing that's you know he's such a galaxy brain and thinks about so many different things that there are sometimes in conversation on camera off camera where something will loop back around and it'll run a little bit in the face of something he said earlier in some way but like i do that all the fucking time yeah i try to point out when i do is i'm like wait i kind of think this though too like it's that's gonna happen

and people will nitpick everything but overall he really believes what what he's saying and where i respect a lot of it even some stuff that I do vigorously disagree with is that he's seen it. Truck Month is on at Chevrolet. Get 0% financing for up to 72 months on a 2025 Silverado 1500 Custom Blackout or Custom Trail Boss. With Custom Trail Bosses available

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you i could fucking feel it in here sitting right across from him his eyes the fucking pupils dilated that the head went low and he stared me right down and he goes you talk about that terrorist who could bomb that fucking place i lived that and i'm just like and that sir is why there are certain arguments that i'll even accept losing and winning you know which some people were like oh that's a dangerous precedent to set maybe but you also we're humans we have to make judgment and and we don't have to be perfect we can get things wrong shit i defended andrew cuomo for a half hour on this podcast one time that didn't age well you know what i mean like not over the sexual assault stuff over the coveted response stuff any of it i struggle age bad in four days right like we get that's a part of what makes us human so what i don't like is when people then completely write

off someone like andy or someone like brian mcmonigal who was in here cosby's lawyer people hurt people hurt i love that guy yeah he's a great human being first which is you know that's an amazing thing especially considering the type of job he has to do but people got to that ar-15 part where he's a little passionate about it like just a little like nothing crazy i wouldn't agree with him and and you heard me i didn't i i agreed with his spirit i disagree with how it is in practice because i think this was a situation he's a little he's letting the emotion win a little too much and i get that but like or he's choosing his battles or or he lives in the northeast of the united states but even like let's say this let's just

assume he's not and like that's absolutely what he thinks there were people who that's a three-hour podcast there are people who heard that one thing and said i'll never listen to him again go fucking fuck it yeah yeah see how you like that you fucking pawn and it's like you're telling me you can't you're listening you're telling me you agree with me for three hours you're lying you are lying yeah right like. That's insane. And I loved listening to him. And I did it twice, I think, on the – you only have one with him, right? Yeah. Yeah. I've done it twice then.

Yeah. And I wholeheartedly disagreed with him on the AR-15 thing. Yeah. But I was just more excited to listen to him the second time because there's so much I agree with him on too. And if you are unable to walk into a conversation or walk into anything, right? It could be a board meeting. It could be a school presentation. It could be anything. And you're unwilling to look, seek understanding first.

You are a dim light. You are choosing to dim your own light your light is lit up by other points of view that you didn't realize might have a better world view from a different perspective than you do on a certain thing if you're off to that you're choosing to leave the the arena and go sit in the stands and watch that's your choice i hate it it makes me sad i'd love to have everyone in the arena i think we need as many millennials as possible in there yeah talking through these things figuring them out saying hey man you know one day i was very skeptical of organizations like this and listen open your mind a little bit and listen and go i'd probably do most of the things the

exact same way if i were in that position one and two i'll disagree with you on some things i would disagree with uh is it diorio um yeah yeah jim him yeah jim and uh andy i would disagree with both of them when it comes to constitutionality and uh probably surveillance arguments i would disagree on um info privacy now they know things i don't right they know that privacy may have been gone for 20 years already for all we know right um they also profited off of it to do what in their mind were good things and i believe them for them yeah and here's what i would also say they're doing their job right yes exactly these guys are absolute warriors for our value set right for western liberalism and democracy.

It doesn't mean they get everything right. No. But like overall, they have good intentions. Yeah. They make mistakes like every other human being. But overall, yeah, those are guys who might violate this guy who's not even aware of it or even cares about it. Um, some of us very much do care about our freedoms and liberties, trust me, I do.

That's why I moved back to Austin, but, um, during all this COVID shit, absolutely, I'm on that side. But... if I had the apprehension I would have around constitutionality, and I was in Andy's position, I wouldn't be the warrior I needed to be in that position. We need guys and men and women in those positions to think like that. They're being the force we need them to be.

It's up to someone else back home to say, hey, you know, we need to check some of this. We need to be sure we're, you know, doing this with the right public buy-in or approval or something i i don't know there's layers to it it's complicated i understand that but uh you want you want people like that in those positions you you want them to say i don't care i want to go get that guy my job is to protect that's the blessing and the curse though too yeah and that's the problem like i do think that's the blessing and the curse though too and that's the problem I do think that's one of my that's one of my arguments that every time I bring it up I feel like

that's a good one and what I'm talking about is the 10th man argument there and it could be the 100th man it could be the 1000th man, either way it's the man what happens when you let someone do something in government, anywhere, but in government in this happens when you let someone do something in government, anywhere, but in government in this case, when you let them do something, they have precedent.

So then they can do it again. And maybe next time they do it again, a little more and a little more. And eventually it's the road to whatever. Tyranny. There you go. And there's literally like a quote, like the road to tyranny is paved with something. That's hell. Good intentions.

Okay. Yeah. You get my point. Like there's something along those those wavelengths and it's like when i've i've looked at andy i've looked at jim and i've looked at brian mcmonica and probably a few other people but those are three guys who are in certain types of positions where i could say this about and i say i like you i know each of you you're great you do your job right even when you get things wrong, like your intentions are good and like I believe that you've had long careers whereamante you Jim Di Iorio you Brian McMonacle I am NOT just giving that whatever it is to you so with the guy

you know and trust right yeah with McMonacle it's that I'm giving you the power to take away ar-15s from everybody right with with Andy I'm giving you the power to take away everyone's privacy including your own with Jim I'm giving you the power also the privacy arguments as well with him and it's like you guys are good what about the 10th guy in the room because he gets that power too and every 10th guy to come after him who sucks who is a power hungry demon child selfish asshole yeah well he gets the power to do that too you don't think that's gonna go bad that's the whole point of america is to not create too many of those positions such that they start to hinder

and influence the ability for each of us to say whatever we want to think whatever we want to try to invent whatever we want to create solutions to any problem we fucking want that's our job to protect and that's where i would get into a fierce debate with bustamante diario and um sorry what was the attorney's last mcmonigal mcmonigal yeah that's where i would get into a fierce debate with them around it um but i would never want someone like me in andy's position because it wouldn't be as effective we need checks and balances but we shouldn't all be on one side like it doesn't need to always be against the individual and that's a little bit of the creepy part when you look at this two-party system what are the few things they agree on eroding

individual liberties and rights control mechanisms depending on what it is but yeah yeah well i mean look at look at the right they were all my body my choice with the vaccine but then when it comes to women and their bodies around reproductive rights that's different it's all the way gone they can't even see it anymore it's like are you kidding me how did you make this argument 18 months ago and now you are completely on the others like the worst part is you can tell them they're gonna do it and they still do it remember the lindsey graham video you can you can record me right now in 2016 where he's like you can record my words and play them back to me if a supreme court justice dies in an election

year and it's a republican president i will not secure that nomination four years later senator graham here's you saying this four years ago and here's you confirming the nomination and he's like yes they don't fucking care they don't care they're they're they're just they're the worst fucking people on planet earth term limits yeah yeah absolutely a must term limits and last thing i want to say on the ar-15 thing especially if this is a hot comment section kind of kind of thing to counteract your guy i would say all right well let's start with the original intent of the right to bear arms what was the intent behind that did they because his argument was they didn't know there would be an ar-15 of course they didn't there were what muskets at best or maybe kentucky rifles and some shit a little bit later turn that that mic to Twitter. Sure. You know,

um, but what was the original intent? The intent was to have the population be as hard to occupy or control as a strong military force. Now, obviously we're not going to do that in today's day and age. And, oh,

we have open carry in Texas right now. You can just walk around with a gun do you see a bunch of people doing it i don't know you don't you don't you did during the 2020 crazy year uh with you know protests and people protesting the protests and people protesting the protests protesting the protest you know it got all crazy sure there was we had you know shooting on sixth street and uh you know there were a few protests uh shooting things generally speaking it's a pretty insanely peaceful self-governing system we got going on there if you really look at government from the high level throughout history it's insanely well working insanely well right now so i would just

say to the ar-15 point what what our government and governments around the world even shitty poor ones have is here and ar-15 is so far down there yeah i can't even see it yeah even if i had a 500 round mag you know and and you can play whack-a-mole with some of this stuff you know he'd make that argument for himself though too right and he'd have one as in he'd say it already doesn't matter great then leave me my toothpick if i'm fighting goliath you know don't take the toothpick from me i'm not saying i'd make that argument. I'm saying he does have one there. I don't know. Just saying that it's already such a disparity.

Okay, fine. You know what? I'll give you that. There's already such an argument. There's already such a disparity that the original intent of the right to bear arms is already gone. Right? So he would have an argument, but out of a sense that it's seemingly so imbalanced already that the Second Amendment is already a laughingstock. Right. Which is not what most people who would say that it's a laughingstock are thinking.

They're thinking it's too robust. Isn't that weird? It depends on what state you're in. It depends on how you think of guns. But I don't't it's a problem i hate that we have i also view a gun as a textbook tool it is a tool you you hope you don't take out you know i don't actually on a way lesser level i don't like having to take out a power tool because it means i gotta screw in shit and do stuff i don't like having to take out a power tool because it means i gotta

screw in shit and do stuff i don't want to do yeah with a gun it's way worse because it's like we're in danger like shit's going down yeah you don't want to have to you understand it's it's a parallel a much more serious but you don't want to have to take it out but it's there so that when when the situation actually calls for it not some bullshit when it actually someone's intruding whatever you're looking at it rather than looking for it and beyond that i think it's just access to to modern tools when when something really happens the idea is you yourself and you right me myself and i individualism these value sets we've been talking about western liberalism democracy the whole idea is when it when shit really is on the line and and there is a moment of hey my biological jelly sack might not be functioning in five minutes if i don't do something are you dependent on a system are you coddled by the state or is it you in the world because

i'm always going to choose the latter because i want a chance i want to survive um and i know this is getting all the survival things and that and i don't really think about that i quite frankly i have a couple guns i don't think i'm ever going to need them for that i really don't yeah granted we've been forcibly intruded on at my mom's place and luckily no one was there they've spray painted all over stuff and wrote profanity and robbed stuff and trashed the place. You know, had I been there, that might've gone differently. I don't know what they had. Um, but the whole idea is if the situation arise,

are you caught up by the state or is it you versus the world? Cause our value set thus far, the reason we went to war in in the 40s was for that latter value set it's an individual you have your own your own uh you control your own destiny whether it be a startup whether it be a job interview whether it be free education through youtube whether it be choosing a state or community school versus a private school, whether it be degree choice, whatever it is, you choose your own fate. I don't choose it for you.

I'm a guy in a suit in DC. I should have no say over what you do on your body and, and, uh, anywhere, you know, I choose for me, you choose for you. And we need to cheat, teach Gen Z that we can have and harbor that level of individualism and choose righteously to work for collectivism. Using that creativity that that allows. climate or sorry a clean economy uh you know preferably a regenerative economy virtuous one that that's not net zero or carbon neutral but actually reversing all the imbalance we've brought upon since the industrial the damage yeah wow so you you harbor and harness that creativity and ingenuity that's only given through systems that are this crazy like ours and then you choose to righteously

work for a collective greater good you can do both you don't have to pick is that what you'd say you're doing right now yes with your career yeah so you you started because i don't think we've really talked about this but you started thank god on roughly speaking the big oil side right when you came out of college so like where where did you because that's not where you are now you're i guess on the opposite end of the spectrum but yeah where where did you work and what did you do specifically so yeah we should roll it back right we've been talking a lot about demography biology all these things i'm actually a chemical engineer not a biologist i would say i'm an amateur biologist because a lot of my heart's there um and and a wannabe geneticist but really i'm a chemi um which means i i work with materials generally when people say chemicals

we all go oh the simpsons the green goo going into the river no no just think stuff like your heroin in this bag and shit exactly like what the tsa doesn't like me bringing so we can look at that in a second but i was going to say look at this materials ceramics metals plastics uh you know insulating properties conducting properties it's just stuff um so I'm a chemie. I graduated from Ole Miss, was a bio major for three years, then switched to engineering, moved to Philadelphia to work for what at the time was the largest producer of commodity plastics in the Americas. So it was a Brazilian firm called Braskem. They grew through acquisition quite aggressively up in North America and in Europe. They actually bought

what used to be Sunoco's plastic plant right up the road, I guess just due west of here, on the Delaware-PA border in Marcus Hook. I worked there on a plastics...

Oh, yeah. Oh, excuse me. Plastics production plant. so i was actually um my teammate and i would joke we were we would say you know there's isis boko haram and then us you know in the eyes of like an environmental activist we are like the third worst people in the world um when in actuality we're people like everyone else trying to fix some of the harsh realities of our modern existence but you're working for nazi germany yeah i'm fucking no no no but but essentially right like

and i'm not saying that that company was like that at all it's great organization i know exactly i'm joking i know exactly what you're saying but you recognize that a little bit yeah yeah yeah going into it and seeing the inside of a business like that and how well intended it was and then seeing the outside perspective, leaving a university in 2017 and going, hmm, how do people feel about plastics? Not great. Can you explain plastics to people out there? Yeah. Obviously, we all know what plastic is. Kind of.

That's the thing. You're relating it to like big oil in this case like why are you doing that so plastics are tricky um quite frankly growing up i didn't i think most of my life i kind of just had this cognitive dissonance uh cloud to plastics like yeah that's something it feels cheap it's lightweight i don't like when like when I can feel that it's hollow on the inside of my door handle or whatever it may be, right? It generally brought around a lot of negative connotations when you think of plastic. And growing up, I didn't really know what it was. I knew it was like some kind of chemical product. Maybe it was oil and gas or something. I don't know. So what is plastic now plastic is generally speaking

just a small piece of what we pull out of the ground from fossil fuels so when we pull let's say if i pulled this red bull can out of of uh crude oil out of the ground you know a small fraction of it would be more well suited for use in materials like this than it would be um pointing to the coffee cup yeah i pointed to a plastic coffee mug um it would be more suited for doing a job for humanity like this as a material than it would be just flaring off as a byproduct because that's what we were doing before we were what happens when that happens it just burns off as co2 co um we use some water and a flare to to subdue it as well um and uh it's just up there in the air and it's it's not great right yeah anytime you burn something anytime you combust something you're doing a chemical reaction where you create a little bit

of material byproduct and then the rest of it is for lack of better terms vaporized into elements that are light enough to float up into the air we breathe them in they warm the temperature of our atmosphere our planet it's not great so plastics are oil and gas speaking, today and have been historically. But all they are, and this is where it gets complicated. I'll try to keep it simple. It's just carbon. People throw around that term.

I know. To the average person listening who's never really had an interest in actually looking into that for sure but actually looking into the environment and all this noise that people make like when you say carbon i think a lot of us can make the jump and move to the term you know too much carbon in the atmosphere we've all heard that but in a simple way like i'm someone who hasn't slept in 32 hours and isn't a chemical engineer this is a good exercise what is that what does that mean let's back away from carbon for a second okay I think most people are pretty familiar I think most people are familiar with or have seen a periodic table of the elements I think

most people have but there are also people who didn't know that the queen of england was from england so good point so there's this little chart we use in chemistry and in science that has listed um and there's an order to the listing that that goes through the size oh that's come um there's a chart that explains all of the basic elements that make up our world. So if, if we all lived in a Lego set, you know how there's a little book at the beginning that says, Hey,

there's 10 pieces of that. 10 of that. You're talking. That is what the periodic table of elements is. The Lego set of the, of the world. Yeah. It's just the parts list.

And it says, Hey, here's all the parts. And, and how those elements are organized in that chart actually, uh, gives us clues or information or conveys information about the size of those elements you know how many atoms are are uh you know are in there how many protons and neutrons are in the nucleus how many electrons

are around it gets me back to science class yeah it gets complicated but basically we have a lego list of all the parts in our kit the world is the kit the list is the periodic table carbon just happens to be the most common part in our lego set so in our lego set of life that we're doing right now talking to each other carbon just happens to be other, carbon just happens to be... The slut. Exactly. It happens to be the element with the highest, here's a way to put it, right? The highest affinity for bonding.

I was going to say body count, but... Same thing, right? Carbon has the highest... So you say it in a dignified way. You got to let the idiot like me say that. Yeah, well, carbon has the highest body count. It's the easiest to talk to. It gets along with everybody that we know of.

It's clean. It's a great element. What a world. Carbon's getting a lot of pussy. Suddenly we like carbon. Yeah, yeah. Carbon's great. You're carbon.

I'm carbon. We should love carbon. Carbon's a great thing. We just don't want it to be in the wrong place all at once. So here's the complex part of this. I don't, I haven't, I have yet to really figure out a clean way of saying this part. That was very clean what you just said, by the way. That was good.

The Lego set thing? Oh, that was fucking great. Ooh, let's see how it goes now. Okay. So in our Lego set, let's just imagine a little diorama. Remember those little projects in third grade and where it's like in a shoebox or something yes yes imagine a lego set diorama i haven't heard that term in a while i haven't heard that term in forever well i don't even know where that came from kind of scared of my own mind right now that's deep that's good but essentially

carbon is the most common piece in the set right we're all carbon-based uh energy typically it's we say hydrocarbons those are just chains of carbon um the stable world that led to our evolution and led to trees and rainforests and beaches and coconuts and all the good stuff yeah all the good things and all the the paradises of this world and honestly the world is a paradise. Earth is absolutely fucking beautiful. Yeah, agreed. When you really look at it. It is alien 10 times over. You can find alien life all over Earth

if you really open your eyes and just look. So carbon, we want in our little diorama a certain amount of the common piece let's call it the little four by four or the little perfect cube in a lego set let's pretend that's the most common one a certain amount of that carbon or that lego is supposed to be on the ground of our lego set and a certain amount of it is supposed to be around the walls of our diorama and if we match that balance right so so think of it, let me try to roll this back. What is the diorama again?

It's just our world. Right, okay. Okay, so it's our Lego set. Just think of our Lego set. The carbon piece, let's call it. Floor, inside, outside the world diorama, around it. Count the floor as our material world in Count the floor as like our material world in our diorama

is our material world. The ground, this coffee mug, you and I. And then count the walls and the little hanging things in our diorama is our atmosphere.

Makes sense. We're supposed to have a certain ratio of the carbon block in our Lego set present in the atmosphere and a certain ratio present on the ground. And if we get that ratio right,

or if we hold it the same as it's been for the last 10,000 years throughout the Holocene period of Earth's history, we get to keep drinking Mai Tais on the beach. Roughly what is that ratio? That might be a complicated one offhand. Oh, no, it shouldn't be. Hold on, let me think. Well, think of it like this.

I'll look it up while you're talking. Yeah, think of it like this. The carbon in the atmosphere is just a small, tiny percentage. And everything on life, all life on earth is carbon-based so that carbon it has always existed in both forms we just as of late have put more of it from the ground form up into the sky and so it's not demonizing one thing or the other or saying it doesn't belong in our atmosphere we absolutely want it in our atmosphere we just only want a certain amount so it's all about

balance so you had said that you laid out that first company a brazilian company was like below isis and boca haram whatever and not actually right it's not a great organization i'm just saying the joke yeah the joke between myself and another engineer was man to a lot of activists we're third on the list but you're all the point was you weren't going in there drinking the kool-aid of the things that are all supposed to be built into their business model you actually did recognize some of this stuff before then and at some point now that we've gotten at least the basics of the science across of how to look at some of this at some point relatively early on you made pretty much a total shift and went to the bright side i guess or whatever yeah now i i would argue there

it's not both sides but um i know what you mean i'm joking yeah no i know i know i i like calling this the dark side because it's like it's like a an environmental capitalist uh kind of mix of all of it like oh yeah you're a tree hugger but you have a gun what's going on that's what lex said yeah now now it's called alexi who connected us yeah was telling me he's like wait loves guns loves the environment. Something's wrong. Yeah, I brought him out into the countryside in Texas the other week and, you know, let him squeeze off some rounds. Taught him some basics on gun safety so he didn't look like a rookie.

He gave Alexi a gun? Yeah, that was a little hindsight. Was he holding it like tony montana i i told him the basics of picking up a gun the first time too of like look man if you ever put your finger uh your your finger here or this or that you're gonna send some bad signals to the rest of the guys around you like they're not gonna like yeah no no no he listened oh he did everyone has this with guns you walk up and you're like oh my gosh i don't even know how to open this thing i I don't know where the safety is. Good for Lex. Do I ask these questions?

Do I look like a rookie? So I like to get that out of the way with people when it's one-on-one and you say, look, you don't know what the hell you're doing just like I didn't when I first walked up to this one or any other weapon. I don't know. Get it out now. Understand the basics and don't make these mistakes around anybody else because I'm ready for you and they may not be. Anyway, yeah yeah i brought him out there and was like look make sure

none of your rounds hit any of these oak trees you can't hit anything here all this kind of stuff right so it's it's both um but yeah i i chose to leave the production of virgin plastic and join a team that at the time was called sustainability um which became sustainable development which became circular economy and sustainability so many mouthfuls but anyway yeah i chose to leave the production side and get into this whole sustainability movement right before the chemical industry took it really seriously. So I got really lucky. I just happened to be in the right place at the right time and said the right things to try to open doors and try to get exposure in other areas. I was a process engineer.

I was, you know, on the pipes, on the reactor here at Marcus Hook, where those big giant. Yeah. I believe it's Energy Transfer Partners now owns the whole marine terminal um just doesn't look good like it doesn't like when you when you when you go over the commoner barrier and you look down you're like that just doesn't look positive because it's been beat into our heads there was a time and this isn't even that long ago like 40 years ago where that maybe in the 50s 60s 70s 60s america that was progress and people put murals of chemical plants on their on their wall and i mean like people the uh c-suite had a little circle there excuse me um some of the high up guys had a circle of houses right there by the refinery it

was a point of pride to be able to see that, that ingenuity, that, that 20, 20th century engineering. Right. And that brought us out of, I mean, that modernized our society, like being able to create these strong, lightweight, cheap, we say cheap, like it's a bad thing. It's also a really, really, really good thing. You know, do you want your car to be $95,000 or $35,000 do you want your gas mileage to be four miles per gallon or 44 miles per gallon that's where it really counts it counts in so many that's where it counts there are so many things behind the scenes where plastics are literally saving the

day or at least allowing us to have gotten this far and the first thing people do and they hear there's a problem ban it's like okay ban but you went from two billion to seven billion on the backbone of a lot of this what are you going to do with that uh five billion people they don't care they haven't thought through the whole that's what i mean that's a better way to say it. They don't, that's never when, and you hear this for various things from our two friends in their respective wings, the solution goes right to banning whatever it is I hate. Yeah. Cancel, ban, silence. Worst idea ever. If you want something to change, do better. Create something new. Don't take a step backwards and then say, okay, now let's create something new. It's like, okay, guys, no, show me a better way and then beat it.

You have to win. You have to beat it out. You can't just say, I don't like this. Let's ban it. You watch states try and then go, we're gonna ban plastic look at any of them that have tried these are the things you're not allowed to make out of plastic and then just wait a couple weeks you go okay hold my beer or i'll hold your beer i'll wait well except for this right oh and that because that's our food supply chain we you know people are

getting hungry oh shit not that because the water crisis in california is more pressing than the waste oh shit or that because carbon emissions we only have five years left on our budget or seven or whatever so then you see them roll the whole thing back and you're like okay was that a productive use of the two years you just did doing that or should we have just focused on solutions you know should we have just made the use of this material years you just did doing that? Or should we have just focused on solutions? You know, should we have just made the use of this material benign to our environment instead of squabbling over what materials we're allowed to use as a society? That is so novice to try to ban our society from accessing a certain form of material right a certain element on the table not only did they reduce our states and people trying to

ban access from a certain element to be used in things like this coffee mug they don't have any replacements in mind. The replacements are worse on the carbon budget. And they forgot to realize that the element they're banning is carbon. It's the only one that will do a lot of these things, right? It's the one that has the highest affinity for bonding. It's why nature chose it, too. It's why you and I are made out of carbon. So not only are they kind of cutting off our left hand before you go into battle can't hold a shield with that um i wouldn't say they're doing the right hand if

you're right-handed like they're they're taking you're talking about banning carbon it's bad yeah it's really in that in that context when you look at it at the broadest level which is how it should be yeah because the broadest level unfortunately holds a lot of reality yeah i say that unfortunate for some things i'm not saying for this like i i'm not educated enough to really go hard at that but there's other things where it's like yeah unfortunately this is a little bit more of the answer right now. Yeah. And I get it. I hate a lot of aspects, and I did before I learned all of this, about plastic. I don't – I get it, but it's so complex. It is not something with a broad stroke, easy band solution.

It doesn't – it's not going to happen like that. So I'll bring it back i i yeah i joined the sustainability team remember this is a virgin plastic company which means raw material plastic which means uh basically oil and gas kind of company or buying products from oil and gas companies to convert it recycle well first to make virgin plastic so just uh i should clarify what that is yeah define that please yeah uh pass the little prop bag over your methamphetamine in here yeah it's a sketchy looking bag you fly around with plastic pellets and flakes and people are like what are you doing doing? Do I literally thought those I've never seen crystal meth That's a drug. I've never been in the presence of but I like

Looked at that and I'm like, is that like an offshoot of it? I would imagine it looks something like this So anyway, it's something like that. Yeah, I say break a bed listening. I have a few What five little jars here six and a few little bags and all they are are full of plastic and coke yeah it looks like maybe these ones no um it's full of little plastic pellets for the most part and then there's some that are in shredded bottle flakes and some that are bottle caps that are shredded into flake bottle cap bottle body all from this area in the northeast um and then if you melt that down you can make pellets like this this is the raw material for most stuff in your life it looks like this yeah give me that and for anyone listening it looks like the inside of a beanie baby

holding that up to my camera right now you guys can see it and that's virgin right there that clear one is uh that he's holding right now can you did you just say what that was yeah so that's virgin plastic we're not going to name the types of plastic because it gets all messy but this is this is what those big uh ugly pipes on the side of the road by commodore berry bridge or uh you know if you go south or east in Houston. A lot of those things are making something like this. And this will get loaded onto rail cars. These are a bunch of little pellets.

And those rail cars will go around to all the factories that make everything from your pool equipment and furniture to your heart stents and hernia meshes so it goes to go make everything in our society like a lot of things um so yeah i i left creating the virgin pellets moved into how do we create these virgin pellets out of waste because quite frankly there's not enough farmland in the world to produce all of our materials out of plants. Producing out of plants has its own drawbacks.

Remember this? Anything we do to order chaos has a cost. There will always be a pie product. There will always be some cost somewhere. You can't put a toothpick in your mouth without a microbe or an ant or a roach or something having given up its right to exist somewhere in the planet for that to be in your hand true um there's a cost to all of it that's what i finally understood this phrase that uh older people said that's what that means of there's no such thing as a free lunch that is

quite literally in in a thermodynamic sense that is exactly what that means of there's no such thing as a free lunch. That is quite literally, in a thermodynamic sense, that is exactly what that means. Is anything you do that is a deviation from the natural, chaotic, dark, empty state of matter, our planet would be an absence of life. Anything you do that has some order to it, that has some function to it came at a cost well it's the end there's a psychological term that's actually smart for this that i don't know offhand maybe i've seen it before but it's those psychological laws that talk about small individuals within a greater group taking collective actions on their own that they think oh well most people aren't doing this therefore i'm okay doing it. But then a lot of people, whatever that dilemma is, a lot of people think like that.

And those actions all put together are what caused the problem. Yeah. And so what I'm saying seems to contradict, right? I'm saying everything has a cost, but we have to pave a path forward. We need a story to rally around. We need to pick the right enemies for the 21st century um hopefully they're not other humans you know i like your enemies i i like where your head i think these are all of our enemies whether we recognize it or not the uh smog

that nine out of ten people breathe globally every day it doesn't give a shit whether you believe in it or not right it's going to affect your lungs either way and we should all want to kill it yeah yeah you can be in denial straight to the grave i don't care you know i i can't i i'm also breathing it right so um it seems like i'm contradicting in a sense where i'm saying there is no matter what a cost and anything we do, any car we make, any plane we choose to take, has some cost of life and cost of planetary equilibrium somewhere, right? But it's not the case. That byproduct could be something else. We are smart enough now, collectively as a society,

I'm not claiming to be anywhere close to that myself, but we have the collective knowledge and know-how to make all of our order, to make our water bottles, our coffee mugs, our planes, trains, and cars out of the very byproduct that's been going up to the top of the diorama. Oh, shit. Okay, now you're bringing it back.

We can reverse it and bring it back down. We have the technology to make all of this shit out of carbon in the air and choose where our bribe so sure we have to have byproducts i wasn't expecting you bring this full circle so fast yeah yeah we get to choose our byproducts but let's choose them to be in balance with the times so what do you guys do to impact that choice? What's the name of your company right now? So, yeah.

So I left Braskem at the end of last year. I joined a company called Tomra. How do you spell that? Tomra. T-O-M-R-A. Okay. Tomra was originally started by two Norwegian brothers who created what we call a reverse vending machine in a grocery store in Norway. Is that where you steal it?

No, no. I like that, though. That's good. Depends on the year. Can't take me anywhere. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I like that. But they're just vending machines,

but you bring your crate of bottles from your house back to it and put them in, and it gives you a credit back oh okay so you get paid for all your packaging that you you know you brought home the last time so it works best like some collector shit yeah yeah it works best in countries or states where there's a deposit system which a lot of places do have but we don't utilize um but but yeah Tom Rowe now started as reverse vending, which was people bringing bottles back. They then grew through acquisition to machines that sort the waste. So they acquired a company called T-Tech out of Germany that essentially, I'm going to keep this very simple, but when we put all our recyclables in the blue bin and that truck comes and picks it up and half of us don't believe anything happens with it, something does happen. Don't stop. Keep going. Please.

If there's one takeaway, double down on things like recycling now because there's an army of people working on fixing all of these things right now behind the scenes. It's all happening. It's actually all making progress right now in the last few years. Don't stop. Keep going. Please keep going. And that shit goes back to guys like you. It goes to what we call MRF, MRF.

It goes to a MRF, which just stands for Material Recovery Facility. You could also call it a recycling plant.'s how i grew up calling it um it goes to recycling plant which is not us we simply outfit those recycling plants with the most modern technology so we you're you're a critical strategic not middleman but like consulting producer for that industry kind of kind of um yeah yeah yeah the company overall tomra is a is a technology it's a technology company it enables these recyclers to say, hey, I used to only recycle water bottles, but because you upgraded my plant with these machines that can do X, Y, and Z using light, X-ray. I'm not going to go into all that. They use a bunch of different separation mechanisms to identify what each piece of waste is on a conveyor belt moving at kind of a breakneck speed.

The machine can identify what each thing is and say, hey, you go over there. You're a water bottle. You're PET, polyethylene terephthalate. I won't go into it. Thank you. You are a milk jug. You're HDPE, high density polyethylene. Why can't you call it a fucking milk jug?

Milk jug. You're a milk jug you're a water bottle but you break it down not by what item it is but what material that item is comprised of and then those get crushed into a bale that bale gets sold to someone else they shred it up create these again out of it there's a there's a couple key questions i have on this that i feel like don't really get answered and one of them actually is my own damn fault because i could look this up very easily and i just obviously never remember to so let's start there when did like my whole life the word recycling has been around and i have vaguely known what

recycling is my whole life shit that's like plastic and then other stuff sometimes there'd be stuff on the line i wasn't sure about but in general i could look at something as a kid and be like that's the recycle thing right you stick it in something it goes somewhere the trash man takes it somewhere where they read they they basically like strip it out and then send it out so it can be used again hence the recycle we get that when did this start though and what started like what's the history of recycling earth day 1970 that was when the movement really uh caught caught some traction was the the hippies the hippies in the 70s shout out to the fucking hippies always shout out to the hippies i knew jenny was good for something

oh yeah you gotta forgive her first oh man she was uh she was cold yeah she's good for something earth day earth day yeah yeah so earth day in the 70s the hippies um they really started a movement that had it it hadn't died it never died it did it go through ups and downs and through you know uh guys like al gore that used it for certain gains along the way sure did those people probably also very much really care absolutely yeah but were all those windows aligned was the technology there was the social willpower there hold Hold that mic up. Was the capitalist incentive value set there? Were all those things there? No, not yet.

Now they finally are. So recycling's been around for, I want to say, or whatever, whatever. 50, 52 years. Yeah, yeah, exactly. But like that day, someone was like, oh, all this plastic, it can be reused. Like they just knew that and they can't, like a hippie was smoking the joint and came up with that?

No. And remember these things. I mean, I believe it. Each commodity, so each type of material, like wood or paper, which paper is wood pulp to a degree, cans. Each thing kind of had its moment in the, I would say limelight, but it's really the crosshairs if you want to really look at it. Each material type kind of had its day where society went, whoa, look how many of those we're using. Let's reuse them. Let's create a program.

And, you know, this stuff has value. It should make money, right? And for a long time it didn't. It was a cost. It was a cost. And we'll get it, we can get into that in a minute. But yeah, it didn't just start in 1970. From what I've heard, that's when the movement began. That's when people started talking about recycling. I think it was probably in 80s, 90s when the first curbside programs or when the first single stream, we call it, programs kicked off in the United States. And really probably not until like the 90s and early 2000s where we became pretty robust at it. How much did people in like the 90s, I'm just to remember because i i wasn't alive for part of that and also i was then a very little kid yeah in the late 90s so i didn't know anything but like do people was there i know there were obviously scientists who've been looking at this for years and years and years i'm not naive but was there a significant amount of noise made about the climate and problems that were coming up?

Or did that more really start like on a grand level in the 2000s? One, I don't know because I wasn't there either. Or I was there as a very, very, very young person. But no, I think it was pretty legitimate. I think there were... going down the rabbit hole and extrapolating on some of these trends that we were already beginning to see in the 70s 80s and 90s so yeah i think there was some significant steam behind all of this granted we just lived in a more polished storytelling world we still only had four big channels or six big channels or whatever everyone tuned into so i don't really know i quite frankly i don't know to what degree the movement was allowed to go full steam aggressive again the net result of all this is a positive so i would hope that it had a good amount of steam i think and i

can remember from when i was a kid uh we had the paper retriever things at our elementary school. And it was like a teal and school bus yellow colored bin with a dog on it with a roll of paper in his mouth. And it was called paper retriever. I didn't have that. And that's because the wood industry, so think corrugated cardboard, paper, and trees, that came under fire in the late 90s and early 2000s was that performative though on their case completely they actually became very circular as an industry well here's one and this i'm getting out of my wavelength now something i'm doing some homework on but like paul rosalie was here when ryan tate was here but paul and i didn't do a podcast yet he's going to be back in october november we're going to do one paul is like mr amazon he lives down in the amazon now

only six months a year because he has to be here on business matters for the amazon six months out of the year but he's fucking tarzan down there jealous trying to save all the trees i'll connect you to i i think i think you'd really really him. But one of the things he talks about is that we even have a problem with how to solve some of this deforestation from the people who are perpetuating it because when they cut down these trees in the Amazon, they're cutting down trees that are 200 300 000 years old and people are like we'll just grow more trees the problem is those trees that grow that are then 10 years old and get cut down when the guy building the home in new york uses that wood he's gonna have to redo the whole house 10 years later or five years later because the wood is not sturdy it's not like part of what makes wood great is that it's old as fuck so like when we're talking about like wood recycling is some of that like counterintuitive because it doesn't really of course because remember there's a cost to everything it can

never be equal we can never take from an environment make something for ourselves replace what we took and it actually be fully equal. There will always be a discrepancy. So that's a great point to bring up. New growth versus old growth forests. Yeah. At first glance, people are like, yeah, look, we planted 300,000 acres right there because we chopped down 300,000 acres. Doesn't work like that.

Not even close. There are species that would never live in uniform, new growth, 15 year old pine trees. That's the other thing. Yeah. But how, you know, we'll live in an old growth forest that has young,

old, everything in between. It's a completely different environment. One is effectively sterile when it comes to biodiversity. And another is so rich and vibrant and you can't recreate that. You cannot. So excellent point um that said if you're going to be doing it anyway pick the right place to source and pick the right place where those molecules end up so here's one thing that if there is one takeaway from this whole

conversation aside from diving into all the weird plastic science stuff all we have to do as a species homo sapiens is not ban our way to a circular future to zero waste cities or whatever all we have to do is be deliberate and intentional with the molecules we use for all the shit in our lives that's it if we get it from the right place that's in time with our current situation i.e let's get it from the air motherfuckers and if we use it consciously i.e don't throw it on the ground value it you know you know don't throw your cigarette butt on the ground and i'm looking at a lot of my friends when i say that that's what i'm saying do you do you think that this is a do you think this is doable yes you you do you think that in a world of eight billion people roughly eight billion people now with all their problems their poverty their their mood swings

their differences their whatever you going to get all these people on board? Nope. No. And I don't need them all on board. And what percentage do you need? I don't know. And it's not me, right?

There's an army rising to do all this. I'm just one scout that gets the benefit of meeting some of these crazy minds trying to reinvent our economy. So you're saying if you could pick off 15%, 25%? I'm throwing numbers out there. I may not be right. But if you – I'm just – hypothetically, if you're throwing out numbers like that, if you could pick off 20% of society to actually adhere to this type of stuff over the next two, three decades, that would have that much net impact of an effect in replenishing the ratio of

carbon potentially in the atmosphere to not have an issue with de-planetation or whatever it's called. Let's call it the end of life as we know it. It doesn't mean it's the end of life. Life will be fine. Life will be totally fine. Life doesn't care what we do to the atmosphere um dna will be passed on by living things even if we nuked ourself into oblivion tomorrow i don't say that it will it life will life doesn't care there's life down in thermal vents at the bottom of the ocean that we could put on mercury right now and it might even survive for a while so now will we that's not guaranteed that's never guaranteed so we need to we need to be it might have been a speaker you had it might have been someone lex had um we need to be selfish man brian mcmonigal that selfish yes we need to be selfish selfish he's so right

about that that applies to the environmental movement beautifully. I mean, out of your own damn self-interest, let's win these battles. Let's solve these problems. I think we will figure it out. We don't need everyone to care. What do they say that that middle 60%? Yeah, we need to get that middle 60% to care. It doesn't need to change all of their behavior. I want to make a world where the system, and I can't believe I'm a, you know, pseudo libertarian Texan gun toting person saying I want the system to handle this, but I do when it comes to these kinds of things around handling waste and all the baloney that none of us really care about. Let's face it at the end of the day, when you're done with the bottle or can, the number one thing you want is it out of your hands and moving on to

what's next in your life. You're not going to go spend 10 minutes, you know, putting it in all the different things like they do in Sweden or they do in Europe. That's called multi-stream recycling, where the onus is on the consumer to do that primary sort. Here in the U.S., we went the lazy way. We call it single stream recycling. We put it all in one bin. And even that we're struggling on getting buy-in to. Hey, I'm guilty of it too, man. I'm not going to lie.

Yeah, I am as well. When it's not made easy and convenient, it will fail every single time. That's the battle that we face, is make doing the right thing easier than doing the wrong thing. That's a great way to put it. Yes. What is that? Eight o'clock. I think I'm at 34 straight hours. So shout out to all my doctor friends out there for doing what you do. I can't even fathom this. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you for coming through. I really enjoyed

this. I hope everyone got a pretty good education there in in the latter parts of this as well yeah so it's really good i know i did but listen brother thanks for coming into town actually impatient today everybody else you know what it is give it a thought get back to me peace