Passion Struck with John R. Miles - Seth Godin on Why We Need Systems Change to Save the Planet EP 187

Episode Date: September 9, 2022

Seth Godin joins the Passion Struck podcast to discuss The Carbon Almanac and why tackling climate change requires changing the system. One of the things that we need to understand about the climate crisis is that we cannot simply reduce our way out of this problem. We have a systems problem. And the system problem is very simple: carbon extracted from the ground in the form of concrete, combustion, and cows is underpriced. We have been stealing from our future by burning stuff way too cheap. -► Purchase the Carbon Almanac: https://amzn.to/3RFHTxE (Amazon Link) -► Get the full show notes: https://passionstruck.com/seth-godin-we-need-systems-change-save-planet/  --► Prefer to watch this interview: https://youtu.be/bSBxOB7Ii78  --► Subscribe to Our YouTube Channel Here: https://www.youtube.com/c/JohnRMiles --► Subscribe to the Passion Struck Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/passion-struck-with-john-r-miles/id1553279283  Thank you, Dry Farm Wines, For Your Support Dry Farm Wines Have No Chemical Additives for Aroma, Color, Flavor, or Texture Enhancement. Dry Farm Wines - The Only Natural Wine Club That Goes Above and Beyond Industry Standards. For Passion Struck listeners: Dry Farm Wines offers an extra bottle in your first box for a penny (because it’s alcohol, it can’t be free). See all the details and collect your wine at https://www.dryfarmwines.com/passithestruck/. In this episode, Seth Godin and I Discuss the Climate Crisis and Why Systems Change is Needed to Save the Planet: Seth Godin and I discuss why the carbon almanac has become the most important project of his life. The four horsemen that are causing the apocalypse and which one takes the most priority. Why Seth believes we need to act over the next decade or face irreversible consequences. We then devote most of the episode to discussing systems change, prioritizing what we need to do first, measuring the changes, fostering public-private partnerships, and keeping global stakeholders accountable. What Exxon knew in 1982 that they kept hidden from the world The purpose of the Carbon Almanac The Impact of Coal, Combustion, Cows, and Concrete Why the next ten years are vital to our survival How we initiate systems change and where to prioritize the efforts Where to Find Seth Godin Akimbo: A Podcast The Akimbo Workshops Other Books by Seth Godin Seth Godin | Website Seth Godin | Blog Seth Godin | Twitter Seth Godin | Instagram Seth Godin | Facebook Seth Godin’s altMBA -- John R. Miles is the CEO, and Founder of PASSION STRUCK®, the first of its kind company, focused on impacting real change by teaching people how to live Intentionally. He is on a mission to help people live a no-regrets life that exalts their victories and lets them know they matter in the world. For over two decades, he built his own career applying his research of passion struck leadership, first becoming a Fortune 50 CIO and then a multi-industry CEO. He is the executive producer and host of the top-ranked Passion Struck Podcast, selected as one of the Top 50 most inspirational podcasts in 2022. Learn more about John: https://johnrmiles.com/  ===== FOLLOW JOHN ON THE SOCIALS ===== * Twitter: https://twitter.com/Milesjohnr * Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/johnrmiles.c0m * Medium: https://medium.com/@JohnRMiles​ * Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/john_r_miles * LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/milesjohn/ * Blog: https://johnrmiles.com/blog/ * Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/passion_struck_podcast * Gear: https://www.zazzle.com/store/passion_sruck_podcast

Coming up next on the Passion Struct Podcast. One of the things that we need to understand about the climate is that we cannot simply reduce our way out of this problem. Say, I'm going to compost a little, recycle a little, which by the way, plastic recycling is a fraud invented by the plastics industry. I'm going to cut back a little bit. I'm only going to fly six times a year instead of eight. It's not a solve the problem. We have a systems problem. And the system problem is very simple, which is that carbon extracted from the ground

in the form of concrete, combustion, and cow is underpriced. We have been stealing from our future by burning stuff way too cheap. Welcome to PassionStrike. Hi, I'm your host, John Armiles. And on the show, we decipher the secrets, tips, and guidance of the world's most inspiring people and turn their wisdom into practical advice for you

and those around you. Our mission is to help you unlock the power of intentionality so that you can become the best version of yourself. If you're new to the show, I offer advice and answer listener questions on Fridays. We have long-form interviews the rest of the week with guest-ranging from astronauts to authors, CEOs, creators, innovators, scientists, military leaders, visionaries, and athletes. Now, let's go out there and become PassionStruck. Hello everyone and welcome back to episode 187 of PassionStruck, recently ranked by Apple as the

number one alternative health podcast, and thank you to each and every one of you who comes back weekly to listen and learn how to live better, be better, and impact the world. And if you're new to the show, thank you so much for being here. And if you would like to introduce this to a friend or family member, and we so appreciate it when you do that, we now have episodes, starder packs, both on Spotify and on the Passion Struck website. These are collections of your favorite episodes that we organize into convenient topics to give any new listener a great way to get acquainted to everything we do here on the show.

Just go to passionstruck.com slash starter packs to get started. In case you missed my episodes from earlier in the week, they featured Dr. Cassie Holmes, who's a professor at the Anderson School of Business at UCLA, one of the foremost experts in the world on time and happiness, and we launched her new book Happier Hour. I also had on Jason Fyfer, who was the editor of Entrepreneur magazine, and we launched her new book Happier Hour. I also had on Jason Fyfer, who is the editor of Entrepreneur Magazine, and we discuss the importance of change, and his new book, which also released on September 6, build for the future. In case you missed my solo episode from last week, I did one on the value of time through the wisdom of the

Stoics. Please check them all out. I also wanted to say thank you so much for your ratings and reviews, which keep helping us improve the popularity of the show and expand it to a larger listenership. Thank you so much for doing that. Now you may be wondering why I am not doing my typical Momentum Friday episode, but I have a guest on today who's covering a topic

that I think is extremely important. So I wanted to make sure that we got this episode out in a timely manner. I know when it comes to climate change, people can be divided on this topic, but I hope you find in our interview today that we tackle this in a nonpartisan way to get the facts on the table and what needs to be done to solve this urgent issue. Now let's talk about today's guest. For more than 30 years, Seth Godin has inspired people and taught them how to level up. He is the author of 20 best-selling books, which have been translated into 40 languages,

books like tribes, lynchpin, the dip, and this is marketing. He is the coordinator of the Carbon Almanac, which he considers to be the most important project of his career. And during our discussion, Seth lays out a primer of what climate change really is, and also goes into depth on greenhouse gases. We discuss the four horsemen that are causing the carbon apocalypse, and which one takes most priority if we want to reverse it. Why recycling plastic is something that was made up by the industry and simply does not work. Why Seth believes it is so important that we act within this next decade

or face irreversible consequences. We go into his thoughts on how we move away from fossil fuels, we then devote the majority of the episode to discussing systems change and how to go about if we're going to tackle this looming disaster, what do we need to prioritize first? How do we measure whether the changes are working or not? How do we foster public-private partnerships and get industry on board with the changes that need to happen? And also, how do we keep global stakeholders accountable? That and so much more. Thank you for choosing PassionStruck and choosing me to be your host and guide on your journey to creating an intentional life now Now, let that journey begin.

I am so excited to welcome Seth Godin on the PassionStruck podcast. Welcome, Seth. Well, thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to talk to you. For the listeners who are tuning in today, they know you for books, such as Lynchpin, Tribes. This is marketing in the dip, et cetera. But what we're talking about today is a completely different topic altogether. You acted as the coordinator of the Carbon Almanac. You're not its author.

Why do you consider this project to be the most important one of your career? So for a quick background, 300 of us worked as volunteers, I'm a volunteer for a year to produce a 97,000 word all-manak, completely foot-noted from front to back, not our opinion just the collections, so that it's easy to understand what is happening in the world around us. And it's about systems, it's about leadership, it integrates with so much of what I've been writing about for a very long time. But even if you don't have kids, when you think about the work that you do, once you have

a roof over your head and enough to eat, a lot of it is about legacy, a lot of it is about the impact we have on the people around us. And what we are dealing with right this minute, wherever we are on this planet is, this is the only place in the known universe where human beings can exist. And we have a very short period of time to change the system in which we live. And if we don't change the system in which we live, we're going to be fighting the weather for the rest of our lives. And that's not a happy thing to do. And so I decided that I have enough leverage and privilege that I could use my ability

to tell a story and my ability to bring ideas to other people so that at least you can't say you didn't know. And once you know, it's up to you what to do about it And there are many climate Scientists who would argue that extreme weather like flooding heat waves fires and droughts are Amplified by the warming of the atmosphere, but there are others who argue then why not landfall in hurricanes Many people would say this is an imprecise science. What does your take on it? So I live near New York City. It's 13 miles up to Hudson River. New York City almost disappeared in the late 1800s, early 1900s. And the reason is that the Hudson River was a sewer.

It was a convenient easy way to dump your sewage and it was poisoning the wildlife and people were dying and What they did not do is say we need a lot more research about the impact of sewage on people's health And what they did not do is say please if it's convenient for you stop peeing in the river What they did was they said don't pee the river, and they built a sewer system. And as a result, the city near me thrives. And also near me about a mile and a half from here is an elementary school. And the elementary school has like every other elementary school,

a school's own speed limit, a 15 mile an hour. And there are people who say, I'm a very safe driver, a very careful driver, it is an infringement on my rights. It's for you to tell me I have to slow down by the school. And please show me somebody at the school who got run over by a speeding car. But we don't really argue about that. And the reason we don't argue about it is that it's very clear if you with an open mind look at the data, they shouldn't be in the river and you shouldn't drive 60 miles an hour near an elementary school.

And it is entirely possible to be trollish and have arguments about science. I would love to argue with you about gravity or the details of evolutionary biology or all of the other really interesting areas of science. But you know what's not interesting? It's not interesting to poke holes in the very, very edges of what we know about climate. That's spending a year of my life, 10 hours a day, 365 days, looking at the data. As somebody who is a trained engineer and has lifted data my whole life, there are very few issues where there is less doubt than this.

If we look at what is happening to our climate, if we look at what is happening to the ice packs, to the glaciers right in front of our eyes, we look at 70 years of measuring carbon in the air or a memo from the chief engineer at Exxon. The chief engineer, Exxon 1982, wrote a multi-page memo which is inside our hominac, and I hope Exxon sues us for copyright infringement. There it is. In which in 1982, he described in detail exactly what was going to happen to the climate. And he was right.

The fact is this is happening. And I understand it gives people solace and satisfaction to pretend it's not. But we don't need everyone to agree. We just need to do something about it. And the purpose of this almanac is not to persuade someone who doesn't want to be persuaded. The purpose of the almanac is to hand it to someone who feels like a hypocrite or to feel insecure about the data and say, here's what you need to know so that you can make a decision. So you can look at your family and the eye, your coworkers and the eye and say, look at this. You can look it up. Let's decide what to do about it.

Because we're not here to have an argument. We're here to just help people what is actually happening. Yeah, it's interesting that you bring up the exon memo that was on page 46, I think, of the Almanac. I used to live in Houston, and at the time I was working for Arthur Anderson, and most of our clients were energy clients. I remember being at this major summit that had all the energy companies represented, and this would have been somewhere around 1999, time frame. And I remember them saying that we had peaked the use of fossil fuels and that from this

point forward in history, they would be on significant decline and that other modes of energy would have to take their place. But that hasn't been the case. So what has happened since 1982 to where we are today that has caused this existential problem to only get worse? Right. So you're bringing up a great point, which is that the act of science is very clear. You make an assertion that turns into a theory and then people bring new data to the fore and the assertion the theory gets better. So science was wrong about certain things in the 1800s. In the 1400s people were sure that the earth was flat in certain parts of the world.

We can go on and on and on about science getting wrong on the way to getting right. and on and on about science getting long on the way to getting right. And one of the things that happened with peak oil is that technology advanced and the technology advances led to significantly better extraction things like fracking that enabled us to extract more stuff from the ground. Technology changes systems. And one of the things that we need to understand about the climate is this. We cannot simply reduce our way out of this problem. Saying, I'm going to compost a little, recycle a little, which by the way,

plastic recycling is a fraud invented by the plastics industry. I'm going to cut back a little bit. I'm only going to fly six times a year instead of eight. It's not a solve a problem. We have a systems problem. And the system problem is very simple, which is that carbon extracted from the ground. In the form of concrete, combustion, and cows

is underpriced. We have been stealing from our future by burning stuff way too cheap. And as a result, the marketplace, which is super smart, has responded in contact by wrapping things in plastic like fruits and vegetables that are already in their own wrapper. You don't need to wrap bananas in plastic. They have a skin, right? And so what we've done is created this convenience mindset that says, my life is really busy. I'm under a lot of stress.

What's convenient? What's cheap and what's easy? And as long as we embrace that system, we're going to do what we've been doing, which is pump stuff into the air. The math of this is super easy and really compelling. That if everyone on earth eat meat the way we eat meat in the United States, we would need a whole of their planet just to hold the cows. You can do the math any way you want. That's just true. And when we think about the fact that half of all the land

in the United States is spent for cattle, we think about the fact that half of all the land in the United States is spent for cattle. We think about the fact that taxpayers, like you and me, spent $50 billion last year subsidizing the cattle industry, that's nuts. If someone was trunning to run for office today and said, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to spend $50 billion of tax money to subsidize cattle. They can't laugh out of town. But because we've been doing it for a long time, because it's part of the system, it's seen as normal. And so, my work has been about culture. My work has been about leadership.

And what happens when you work on this project, or even leave through the book for 10 minutes? You start to see what's actually happening. And when we reveal how systems work, it makes people uncomfortable, but then we can make them better. So, what I wanted to do was perhaps give the audience a bit of a primer, on climate change, and the basics of greenhouse effect before we go deeper into some of the questions that I want to ask you, so we can just level set this. How would you explain the greenhouse effect before we go deeper into some of the questions that I want to ask you, so we can just level set this. How would you explain the greenhouse effect in a very basic way so

that people can understand why climate change is happening? Okay, so it's super easy. Go to your fridge and get a stick of margarine or butter or a piece of chocolate, put it on a plate, put it outside on a day where it's 65 or 70 degrees and nothing's gonna happen. Now, take an identical piece and put a clear glass bowl upside down over it. And what you will see is that it melts. And the reason it melts is that the sun enters

that domed area, but the heat can't get out. And the greenhouse effect is super simple. So let me try to explain it. Take a deep breath there. Let's assert you brought in 10,000 bits of air. Of the 10,000 bits of air, four, four out of 10,000, our carbon. It used to be three. When it gets to five, the earth is going to change forever. Why? Because those little tiny particles of carbon keep the heat from leaving the earth. The sun comes in but it can't get out. Now, if there was zero carbon, we would all die. Because it would get so cold we couldn't survive. We got lucky over the years,

the reason that there's life on earth is because we have an atmosphere that keeps stump of the heat in. And there are other planets that have a lot of stuff in the air and they're much, much hotter than the earth. And there are many, many planets that have no atmosphere, they're colder. But we evolved to live in a world where it was 70 or 80 degrees. What's happening is as we burn things and there's lots of forms of burning cows do a different thing we can talk about, it puts these little particles in the air and that retains the heat. Now it is entirely possible Now, it is entirely possible for the greenhouse effect to where you are make it colder. And the reason for that is one of the things that happens when it gets warmer in some places is the ice cap melt.

And when the ice cap melts, and almost all of the fresh water on earth is in the ice cap, when the ice cap melts, it makes the ocean colder because you're melting ice into it, just like Coca-Cola. And when it gets colder in the ocean, that can lead to cold wind. And so just because it's snowing, doesn't mean that climate change isn't happening. It's proof that things are changing

when it's snowing in Texas. So if you look at this, and I think people would refer to RCP 8.5 as one of the things everyone points to this threat, and that's very dependent on an extreme rise of coal production. If you look at the most serious scenario that they have, so you mentioned the forehorsement are coal combustion engines, cows, and concrete. Out of those four, it would seem to me that trying to tackle whole and combustion would be the greatest opportunity we have to bring this down. Would you agree with that?

Well, okay, so now we get to talk about systems. Your podcast has done a great job of helping people think about how they navigate the world personally. And one of the things that we have been seduced by, and it's one of the things that we have been seduced by, and it's one of the greatest evil marketing campaigns of all time, is Ogilvian Mayther, the great head agency, was hired by British petroleum to invent the phrase carbon footprint. And that carbon footprint was invented to make people a privilege wealthy people on or feel guilty about what they were doing so they wouldn't speak up about the system's problem. And so we say, well, I drive a car so I

better not say anything because there's so many people who don't even have a car. And carbon footprint succeeded because people who care about the climate get obsessed about their carbon footprint. So when we think about coal and combustion and we think about cows and concrete, the personal choices that are available to us are mostly about combustion and cows, that the easiest win it would only take a week is for people to stop drinking milk and eating beef. There is no health reason to do it and with all the substitutes that are available, there are a few cultural reasons to do it. And it would wipe out 8, 10, 20% of our problem. In a week, it's not going to happen.

And it's not going to happen because the systems are so significant. If we don't change the systems around it, then it's going to persist. And when we think about concrete, I didn't know anything about concrete. Concrete is 8% of our problem. The reason is in order to make concrete, you have to take cement, put it in a furnace, heat it up to 2,000 degrees, usually heated by coal, and that's how you make concrete. Well, the good news is they're starting to come up with new alternatives to concrete that are made in a different way, that actually capture carbon, they don't release carbon, again a technological change to our systems problem. But as you pointed out, coal is the easy no-brainer big win. And the reason is, because solar and wind is now

cheaper than coal. They are shutting down coal plants because, particularly in China, because it's just cheaper to use solar and wind. One more example of how systemic change is going to get us to be able to move forward. But we all have to know about it and speak up about it and ask about it and ask about it and ask about it and invest in it because if we don't do that, it's just not going to happen because the people who you used to work with in Houston have a trillion dollars of assets under the ground and there are no hurry to give up on that. They're going to try to pump it all before it's too late. As I was reading the Almanac, some of the things that really surprised me is that if we were

going to go completely to solar power, you would need an area at the size of the Mavi desert to put this solar array, which is another thing that's not going to happen. When power makes up a very small portion of this, hydropower makes up a bigger way to tackle it. But many experts, including Michael Schellenberger, say that electrification, replacing technologies that run on fossil fuel with technologies that run on electricity is completely unrealistic.

Unless we re-embrace nuclear energy, what is your thought on that? Okay, so I can talk about these things as a non-expert, but I just wanna highlight here that this is not the productive way to have the conversation. It's not the productive way to have the conversation. It's not the productive way to have the conversation because every single time we have seen really significant changes in our culture and in our economy, there has always been a good reason to say, yeah,

that part isn't going to work. So I'll pick a trivial example. The travel agents and the newspapers of the world were not happy when the internet showed up. Because if you give people access to every single flight and every single hotel, they don't need a normal travel agent anymore. And you could come up with 500 reasons why it was going to be a big problem. And it happened anyway, whether or not it was perfect, because systemic change creates winners and losers. Can we possibly electrify the earth with the wires and the infrastructure we have right now? No, but if you live in a village in India and I spend some time there that has no electricity and there are a billion people on earth who have no electricity, and somebody says, you know what we're going to be able to do? We're going to put

in the solar lantern here so your kids can read it night. You're going to say, yeah, I'd like that very much. And once people have that, they pretty quickly say, let's put in a solar panel so that I can electrify my house. And the next thing you know, off-grid energy is in Kenya, off-grid energy is in India, off-grid energy is in China. And then when you say to someone in Texas, who has been buffeted by the ridiculous Texas power system over the last two years, would you like your electricity to be off the grid? They'll say yes, because it's cheaper and way more reliable, and the system begins to change. So would it be great if we had fusion power?

Of course, can nuclear power work in many ways? It can be made safe, possibly, not my thing to say. But what is important to understand is fighting the weather is something human beings aren't capable of doing. We see that again and again and again. When the New York City subway floods, Fighting the weather is something human beings aren't capable of doing. We see that again and again and again. When the New York City subway floods, there's no amount of money to keep it from flooding.

That just hoping this will go away is clearly not an option. We've been hoping it would go away for 20 years. It keeps getting worse. So the question on the table is not, is this solution perfect? Is that solution perfect? The question on the table is, is dramatic systems change required? And if so, will it inconvenience some people? Yes and yes. So now we should be asking ourselves, not how can I personally recycle my clothes? The question we should be asking is, how often are we talking about systemic change? Are we actually fibbing when we say we're going

to be net zero in 2030 in our little company? Because we probably are. And we're just helping people will go away and then we won't have to worry about it. And what I learned from working on this project is that there is no doubt that some of the science is going to change. And there is no doubt that some people are being hyperbolic. But if you look at the pictures, if you look at the data with an open mind, it is inconceivable to me that someone of good will. Cannot see that we have to dramatically change our systems and we have to do it now. Okay, so I think we'll spend the rest of this

interview talking about how we make this systems change happen. And I wanted to start this out with I happen to read an article that was on climate.gov and it said while we cannot stop global warming overnight, we can slow the rate and limit the amount of global warming by reducing human emissions of heat, trapping gases. They say it will require a major departure from business as usual

and how the world uses and produces energy. And when I read that, to me that systems change. So the first thing I would wanna know is you have all these problems to solve. How do you prioritize them? So there are a couple ways to think about where systems change comes from. And if you think about the fact that a hundred years ago with very little technology compared to today,

human beings paved most of the earth. We didn't pave the earth with a coordinated top-down approach. We didn't build the interest rate highway system for years and years after that. It's because we created the economic and cultural condition for it to work. If you didn't have a road near your house and you couldn't get to Disney World or Disneyland, then you spoke up because you needed a road. That when Henry Ford figured out how to make the car, one third the price, suddenly a lot of people

wanted to buy a car and that led to the rise of gas stations. Who wants a car if there are no gas stations? Hard to sell that, right? And so the system ends up changing. So what needs to shift is the inputs of the system so that the marketplace can wake up and start doing things appropriately. So a simple example is if it's 20 minutes faster for somebody to get on a private jet to fly to England instead of taking a commercial flight, it's their company's money, they might do it. But what we're seeing in places like France is they're saying, we don't want 15% of all

of our air travel to be private jets. It's hurting all of us. So if it turns out that you take private jet fuel and charge twice as much for private jet fuel, people will make different choices about how to fly somewhere. And those choices are based on the costs of the input. That if Amazon was on the hook for taking back all the packaging they used, the sender stuff, I guarantee you, it wouldn't take more than a couple of days for them to change the kind of packaging they use when they send you stuff.

Because the system would change in response to the price of the inputs and the way they were measuring the outputs. So there are lots of ways to do it. One of the things that gets talked about in the Almanac. Again, none of this is my opinion. We are reporting what other people have shown is that when you offer people a climate dividend, when you send everybody a check for three or four or $5,000 and pay for that by appropriately charging for carbon, people change what they buy, and they do that in a way that causes the systems to change. That is completely different than the myth of plastics recycling,

because it turns out almost no plastic is successfully recycled after you drop it in the blue bin. That was invented to make you feel like you were doing something when you didn't actually do something. The only purpose of the ominat is so that someone who's hearing me rant with you today can look it up and then they can start ranting too, because if we don't start talking about it, the systems aren't going to change. I think it's interesting how you keep bringing up

plastic. I live here in the Tampa Bay area and we have the blue cans just like everyone else does. I had started a startup around the trash industry and was working with many insiders. And what I found out is that all that plastic that we put in that blue bin goes to the same place as the trash does. And here they incinerated all. And they were telling me it's actually a really good thing because they take the plastic in bunches because it burns hotter, which actually burns the other trash more cleanly.

But it's interesting because when I just throw things into the garbage can and not put them in the blue trash can next to it, my neighbors get so upset, and I keep telling them it's all getting burned anyhow. It doesn't matter where we put it. But I think this is just one thing that we could change. Another one that you like to bring up is the blowers that we use in the yard that are gas powered and it was pretty amazing to me that one hour of using one of those grass blowers equates to driving from New York to San Francisco and back in a normal car. So if we could just change it so that you couldn't use those things anymore, you would eliminate you know one

large culprit in this. And I'm just using those as examples because those are small examples of changes that we could make. I want to decode the leaf flower thing because it's such a vivid example and I'm really glad you brought it up. So let's go over this again, slowly. One hour of using a leaf flower, a traditionally flower, which did not exist 50 years ago, by the way. There were plenty of yards and there were plenty of leaves,

but 50 years ago there were no leaf blower. One hour of using leaf blower is the same amount of carbon production as driving a Toyota Camry from New York to California. In my town, leaf blowers against the law. Leaf blower should be against law in every town. You only need a hundred people in your town to make leaf bl floors against the law. Leaf floors should be against law on every town. You only need a hundred people in your town to make leaf floors against the law.

When you go up to someone in my town, calmly and kindly, who's using a leaf floor, and you say, did you know it's against the law to use that leaf floor in my town, they get upset. If you went to that person's house and started poisoning their kids, they would also get upset. But that's what they're doing. Is there poisoning their kids, they would also get upset. But that's what they're doing.

Is there poisoning their kids? They just don't feel it because the system says it's normal to use a gas leaf flower. It also turns out that when someone starts using an electric leaf flower, they like it better. It's quieter, it's easier, it's more reliable, you don't have to do that pull start thing, everything gets better. But the system change is hard. People don't like systems change. And what the climate has said to us is, we don't care whether you like it or not, the system is going to change no matter what.

It's either going to change because we're going to make large parts of the earth uninhabitable or it's going to change because human beings get their act together and change the systems. A lot of this time on the podcast, we talk, as you mentioned, how do you create an intentional life? I talk a lot about, it all starts with the choices that you make, and we make hundreds of thousands of them a day. But if you're not doing those inputs in the right way, then the long term output is going to be completely 180 degrees

from where you want it to be. And it's the same thing with systems change. If you don't make those inputs correctly, then that long-term result is going to be drastically different than what you're hoping to accomplish. So I wanted to take this down the path of, in my experience, government alone can't do this. It's going to take businesses really leading the way on this. How would you see these PPPs, these public private partnerships exist in the future in an ideal way? Right. So, again, back to the, please don't speed in the speed zone thing. Please don't speed rarely causes people to slow down. If I think about Gillette Razors, Gillette Razors come in a plastic tray that holds six plates.

There are lots of ways to deliver six plates without putting them in a plastic tray. Gillette sells how many hundreds of millions of razors I have no idea. Well, wow. The person who works at Gillette is not some evil villain. They're not trying to destroy the planet. They're just doing their job.

They're part of the system. How many customers would have to call Gillette's 800 number and start saying, I'm switching to another company. Before the brand manager had to have a meeting with her boss and change what they were doing. Turns out not that many because markets are really good at being heard if the business is monopoly. At the same time, if an organization can cheat and get away with it, it probably will.

Not all organizations, just some. If you get spam in your email box, the people who are spamming you aren't spamming you because they think they're good people. They're spamming you because they can get away with it. And so until we create systems that make it hard to cheat and until we get consumers to speak up, the government's not going to pay attention and the private organizations aren't going to pay attention. So the organizations that are actually starting to shift years now are doing it because consumers

are speaking up. And so when people show up inside the Almanac community and now there's 2,000 of us in 91 countries, they're like, well, I don't eat meat on Mondays and I recycle, so it's not my problem. How do I get everyone else to do what I'm doing? And within a week or two of working on this project, what they realize is they've been being quiet, what they realize is they've been seduced

into the carbon footprint thing. And what we need to do is talk about it. So the intentional act here, and again, I get nothing if someone buys one of these, the intentional act is to get 10 copies of this and hand it to people you know who you work with, who you're boss, your neighbors, and say, can we talk about this tomorrow? And if we talk about it and we talk about it and we talk about it, then things are going to change. That's how people started using email. People started using email because other people said, I can't hear you. You're not sending me email. And we talked

about it. And that's what's missing. And the people who want to defend the fossil fuel industries have made the rest of us feel like hypocrites and have said, you don't know enough to talk about it, be quiet. And what we're trying to do is say, no, you know enough, you should talk about it. So it sounds like what you're saying is that there is no need to necessitate centralized or even globalized authority or decision-making to start fixing this issue.

And I think that's what a lot of people are afraid of, is that big brother is gonna come in and start telling him how to live their lives. What's your thoughts on that? I think if we had a benevolent queen on Earth who was in charge of everyone, a whole bunch of things would get better. Unfortunately, queens don't end up being benevolent

when they're in charge of everything. And so we've built this other kind of system. But the thing is we have an enormous amount of independence. There are many, many countries in the world where you would not want to live, where they pay almost no taxes, and where they almost never see anybody from the government telling them anything to do. They also don't have paved roads, they also don't have health care, and they also don't have a civil society where it's safe to go to sleep at night I don't think you want to live there. I think we take a certain level of civil structure in our lives for granted and So when the government shows up and says, you know what? You're not allowed to sell let it gas

Every person who doesn't have a disabled kid because of that is grateful that unlet a guess is the standard. I think that when the government showed up and said you have to put seat belts and cars even though it costs the car company 12 extra dollars, I think the million people who are alive are glad the government did that. So no, we're not going to have a situation where the government tells us everything to do. But is it appropriate for the government to say, if you're the person who's burning all the carbon that is wrecking your neighbor's yard, you have to stop? Yeah, I think that's appropriate because we do that all the

time anyway. My late dad had a factory and it was discovered that when they were painting the thing they made in their paint booths, little tiny droplets of paint were going through the smoke stack and landing on cars of block away. And people saw little tiny red dots on their cars. And the EPA showed up and said, you can't do that. And so he stopped. And I think we're all glad that that's the rule. Because if it wasn't the rule, all of us would have crap all over our cars all the time. So what my argument is personally, not on behalf of the Almanac, is we're used to structure.

We just got to make sure the structure is accurate and helpful. Yeah, a great example of this is I interview Gene O'Wing. I'm not sure if you know who she is, but she runs Virgin Unite for Sir Richard Granson. I know Gene's shirt. Yeah, and I was talking to her about her book partnering, and she mentioned the story of the ozone layer and how two scientists discovered it, and they were very prominent. And when they came out with their studies, all of a sudden, they lost all their speaking gigs, people started attacking them.

And this went on not for a short period of time, but for about 20-something years. And ultimately, the British government happened to be doing their own research studies over the, I think it was the South Pole, and confirmed what those two had been saying all along. And it finally led to system change when 170 countries and territories all agreed to a common doctrine that we have to eliminate CFLs. I wanted to use that as an example because we have this situation now where we talk about energy independence all the time. And people argue, well, why shouldn't the US be energy independent if the Chinese and the Indians aren't going to get beyond this?

And so my question for you is when you look at a scenario like that, how do you get the different stakeholders around common goals and unite them to see that need to change? It's a pretty complicated question. The biggest solar farm in the world is in India. Last year, China built enough solar and wind facilities to replace 52 coal plants if they choose to. So lots of places around the world are paying attention to this. My point about systems changes that once it becomes clear that solar and wind and going off the grid actually gets you all the other things you want in life, the system will embrace that.

And so if we didn't have that, we would be in really big trouble. The extraordinary thing that's happened in the last 10 years is with the exceptions of jet fuel and cows, we're getting much better at making things more efficient and cheaper, which is what people have wanted all along. For the people who say, every other country has to be better behave than ours before we decide to do something. There are a couple answers. The first moral answer is you're on the same planet as those people.

So showing that you have some sort of outrage while they're being bet doesn't help your kids. Number two is once you put in a border adjustment to the carbon dividend, then any country that is exporting things to the United States would have to play by the same rules as the United States. This is not logistically difficult to pull off, but first we have to just acknowledge that there's a problem. And the thing is you open a newspaper, you turn on the news, it's not the top story and the second story and the third story.

It needs to be every single day. Because if it was, we'd figured out, because we figured out worse problems than this. When I was born, I don't know how we'll do it, but when I was born, the earth was less than a week away from being destroyed in a nuclear disaster, less than a week. And we survived the Cuban Missile Crisis, and we survived the Vietnam War, and we survived, totally chemical dumping stuff in the love canal right near my house. And, and, and, we are resilient if we choose to be, but we can't be resilient if we pretend

that we don't understand and we don't talk about. Yeah, I would just phrase it this way. The other day I was reading the Wall Street Journal and the first four articles that I read were about rivers in Europe that are drying up, a lake in Italy, which is the largest lake that they had, which is now dry, record forest fires in the United States, this and another part of the country. I looked at it and it just causes this reaction inside you, but they're not the articles

that you're talking about, which is how do you undo that? That really need to be there. And so you could use this cow example to look at if we were going to fix this situation that we have today with cows, what are the key foundational building blocks for system change that would be needed? This system changed from an individual point of view is pretty simple. Get your local school to have meatless Mondays. And every time you go to a restaurant, ask the manager if they could put more things on the menu that didn't have beef in them. And if you're going to have a wedding, make it clear to the caterer that it's shameful

that there's beef as an option. Because that's the way we've done things in the past. Add to that systemic change of let's stop spending $50 billion a year subsidizing the cattle industry. Let's figure out how to invest in organizations that are making a white fluid that you can have on top of your cereal in the morning that actually tastes better and is better for you than milk. This is such an easy problem to solve because every morning we wake up and make a new intentional decision about what to buy at the supermarket and what to eat. And 25 years from now, 10 years from now, people are going to say, you did what in 2022? You ate what for dinner when

you knew? Because you can just decide. And I've been around the world. And there is no place on earth except Argentina that eats beef the way that we do. They're plenty happy. And they're plenty fit. More fit than we are. You don't have to do it. It's just cheap and convenient. And we can solve this problem systemically by making it commercially unattractive to bring more cows into the world, because there are people who will talk to you about magic regenerative agriculture that can work on a few cows for a few rich people, it doesn't scale. What scale is eating a little bit differently on behalf of the people we care about? Okay, and Seth, my last question to you would be, so we put in the systems change, we start getting people to navigate towards this goal?

How do we measure progress of the collaborative work? Well, the progress that's super easy to measure is in Hawaii. We can just look at what amount of carbon in the air. If the amount of carbon in the air keeps going up, then we as a species is not succeeding at solving this problem. When we talk about small little components of it, how did we turn the world literate? Right? Martin Luther figures out the printing press with Gutenberg 500 years ago, and now everybody who I know knows how to read. How did that happen?

Did it happen all at once? Who invented reading glasses? Oh, Ben Franklin, when did he do that? There are steps toward this process. And so intellectually, I think we can understand that methane is 80 times more powerful greenhouse guests in carbon dioxide. I think we can understand that the number one cause of methane are cows respirating. I think we can understand that if there one cause of methane are cows respirating. I think we can understand that if there are fewer cows, it's going to be less methane. Do I need to measure how much methane on a daily basis? I don't think I do, because I haven't had meat in 35 years, and I'm fine with it. The fact is, we can make changes in the short run that will turn the system in another direction. And at the same time,

there is a significant number of people who are getting better and better at measuring stuff. And we will see that things begin to get better, but we don't have any more time. And so our slogan is it's not too late, but the subset of the slogan is, but we have to hurt. And so there's no time to discuss whether there's a real problem or not. There's no time to discuss whether or not you should be allowed to have more meat than anybody else. What we need to figure out is how are we going to change the system? And we're going to change the system by being really clear that our goal is to change the system. I just want to ask one short follow on to that.

I've heard you say we have 10 years, we have to do this in. Why is the next decade so important? Well, the simple answer is this. Once ice caps melt, they don't un-melt. And when you melt the ice caps, a whole bunch of really significant things happen. For example, under the ice caps near the North Pole is an enormous amount of buried methane. And when that methane thaws out, it will be

released into the atmosphere worse than any herd of cattle could make a difference. So you end up with the ocean changing direction, you end up with the ocean not being able to absorb any more carbon dioxide, you end up with flooding and not being able to absorb any more carbon dioxide. You end up with flooding and heat waves. And guess what happens when there's flooding and heat waves? People turn on their air conditioning even more. And they say, well, I have to spend money on this and this and this because it's an emergency. And all of those things are like burning your house for more heat.

It's not going to solve the problem in the long run. It's just going to be an emergency reaction. So this little window that's left to create new systems opens the door for us to say, okay, now we can take it breath and start if you want to, exploring nuclear, but we can't wait because that's what the fossil fuel industry wants us to do. They just want us to wait till they retire. And I think deep down the people in that industry know that it's too late for that strategy. And they're starting to wake up. You will hear people from shelf talking about the urgency of this problem for the first time ever that you will see that Exxon no longer denies that this is a real problem. So if the oil industry is now starting to understand it, that should be a symptom that

the rest of us really need to show up. Okay, and if a listener wants to get more active and participate in the Carbon Almanac, how can they do that? So, the key to what we did is this isn't my project. This is a Wii project because it's a Wii problem. You can start your own version of this, your own book group, your own discussion group, publish your own version of what you want people to talk about. You can start a podcast, you can join one of our podcasts.

There are unlimited ways for you to speak up. I'm not going to pick you, I'm not going to call you on the phone because I'm not the picker. I'm just here saying, systems change happens horizontally. And when you are ready to lead, there are people who are eager to follow, but we need more people to show up and lead. It didn't take me but a week to get started on this project and find other people who wanted to follow me. And I'm not some sort of superhero. I just decided to show up and make a difference. That's what systems change looks like. Okay. You've've shown it a couple times. I'm going to show it one more time. Here's the book, Carbon Almanac. I'll have all kinds of links to it in the show notes. Seth, thank you so much for

taking the time to talk about this vital issue that we have to solve. Well, thank you, sir. I know this wasn't the easiest show you ever did, but I for one and grateful. So thanks. I thought that that was an extremely important interview with Seth Goden. And I wanted to thank Seth, Marisol Salaman, as well as Penguin Random House for giving us the honor of interviewing him. Links to all things Seth and the Carbon Almanac will be in the show notes. Please use our website links if you buy any of the books from the guests that appear on the show. All proceeds go to supporting the show and making it free for you or listener. Videos are on YouTube at JohnRMiles where we now have over 400 of them.

Please go check it out and subscribe. Avertiser, deals and discount codes are in one convenient place at passionstruck.com slash deals. Please consider supporting those who support the show. I'm at JohnRMiles on both Twitter as well as Instagram and you can also find me on LinkedIn. And if you want to know how I book all these amazing guests on the show, it's because of my network. Go out there and build yours before you need it. You're about to hear a preview of the PassionStruck podcast interview I did with Rachel Hollis, who is a repeat New York Times best-selling author, one of the most requested speakers and personal development and one of the top podcast posts globally.

The last two years, two and a half years really for me have been filled with those defining moments. It's been a really hard couple of years on personal levels, professional levels. I've experienced a lot of loss, a lot of grief and And in that process, as brutal as it's been, I am a completely different person. I'm a completely different mama. I'm a completely different writer. I'm a completely different everything. I wanted to remember that every great thing I have in my life came on the other side of hardship, came on the other side of a difficult season, or a hard lesson to learn. The fee for this show is that you share it with your friends. When you find something useful or interesting, if you know someone who really wants to understand more about climate change

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