The Rich Roll Podcast - Sailesh Rao On Why Ahimsa (Nonviolence) Is An Essential Response to Climate Change

Episode Date: October 16, 2015

Today I am pleased to offer a conversation with environmentalist, engineer and technologist Sailesh Rao, the founder and Executive Director of environmental non-profit Climate Healers. With a focus on ahimsa — the Sanskrit word for non-violence — as an essential and perhaps the most powerful response to climate change, Climate Healers promotes technological and engineering advances aimed at clean air and reforestation. Partnering with NGOs, tribal villages, and school clubs, current projects include efforts to devise an affordable and high-functioning solar powered stove to replace the traditional — and quite environmentally detrimental — wood burning stoves that proliferate across low income areas of India. An electrical engineer by training with a Ph.D. from Stanford University, Sailesh’s background in technology includes stints at both AT&T Bell Labs and Intel, where he was instrumental in developing early iterations of the internet itself. Sailesh is also the author of Carbon Dharma: The Occupation of the Butterflies*– a call to undo the planetary damage done by the human species in its present “caterpillar stage” of existence. As for palmares, Sailesh was selected as a Karmaveer Puraskaar Noble Laureate, an award presented by iCONGO (Indian Confederation of NGOs) whose primary mission is to encourage citizen action for social justice. This is a conversation about environmental preservation, the inherent and incredible power of ahimsa, the imperative of service and a reminder that each and every one of can make a positive difference in the world. Sailesh is a highly intelligent, contemplative and compassionate man devoted to making the world a better, cleaner place for us and future generations. I greatly enjoyed this conversation and applaud his advocacy and devotion to service. I sincerely hope you enjoy the exchange. Note: Apologies for publishing this episode a day late and for the brevity of this post. I am currently traveling internationally with little free time or internet access. I'm doing my best under the circumstances and appreciate the consideration. When I find the bandwidth, I may supplement this entry with additional thoughts and resources. Thanks for understanding! Peace + Plants, Rich

The Rich Roll Podcast. Can you believe that? 185 episodes. The podcast where I sit down with the outliers, the big forward thinkers across all categories of positive paradigm-breaking culture change. Why do I do this? To help all of us, myself included, unlock and unleash our best, most authentic selves. So thank you so much for subscribing, subscribing, yeah, I can talk, to the show, for giving us a review, and for always making sure to use the amazon banner ad at richroll.com for all your amazon purchases the banner ads right there on the main podcast page doesn't cost you anything extra you just click on it and then whatever you

get on amazon we get credited they don't charge you it comes out of amazon's pocket it's just a great really easy free way to support the mission. And thank you so much to everybody who has made a habit out of doing this. It really does make a big difference. So thank you. We appreciate it. Today, I've got Silas Rao on the show today. He is an environmentalist, an engineer, a technologist. He's doing some really interesting things out in the world. And I'm going to get a little bit more into him and his background in a minute. But before that, two things I want to cover. Two things. First thing, apologies for the podcast being late this week. I am so sorry. But right now, it's the middle of the night somewhere outside of Frankfurt, Germany. I'm in Europe. It's been a very busy last few days. Arrived here a couple

days ago. I'm here for the Frankfurt Book Fair, which is the largest international book market in the world. And I'm here to do press around the launch of The Plant Power Way, which comes out in a German language edition, which is really exciting. But it's been kind of a demanding last couple days

of acclimating to the time change and doing a bunch of press, et cetera. By the way, check out the book. It's now available at amazon.de for those of you who want to get a German language edition. It came out really beautiful. Really proud of it. Narayana Verlag, our German publisher. They are amazing.

Julie and I are going to talk a little bit more about our experience working with these guys on the next AMA podcast. But just trust me that it's been really cool working with these people. But there's been a lot going on. We've been running around quite a bit and not to mention trying to adjust to an eight-hour time change. So I am apologizing for the podcast being late. It's the first time that that's happened in an extremely long time. So I'm sorry. And the second thing I want to say is uh before we get into silage is let's take care of some business really quick all right you guys so this week's show i'm going to keep this intro really brief because it's like the middle of the night i'm in the middle of nowhere

in germany i'm extremely jet lagged and tired. But this is a really exciting show. I don't want to put a damper on just how amazing today's guest is. Silas Rao is the executive director of a nonprofit called Climate Healers, climatehealers.org. He's the author of a book called Carbon Dharma, The Occupation of Butterflies, really interesting book. And by training, he is an electrical engineer, a technologist. He's got a PhD from Stanford University. And very interestingly, his technology career involved working very intensely on the very early iterations of the internet, which is fascinating. He did that both at AT&T Bell Labs and at Intel. And at some point in his career, he was moved to action to address the global climate challenge. And in 2007, he was

moved to found Climate Healers. And the goal of Climate Healers, among many things, but its primary goal really is aimed at reforestation. It's got a lot of projects going on. They partner with NGOs, with tribal villages and school clubs to help low income areas, particularly in India, use solar rather than wood burning stoves, which is a big focus of today's conversation. It's an interesting little niche thing, you would think, but actually it's a huge problem. The sort of carbon footprint incident to wood-burning stoves and the millions of people that are using them and the work that Silesh is doing to find more sustainable, sort of environmental-friendly ways of people preparing food in their homes.

So Silesh is a really interesting, thoughtful guy. He's doing amazing, important, interesting work. So let's pay him a visit, step into his world and see what he has to say. Enjoy. I'm looking forward to getting into so many of the interesting things that you're doing and welcome to Los Angeles. You live in Phoenix, yeah? Yes, I do. What brought you out here other than the podcast? Do you have other business here? I'm on my way back to Phoenix. Oh, you are? On a long trip. Well, I know you were in Paris. Where else have you been?

Before that, I was in India. From Phoenix to India and then India to Paris, Paris to San Francisco, and now San Francisco to LA. That is quite a road trip. Are you a little road weary? Yeah. Yeah, very good. Looking forward to going home tomorrow. All right. Well, if you need some caffeine, let me know. No, no, I don't take

any caffeine. All right. I didn't think so. Well, you have such an interesting story. And I want to get into all of the advocacy work and talk about climate healers and all the work you're doing in India. But maybe the best place is to start start at the beginning you grew up in you grew up in india of course right yes uh-huh and um and and was sort of raised as a lacto-vegetarian from the get-go is that right absolutely yeah uh-huh and that was just something your parents did or or how did that kind of come about yeah we were brahmins you know brahmins almost all of us are lacto vegetarians so it is the ahimsa tradition right the ahimsa do no harm do no harm right yes and and it sounds like you know from poking around the internet and what i've read that you know

you had a pretty you had a you know sort of a normal childhood right yes this is true yeah and you came to the united states eventually for your graduate work. You got a PhD at Stanford. That's correct. In electrical engineering. That's correct. And then found yourself in the world of Silicon Valley. Well, I was actually in New Jersey.

Oh, you were? Doing silicon design, yeah. I see. So you worked for Bell Labs originally? Right. And then Intel? doing silicon design yeah i see so you worked for bell labs originally right uh-huh and then intel bell labs and then i started my own company called silicon design experts which got acquired by level one communications which got acquired by intel wow that's nice

very good that's good so so essentially you know sort of uh in terms terms of being an entrepreneur and being an engineer, you're sort of retired, yes, from that. Right, yeah. And I'm interested in exploring the evolution away from being a tech entrepreneur and into the world of environmentalism. What sparked that for you? Well, it's sort of like the dog that catches the car and then discovers what to do, right? So you have ambitions as an engineer. You say, I want to do something significant.

And I did this standard called Gigabit Ethernet, which was the basis for the internet backbone. And the internet took off. And so I said, okay, I achieved what I wanted to do in engineering, but it isn't what I thought it was. What did you think that it would be? I don't know. I mean, I thought it was, you know, that I would feel much better about it.

But then I noticed that my, you know, my, But then I noticed that I'd spent so much time working on that that my family life had suffered. So I was beginning to question, what am I doing with this? Right. And what you were doing specifically in layman's terms was really working on... Oh, I didn't turn my phone off. Sorry about that. Was working on chip design.

Is that accurate? I was working on the backbone of the Internet. So this is what connects switches to each other and switches to computers. So this was the hardware infrastructure for the Internet. Right. So in many ways, you are one of the inventors of the Internet. No, I'm not even the inventors of the internet. No, not really. No, I'm not even going to touch that.

Okay. Let Al Gore run with that. But you were involved in the early days of pioneering the technology that kind of powers the internet. That's correct. We were a pretty collegial group at that time. We didn't really realize that the internet was going to be so big. What did people think at that time? You know,

imagine in 1996, Cisco was like a billion dollar company. That was the biggest company around among the companies that were working on the internet. So we thought maybe it'll be a little bit bigger than it was right and we never really

thought it was going to take off like it did in 2001 uh-huh so if you had known that would you have done things differently a lot of people would a lot of people yeah exactly right right all right so that the dog catches the car and you're kind of doing an inventory on your life and trying to figure out what's important. And so where does kind of the environmental awareness start to crop up for you? So it started with coming home from work one day, and I had a company doing 10 gigabit Ethernet at that time, and switching on the TV, and there was Al Gore talking about climate change. He was basically doing a slideshow in front of a live audience in San Francisco, and someone had taped it, and they were showing the tape on Link TV. It was kind of his keynote that ultimately led to the movie.

Right. It was before the movie that ultimately led to the movie right right before the movie before the movie and it was it was actually a small group of maybe 50 people in san francisco and link tv had taped it and they were showing it on uh on satellite so i i turned it on and i i couldn't get off the couch i was so mesmerized by what he was saying. And after he finished, I told my wife, if even half of what he said is true, I'm wasting my time working on 10 gigabit Ethernet. So I decided to study the problem.

I'm like a systems guy. I basically do systems work. And to me, that was the biggest systems problem around. I realized that the kind of legacy we leave our children has nothing to do with money, if this is going on.

Within three months, I realized that it's far worse than what Mr. God is saying. Because he only touches on the energy issue so it's a whole another so it's like you know someone talking about just the fever when there is a cancer going on in the body so I told my wife that we have to close our company and she agreed wow so so we closed it within three months and And I wrote to Mr. Gore and I said, how can I help you? And I didn't hear back from him for like six months. Right.

How do you even know where to send the email or a letter? I sent a letter, actually, because I didn't have an email address. But I could find an office address. The guy who's working on the internet doesn't have his own email address? What year is this? It was 2006. Oh, my God. Come on.

So then I found a physical address for him, and I wrote to him, wrote to the office of Mr. Lowe. Right. And I got a reply back like six months later, basically asking if I would come and get trained by him and to give this presentation. Right, so he was kind of dispatching lieutenants out in the world to kind of give the talk that he was giving

so it could kind of spread a little bit more virally. Right, yeah, right. So you became one of those people. Right, I was in the second batch that he trained. Right. And then, you know, as part of that, you agree to give that presentation 10 times over the next year. And I did that.

And then I started Climate Healers. Right. But while you're doing this, you know, you're sort of, you're giving his talk, right? So you're kind of talking about the fever as you're, you know, going home and deepening your research and realizing that there's a cancer underneath this that is going under addressed. Right. But even when I was giving his talk, I did add slides. I mean, he said it's okay to personalize your slides because you're talking to your friends and your community, right?

So you have to personalize it to that situation. So I did add slides about the cancer right from the beginning. And the cancer is? The cancer is really human overconsumption in many ways. Mainly the consumption of animal foods, because that's the biggest impact on the planet. And then other consumption also, if we sort of propagate that kind of consumption throughout the whole world, the planet cannot tolerate that. Right. Yeah.

So let's just lay a little bit of foundation here because we're kind of getting into the world of industrialized animal agriculture and the impact of that on the planet. And, you know, for listeners out there, they know that I had Kip and Keegan in from Cowspiracy. We talked at length about this. there they know you know that i had kip and keegan in from cowspiracy we talked at length about this but if somebody's new and they're unfamiliar or they haven't seen that film um you know let's let's like sort of paint the picture if you will right um i mean if you look at the overall situation right now it is fundamentally unsustainable because sustainability means that the earth can maintain something for the foreseeable future right and for the past um i think it's like two million years or so the biomass of megafauna has been stable at around 200 million metric tons. Megafauna are all animals greater than 25 kgs in weight.

So it has been pretty stable at 200 million metric tons. And then we come along and our weight, the weight of human beings alone, is 360 million metric tons right now. Wild megafauna has dwindled to 40 million metric tons. So we have basically destroyed 80% of them in terms of total biomass. And livestock is around 1.1 billion metric tons.

So clearly, if you were to say, how do you become sustainable? You have to get rid of livestock. I mean, there's no ifs, ands, or buts about it. The UN agrees with that. The UN had this, UN environmental program had an international council on sustainable resource management. And they said that a global transition to a vegan diet is vital to save the world from hunger fuel poverty and the worst worst effects of climate change that's the reason for that because it's like you're a

it's like a man holding a holding a weight that's three times his weight and then discovers that he's in quicksand and he's sinking the first thing you do is throw away the weight you're carrying right but we're trying to figure out a way to still hold on to the weight and not sink right right and convincing ourselves that there's there's a solution to this fundamental problem that defies the laws of physics laws of biology right the ecosystems yeah right so in terms of statistics i mean what is the impact of this you of this biomass of livestock? I mean, I know there's certain statistics that you learn about in Cowspiracy, like 45% of the earth's non-ice landmass is covered for livestock, including grazing grounds, I think, right? grazing grounds, I think, right?

And statistics like it takes 660 gallons of water to produce a quarter pound of hamburger and 1,000 gallons of water to produce one gallon of milk. And I think it's one to two football fields worth of acreage is lost every second in the rainforest due to clearing it for livestock. Right. I mean, the statistic, if you look at the UN IPCC, AR5, which is the fifth report, fifth assessment report, in Working Group 3, Chapter 11, you know, they

go through all of this in detail. So the amount of grasslands used for livestock covers 35% of the land area of the planet. And then half the cropland is being used for livestock. So that's another 10%. Right, to feed these animals. Right, so that's where the 45% comes from. And if you look at the total amount of biomass that's going to feed livestock, it gets reduced by a factor of 26 before it becomes food for human systems. What does that explain what that means?

It means that there's 26 calories going into livestock to get one calorie out. Right. So it's the definition of inefficiency. Exactly. It's only 4 of inefficiency. Exactly. It's only 4% efficient in that sense. So when people really talk about protein conversion, they're talking about just the protein. They don't talk about the overall calories that are going in. And that includes, I mean, that average is, that's an average including eggs, milk, meat, all put together. If we just look at beef, it's like 65 to 1.

I mean, it is very efficient in the US because it's like 50 something to 1, 55 to 1 or something like that in the US. And it's like 110 to 1 in developing world. And the number is different in the US because we have our system down so locked in in terms of how we create economies of scale around our agriculture, right? Right. Because the animal is only alive the shortest amount of time possible before it's slaughtered, et cetera.

Right, and they're not allowed to move too much, so they're sitting around. I mean, so that they don't waste energy in movement. So there's all kinds of optimization done, but it's really tremendously cruel to the animals to do that. In the developing world, they let the animals run around and graze, and so they're wasting energy walking around. Whereas in the U.S., most of the food that's eaten, they want it to become muscle as much as possible. So that's why the energy conversion ratio is less in the US.

Okay, so water use, inefficiencies in terms of calories, rainforest destruction, what else is going on? So there is deforestation going on, which is what the UN usually points out. I mean, it's like 20, 25 million acres per year. But there is also desertification going on,

which not many people talk about. Explain the difference between deforestation and desertification. So deforestation is when you take a forest and you clear-cut it. And then you convert that into grassland or you convert that into soy,pland or something like that. But over time, the carbon in the soil disappears.

So the soil basically becomes less and less fertile because it used to hold a forest. And as the soil becomes less and less fertile, you discover that you can't grow so much soy. So you start pouring more and more chemicals to get the soy to grow. And then the soil basically becomes infertile. And it turns into desert. So that process, so at the end there is desertification going on, you know, from the grasslands and from the cropland. there is desertification going on from the grasslands and from the cropland and the amount

of desertification is greater if not equal at least, if not greater than the amount of land that's becoming deforested Oh that's interesting, I didn't know that Right So there is an entire UN

sister organization to the UNFCCC, which only looks at desertification. So I think it's called the UNCCD, Convention to Combat Desertification. So these are their numbers. They're saying 30 million acres is becoming desertified. And is that localized somewhere, or is that sort of... It's spread out. Right.

It's spread out. Basically, the Sahara is trying to grow. In the place that I work in, in India, we see that happening in the ground. So I work at the edge of the Thar Desert, which is, the Thar Desert is a desert in Rajasthan, India, and that's really the tip of the Sahara Desert. The Sahara Desert begins in the western part of Africa, goes all the way into India. Oh, I didn't, wow, I didn't realize that.

And it goes all the way into China as the Gobi Desert. So it's one big continuous desert. And if you notice, that's the area where the civilizations of the world were, the ancient civilizations, you know, Egyptian, Sumerian, Babylonian, Persian, Indus Valley, Chinese civilizations. I mean, these are their homes that became the desert. Because they essentially deforested and converted it to cropland or livestock grazing land and then desertified.

So that's growing, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you watch it at the edge, because we are working at the edge of the Thar Desert, and at the edge of the Thar Desert is this Aravali Hills, and the hills have forests on them still. But the forests are dying, and you can see why they're dying.

And you can see the desertification process happening because the people have a lot of livestock because that's their source of income. See, there's no other income for them. They eat what they grow, but they need anything from the outside world. They need to have some cash. So how do you get cash?

Well, raise some goats, sell the goats, you make money. And the goats get bought by traders who convert that into mutton. And then they sell the mutton and export it to the Middle East. So it's like the biomass of the forest is being transported to the Middle East. And there they eat the goats and the sewage gets flushed into the ocean. So we have all these open loop systems where the biomass is being removed from land and being flushed into the ocean. Of course you're going to get deserts.

Right. So by contrast, a closed loop system would mean that the animals that are living there perish there and then their remains go back into the soil. Right. Yeah. Right. And even the plant biomass as well goes back into the soil. So you have to compost and put things back into the ground. That would be closing the loop. Right, right, right. But you're seeing the desert essentially expanding around the perimeter.

And part of the work that you're doing is trying to stop that momentum and reverse it and start moving it in the other direction. Exactly. Right. All right. And I want to get into that specifically with the work that you're doing. But while we're kind of on the subject of the global impact of animal agriculture, there's other things going on too. of the global impact of animal agriculture,

there's other things going on too. We have carbon emissions, we have ocean pollution, we have the algal blooms and all these other things that are happening as well, right? I mean, explain a little bit of that perhaps. Well, it's basically a symptom of these open-loop systems that we have created. Algal blooms are because of over-nutrition. So if you get a lot of fertilizer in the ocean, you get a lot of plant growth. And this comes from maybe chemical fertilizers on land.

You pour a bunch of chemical. Yeah, and the runoff from that goes into the ocean and it fertilizes the ocean bottom. And so you get a lot of plant growth. When a lot of plant growth, algal growth happens, it sucks all the oxygen out. And when it sucks all the oxygen out, then there's nothing for the fish to breathe.

So they die so you get dead zones direct consequence of this and so it's all industrialized agriculture which is mainly being done in the west to feed livestock

essentially results in these things and these are all things that the un you know has written about and has been very clearly you know kind of articulating to the world our issues that we should be concerned about but to kind of bring it back to the work that you were initially doing with with al gore i mean this is sort of a more inconvenient truth, perhaps too inconvenient, right? And so, I know that, you know, he wanted to sort of curtail his message, you know, specific to fossil fuel use, etc., and really didn't want to get into this area, right? So, it's sort of like

the elephant in the room that is not being addressed. I mean, if you look back on that experience of, you know, kind of being one of his lieuten addressed. I mean, if you look back on that experience of, you know, kind of being one of his lieutenants, I mean, how do you explain why he didn't want to go there? Al Gore is basically off the current system. He's within the current system, and he's not going to do anything that would upset the current system. The current system the current system

is based on economic growth it's all about growth okay and if you suddenly you know decide to shrink it that's a that's not a politically viable message exactly it's not a politically viable message so when we talk about switching from animal foods to plant-based foods you're talking about shrinking the footprint of human beings significant amount and thereby you know releasing land back to nature to regenerate forests and bring back life but the economic footprint also shrinks you see the message to consumers is you have to change your habits, not only in the kitchen and at the grocery store, but your consumer habits overall,

which means spending less money or spending your money on different things. It's more than that. I mean, in terms of consumption, In terms of consumption, the number one thing we need to do is to reduce the consumption of animal foods. To me, that's the biggest bang for the buck. And of course, if everybody in the world wants to build 3,000 square foot homes,

that isn't enough to support something like that. Or everybody wants a car per person, one car per person. It's, you really don't need one car per person. What you need is to be able to transport yourself when you need to. Right. Right?

You don't have to have a car, a separate car for each person to do that. Right. But the industry would rather that you do this, right? The industry would rather that you buy one car per person or you change your phone as if you're changing diapers. Okay, so this way you get a lot of circulation, right, of material.

And so they get to do a lot of work and they sell you a lot of goods, but you create a lot of pollution. You get a lot of pollution and you create a lot of ill health. And then they can you a lot of goods but you create a lot of pollution you get a lot of pollution and you create a lot of ill health and then they can create a lot of drugs to treat all that ill health so it's like it's like a never-ending vicious cycle right right right right yeah so uh i mean did you ever i mean when you were kind of giving this you know al gore keynote i mean were those were were you slipping in some slides about animal agriculture? I mean, did you ruffle some feathers in that organization

by starting to think and advocate in this regard? Yeah, we tried to do it internally. We actually sent him a letter, and he basically brushed it off. And he basically brushed it off. And then we did demonstrations during one of his training sessions. And I think the message... So you actually jumped the fence. I did.

Sort of. Interesting. Because I think it's very important. To me, it's about healing the climate. You see, the story that's being told so far is that climate change is inevitable. It's going to get worse. And the best thing we can do is to hold it steady at a high level of disruption. Right.

Right? Yeah. I mean, and I think what, you know, on the the consumer end of it the messages that we're receiving are you know take fewer showers drive a little bit less you know sort of tiny little things that really aren't going to make an impact and are not addressing the real problem yeah it's to get a social movement really we have to change our lifestyles okay so you have to have a social movement to change lifestyles because people consider some things to be normal now

and you are going to go to a new normal right when you change lifestyles to create a social movement like that you need to get large numbers of people doing the same thing okay in unison with

discipline and persistence. I consider the vegan movement to be the vanguard of a social movement that's going to do this lifestyle change. So that one thing that you do together that creates that movement has to be a substantial thing. Changing light has to be a substantial thing. Changing light bulbs is not a substantial thing. I mean, you have to do it, but it's a really minor blip. Whereas changing your food habits, I mean, you do that three times a day. I mean you do that three times a day and three times a day you're making

an impact on on the earth essentially so whether you're eating animal foods or plant foods it makes a huge difference if millions of people start doing it together

billions of people start doing it together then you create social change. Right. The example, and I love this, the example that you used is the one of Gandhi with garments, right? Can you recount that?

Yeah, so Gandhi was an activist first in South Africa. He spent a lot of his life in South Africa. And he came to India exactly 100 years ago as an adult. I mean, he grew up in India, but then he left to do his studies and then he came to South Africa. And exactly 100 years ago, in 1915, he came to India. And there's a picture of him getting off the boat and he's wearing a suit and a tie.

He's like a lawyer. Yeah, it's hard to picture. Right. And then there's a picture of him three years later or four years later and he's wearing these Qadi clothes. Yeah.

So he started the Qadi movement in 1918 and his idea was actually genius. He was going to ask people of India to do one thing together. We all do that one thing, then we will tackle the mighty British Empire of that era. And that was to change clothes. Change from British-made clothes to cotton clothes that were spun and woven in India, called Khadar clothes. Change from British made clothes to cotton clothes that were spun and woven in India.

They're called Qatar clothes. They were actually quite popular outside the country as well. Qatar clothes. So with that, it was a simple act that anybody could do and join. It was a substantial act

because the textile industry in England was the largest industry they had at that time. So we're going to impact the largest industry in England. And it was also a spiritual act because it united the people of India. You know, we could overcome all these divisions that we had in terms of religion, caste, you name it. Because you see the other guys wearing Qadi clothes, just like you. That one thing. That one thing, yeah.

And the impact of that was what? So within a dozen years, the textile mills of Manchester had been bankrupt, and the British came begging to negotiate with Gandhi. That's so interesting. Right. Yeah, and there are so many analogies to switching your diet right to that thing it's simple it is substantial you are asking somebody to you know make a pretty radical

lifestyle change right for most people um simple substantial and definitely spiritual right right uh i think it's i think it's probably perhaps, I don't know because I didn't live there at the time, but to ask somebody to change their attire might be easier than trying to get people to change their eating habits. People are very, you know, it's a very emotional thing for a lot of people. Yeah. Well, in India, there was a lot of debate about Qadhi as well. If you read the magazines

from that era, you realize Gandhi had a lot of opposition in the beginning. People said, well, how could this be? How could this affect the British at all?

Okay. So he had to go through a lot of explanations. And then they came up with all kinds of arguments. Well, Qatar is costlier than British clothes because those are all made in industrial factories, right? So they were cheaper than handmade clothes. And so that's why Gandhi started wearing just the loincloth.

So he said, well, you can use very little cloth and still cover yourself so he started changing himself to show that it can be made cheaper right so just like vegans uh we face the same kind of uh it'll be more expensive right yeah it's going to be inconvenient and what are you going to do when you go out to dinner or you travel? All these arguments crop up around it that are really just mental constructs that prevent people from kind of mentally grappling with the reality of what it is. Because it is very simple, actually. It's a very black and white thing.

You're either ingesting animal products or consuming them in some way, or you're not. Right. Yeah. But there is, see, we all have these blinders, okay? Some area or the other. And we put these blinders on and we come up with rationalization to keep those blinders on, because we are comfortable doing what we are doing. And so it's kind of human nature to be like that. The thing we have to focus on more, I think, is the suffering that's happening. You know, the suffering that's happening, not just for the animals, but also the people who are ingesting the animals. They're suffering a lot too, you lot too because you look at all the pollution that we have put into the environment

every product we buy has caused a lot of pollution to go into the environment and all that pollution we think we have just pumped it up into the atmosphere and it disappears no it doesn't disappear it comes down in the rain it gets sucked up by plants

and the plants get eaten by animals and they concentrate it in their bodies they actually you know and then they give you a concentrated dose of those pollutants back to us so we are at the top of the food chain so we are getting it in in big big chunks so it is it is going to become toxic to eat these things. I don't know how long we can continue this because the circulation of these toxins never goes away. You're just adding more and more each year. So as a scientist uh as an engineer and somebody who has studied

uh climate change for quite some time uh if you had to if you had to make an estimate that if we don't change our systemic way of feeding the planet i mean what are we looking at and and how far off are some of these repercussions? It's very hard to predict nonlinear systems. There are tipping points, and then they just go off into another realm altogether. But rather than saying, okay, this is where you're going to hit the brake, I mean, you're going to fall off the cliff. I think that there is a tipping point

in people going vegan, okay? People joining the movement. I was at a conference in San Francisco of the IIT engineers. All the alumni got together, like 50,000 of us, you know? And so they had Elizabethizabeth holmes for the keynote and elizabeth holmes she's the ceo of terranos which is revolutionizing the medical diagnostics industry um so she's like the youngest billionaire ever and so she stands up on stage and the audience

is packed. It's only a standing room. She finishes her presentation and then they ask her a question and she says, well, I'm a vegan. And people look, wait a minute, this

lady that we look up to is a vegan. Then they had Vinod Khosla in the next session. And Vinod Khosla is an investor. And he's one of the biggest investors in Hampton Creeks. And he talks on and on about plant-based foods. And people are getting this message now. Some of these people sitting up on stage are investing in these things and are being vegan.

There was another philanthropist who also came on stage and he said, I'm vegan. So three things that happened within like two hours span and you have all these engineers thinking about this now. So I think we need to make this an aspirational goal for people. So it's no longer the old, which planet are you from, when you say you're vegan, right? People know that.

No, not anymore. Not anymore. It definitely has a level of mainstream awareness and acceptance and momentum that is unprecedented. And I see that only growing, and that's exciting and interesting. But I think at its core, it still very much remains a grassroots thing you know and i think to the extent that you know we want you know we would be inclined to sit around and wait for you know our elected representatives to pay attention to this UN report and start doing something about it

is to ask them to defy the very kind of rules that have been set up around government. Because unless there's radical campaign finance reform, the big agricultural companies and the milk and dairy lobbies, et cetera, just hold too much sway and power over our legislative process. They have it in gridlock.

So I don't think that that's going to be the way that things are going to change. And similarly, they have a stranglehold on media as well because their media ad buys are so large that it becomes difficult to get objective reporting on these issues in our typical kind of mainstream outlets. No, it's more than, it's actually systemic. You see, I mean, when you are in a system, you don't want to do anything that would break that system.

So there is the fear of the loss of the known. So even though this is awful, at least it's still going, right? You say, I don't want to derail this thing because it's still going. So you will never get leaders of the system to break the system. I mean, it's very hard to have,

it's very rare to get a Gorbachev, so to speak, right? Who could say, well, this thing is messed up, so I'm going to just change the whole thing. So you are going to have to get pressure from below. Right. So this is the grassroots. This is like the Qadi movement.

Yeah, and ultimately, if you get enough critical mass around that grass movement, that influences consumer spending habits. And, you know, we live in a capitalist society and the markets will adapt to serve the consumer desire, right? So if desire shifts away from, you know, Hellman's mayonnaise to Hampton Creek to a plant based alternative, because it's healthier, and it it's less expensive and it's more sustainable then the market will you know applaud that but we have to work within that system unless we overthrow the system by virtue of you know a grassroots movement i think right so the the analogy with the kadi movement is is very apt because there also it was a grassroots movement and Gandhi couldn't go and ask the

British to move and he did but they'd said go away right so they only listened when it impacted their bottom line exactly right so the same thing is going to have to happen here when it when it impacts their bottom line they'll have to come and talk to us. And I mean, they will probably, you'll see major changes happening at that point, you know? Right. And I see that also as an exponential process, right? Because it's exponential process meaning you see more and more vegans and then until you reach over 10%, then you're going to see it shoot up, and then it'll become the normal thing.

Yeah, it reaches a critical mass, and then it explodes. So then it seemingly overnight, it becomes much bigger than it was the previous day. Right. So you're out in the world. You're giving the Al Gore keynote. At some point, you realize this isn't cutting it. You jump the fence. You start protesting Al Gore.

Did he become aware? Did you ever have a conversation with him about that? Not with him directly, but with his people. They took me to a room and they gave me the third degree. Really? Oh, wow. And then I walked out, yeah. And was Climate Healers kind of formed on the shoulders of that experience?

No, no, no. Climate Healers has been going on from before that. Right. So you formed that in 2007? 2007, yes. So it's climatehealers.org, and it's a nonprofit. So explain the mission of this organization. The mission is to heal the climate,

not just stabilize it at a high level of disruption, to heal it. It's like a patient who goes to a doctor and he says, I've had this persistent fever for the past few weeks. And the doctor examines the patient and he says, sorry, it's not just fever, you have cancer. And your fever is going to get worse. And the best I can do is to stabilize your fever at 102 while the cancer ages on and then you discover that he didn't tell

you to stop smoking if you had stopped smoking and if you had stopped eating all these carcinogens your cancer could have been reversed and if you would go away right so the un ipcc is not telling us that we can do some lifestyle changes that would reverse the cancer they're just telling us if you can we're going to continue doing this because if you look at all their projections the economy is growing by a factor of three or four by the year 2100 we're going to continue deforesting from now until 2100 you know you say how stupid are we right yeah by 2100 we're going to have 11 billion people on the planet most likely that's their i mean they're they're looking at projections like that right so 9 billion to 11 billion and they're looking at okay we have to continue deforesting

because we have to continue eating at the current rate. They're assuming that livestock biomass is going to double by the year 2050. So, I mean, how can the Earth support that, right? Without going overboard. It's just not possible. It's impossible

to continue to feed the planet the way that we've been feeding them as population continues to swell and i think we're already at that tipping point and and point of no return and yet the the solution is staring us in the face the entire time but that message really isn't getting out there and nor is it being heated on a mass level. Right, because most of the scientists are not vegan. In fact, I haven't found a single climate scientist who prefers to be vegan. Right, I mean, I feel like all of the people that are doing,

not all of them, but a good percentage of the people that are doing work in this area, all very smart, well-intentioned people, are trying to find ways to make our current system work to serve this growing, you know, swelling population, as opposed to taking a step back and saying, well, we need a new system. It's the system that's the problem, right? So, you know, you're an outlier in that regard. Yeah, I mean, we see ourselves as presenting alternatives that would reverse the damage that's been done to heal the climate, heal the planet.

And the way of going about that is what? So the way of going about that is you look at what are the systemic changes and behavioral changes? What changes should be done? And what would the effect of that be? If you make one change, what does it do to the climate? So we analyze that and we present that. So breaking down individual behaviors and sort of tracking the impact of that behavior

protracted out over time. Right. and sort of tracking the impact of that behavior protracted out over time. So for instance, if you ask the question, if the whole world goes vegan, how much carbon can be sequestered by regenerating forests? It's a very simple question, right? Because right now we are deforesting. When we release land back to nature, it will reforest.

We know that. So then the simple question is, how much carbon will be sequestered by those regenerating forests? So I asked a professor at University of Illinois, Professor Atul Jain. He's a land carbon expert. And he took out his model and his grad student

Shiji Xu worked on this and they looked at the grasslands alone 35% of the land area of the planet is being used to raise grass to feed cattle to feed livestock

so of that they looked at all the grasslands that are adjacent to forests that can be reforested and that happened to be just 40% of that so about 41% of that and on that land alone

41% of the 35% on that they were able to sequester 265 gigatons of carbon which is more carbon than we have put into the atmosphere since the industrial era began so 265 gigatons of carbon, which is more carbon than we have put into the atmosphere since the industrial era began. Right, so in the last 200 years.

In the last 200 years. So that's, of course, at maturity. So there's a transition that's going to have to happen. But the potential is enormous. And we haven't even begun to look at what can we do when we afforest, not just reforest, when we actively go and build soil and bring back forests that used to be there.

Because over 10,000 years, we've been deforesting as human beings. And the estimate is that we have, I mean, the Sahara, most of the Sahara, that used to be all carbon-based forests. How long ago was that, when it was forest? Well, 10,000 years ago is when the transition happened from the interglacial from the Ice Age to the current interglacial period and agriculture

kind of began around that time. Remember the fertile crescent? Yes. Not so fertile anymore. Exactly. Right, right, right. right well i feel like there's an interesting thing happening culturally right now and i'm interested in your in your opinion on this um as we you know as western culture becomes more intrigued by wellness and these you know the idea of living more sustainably is kind of having a

zeitgeist moment at least in in terminology if not in actual behavior change right uh and so i feel like industry has kind of cropped into this world because they realize there's money to be made around branding these ideas of sustainability and so what you you're seeing, and in my own personal experience, you know, I have friends who are not, you know, they're not plant-based, they're not vegan, but they'll say, well, I make sure that all of the meat that I eat is sustainably harvested, it's grass-fed, you know, and it's humanely, these animals are humanely treated, they have good lives, and therefore, they feel alleviated of whatever kind of guilt pely treated they have good lives and and and therefore they feel alleviated of whatever kind of guilt pang that they have like they feel like they're they're

making a responsible choice when in reality that's quite an illusion because it's it's certainly not what they've conjured up in their mind of some happy cow or or chicken or or what have you uh and by its very definition, an animal raised for food is not sustainable under any circumstances, right? So there's sort of this, for lack of a better phrase, like Madison Avenue kind of marketing

and specific language that is created and crafted around these products to perpetuate the very behavior pattern that is, you know, causing the harm in the first place. Right. I mean, but you would expect them to do that, right? Because they are all about increasing their business. And they see an opportunity to make money and they're going to do that.

We have allowed a system that's built around this, right? Mm-hmm. Because fundamentally, sustainability is very simple. You know, compassion for all life is sustainable. Violence towards any part of creation, when it's sustained, is unsustainable. It can't be that easy. Come on, Silas, you're talking crazy now.

It is that easy. It's simple. Non-violence, you know, go to town with it. It is infinitely sustainable. But when you commit violence on something without any limit, you're going to kill it, or we're going to kill ourselves in the process of trying to kill it.

Right. So violence is the root of all unsustainability. That's interesting. So violence cannot be part of the solution either in a Gandhi-esque sort of way. Right. Cannot be part of the solution. This is why I think

this is a very spiritual transition that's happening. We are undergoing a transformation as a species. Okay? This gets into your whole butterfly thing, right? Exactly. Yeah, let's talk about the butterfly thing.

Yeah, well, you know, what we are undergoing is similar to the transformation that a caterpillar does when it becomes a butterfly. A caterpillar, when it's born, the first thing the caterpillar does is to eat the shell of the egg he came out of. Then he eats the leaf that the egg was on. Then he eats every leaf that he sees. He's like a voracious consumer. And then after

two or three weeks he stops. He builds a cocoon around himself and he meditates for a week. And he wakes up as a butterfly.

And as a butterfly she's a very discriminating consumer. She only sips and he wakes up as a butterfly. And as a butterfly, she's a very discriminating consumer. She only sips nectar from flowers. And as she sips nectar from flowers, she pollinates the flowers and regenerates life. She undoes all the damage she did as a caterpillar. But in nature,

both the caterpillar and the butterfly have their own purpose. butterfly have their own purpose. They serve their own purpose. Whatever they're doing is useful for the forest, useful for the ecosystem in both cases. So we are, I think, going through the metamorphosis from our caterpillar stage to the butterfly stage. Well, that's a very optimistic perspective.

I think we have to tell optimistic stories now. I mean, if we tell pessimistic stories, then we are going to basically doom ourselves, right? Because we live out our stories. In fact, I have a granddaughter, and my granddaughter took me to a movie. Basically, she said, we're going to see Cinderella.

So we went to see Cinderella. So we went to see Cinderella. And at first I thought, here is a children's movie, and I'm going to sit with her and enjoy her company. And then I heard Cinderella say something that poked my attention. And I said, I better pay attention to this movie. What did she say she said have courage be kind and all will be well

very simple right have courage be kind and all will be well and I think it is true for all of us as humans as human beings

be kind is be kind to all life not just your neighbors not just your family but to all life if you're kind to all life which is compassion for all creation then all will be well that is the sustainability mantra right and then the second thing she said was just because it is what is done doesn't mean it is what should be done cinderella is quickly overtaking gandhi as their uh prophet of the day right i mean this is what we face right as we've been eating this way all along and so they've been doing this all along

doesn't mean it's what should be done today because our situation is very different from what it was 2 000 years ago when they came up with that custom. You see? So, all these cultural things that we have brought along, we have to question now. Because we are in a completely different environment than when it was initiated. And it probably made sense 2000

years ago. I mean, I've seen I mean, I have tremendous respect for what our ancestors have done. You know? Every one of our ancestors, not just Indian. And the third thing she said was, imagine the world as it should be, not the world as it is. So then you'll work towards the world as it should be. See, if we all imagine a world in which we are sustainable, we are fundamentally equal,

so we don't have wars and we have peace, we will work towards that, right? But if we say the current system is going to continue, so the violence is going to continue. I mean, have you ever had a single day without somebody dropping bombs somewhere? President Obama has a kill list that he signs off on every day. So if we imagine the world as it should be, not the world as it is, then we will all work towards that. So how does that translate into the actions of the everyday person who's listening to this? Have courage, be kind, and all will be well.

This is a closed loop. Right. No, no, I think, you know, everything we do, we have to ask, okay, what is behind it? I mean, where did this come from? Let's say we buy a product, right? We don't really understand most of the time what happened to get that product to our table. It could be something as simple as even, you know, strawberries. And you discover that the people who are picking strawberries are being abused,

they're enslaved, they're, you know, and they're being paid a pittance. And you say, well, maybe I should be going local so I understand the farmer. I'm, you know, so I know where my food comes from. Right? So that's one way of saying, okay, I'm not going to participate in the cruelty of the industrial food system. I'm going to go local. Or you say, well, if this apple is cheaper than this apple, so which one should I get?

Or this fruit is... And you say, well, this one was made with chemicals. So they poured a lot of chemicals to kill all the pesticides, the pests, the so-called pests. And this was done organically. You're not being kind to the insects that you call pests. So you slowly switch to a local, organic, vegan eating lifestyle. That's love i think gene bauer would say that that

is aligning your actions with your values exactly right it's about being clear about what your values are and then trying to make sure that what you're doing is is uh consistent with that right but the problem is we walk we we walk around with blinders on. And a lot of those blinders are either conscious or on some level of unconscious willingness to not know. Like it's just easier to not know because then you don't feel that dissonance, right? Like if you don't ask the question,

where is my food coming? And you just purchase the food, the question never arises right to ask see there are a lot of us that i mean there are a lot of us who are in a position to ask questions and answer them and make choices that align with our values we can afford to do that. We can make those choices. Some of us. I mean, there are a lot of us actually who can do that. There are a lot of us who are in a rat race

or in a mill who are sort of stuck in this daily grind who are not going to think about things like this because they have more important things to think of in their immediate family life.

They are the ones who will come along once enough of us at the top do this. They'll come along because things will change around them automatically. And then there will be the ones who are stragglers, who will not change. Most likely they'll have to just die off and that's the way they will die off, right? So in the sense that there are some people who are not going to change. That's okay. That's the way things are.

But new generations come along. The new generation right now, the younger generation, I mean, they have no qualms about gay marriage. They have no qualms about gay marriage. They have no qualms about skin color and things like that. So they don't see those differences as much as our generation saw them. I think they ask more questions, too. And they demand a level of transparency that really was not something that was part of our generation.

Right. And that's exciting. It is. I mean, it is an exciting time to be alive because we're in the transition period, the transformation period. And you're witnessing the butterfly being born. And it's beautiful.

I like your wings. So tell me about some of the work that you're doing with uh with climate healers i know you're very involved in this issue of cooking in india the impact of of wood burning stoves on the environment and trying to find sustainable solutions for that so explain that to me a little bit so um i mean this again started with that with observing that forest in rajasthan and and understanding why it is dying off and you and as i said livestock is one of the major reasons for it but the other major reason is um wood being extracted for for cooking now normally we consider wood being extracted for cooking as a sustainable activity because wood grows on trees and you take some and you burn it.

So it would have fallen off and anyway decayed and become CO2. So all the woman did, all the person did which we're doing it. There are 600 million households that are burning wood for cooking. And together, they're burning about 2 billion tons of wood. And is it wood itself, or is it wood that is turned into charcoal? How does it work? No, it's wood itself. So it's basically dead wood from trees, wood that's

fallen off on the ground. They bring it and they dry it if it's not dry already and they chop it up and they burn it. So it's a daily I mean, it's a daily activity in the village. Women go at least three to four times

a week to collect wood. They bring back like 60 to 70 pounds of wood on their head every time they go. And it's a really tough task to go collect wood. It takes about an hour for them to walk to where they're collecting wood. It takes them an hour to collect the wood. It takes them an hour and a half to walk back because they're carrying a heavy load. And it lasts them two to three days, 70 pounds. And they are burning this wood for making their,

for cooking their food, for making their chai in the morning. And then during winter, it's also for heating. And how many people are doing this how many million uh worldwide there are three billion people who use biomass for cooking so there's about 600 million households and biomass is that's a broader term right right it's wood and it's always a mixture okay there's, there is cow dung, dried cow dung. They use corn stalk, I mean, other things, other biomass as well.

But mostly it's wood. But it's all carbon. As far as I'm concerned, it's carbon that was sequestered by photosynthesis. It's precious because it was sequestered and we should be keeping it underground because we can't afford to keep sending it back up. And it's being turned back up

and sent to the atmosphere as CO2 or carbon. It's black carbon. And that black carbon, what happens to that? Walk me through the sort of step-by-step. So when you have incomplete burning of wood it you get soot a black carbon so it's smoke soot right and that black carbon goes into the atmosphere and is taken by wind currents and deposited on the ice in the himalayas or deposited in the ice in the arctic or in greenland So we've seen all this ice now becoming darker and darker and darker.

And when they become dark, basically they absorb sunlight. Rather than reflect it. Rather than reflect it. And when they absorb sunlight, they heat up the ice faster. So the ice melts faster. And the fact that it also absorbs sunlight makes it a greenhouse gas, right? Because basically it's increasing the heat that's being trapped.

So black carbon is a very significant greenhouse gas in that sense. And India has 160 million households that use biomass for cooking. So we've been

working in this region of Rajasthan, trying to address this issue. How do we reduce their wood use? So the first idea, you know, I'm an engineer, right? So I have this brilliant idea that I can build new things. So I said, okay, here's an engineering challenge.

Let's build a solar cooker that can cook their food. And their food happens to be really thick rotis. These are flatbreads made with corn or millets. And it takes a lot of energy to cook those. And it takes a lot of concentrated energy to cook those. It's like you have to make the equivalent of a gas stove with solar energy. That's not hard.

But what is hard is to make a stove with the equivalent of a gas stove while the cook can stand near it. Because otherwise, what, it would heat the whole house? It would heat the cook, right? Because most solar stoves that have that kind of energy concentration they're intended for making big big you know pots of rice or something like that so the assumption is that you put the pot focus the

solar stove and then you walk away whereas to make rotis you have to stand there and flip it around you know so it's an interactive process so you don't want a stove that will cook the cook. So it took us a while and we came up with a stove that met our requirements, engineering requirements. And then we went and deployed it in the village. We gave them five stoves

and within six months not a single one was being used. Because? Because it was culturally the exact opposite of what they're doing now. Because they cook inside, we are asking them to cook outside. They cook sitting down, we're asking them to cook standing up. Right, so you can't disrupt the environment to do it. It has to work within their sort of social construct

and the environment that they're used to. Right. They cook early in the morning or late in the evening when the sun is not out. And with the solar stove, they have to cook when the sun is out. So anyway, it was a completely disruptive thing, and they said they just didn't want to do it.

And I realized at that point that I can't ask them to change so drastically. And again, if solar stoves are such a great idea, how come the rich people are not using it, right? So we had to be humble and say, okay, now I have to sit down and figure out how to do an intervention that works within their cultural context.

So this year, we tried these efficient stoves. These efficient stoves are still biomass stoves. They use wood. But they're supposed to reduce the wood consumption by 40%, 50%, whatever. So we took three different efficient stoves that are like the top of the line. And we took three samples of each. We went to nine different households, and we rotated them around, and we did surveys.

We asked them to cook with these stoves and asked them whether they like it or not like it, and we measured how much wood they were using. So we did this engineering assessment, right? And we could clearly see why they don't like them just by watching them and talking to them. Because these stoves, either they're, I mean, they're made of metal. So they get hot on the outside.

So it's a hazard for children. And so the women said, our stove, it's got mud on the outside. It's insulated. The opening for the stove is too narrow. so they had to chop the wood lengthwise and it's that's more work for them it's a pain in the neck to chop wood lengthwise you can chop it this way you know but this way it's painful so they wouldn't do it as soon as they encountered a log that wouldn't go into the hole they would just go to their original stove and then abandon the stove. The flame was too narrow.

So it was good for a metal pan, but they don't use metal pan. They use a mud pan for cooking their rotis. To disperse the heat over a wider area. Right. So you have to disperse the heat over a wider area. So their stove was built like that. And they love cooking rotis on mud and then eating that because it brings

the taste of the soil into the roti you can even donate to them an iron pan they won't use it right so

it was clear that the efficient stores are not going to work but we asked them so how much would you pay for these and they were roughly

each one that cost us about $50 retail. The best we could get was like $5, $10. You know? To get something that they're not going to use. Right.

So then we asked them to cook with their stove and we observed what they were doing with their stove. And we noticed that the inefficiency was coming from all the embers that were falling off the edge of the wood as it was burning. The embers would

fall off and they would pile up. And those embers were the source of all the soot. And they were the source of inefficiency as well because that's not complete combustion. So we said, so how could we just reduce those embers? How could we get the wood to burn more completely? And then, you know, every fireplace,

if you notice, has a grate. We put the wood on top of a grate. They don't have a grate there. I mean, they're putting the wood on the floor, right? So we made a grate, a simple grate that would allow airflow from below. And the holes were too small for the embers to fall through, but they're big enough for the ash to fall through.

Right, almost like a little cage for the fire, so it could burn more completely. Right. And therefore use less wood and create less carbon emissions exactly right so we made one in the local market and have had the women use them and we were shocked at how much it reduced the wood in their stove. How much? So the woman was using 2.9 kgs for cooking her meal without the grate.

And with the grate, it went down to 1.1 kg. So more than that. 60% reduction. And it was better than even the efficient stoves. With the efficient stoves, she had used 1.8 kg. So we were shocked.

And then we said, well, this couldn't be true right you know i mean how how can it such a simple solution actually work right so we had it tested at a cookstore testing center in udaypur and the official numbers are that it reduces wood use by 63 percent and it reduced soot by 89 percent Wow. So I went and assumed... But the important question is, do they like using it? Right. So when I got those test results,

I immediately booked a flight to India. So we could go and deploy a thousand of them in four villages. And we first did a survey where we took a sample of the grate and went to 10 different households, asked the women, do you like them or not like them? It was unanimous.

Why wouldn't I not use it? You know, it changes nothing for me. Right, it's half the trips of carrying wood around, if nothing else. More than that, it was less smoke. You know, I mean, she's suffering with the smoke burning her eyes. She's cooking indoors.

And so she said, I can hardly feel any smoke with this. So anyway, it became quite apparent that it was, at least they were going to use it. So we're deploying a,000 of them, and we're going to go back six months later in December and survey again and see how well it's taken on.

Right, and they don't cost anything, right? It costs them a dollar to get one of these things? Is that what I read something about that? Right, I mean, in volume it's going to cost a dollar, but since we only did like 1,000 of them, it's costing us like a dollar but we since we only did like a thousand of them it's costing us like four dollars each right

but it's you know as far as the cost is concerned the amount of carbon it saves is so huge

even with the current price of carbon credits in Europe you can fund this thing very easily easily because the carbon reduction is going to be over multiple years fund this thing very easily. Because the

carbon reduction is going to be over multiple years. Because that grate is not going to go away for three to four years. Right. And weren't you doing something with incentives by giving them a cell phone? What's that about?

Initially, when we started Climate Healers, it was 2007, no one in the village had cell phones. And cell phones, they wanted them. They wanted communications, right? So it was a good incentive if you could offer them cell phones. Right, be part of my pilot study and I'll give you a phone. I can give you a phone like that.

But by the time I brought up the solar cookers, three years later, 40% of the village already had cell phones. It's not going to work anymore. It doesn't work anymore. And then he said, where did you get these cell phones? I mean, it's like proliferating all around. And they said the local, the contractor in the city was giving away cell phones for free to able-bodied men so that he could call them to come and work in the city for construction.

Right. That's a smart man. Because he can pay these village people half the price as the worker in the city was asking. So it's really a method. Capitalism is providing these free cell phones. Right. Because they can get labor at a lower cost. Right. so it's really a method capitalism is providing these free cell phones right because they can get labor at a lower cost right so that's amazing so you know assuming that you can get these you know these uh these devices into all of these homes i mean that's a huge

that'll have a huge impact but as an engineer engineer, you still have to come up, you realize that you still have to come up with this solar stove, right? You still have to invent that so that it works. There is a team working on it in New York City. Oh, there is good. Yeah, because we're trying to store the energy and then release it at night and next morning and so on, yeah. And so is Climate Healers doing this all on its own

or are you in partnership with other NGOs? I mean, how does that function? We work mainly through partnerships. We have partnerships with academic institutions. We partner with the University of Iowa. We partner with the University of Illinois. UC Berkeley has done work with us. Georgia Tech has done work with us.

And several universities in India. IIT Madras has worked with us. And we work with NGOs in India. IIT Madras has worked with us. And we work with NGOs in India. We have NGOs now in Ghana who are working with us. So really it cannot be done with just one organization.

All of us have to get together to work on this. And I tell people when they ask me how many people are in Climate Healers, I say 7.4 billion. We all have to do this together so when's the next kind of phase of this? Are you mass producing these things right now?

I mean you just came back from India so what were you doing there on this trip? On this trip we had about about 1,000 of them manufactured and distributed to the four villages in Rajasthan. And we then took samples and we gave it to a number of NGOs. So we gave some samples to an NGO called SEVA, which is Self-Employed Women's Association. And they have 1.1 million members,

and they've been looking for a cookstove solution for a long time. We shipped a bunch to an NGO in Hyderabad. So it's just seeding. Right. And different areas. And then have them try it out. Try it out and see what you think.

And then we can manufacture more of them if they need it. Right. That's cool. I want to turn the conversation a little bit back towards deforestation and desertification. One of the things that always comes up, and I've gotten a lot of emails about this, is the work of Alan Savory, who is out there and kind of has a lot of energy around him and a lot of people paying attention to his work, that I think really kind of entered mainstream consciousness as a result of his TED Talk.

But essentially, his philosophy is sort of at odds with what you're saying, which is the solution to desertification is to increase grazing, right? That if we had more animals kind of freely grazing the planet, that this would cure this problem that we're having. So I'm interested in your perspective on that theory. Yes, what Alan Savory is talking about is what our ancestors used to do.

used to do. They used to keep livestock and maintain the fertility of their soil. But as population increased and as the livestock population increased, with the current levels where we are 7.5 times the biomass and megafauna that used to exist sustainably in the past. I mean, are we as human beings so hubristic to think that we can beat nature at her own game

and that too by a factor of 7.5 and make it sustainable? No way, right? We know that native ecosystems have the maximum carbon sequestration in any given area. If you disrupt a native ecosystem, your carbon sequestration on land is going to go down.

This is well known, right? So if we take a forest and convert it to grassland and then we add all these things, we're going to get less carbon sequestration there. And the amount of biomass that you can raise on that is going to be less than what nature did. So there is no way to do this and beat nature. So this is why when I hear

that you can now triple or double the volume of livestock, I say we are smoking something. I mean, this is not possible. Who's saying that? That's what, when you look at Alan Savory's message, it is you have to increase

the density of livestock, is what he says. You have to increase the density of livestock. Well, we already have what about the the just the methane you know production alone there or the water use required for that and not that doesn't even get into land use like to me and maybe i'm missing something and i'm certainly not an expert in this field by any stretch of the imagination, but we don't have enough land.

Like, even if we implemented, let's say we implemented his philosophy completely, would there even be enough land to support? I mean, there would just be livestock everywhere roaming through the streets. And I mean, is that? It's already happening in India, right? I mean, there's livestock roaming through the streets and the density of cattle in India is, and the density of cattle in India

is nine times the density of cattle in the U.S., mainly because Indians... Well, that's rooted in Hinduism, though, is it not? It's rooted in the lacto-vegetarianism. This is why I was a lacto-vegetarian, and then I became vegan when I saw what was happening to the forest

because in India we drink a lot of milk and we don't eat so much beef so we don't kill the cows cows are sacred so the cow lives for 25 years eating the forest every day

so you say well if you drink milk you started exploiting the cow right then maybe we should finish it finish the exploitation meaning you have to eat some beef to compensate for the milk you're drinking so it's almost like right yeah so it's not it's not a black and white thing right so by virtue of all of these cows eating up, basically encroaching on the forest land, then there's less habitat for the other animals, right? Absolutely. It's encroaching on the tiger's domain.

Exactly. That's why the tiger population is down so much. The tiger population used to be 100,000 just 100 years ago, and now it's down to 1,300, 1,400. But I think one of the things that people miss in this is i mean it's different in india because of your cultural perception of this animal the the cow but i think people think well if everyone went vegan there would just be cow we have so many cows who would who you know what are we going to do with all these cows but they don't understand that we're specifically raising these cows.

Like if we stopped raising, first of all, the whole world is not going to go vegan overnight. So this is not going to happen that way. It's going to be a gradual process. And as we move in that direction, we're going to be raising fewer animals for food. Like that would course correct itself. Right.

I mean, cow impregnation is a profession right these yeah these animals need to be inseminated right in order to reproduce right and so all those professions will will start dying out you know because we are abusing these animals when we impregnate them by hand they are not having sex you know i mean this hand. They're not having sex. I mean, they're not having families and therefore raising their own children. So this is all being done forcibly through industrial methods.

So yeah, as the demand for livestock products decreases, there'll be less and less being produced by industry. And what is the difference in impact between a person who says, I'm a good environmentalist, I'm driving a Chevy Volt or a Prius or an electric car, or I ride my bike to work and I don't take very many showers. But yeah, I like my meat versus somebody who's driving a normal car to work every day, but they're eating a plant-based diet. Like, how does that balance out? Balances out in favor of the person who's eating a plant-based diet.

He's less environmentally destructive in general. You can come up with outlandish scenarios where you... The guy's flying a private jet every single right yeah things like that you know so but overall it's it's just raising awareness and raising our consciousness and raising our consciousness about the violence that is around us so that's the main blinder we have is that there is

violence all around that's happening on our behalf that we don't want to know about. And we really see how every product is made, whether it is chocolate. I mean, chocolate, there's so much child slavery going on for getting all those cocoa beans

and turning them into chocolate. That's violence. Some poor child didn't want to do that and is being forced to do that at the point of a gun. And when we pay money to buy that, we're actually supporting it. We're saying that's okay. So it's raising our consciousness about what is really going on,

the amount of violence that's going on, and realizing that it's nonviolence that's sustainable, not violence. Right. I mean, I think that changing your plate is a very powerful thing to do. And it certainly helped me relieve myself of some of that dissonance that existed between values and actions. But it doesn't stop there.

You know, the road gets narrower, and as you kind of take the blue pill in the matrix and you start to open your eyes as to how the world functions, then it applies to basically every consumer purchase that you make. Everything from the precious iPhone that I have right here sitting next to me

that I can't imagine living a day without. And I know on some level that there's a factory in China where there's some issues and I don't really want to think about that. I don't, you know, I don't necessarily want to think about how the clothes are made that I'm wearing, but I'm becoming more hip to that. And I've made more conscious decisions around those things. And it doesn't end there. It continues and continues and

continues so it really is on a macro level a conversation about consumerism in general and raising awareness around that and and having the courage and the willingness to ask those questions and and to uh you know be inquisitive we don't want to do that. And our system is set up to specifically prevent that, to keep us in that foggy haze. Right. I mean, they number us, you know, and basically if you're concerned about your paycheck or how you're going to pay the next bill,

you're not going to think about things like this. You're more concerned about those. Yeah, these are rich white guy problems you know exactly yeah so how do you begin to uh you know shift that in terms of like advocacy and how you communicate with people um i think it's really important to to be conscious of your approach to that like and so if you look at like veganism for example there are all different kinds of people that that that employ a wide variety of different communication tactics right you have people at PETA that are that are you know throwing blood on on women that are wearing

you know furs uh all the way down to you know the more kind of Gandhi-esque approach which is just to kind of be the lighthouse and stand in the light and just pay attention to your own behaviors and not preach, right? And so there's a spectrum of approaches. So where do you like fall on that spectrum? Well, see, Gandhi has also been mischaracterized, in my opinion, because he never really said, be the change you want to see. And he wasn't a passive activist. I mean, he was an activist. He was quite militant about making people wear khadi.

In the Naljivan magazine in 1925, he said, I consider it my duty to use every available means at my disposal to persuade people to wear khadi. So this was not a passive man who would wear khadi and say look at me he went out and told people please wear khadi right so activism is absolutely essential for social movements but we have to be non-violent in our activism as well. So the ends never justify the means. So when you attack people or throw people or abuse people when they're not doing what you think they should be doing,

you're not going to win them over. And so those are the things I say, you know, yes, we have to be activists I've participated in protests with direct action everywhere I've gone and stood with them in Whole Foods and talked about what is really going on behind those products

that they're selling and that kind of activism is essential to basically snowball the movement as far as consumerism to basically snowball the movement. As far as consumerism is concerned, I've realized that it's everywhere. I mean, the violence is everywhere in everything we do.

Everything we do, there's pollution being poured out into the streams and some fish is dying so it's like so you say where do we start right so the way i did that was to say if i really need if i think i need some product that's not an essential product i just write it down in a piece of paper i don't go buy it i do a buy everything day day. Yeah, I heard you go shopping once a year. Once a year. I mean, that doesn't include food in a sense, right? But for things that you would like, right? You indulge yourself one time a year.

One time a year. So what did you buy on your last big shopping spree? I bought only toothpaste and shaving items and stuff like that. So I really didn't need anything beyond that because my clothes are still lasting me. I'm doing fine with what I have. And as far as buying even my essential stuff, even my travel, I'm very conscious of it.

And I say I'll only travel if I know I'm advancing my cause, which is healing the climate. So if I have to fly to India, I will fly to India. I'm not going to spend three months going in a ship because it has lower carbon footprint. I'm going to fly because I need to do a lot of things. But I'll only fly for those reasons. Or I'll only drive for those reasons. Right.

So you do like an engineering calculus on the sort of, you do like a profit and loss statement on the impact of your behavior when you make these decisions that might release some carbon emissions into the environment. Right, I look at these as tools. Okay, so a plane is a tool, car is a tool. I mean, but what are the tools being used for? Are we using the tool to just, I i mean are we using this to go for pleasure if i i don't get any pleasure anymore going and sightseeing things and i mean i i have so much fun doing my work so much more fun doing my work so i'd rather just use all these things just for that purpose you see i really think that these tools are available for us

to do this healing work. And we shouldn't just allow all these tools to be used only by the people who are destroying the planet. Those of us who want to heal the planet should get into it and start using them as well. Have you followed this woman, Bea Johnson, who is the zero-waste home person? Do you know about her i gotta

send you her website oh she's amazing i heard her speak at a wellness conference a couple months ago and she lives in marin county with her family she has two kids and she just decided to see if they could live with uh creating the least amount of waste possible. And over a number of years, she refined her techniques and experimented with all different kinds of things. But she's got it down to this science now where she held up like a mason jar and she said, this is the mass amount of garbage that our family produced last year. And it all fit into one jar. And she shows pictures of her home.

It's like upper middle she you know it's like upper middle class but it's a it's very minimal but everything you know they just have the least amount of each thing that they need and you know they don't have any plastic or and everything is like you know all they don't use any single use items they don't accept anything into their house like it's amazing like it was incredibly inspiring. It's intimidating, too. But also, she's a very beautiful woman, and her kids look healthy, and they look happy. And when you see that, somebody who's living in the modern world with normal jobs and all of that kind of thing, that they're able to do that really makes you think about how we behave. The level of single-use items that we go through on a daily basis is insane, and the plastics and all of that.

It's really crazy. Yeah, the statistic is that 99% of what we buy, we don't use within six months. So basically 99% of our purchases are useless after six months. Right. basically 99% of our purchases are useless after six months. So clearly there is a lot of excess that we can cut out from that. But we're not trying to export that kind of lifestyle to developing countries.

Right, so when you're talking about the caterpillar turning into the butterfly and this kind of mass awakening that we're having, and I feel like that is happening in the in the united states you know meanwhile look at china and i and india you know and you see the rise of the middle class there and they're they're like yes now we can finally do what all these people in america have been doing and they want to live the good life and they want to consume these products that we've been consuming and we're happy to export that those items and that lifestyle over to them.

And that compounds the problem, obviously. Right, but they're actually learning much, much faster than we did in America because it's not just buying these things. You also get the baggage with it, right? So you get two-thirds of Americans are either obese or overweight. 49% of Americans are either on antidepressants or anti-anxiety medication or on illegal drugs on a daily basis. So I mean, these are statistics that they are also beginning to see very quickly. And they're saying, wait a minute, just 20 years ago, I didn't have. Just 30 years ago I didn't have this, so how come I'm getting it?

So they're beginning to answer those questions faster as well. So there's a tremendous acceleration of the process that's happening in those countries. This is like they're leapfrogging. So just like they leapfrogged the landline telephones and went straight to cell phones, they're going to leapfrog a lot of these intermediate stages that Western countries went through and get to the final state much, much faster. There you go with this optimism again.

No, I see it happening. Your example of Bea Johnson, is it? It's so apt because she's an embodiment based on their description of the first mantra of the Upanishads. It's so apt because she's an embodiment, based on their description, of the first mantra of the Upanishads,

which says, Upanishads. Yeah. The first mantra of Sri Aiso Upanishad says, and his rough translation is, Take just what you need and no more. For the earth and all her bounty does not belong to you, place to end it. But I can't let you go without asking you one last question, which is for people that are listening

and they're ready to make a different choice, what is the one thing that they could do first that's simple that's accessible to everybody um and doable that you would suggest to try to reduce their carbon footprint and you know live more sustainably transition to a plant-based diet i mean that's the number one thing I would say. And within that, I would say, try to eat local and try to eat seasonal fruits and vegetables so that you're not ordering apples from Chile, but apples from Washington. So the way I do it is I go to the store and I buy the three cheapest fruits and the three cheapest vegetables that are organic and they all tend to be

local, organic and seasonal so I think there is this is the one thing that we are all going to do together to make the transition this is the start of the transformation the vegan movement the one thing that we're all going to do together to make the transition.

This is the start of the transformation, the vegan movement. And it is shaping up beautifully. I mean, you look at Germany and how fast they're turning vegan. You look at Israel and see how fast they're turning vegan. And you look at California. The proliferation of vegan restaurants.

My God, when I turned vegan in 2008, it was difficult. And now... Yeah, it wasn't that long ago. It wasn't that long ago. And you look now, you know, it's so easy. It's everywhere. In the mainstream supermarkets, you know, you get vegan products everywhere. And, I mean, Germany has its own vegan supermarkets, right?

I heard about that. I'm going there this fall I'm looking forward to it I'm going to Frankfurt wonderful yeah I'm excited well that's great thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me today my pleasure thank you for having me if if you want to learn more about Silesh and his work, the best place to go is climatehealers.org. Yes. Are there other places or resources that you could point people towards where they could begin their own process of learning more about you and the things that you are talking about? That's the place. That's the place. All right, cool. And, you know, whatever books or other kind of things that we talked about during this podcast,

I'll put in the show notes to the episode. So, all right, where are you headed now? What's next? Oh, I have to go and talk to a nonprofit that's going to look at our grade. Yeah. Oh, I forgot. There is a book they can read as well. Oh, that's right.

Yeah. There's a book called… I forgot about that. Carbon Dharma. Carbon Dharma, that's right. Yeah. There's a book called. I forgot about that. Carbon Dharma. Carbon Dharma, which is available on Amazon. So that sort of details my story until 2011. I'm writing a follow-up book called Carbon Yoga.

I like that. So Dharma is what is the right thing to do. Yoga is how do you do it. And this one hopefully will come out by the end of the year i like that awesome that's exciting well maybe you can come back and talk to me again when uh the book is released and we can talk more about that i would love to all right very good thank you so much i appreciate it you're an inspiration keep doing what you're doing we need more guys like you and uh i love your message man so anything i can do to help you support you and help get the word out about the work that you're doing I'm happy to do so that's wonderful we need more people like

you as well we're all but like you said we're all we're all in it together absolutely yeah all right thanks so much peace plants all right everybody I hope you guys enjoyed that Two big Stanford brains in the same week. First, Craig Heller with the whole cooling glove thing, and then Cy Lesh with the solar-powered stove. Both Stanford guys, pretty cool, right? I enjoyed it. I hope you guys got something out of that

and it helped raise your awareness about climate issues and made you think a little bit more deeply about certain things that concern all of us. Again, make sure to visit the show notes on the episode page at richworld.com to read up, learn more, and take your knowledge base and podcast experience to the next level. If you speak German, our book, The Plant Power Way, is now available in German language edition. Go to amazon.de. Finding Ultra is also in the German language edition as well. edition, go to amazon.de. Finding Ultra is also in the German language edition as well. Same German publisher. That edition came out really great as well. If you're in the LA area or your visits bring you nearby my neck of the woods, check out a few of our businesses that

we're partnered with. Joy Cafe, it's our organic plant-based and gluten-free eatery in the West Lake Village area when I'm in town, when I'm not in Frankfurt, Germany. Usually I'm eating lunch there. We also partnered with the Karma Baker, which is a vegan and gluten-free bakery also in the Westlake Village area of Los Angeles. So, again, I've said it before, but the podcast is a great way to kind of serve a global audience with this message. audience with this message, but it also feels really good to kind of invest in my local community and kind of give back by helping provide food that's consistent with my values. It feels really great. So if you're in the area, again, it would be great to see you come by Joy or see you come by the Karma Baker, both my friends and great products for you guys. For all your plant power

needs, visit richroll.com. Check out the Plant Power Way in English language version at amazon.com. We have signed copies of that and Finding Ultra at richroll.com. We've got nutrition products. We've got 100% organic cotton garments. We've got plant power tech tees, all kinds of cool, awesome stuff all there to help you take your life and your health to the next level. That's it, you guys. I'll see you in a couple of days. Hopefully I'll be a little bit more coherent. Again, I'm pretty jet lagged today. Hey man, I did my best.

Give me a break. It's hard to put these things together from the road, but I'm trying. Apologies again for being a day late, but I hope the listen was worth your while and I'll see you guys back here in a couple of days with another great episode of the RRP. So make it great, everybody. great everybody peace plants and namaste