Waveform: The MKBHD Podcast - How Sustainable Are Tech Companies, Really?

Episode Date: December 12, 2023

We have another special episode! Today, Rollie from Climate Town joins us to discuss clean energy and the climate crisis. Specifically, he helps us understand some of the promises that big tech companies companies like Apple and Google have been making when it comes to the climate. Like what is a carbon credit? And what the heck is a Duck curve? We hope you learn as much as we did in this fun chat! Climate Town Youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/climatetown The Climate Denier's Playbook: https://www.youtube.com/@DeniersPlaybook Links: Apple: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2023/09/apple-unveils-its-first-carbon-neutral-products/ Google: https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/cleanenergy/ MKBHD Tesla Solar Roof: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJeSWbR6W04 Shop the merch: https://shop.mkbhd.com Instagram/Threads/Twitter: Waveform: https://twitter.com/WVFRM Waveform: https://www.threads.net/@waveformpodcast Marques: https://www.threads.net/@mkbhd Andrew: https://www.threads.net/@andrew_manganelli David Imel: https://www.threads.net/@davidimel Adam: https://www.threads.net/@parmesanpapi17 Ellis: https://twitter.com/EllisRovin TikTok:  https://www.tiktok.com/@waveformpodcast Join the Discord: https://discord.gg/mkbhd Music by 20syl: https://bit.ly/2S53xlC Waveform is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This episode is brought to you by RBC Student Banking. Here's an RBC student offer that turns a feel-good moment into a feel-great moment. Students, get $100 when you open a no-monthly-fee RBC Advantage Banking account, and we'll give another $100 to a charity of your choice. This great perk and more, only at RBC. Visit rbc.com slash get 100, give 100. Conditions apply. Ends January 31st, 2025.

Complete offer eligibility criteria by March 31st, 2025. Choose one of five eligible charities. Up to you run, you're a runner. However you choose to do it. Because when you're not worried about doing things the right way, you're free to discover your way. And that's what running's all about. Run your way at NewBalance.com slash running. What is up, people of the internet welcome back to another episode of the waveform podcast this time a bit of a fun special one so a bit of a background we've been making lots of videos on tech for a long time right lots of consumer electronics lots of tech companies and the stories behind them

but you might have noticed lately in the past couple of years, we've seen more and more climate-related messaging from these companies as we all sort of get on the same page that they should be more responsible about their impact on the climate. You might remember the sketch with Tim Cook and Mother Nature and the last Apple event, or any number of various quotes about percent of recycled materials and this and sustainability, reusability, that in any sort of keynotes we've been noticing

lately. And I want to be able to analyze all that, but I don't know nearly enough about it to make really good analysis of that. So this episode, we have someone who can. So Raleigh from Climate Town is joining us. David's to my left, Raleigh's to my right. We're going to talk about all of these companies, their claims. We're going to zoom out as far as we can to try to understand what they're doing and what they maybe should be doing. And I think this is a

really good conversation to have. So Raleigh, thanks for joining me. Thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited to be in the lair. Yeah, in the hot seat. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we have a ton of questions and I feel like probably the best place to Yeah, in the hot seat. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we have a ton of questions and I feel like probably the best place to start is with what you do. So your YouTube channel, Climate Town, I've watched a bunch of the videos. Thank you so much.

Some of them incredibly informative about things that I never would have even thought to look into, like recycling, the latest one about roads, a lot of really good stuff. What is your elevator pitch? How do you describe what you do when people ask that's my favorite question ask creators um my elevator i've

finally gotten around to telling people at parties that like they're like what do you do and i say i'm a youtuber and i i don't have to like back up and be like i like to do climate stuff um are do we can we swear on this there's like bleeping yeah yeah um so my my new elevator pitch is that i'm like a extremely low budget john oliver we're like we're trying to get to that sort of or like john wilson and john oliver kind of together because we we go out and into the field and taught in like you know on location shooting but it's always based on something about the climate crisis yeah that's the that's the vaguest pitch that i think the the natural follow-up question would be why is that the topic that you dive into so often so what the answer to that being your education yeah yeah so i

used to make billiards videos very regularly i i my my start on youtube was as a billiards videos very regularly. My start on YouTube was as a billiards influencer. Oh, wow. Yeah. And like, they're out there. We exist. Good thing we have a ping pong table up and not the pool table. We do have a billiards table. I saw it. I clocked that. You have four sticks, but they're all the same kind, which means like we're bought in bulk, which means they're probably not high end sticks. We're pretty average.

I was clocking it. I was trying to see if these guys were hustlers or not. But that doesn't mean you're not you could have them and be like oh yeah these second layer of hustling that's right interesting yeah um yeah so i did like a bunch of pool videos and i kind of like honed my chops of editing and hosting through the pool videos and then i i moved to new york to do comedy in the first place i was doing a comedy show and I was the question, how did I get into this? Sorry. Why, why climate as the top?

Oh yeah. Yeah. So I was doing a comedy show and I was, the comedy show was like, I'm a sort of a strung out Al Gore kind of figure doing like an, I told you so tour. Like I called it, I knew it was climate change was happening.

And then, um, I had enough climate experts and climate scientists on the show, like in a comedic way. Like I called it, I knew it was climate change was happening. And then I had enough climate experts and climate scientists on the show, like in a comedic way, like I'd interview them in character. And then we'd have like comedians from SNL and Jimmy Fallon come on the show because they're, they're all in New York. You can just get them and you can throw a little net out and they'll come running.

Yeah. And then eventually six months into doing this show and enough conversations with these like climate scientists around a beer after the show. And we're like, so we're going to be fine, right? And they're like, no, no, we're way further away from where we need to be. And so then I was like, okay, well, if I go back to grad school and study climate science and policy. I can make a really good comedy show. And maybe through that, I can be a good climate communicator. So then I did that.

And that's where the show came from. Interesting. How long did that take you to complete? It was a two-year... I did the program in two years. But one of the years, one and a half of the years, were during COVID. So it was a very expensive University of Phoenix. But it was Columbia. So they charged Columbia prices it was a very expensive University of Phoenix, but it was

Columbia. So they charged Columbia prices for like, not really knowing how to do an online institution. Yeah, super early in that. So coming out the other side of that now, you've seen, you've learned a lot about the climate and the situation we find ourselves in. Have you also noticed this increase in messaging from these tech companies? I don't know how many keynotes you get to watch, but they all sort of seem to talk about recycling at some point now. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think it's certainly as of like the 2015s with the Paris Climate Accord, that sort of sparked this avalanche of climate pledges and companies realizing that consumers really were interested in having a planet where

they could still you know fish and ski and that so i think they're realizing like oh this is gonna be an important piece of our company going forward and so they're all getting on on board with like pledges which are not actions but yeah they're close huge difference between promises and what we actually see happen sure between promises and what we actually see happen sure yeah and something we also talk about a lot when we see these promises is how much does X company actually care like trying to judge based on their promise and their actions does it seem like they actually care about the environment ah and that is a tough question. You know what? It's almost not

a question I think is that meaningful to their actions. Because you don't have to care about the planet to do a good thing for the planet. And you could care about the planet and do a bad thing for the planet, right? Like, I don't really care if Apple wants me to have a nice evening out, but if they are promoting Recite, and if they're truly trying to recollect all of their cobalt, for instance, to reuse in their batteries, whether it's for their marketing or for the planet, I don't care. Just get the cobalt.

Yeah, totally fair. Get the cobalt. There was a thing in the most recent Apple keynote where they were like, we now can fit way more Apple watches on one car, which is great for the environment. And in the back of my head, I'm thinking, well, that's saving you a lot on shipping costs. So I guess it can be both, right? Yeah. I mean, I think honestly, the only way they're going to do this is if it is both, which sucks for us. But like, them's the brakes. Like that's the that's the system that we have not so much voted for,

but that the corporate interests have like lobbied for and like, you know, it's it's sort of a you got to do a double pronged attack, single prong, no two prongs. a prong is an individual thing okay double prong detect yeah yeah yeah i feel like the way i i see that is every decision that we see a public facing company make always has the public facing reason and then the private reason usually it's this makes us look good this makes us more money but also like we care about the money a lot that's kind of what we do yeah that's their whole thing it's kind of our whole deal in fact making a lot of legally like they have they like the fiduciary obligation to the shareholders and the board of directors like you have to grow you have to make money and you have to make the decisions that you can justify will make you the most money or they will fire you yep and so like

yeah i don't know it's it's a tough system to uh yeah have a beneficial outcome from. So in the context of all of this, knowing that these companies need to make money and that they have this massive impact on the environment and knowing that we are in a particularly delicate place with our climate right now, I figured we'd go over these like three big bullet points. Maybe they're not even the best bullet points. You can let me know.

But these three big bullet points that I think encapsulate a pretty good understanding of everything that we'll need to know to make decisions about these companies, those being carbon emissions, clean energy, and recycling. We see a lot about all these things. I think we'll probably talk a lot about Apple in this because they are so public about it, but a lot of companies sort of follow in their footsteps and do similar stuff. So I'll start with carbon emissions just in general. Well, first we should just set the baseline. What are carbon emissions and why are they bad?

Sure. Yeah. Just so we're all on the same page. What is carbon on the periodic table? Element six. Nice. Yeah, I got it. Okay.

I had to go through that in my head. Yeah. So, I mean, it's an incredible element, right? It forms tetrahedral bonds at a 109.5 degree bond angle. I think that's right. You can look that up. Did you take organic chemistry? Oh, yeah, baby.

I TA'd an organic chemistry class. So that's the correct angle. I hope so. Somebody is going to be like, actually, that's... Is it possible for humans to form that kind of bond as well? You two certainly have that bond. You could see it a mile away. You don't have to be a chemistry teacher to see your chemistry, you guys.

Fair. Okay. Wow. In my head, I was like, this is going to kill. But it really, really thudded. Anyway, yeah. So carbon dioxide is a byproduct of burning fossil fuels or any hydrocarbon really um and it uh it's a gas it's a greenhouse gas which means it will off into the atmosphere and capture uh infrared radiation and re-radiate it back out so it doesn't it doesn't capture incoming uv rays so that comes into the planet and then it hits the planet,

which heats up and it pops off infrared radiation. And then that gets captured by carbon dioxide, but also other gases, methane, um, knocks. Like there's a lot of different, there's like sulfur hexafluoride.

That's got like 20,000 times the heat retention capacity of CO2. Yeah. That's the, you use it in power lines for insulation. Do you think that we focus too much on carbon and not enough on other stuff? No, if anything, I focus too much on other stuff in that last sentence. Like carbon dioxide is the, I mean, carbon dioxide and methane are kind of the two, the two big bads of the current moment. But yeah, these are yeah these are these are pollutants they capture energy and that energy it's like a blanket on the earth right it just heats up the earth yeah which would be fine except for we've sort of created all of our systems to work in a certain biome and environment and like we're rapidly changing that environment so we're

yeah slowly ruining all of the systems that we've developed in. So that's carbon dioxide. What was the question? I'm so sorry. I think because we just want to establish like we all know that emitting too much carbon in the atmosphere is bad. And these giant tech companies who are manufacturing millions and millions of products and shipping them all over the world and people plugging in these products. Like there's a ton of carbon emissions that come from them doing business. And so their goal is going to be to minimize their impact on the environment.

And so what they're telling us they're doing is minimizing their carbon footprint and quote, becoming carbon neutral. But I think you kind of have to look past that title into what they're actually doing and what that means to decide if it's working or not. I think the sort of famous one that we all see is Apple wants to be entirely carbon neutral as a company by 2030. Apple's a big company.

So that's a big promise. Huge buildings, huge manufacturing, suppliers all over the world, shipping all over the world. It seems impossible that they can do all that without emitting any carbon. So how are they going to do this? How are they going to reduce their carbon footprint to actually be zero? Yeah. So the short answer is they're not going to do that. But what they can do is a sort of accounting technique that they emit as much carbon as they're going to emit they try to reduce it and then they offset the rest of the carbon by by like the easiest way like there's a thing called carbon offsets which i suspect we'll be talking about pretty shortly here yeah but um they're

gonna you know you they probably can't reduce their carbon output to zero so they're gonna figure out what they're gonna try to figure out how much they're emitting and then pay other people not to emit it or pay for projects that are removing carbon from the atmosphere, like timber projects that grow trees and then sequester the carbon from the trees or a hundred other techniques with various degrees of like

how effective they are i heard there's one where they just scoop it out of the atmosphere and put it underground is that real oh yeah that's uh that's what called DAC or direct air carbon capture and sequestration but they don't the scoop is more like pulverized limestone and they like yeah it takes so much energy to do it it's just like always more efficient to just not emit it in the first place right yeah but they're a tech company so they want to probably do the tech part so i found it's it's interesting watching what apple does because they kind of do a little of everything all over the board i found that they number one obviously still emit some carbon so they do have to do some amount of carbon capture to

make up for what they emit but on the other hand they also are attempting to make a difference in how much carbon and how sustainable their processes are in the first place yeah which i think is way more noble and way more impactful which we can talk about more but I think in general it's it's important to understand that you kind of at that scale can't be carbon neutral you will be emitting a ton of carbon it's just a matter of how much you value the other part of that equation like removing carbon from the atmosphere or you said paying others to not emit is that also a real yeah there's like i mean there's a lot of

ways to offset your carbon so like carbon neutr neutrality is not so much like zero zero. It's like, you know, a hundred million tons over the course of a few years. And then you you like account for a hundred million tons not going into the atmosphere or coming out of the atmosphere. So like there is no version of this where like Apple does zero. Right. And they and they know that. And I mean, they would they know that and i mean they would they would like to not emit any carbon dioxide that would be great but like they have to or they feel they have to um yeah so uh so they are gonna find some way to to balance that

equation out theoretically when you said that they pay people to not emit carbon that seems like a loophole where couldn't people just come in and say we're gonna emit this unless you give us money i mean there therein lies the problem with carbon offsetting and it actually exists in like all carbon offsets so for instance if you want to like oh hey i want to emit a ton of carbon so i'm gonna there's a forest that's gonna get cut down and turned into they're just gonna burn it for fun's like a group, maybe there's a group of people who just like burning fire or something. So you say, okay, no to that group.

We're going to pay for this forest to be protected. And then that's going to offset, right? Which kind of works, right? If they were going to burn it and then you stopped them from burning it, that kind of works. But if they were just thinking about it or weren't going to burn it in the first place, then it's like, you can say, hey, will you just say you were just thinking about it or weren't gonna burn it in the first place

then it's like you can say hey will you just say you were gonna burn it yeah or but apple's not going to be like hey to tell them you were gonna destroy this forest they're trying to do their best but yeah i mean these are just really really hard projects to prove that they're additional so like additionality is an important part of yeah carbon offsetting has there been a whole industry that's popped up around like not emitting in order to make money um yeah i mean that's the offset industry they're there it's either removal or maintenance of a forest and there's a lot of like there are many many many examples of a already protected forest that they're like oh now it's an offset so we're gonna like not burn this down we weren't ever gonna clear cut it but we're gonna say we're not clear cutting it now which kind of makes sense because if you have a forest and you're like i'm

gonna be a good person and i'm not gonna clear cut this forest i'm gonna leave this forest and then somebody who was gonna cut their forest down gets a bunch of money for the offsets you're like what the hell i was the good person i should get that money so it's just like right it's sort of like capitalism is not the best system for maintaining a livable climate interesting and i know i'm the first person to think that and say that it's a hot take yeah yeah i do have I feel like my favorite way to understand more complex topics is to make analogies for it. And I feel like when you describe

like net zero carbon impact, if you can oversimplify it to like you're driving a car, if you drive this car 100 yards, it will go off the edge of a cliff. So I understand that my whole business is to drive the car but if i can pay someone else not to drive their car then i can still drive my car forward

if you could pay someone to drive in reverse if i can pay someone else to drive backwards yeah or maybe i drive forward and then drive backwards where it's like yeah technically no no that is technically yeah you have removed the carbon dioxide yeah if you remove it in the forward yeah yeah so there's like a sort of a a dance that they have to do to be able to justify you know net carbon zero certainly and it's a dance that they you know like to be clear they are not required to do this dance that's right they're not required to buy offsets and they're not required really in most jurisdictions. They don't have to do this. So this is the problem where like a lot of these offsets are, some of them are not, and we should be encouraging investing in offsetting projects, be it like forest protection

or direct air carbon capture. I mean, like that's probably going to be a thing that we have to do because we can't reduce our emissions. So like, this is a good thing to encourage and do. But then companies are like, okay, great, we're just gonna like throw 100k at this like solar farm, and then we're gonna do whatever we want to do. So it's like a get out of jail free card. And that's not how we should think about it. So there's been this trend in the last couple of years where a lot of smartphone manufacturers in particular, but this is happening kind of throughout the industry, they've slowly been removing the stuff that they give you in the box. And their whole reasoning for doing this is like, oh, we're saving the environment by not giving you a charger or we're now using cardboard and the boxes are way slimmer and yeah we can fit way more on our truck but it's better for the environment but the bigger the

bigger question is like the chargers and that kind of stuff do you think i mean again like we talked about earlier it doesn't have to be a zero-sum game like it doesn't have to be bad for their business in order to also be good for the environment but like in that trend in particular where do you think that leans i mean it's it feels it feels case dependent but it does feel a little bit marketing speech it's like you know like kind of the bug not or feature not a bug speech it's like oh yeah you were supposed to be able to clip right through that wall and like pop right into the boss chamber We made that you know, well, we wanted to do that. Yeah, it feels like Here's the thing about like modern marketing teams They're very smart and they're like, you know, we saw Don Draper in Mad Men

There's like a million of those people and they've all seen Mad Men like they have the background already They know how to spin anything and they're just spinning you know you could you could you could throw like a hundred problems with the iphone at a marketing guy and they they'd be out by lunch you know they'd be like no problem what else you got yeah yeah when i okay an analogy i've told before i think on the podcast already actually but i'll use it again is you've seen those youtube videos where like someone will go up to a homeless person and give them 100 bucks and then it's like you get this cool reaction on camera and you're like, see, I did a good deed, but it's like, okay, but you had like a camera going and it doesn't really feel as much of a good deed. Right. But also technically you still did a good thing. I bet

the person who got the a hundred dollars was like sick. And I think that's the interesting thing is like, okay, you said they're not required to do any of the things that they're doing but there is sort of a feel-good angle to it and there's also the whole pushing the responsibility onto the customer angle a little bit i wonder do you think people actually buy more things because they are more environmentally friendly or is that as in do people like uh offset the environmental friendliness by over purchasing or do you think people purchase based on knowing something is environmentally friendly yeah or even just think feel better about a purchase because of that slide in the presentation yes absolutely i think that's in fact that's like if it wasn't if

that wasn't the case companies would stop doing Because like, it is such an effective marketing tool, especially like, there is a real climate crisis happening. And so like, a company that's like, oh, right, we'll use this crisis a Machiavellian like puppet master because the company probably the marketing team is like, yeah, we don't want it to be a climate crisis. Like I wish the climate was great. So like everyone is kind of, you know, like leaning into the problem a little bit in a way that I don't think is terribly nefarious individually. But you don't judge a system on what you want the system to do you judge it on what the outcomes are and i think in this case the outcomes are like we're really consumeristic is that that's a word right consumeristic it can be i'm going with yes words aren't really our consumerism is out the charts um and we're certainly purchasing more and more now and there's certainly like more claims of sustainability.

And we're still emitting way, way, way too much carbon dioxide or carbon dioxide equivalent. And you can even clip this part and put it into the other part because carbon dioxide equivalent is like how much the other greenhouse gases contribute using carbon dioxide as a benchmark so it could be 10 times as much of a less potent chemical that has the same effect as right one-tenth of the amount of carbon dioxide wow yes yeah sorry i had to do that math but i think that's right and mostly it's you use it for like for so for instance methane is like 22 times more potent than carbon dioxide and 80 times more potent over a 20 year period. So like you just count that into the carbon dioxide. So like every methane molecule you count is like 22.

So that's actually really interesting. There's a difference you're saying between just the pure amount of emissions or how, how effective it is over time, how much impact you have over time. Yeah. Yeah. So methane degrades in the atmosphere a little faster than carbon dioxide does. That stays around forever. It's like Axe body spray, you know what I'm saying?

No, it smells terrible. No, yeah, so methane degrades a lot faster than carbon dioxide, but over a 20-year time horizon, which is the time horizon that we're living in and probably care most about because that's when like a lot of the heating that we're trying to you know prevent is locked in methane is like even more potent than co2 and so is it potentially true that in a lot of these like carbon emissions statements they're using carbon emissions equivalents and maybe there's a mix of things in there that might add up to zero but it's kind of muddy now that there's different factors i mean they they should

be using carbon dioxide equivalent because that that takes all the carbon dioxide and includes all the other gases that are doing what carbon dioxide is doing but worse and faster yeah so like you want to use co2 equivalent. So when someone says they're carbon neutral, usually they're talking or they're talking about trying to be carbon dioxide and the other greenhouse gases neutral. Got it. So they are like CO2 is the benchmark. So it's not like in 10 years their CO2 equivalent will go down because it's degraded. It's like that's what their their their output was sort of became the blanket term yeah yeah got it yeah sick well I think we have

I'm going to take a quick break we have a lot more to talk about from clean energy to recycling and electricity and all that but uh stay with us we'll be right back At New Balance, we believe if you run, you're a runner, however you choose to do it. Because when you're not worried about doing things the right way, you're free to discover your way. And that's what running is all about. Run your way at newbalance.com slash running. This episode is brought to you by Dyson OnTrack. Dyson OnTrack headphones offer best-in-class noise cancellation and an enhanced sound range, making them perfect for enjoying music and podcasts. Get up to 55 hours of listening with active noise cancelling enabled, soft microfibre cushions engineered for comfort,

and a range of colours and finishes. Dyson OnTrack. Headphones remastered. Buy from dysoncanada.ca. With ANC on, performance may vary based on environmental conditions and usage. Accessories sold separately. All right, welcome back. We got a lot more to talk about. I think probably a good packaging way to end the carbon neutrality part is it feels like it's both a real thing, a real concept, and an accounting practice.

And that's probably how we should look at it just because there's a lot going on to equal carbon zero. Yeah, I think that's a good way to think about it. Also, like, we want to encourage companies to do their best to have the best possible versions of the offsets that are, like, certified and fundamentally permanent and not duplicative, a real word, and and these are like these are things that they know and and the better the offsets are the more real their neutrality is

right yeah yeah so that brings us to clean energy oh there's a whole another topic clean energy how would you describe clean energy there's a thousand different ways you could probably define it, but in the context of tech companies and all the energy they use, how would you define clean energy? Yeah, I think clean energy is energy generation that is low carbon. I think for me, the cleanliness factor is how low of carbon it is. I think when you get into burning coal, you get even dirtier, worse byproducts. And so, but luckily, America is like, pretty much off coal for the most part. And, you know, like, it's really expensive to run a coal generation facility. So we're sort of on the outs with coal. All I mean, remember, this is like a global problem. And 80% of the world's energy is still fossil fuels and a

lot of that is coal in across the world so like it's still a huge problem but clean energy is something that uses uh as low carbon as possible so that's going to be wind solar hydro that's going to be geothermal and nuclear and i'm probably missing 40 of them but but these are these are sources did i certainly said come on i definitely said wind right yeah i think you said wind now but yeah in general run it back run it back right now and do a slow-mo of me going wind are any of these methods carbon zero emitting no i mean like look we're sitting here talking and we're carbon positive. Like, we're all excreting carbon dioxide. Which is like a thing that these d***s are like, you want climate change to end and yet you drink from a water bottle?

Curious. Bro, you breathe? Yeah. You hate society, but yet you exist in it. Right. Like, pick a flag brother yeah um i uh i definitely want it like we're all emitting currently so nothing that you're gonna do even like the walk to a water well is carbon excreted you're breathing out yeah um but also like and that's not and that that sounds like i'm minimizing the

amount of carbon required for like a wind turbine and i don't want to do that because it's a lot of carbon required for all of this setup um solar solar panels like they do also take carbon uh to to produce and to set up and to a little bit to run but like once you're through the setup phase like amortizing that over a handful of years and then you're you're good on the carbon side is there one of those that you think is the most effective slash you would like to see more of throughout the world i mean so one nice thing about like solar and wind is that they are officially the cheapest form of energy now like the cost curve for those two has

just fallen off of a cliff and now like in the past 10 years like solar power has dropped 90 in the price wow that's crazy yeah it's like we've we've just marched it all the way down the cost curve so i think like i would like to personally i want to see more battery installation because i think that's the that is the like fix for intermittency. There's also, I know, I know all of the things that it's online say. And so I'm going to say that. You're going down the rabbit holes in your head before we even get there. Deeply.

Yeah. And it's like, well, yeah, but like at night you can't get solar power and the wind doesn't always blow. What do you do then? Huh? Sheeple, you know, like you're done. You need your coal to burn. Um, and the answer is like, well, yeah, but that's how the grid was set up. blow what do you do then huh sheeple you know like you then you need your coal to burn um and

the answer is like well yeah but that's how the grid was set up when all we had was coal you know like why are we judging these new technologies by like the benchmarks of the 1800s you know the way to cut the intermittency of renewable energy like solar and wind is battery storage. So you like extra juice these batteries when you have too much solar and then you're able to like cut that drop off. Yeah, I did a video on my setup, which is, it obviously takes a lot. And there's another rabbit hole to like create the batteries

and to ship them to your house and all that. But once you have it all set up, you have batteries. I have batteries in my garage and i have solar panels on the roof and the whole thing just kind of works as a cycle hardly ever touches the grid charges the car the house runs off of electricity from solar all day and so that's like a nice ideal setup but it's still not carbon zero because you have to get it all to the house there's there's that whole rabbit hole um but i think what we want to talk about is some of these big tech companies where it's like okay now if you're google how how on earth do you attack that problem of like all of your buildings and all of your manufacturing

and electricity and the lights and everything being uh clean energy we have a quote here from google google has claimed that they have matched a hundred percent of its global annual electricity consumption with the purchase of renewable energy okay okay so this kind of feels like another accounting practice what does this mean i mean it's it's tough because this is great like we like that google is investing their money in clean energy right we i want to say Google, Jonathan P. Google, if you're listening, thank you. You're doing, I love what you're doing with the place. The accounting strategy is real, right?

Like you're generating power from all sorts of places. Those electrons get mixed up in a big electron soup and then they're powering Google. So like various parts of Google. So it's not as though like every electron that turns on the light in Johnny Google's office is from a renewable energy source. But they are, I believe they are accounting for all that energy through things like power purchase agreements and REC purchases, which are renewable energy certificates. agreements and uh rec purchases which are renewable energy certificates so when you man god i'm i i know what i'm going to say and i'm already bored by what i'm saying i'm so sorry um when you produce clean energy you you dump it into the grid and you also get a rec or renewable energy certificate that you can sell and that's a way to incentivize more renewable energy generation. Yeah. So Google can effectively offset the

electricity that they use by making sure that they have accounted for all their electricity through purchasing direct from renewable energy companies or purchasing renewable energy certificates for the megawatt hours that they've been using. Okay. So it kind of divides again into like those two camps of like, you can either get your supply as clean as possible, or you can accept that your supply won't always be clean, but sort of accept that total and purchase offsets in some way that can account for that. Right. Which is what we want to encourage, right? We want to incentivize that.

But also like, it also encourages Google to make claims like every single thing we've ever done is renewable energy we've never once even thought about using natural gas as an energy source yeah and like of course you could very easily point to a time when some station was run on yeah natural gas uh-huh yeah But because they bought so many offsets, they can say that everything they've ever done has been offset. Right. In fact, like legacy emissions. This is a new thing.

I think Microsoft is kind of hot on this, where it's like, we're going to calculate all the electricity we've ever used and offset that. But also, like, Google is doing some cool shit where they will install geothermal generation on generation oh on their i think their bayview campus is all geothermal heat pumps wow and so that's like powered pretty renewably and also it cuts down on their water usage so like they're doing cool i i wanted to you know talk more about the language because you know google lays down this sort of complicated like matched 100%. It's not exactly like the clearest sentence in the world,

but in the sort of Apple companion sister press release that they always do, they full on say, "'Apple's global facilities are powered "'with 100% clean energy across 43 countries,' "'which just feels like an impossible wrong thing. So are you allowed to say powered with 100% clean energy, even if you're just offsetting it? Yeah. So I think Apple's claim that they're powered 100% renewable in 43 countries when they only

have power generation in 20-something countries is is like so you're not powered by that you're doing the offsetting and i and to my knowledge i think they are also doing some kind of power purchasing or or rec purchasing or something and just calling it powered because you can do the mental judo to make it feel like that's what's powering you is that sorry to interrupt is that kind of like when they say like made with made with a hundred percent real juice or something and it's like half half from concentrate but it's made with a hundred percent real juice there was a yeah or so you can get there was an attempt yeah it's an or you know what i mean like that i think it's actually even worse than that because the fda pretty tightly

regulates things like that and there are such loose regulations in what you're allowed to say europe uh i think the european parliament is is starting to crack down on that and so like you can't make greenwashing claims like 100 clean clean powered if it's not. The US, bless our little hearts, has fewer scruples about what a company's allowed to say marketing wise. So yeah, I think Apple can say that and they can back it up by proving, oh, every single time we flushed a toilet,

that's the one thing that doesn't take electricity my god every time we turn the light on and turn the fan on uh-huh at in the bathroom yeah wow what i'm blowing this um we can account for that in renewable energy right and yeah i mean like think they can you know like they kind of can and also no one's gonna no one's gonna walk into tim cook's office who runs runs Apple now? Tim Cook. Tim Cook. Okay, great. I almost said Steve Jobs.

I really did. No one's going to dig up Steve Jobs and arrest him. So this is a really interesting thing because Apple kind of, I've learned a lot about what Apple's been doing. And they kind of do both sides of this where, yeah, they clearly can't be completely renewable. And so their statements kind of feel fuzzy in that way. But on the other hand, they have a lot of solar on their HQ. I doubt the entire thing runs from solar, but they have a lot of solar there.

They have all these solar farms that they've contributed to building. And then the one thing that really stuck with me was having a meeting with them, them talking about manufacturing. Also, that's a very cool sentence to say. Having a meeting with Apple. Oh no. Yeah. We've and look, they, they love to talk our ear off about all the great things that they're doing. Nice. Um, but one of the things that stuck with me was they may say that they're doing some things and you can split it into these two buckets. But one thing about Apple is they,

they've told me like strongly, they're trying to make the best effort to use sustainable suppliers. And so they'll go to a supplier and say, we will only do business with you if you are reaching this benchmark or if you are this much more sustainable. And so instead of just buying the credits, they're actually making that effort. And then on top of that, because they're such a big company, the suppliers, the suppliers number one they want that business so they're going to try to do that right and then every other company who uses that same supplier for something just have their process their supply chain get that much more sustainable as well so the biggest companies going through the effort to adjust their supply chain to be more sustainable does have, feels like a really good impact on the entire system,

if that makes sense? I think that's a great point. And I think what we want is every company to be like trying for that. I will note the sentence that Apple told you was, we're trying to make the best effort to work with people who are like clean in the supply chain which is just like couching all their life you know like at the end of the day they're trying to make another trillion dollars or whatever and they're really

good at it and they have so much money right like they if they wanted to yeah they could just say we're only working with suppliers to do this yeah so like they are doing a lot and I really respect the accomplishments that they have made and I think our job as like people in the same world as Apple is to like say good job but also don't stop where you're at because that's not far enough yeah or you can say whatever version of good job and you can make it mean if you want even good start good start yeah it's a good start speaking of clean energy and um kind of near the end of this topic there's a thing that apple did either at the beginning of this year or last year bitmojis yeah bit huge yeah uh that we made a short on where basically by default on every iphone running a certain ios version or whatever uh it now automatically will only pull

power when your grid is coming from a clean energy source unless you turn it off it is opt out and i wanted your opinion on both what exactly does how does that work like how does your grid sometimes come from clean energy and sometimes not can you just give like a brief like top-down recap of what that looks like yeah and also if you think that that is actually super impactful or not yeah yeah um okay, so I think what probably what Apple's language is, is like, we're going to charge when the grid is most renewable, right? Yes. Because like some grids, never, never renewable, all natural gas, you know, like some sometimes there's just or not all natural gas, but like the majority of the electricity is generated by natural gas. However, in California, for instance, there's this thing called the duck curve is this has anyone heard of this thing no it's like don't worry about it don't look it up don't look it up um it's it's basically don't don't stop googling don't know um basically like we put so much rooftop solar like a duck i i totally think the opposite i've never seen the duck people have been like look it's a duck and i'm like it's a stretch it's not okay yeah that's true it's a switch what it what it what it is is uh

there's enough solar electricity being generated in california that they can't use it all so um so it creates this kind of like oh wow yeah so so if you're in California, your iPhone is most likely to charge on this renewable energy charging at the peak hours. In the noon, kind of when there's the most sun and the most solar on the grid. Because that grid is like maximum solar. This is my understanding of how this Apple works. If you are out there, Tim, I know you're watching this. Nice pajamas last night. What a weird, what a horrible thing for me to say to Tim.

Yeah, so I think this is how that works. But if you are in a place where there is not a lot of renewable energy being dispatched into your grid, it's just going to have to pick the time when it's like, oh, there's like a little bit more wind. Maybe it got like windier tonight. It's always a mix, yeah. Yeah, or like there's more nuclear online or is that like public information that your iphone can collect yeah absolutely yeah you can the energy information administration

eia matt fact check yeah yeah you can you can i mean you can't get like your specific part of transmission but like you can get a breakdown of your chunk of the grid. You could look at New York State and see basically what's happening. Right. And it's different for different times of the year. So the shoulder months where there's less electricity load for AC and more solar, so say September, October, that's where you have the biggest,

where they're dumping a lot of solar in California. Matt is an engineer turned comedian and so that's it. There's not a lot of those out there, so if you find one, hold on to them. That's me too. Oh, really? I'm not funny. You're very funny. I thought you were a computer scientist. That's the same thing.

That's like an engineer. Matt's like a real engineer. A computer scientist is just an engineer who... Matt drives trains okay wow i was making a bad joke that um if was funny would be would make my point true if you're a comedian here's what happened i felt i felt like i needed to defend myself but objectively it was funny it was the right moment it was the right timing you said it right i just was like someone's gonna get mad at me yeah and i didn't want i'm not a comedian but i can be funny you're a funny guy when there's 1.46 billion active iphones uh throughout the world do you see that as actually being an impactful change like that only charging in peak hours kind of thing so i think uh i mean that's not going to

be the thing that saves us but i think the thing that saves us is like a hundred thousand things that won't save us you know like our salvation is going to come at the hands of like an everything thrown at the wall kind of approach right an apple doing an opt out yeah version of this is awesome it felt like a big deal to us because they normally companies don't do opt out things they're trying to screw you over but this this seems like a like wait this is like good for everyone yeah it felt like a thing they didn't have to do they flip the switch everyone's phones are doing it by default and you can then people were happy to opt out in the comments, but it was just the fact that that many phones all at once opted in.

It felt like it made a dent. So really your video about how to opt out. Probably was carbon negative. Probably a bad thing. Oh man. I think it's, I think it's really cool. I think it is free for Apple to do because they're not paying for the electricity. So like, it's a very cool move.

Way to go, Tim. It goes back to the beginning thing. Every company has got a good public-facing and private-facing reason. The private-facing reason is that was pretty good PR. Yeah. That was pretty good. But yeah, it actually does make a difference. So that was good to see.

That's cool. That most of what they're doing with emissions when they're looking at carbon emissions is scope three so they're actually looking at um what's happening with their products when they're out in the world not like what's happening at their offices or what's happening in their trucks like they're looking at like these products are living out in the world and so over the course of your life your iphone like you're charging it on the grid and so it is also affecting their carbon emissions because like the vast majority like 90 plus percent is scope three which includes charging your iphone so it all ties back into the same thing of like carbon neutrality where if they can get an iphone onto a cleaner charging system

that's reducing their carbon emissions because they're actually counting that with their can they track that they can estimate they can estimate that that's really interesting i had no idea that when you're looking at like carbon emissions for these companies tech companies it's like like 95 percent yeah i mean microsoft was 96 yes like very very high scope three which is outside the company wow that's interesting because i when i look at a massive company like a microsoft to google apple whatever i just automatically picture huge buildings and tons of lights and manufacturing equipment and all this stuff that naturally feels

like it has to be making a big impact. But probably more than all of that put together, or as we're learning is more than all of that, is probably the transportation of getting it to you and then the energy that it burns while it's in your hands. So this is something when when apple came out i think it was earlier this year and they said that the the apple watch

this year series 9 is apple's first ever carbon neutral product fully carbon neutral right they said that that includes the entire lifetime of you using and charging it which obviously they don't know how much you're going to use it or charge it or how or when you're going to use it and charge it. But they've made that estimate. They've reduced as much possible in the manufacturing and getting it to you and bought enough offsets that they feel that they can claim that the Apple Watch for the lifetime of owning it

makes no impact to the environment. Or at least that's what they want you to think. Yeah, I think that sounds like a really good start. Yeah, interesting. Okay, well, I think that's a they want you to think. Yeah. I think that that sounds like a, like a really good start. Yeah. Interesting. Okay. Well, I think that's, that's a pretty good place to leave off for clean energy. We've got one more section on recycling coming up, so that's a pretty good place for a natural break. We'll be right back. Breaking news coming in from Bet365, where every nail-biting overtime win,

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We've got one more section, one more topic to cover with these tech companies and their green stuff. And that's recycling. And we're not talking about juice. We got to talk recycling. You almost went hard on them. And their green stuff. Yeah. You know, the quote again came up in my head about like,

made with 100% juice. And I just keep replaying that in my head. Because every time I see one of these recycling quotes, it kind of feels like I don't know how to read this quote in a way that would actually answer what I'm supposed to know about this. But I'll give you some examples. Okay, man.

And you can tell me what you think about them. Apple promises that by 2025, magnets in Apple devices will use entirely recycled rare earth elements. earth elements all apple designed printed circuit boards will use a hundred percent recycled tin soldering and a hundred percent recycled gold plating oh cool and by 2025 the target is to use a hundred percent recycled cobalt in all apple designed batteries apple design apple designed which ones are apple design which ones are not so some of these feel like made with 100 i don't know exactly if that's what that means um but all of them seem like good things i mean you obviously want to use as many recycled materials as possible what was

that quote that you had about like if all the phones anyone's ever bought so uh there's a company in france uh i think, maybe somewhere in Europe. I'll fact check as you go. Yeah, it's a company called Fairphone. Oh, yeah. Amsterdam. Amsterdam, yeah. They make these.

Amsterdam, France. Yeah. They make these phones that are supposed to be like upgradable and last a long time. But their biggest thing is that they are just trying to like be better about getting people to be more climate conscious and uh we interviewed the ceo and he he said something about cobalt where he said if you took every phone that was sitting in a drawer somewhere in someone's house and you recycled all the cobalt in it we'd never have to mine cobalt again dang yeah so crazy and everyone's got that drawer like when you said that i thought i was like yeah i know the exact drawer that's got four of my old iphones right yeah yeah right i think

that's like so so cobalt is like a extremely renewable resource right uh i mean yeah so every every molecule of every element is a commodity, right? It is identical to any other molecule. So in that way, yes, they are renewable. Or they're not so much renewable as in reusable. Renewable means like regenerative. They're all finite, but they're all potentially reusable. Right. And the problem is it's kind of hard to organize every single person in the world

to like go to their drawer get it out give it to the the right factory and then that factory has to like go into the phone take the cobalt out re homogenize it in whatever way cobalt is i'm over my skis here i don't know how cobalt is like actually recycled into a new cobalt phone but like that is totally true in the same way that like if we were able to like get all of the food that's wasted at a restaurant in america to every other country like no one would ever go hungry again like technically accurate probably or close to it i mean not known whatever just close but it's like logistically insane got it for sure yeah right yeah but in general i think i think this is one of the easiest ones to get everyone on the same page which is uh virgin

materials bad recycling good it feels like the feels like the simple uh at least from the messaging that i see from these tech companies it feels like the thing that they're all stressing like we want to use as many recycled materials as possible because that is sustainable yeah i i mean yes i think that the messaging is going to say a lot of that and to a to an extent that's very true um however they're you know like they're they're in they're trying to hit a quota? They have to make a certain amount of phones, and if they can't get the recycled cobalt from a drawer in your mom's attic or something, not to, why did I drag your mom into this?

Doesn't matter. If they can't get that phone, they're going to mine the cobalt out of whatever cobalt mine they need to, because, like, they're going to do that. But, I mean, like like that's not to say they shouldn't use recycled cobalt and i'm really happy that they are yeah but like it's it's a it's a piece of the puzzle right it sort of feels like with all the things that we've talked about

so far today it's like it it feels like we're reaching a point in capitalism where it's more cost effective for the company to do things that are climate positive in a lot of ways would you say that's the case i think we're slowly getting to that point i think still to this day it is probably more cost effective for a company to mine new material than it is for them to recycle it. Just because like when you're mining it, you're getting it a giant vein of it in one shot and you don't have to do a lot of processing to pry it out of old phones. I think like if there was some kind of law that was like,

we're gonna put a giant tariff on like mining new cobalt, yes, that would be super cost effective they would all go after all the old phones there'd be like a huge phone buyback program that would absolutely be a fantastic move but i think like it tends to be a little easier to mine it and companies are very incentivized to do the easy fast thing like, that's why there's so much mining right now. Which is crazy, because cobalt is not, like, an easy metal to mine. Like, it's not found in places that are necessarily

the most accessible. It's, you know, it's crazy that it's easier to go to the Congo, into the middle of the jungle, and pull the stuff out of the ground than it is to, like, you know, not to bring her back into it, but go to David's mom's house. Go to the attic of David's mom's house. to like you know not to bring her back into it but go to david's mom's house and go to this the attic of david yeah you know what i mean you've all done it it also it kind of strikes me that a recycling would be the easiest for uh regular people to get on board with like we talked about that feature before where it's opt out where it's going to flip a switch

on everyone's phones and it's going to if you plug it in maybe not charge for a couple hours until you're on clean energy and people were were like, oh, that's so inconvenient. I'm going to disable it on my phone. I wish it would just charge. But nobody can tell the difference between a recycled aluminum frame on their phone and a brand new aluminum frame on their phone. I feel like the more of these metals and rare earth magnets and all these things that happen to be recycled in your phone, generally the better because I feel like I can't tell the difference. I think that's true i think like it would be amazing to like have that be the the uh status quo where we're just like recycling old phones and my god there are so many phones out there

like if we could just take those phones and disassemble them uh and put those elements right back in a new phone that would be awesome yeah awesome. I think it tends to not be that easy. Recycling facilities are like, you have to kind of mulch up a phone and use different density sorting techniques to get different elements out of it. And it's not a perfect science yet. It's hard to do.

But emphasizing that to companies, we want more recycled in our phones, that's, I think, a really good move. I love your take on this thing that happened recently uh there's this company called one plus right and they hate them hate them no what's what are they sorry one plus catching a stray right there what's one plus what do they do they're a phone company okay they do all right strike one strike one uh they made this folding phone recently okay right expensive Right? Expensive, $1,700. They have this rebate that lasts until the end of time, until they stop selling the phone,

where if you send them in any phone in any condition from any... Any OnePlus phone. No, any phone at all. Anybody's phone? Well, sure, I guess. Marques, can I borrow your phone? I got to send a text right now. Any phone that has ever been made made if you send them a phone

it could be burn to a crisp it could be whatever they will give you $200 off their new folding phone and somebody in my briefing was like so it could be like you know 12 year old phone or like something that doesn't work anymore and they're like yeah

and there's been a lot of questions like why would they do that and my intuition was like something that Barrett doesn't work anymore? And they're like, yeah. And there's been a lot of questions like, why would they do that? And my intuition was they're trying to get the Cobalt from it either as a credit of sorts that they can use later or that they can reuse in their devices. But I don't know if that's way too expensive to do. It probably costs more than $200 per device. What's your take on that?

Yeah, there's definitely not $200 worth of cobalt in every phone. Um, I think, I mean, it sounds, it sounds cool. I think that's a cool move for one phone,

one plus, one plus to do. Yeah. Sorry. One plus. It sounds pretty cool. and I, yeah,

I don't, I'm not, I'm not really sure. I suppose there's like a i bet it's a 1500 phone that they're like we better tack on an extra 200 bucks my guess was like they just want it to seem more premium but it cost them less i think in general a lot of these folding phones have bigger margins they are more expensive but they have to make them expensive to look like the highest end thing so they have bigger margins to play with, and maybe they're just taking the $200 hit in the margins to maybe it's a combo of marketing and recycling

and the cobalt they get from it and whatever they'll be able to say in the next keynote about how many phones they recycled. We recycled 50,000 phones for you. All that put together, yeah. And that's just from one guy's mom's house. Yeah. So it feels like a net positive.

Mom has had many phones. Mom's mom's house. Yeah. So it feels like a net positive. My mom hasn't had any phones. But as with any... Your mom's a drug dealer. What? Whoa. As with any of these... My drug is cobalt. As with any of these quotes,

there's obviously language that's very specific to them. And there's an asterisk at the end of apples. That's the whole thing about quotes. Language that's very specific to them. Very specific. Yeah. Very specific with this one so apples that i read at the end with the apple design batteries has an asterisk so the quote

again is by 2025 they are targeting using a hundred percent recycled cobalt in all apple design batteries asterisk asterisk says when you scroll down to the bottom all cobalt content references are on a mass balance system basis okay i read this and i don't know what that means so when i knew you were coming i decided not to google it i'm just asking okay so as far as i understand mass balance system is about inputs versus outputs so when you say mass balance if you have almost all recycled cobalt or all recycled cobalt going into the system, anything that's coming out of the system gets to be counted as 100% recycled cobalt. So even if you've got somewhere in the line, and please, if you're out there and you're like, that's not what it means, leave a comment and I'll respond to it and I'll say, thanks, Jackson.

Yeah, so mass balance is a way to, because when, and it's also probably not 100% recycled cobalt in the whole thing. In the same way, it's like, oh, it's 100% recycled plastic in the phone. But it's actually like, oh, actually just the back case is recycled and 58 percent of the plastic total is recycled um it's it's a way to allow inputs to be counted in the system itself because when you are recycling something you're mixing all the molecules together just like the electricity or just like the offsets where you you need to be able to other just like the electricity or just like the offsets where you you need to be able to account for the extra inputs in the system so maybe maybe you're flushing the system with recycled cobalt and eventually all of the the phones and all of the batteries are using recycled

cobalt but it's a way to kind of couch it a little bit yeah and the thing you mentioned also with the different parts of the phone is very, very, very common for these quotes where they'll say that we're using recycled aluminum, but they'll say it's just the enclosure of the Pixel 5 where there's a lot of aluminum also in the frame on the inside of the phone that they don't talk about. So it'll just be the outside, which you're holding and you're holding recycled aluminum.

That's great. But stuff like that comes up a lot. The enclosure of the phone, the frame of the the phone this part of the phone is recycled aluminum which is nice uh and which also brings up another thing also which is uh google's quote for recycled aluminum it was back housing only and it recycled aluminum is approximately 58 of the pixel 5 enclosure based on weight okay specific yeah yeah and like i just want to make sure i'm i'm clear here like this is a good thing to be recycling this material absolutely and the engineers the the mechanical engineers or whoever's designing or what i don't know how phones work um these these guys are like we're trying to do our best you know like we're we're

doing our best to put as much in there and then the marketing arm is like got it now how do we like spin this in one line and make it really pop yeah and that's where this sort of like judo comes in so i want to say like great job on the 58 of recycled material let's see how high we can get that but then when you see a quote that's like 100% recycled, and you're like, well, back away from the table like a blackjack dealer and move on to the next thing. You can't let

them stop at 100% when 100% is 50%. But it's good, but it's not there yet. It says the aluminum in the enclosure of the Pixel 5 is 100 recycled content in which i would say so is ours so uh it's recycled see you are a comedian don't sell yourself short but 100 of 58 is 58 no one can do that math that's too hard yeah and that to me that is the exact

fruit juice thing that right there yeah the aluminum in the enclosure of the pixel 5 is 100 recycled content but that recycled content is 58 recycled right yeah okay what is it 50 of the time it works every time yeah that asterisk is doing a lot of heavy lifting but like that's not the engineer like the engineers are doing their best you know i don't i don't know there's it's no i i think it's easy especially in um especially on youtube or on the internet in general people want to be like this is only terrible or this is only amazing but it's sort of one of those middle ground things where it's like it is a net positive even though it is also beneficial for the company to be doing it one of those kind of things and you know i mean it doesn't feel good to be like

thanks apple you're really saving the planet yeah you know that their net emissions without all the offsets and stuff are still like but yeah it's still good you don't want to like be mad at companies for doing the best that they can uh well are they doing the best that they can well and that's like they're doing the best that they want to do. Yeah, right. I think that's where we exist. We can force them to do better or ask them to do better and also be happy that they're doing something. Yeah.

I think that's a good place to summarize it all because at the end of the day, we vote with our wallets. If we actually want to make decisions based on what these companies are saying about not just how well the product works but how sustainably well it's made, we can make that difference to them because that's the thing they care the most about is where we spend our money. them a little bit on okay you could do better here or you could do more here or you could be more sustainable here and actually buy products and make it uh obvious that that's why you're buying the product yeah although we we vote with our wallets but we like encourage with our mouths and social media so like that's that's the other thing if you're out there and you like want to push these guys like push them like they for reason, they listen to you on Twitter.

They take all that into account and be that force if you're out there. Don't let them off the hook. Yeah, the Fairphone company that we were talking about is one of the most interesting ones in the space because they have made a conscious effort to, and I made a video about this, to make their entire smartphone

from the beginning of the process from the the offices that they work in to the manufacturing to the mining to the packaging to the shipping the whole thing to be as sustainable and renewable as possible and the trade-off with a phone that makes all of those decisions is it's not as thin and pretty and it's not made of metal it's got a plastic back there all these are all these things that are a little bit right here it's got it's got a little bit of the uh do you want to go all the way or not yeah and i think people will vote with their nuance somewhere in the middle as we all follow that example of what Fairphone does. There's a new sort of SOC computer process that people are doing where they do everything

on one die now instead of having like the RAM is separate from the GPU, is separate from the motherboard. Now it's all one. And integrating everything like that makes these things exponentially faster. So like Apple announced the M1 architecture a couple of years ago, and that's what all these computers are running on. They're not very repairable. So there's sort of this awkward tension between like if we want to keep advancing technology, becoming more integrated is like kind of what you have to do. But then there's the flip side of like you can't fix it yeah so and repairability is like one of the biggest ways to be sustainable yeah that's

true yeah yeah i mean so we're the right to repair are we're going to do an episode on right to repair on our cool our youtube channel climate town i'm so excited on climate yeah at youtube.blogspot. Is that the plug? Oh, that's cool. Oh, okay. I also have a podcast called The Climate Denier's Playbook. There we go. All right. It's on Spotify.

Oh. Hosted on the World Wide Web. Oh, damn. Too many plugs. It's hosted in my mom's attic. But yeah, right to repair is... That's a good callback see you got the chops man you could go all the way with that one but yeah right to repair is one of those

things that we we always i made a video about this as well it's like okay we want tech to be better tech gets more integrated gets more tightly knit gets faster now it's less repairable now it's less sustainable yeah so that's a challenge we all have to sort of contend with yeah that's true but there's also like apple being like purposely difficult to repair and that's that yeah that's that yeah there are things on the fringes that are notably anti-repair which make it really tough to justify all the rest of the stuff that they do yeah are you kind of wrapping it up yeah i was gonna say the ev rabbit hole is way too deep to dive into now oh god big one i'll come back later i'll come back in an indoneevy oh what about the you want to do the the leather one we have like quick oh yeah

yeah quick hits okay cool okay yeah all right i think i'll i'll we'll wrap it up with a couple quick hits no pressure to think too hard about these but also all the comment section is is waiting to comment about these we got a bunch of quick hit heads in the comments a couple quick hits they skip straight to this part of the podcast there's time stamps for for them to get mad here all right but okay 10 seconds for each answer uh first one is net water positive a real or interesting thing we should care about it's a bit of an accounting technique google uses net water positive to imply that they're gray or non-potable water. Potable obviously being Latin root for potare, right? Not potable. They use that to say we're catching more rainwater, so we're cycling out how much potable water we're using and we're collecting more than we're using. Okay.

Yeah. And then they also use as much pot potable water as they as they want um apple getting rid of all leather in all of their stores and all their products feels like a good thing but doesn't vegan leather use a ton of energy to create yeah but like it also doesn't produce all of the methane that we're seeing like cattle farms produce so like certainly there are bad parts of everything but like i'd rather have like a vegan product that produces all so little methane rather than like a leather product that is part of this in a giant meat industrial complex that's like slowly drowning the entire planet totally fair uh is it true that shipping more products via ocean than air is actually a good thing absolutely yes um it's a little bit slower but when you think about buoyancy right

you can make a ship naturally buoyant and a plane requires like a ton were you thinking about buoyancy too hard there there's a running joke here on the pod that none of us understand how boats work don't know how to work that's a good bit just just perplexes us but i just don't you know boats are just yeah joke right well air is a fluid air is a fluid so just imagine how and boats don't have wings so what the do they have little tiny wing they have one wing on the bottom of the boat little wings it's called the keel or the dagger board if you're in a sailboat this is see like my eyes they're're just, I can't. They turned all black for a second.

He covered off his chair. You could cover a donut with all that glaze. Damn. Okay, next. Yeah, the quick hit heads are going crazy in the comments. Yeah. Well, last quick hit, true or false, the EV battery rabbit hole is too deep to dive down right now.

True, but only because I want to come back and talk to you guys about that later. We are going to have to do a separate episode just on the EV rabbit hole. Because we'd be happy to dive down that rabbit hole. Yeah. I have a quick hit. Sure. Raleigh. Yes.

How fast can you type the alphabet? 5.9 seconds. Would you like to prove that? No, but yeah, I'll do it. Let's do it. All right, so the way this works is pretty simple, Raleigh. What you're looking at in front of you is a box. It's empty.

All you've got to do is type all the letters of the alphabet in order from A to Z, and then don't hit enter at the end. When you hit Z, you'll have a time. Don't hit enter. Don't hit enter. In any order? You've got to type them in order. Alphabetical order?

A, B, C to E, F, G all the way to Z. When you hit Z, that's your time. We're going to give you three attempts. And if you hit 5.9 on the dot, I will give you a small trophy. Oh, wow. And if you miss a letter, it will not accept any of the following letters until you hit it. You have to go back and hit it. If you go A, B, D, E, F, D, E, F will not count.

It'll be waiting on C. But it doesn't penalize me for hitting the wrong letter? Correct. So I can just mash in the area? Yes. True. I mean, that's not going to be faster. It's a bad strategy, but you're technically right.

But what if it isn't? You know what? You'd have to hit them in order still. But you can hit like... I mean, you could just... I'm just going to try something really quick. I mean, theoretically, if you wipe 26 times in 2 seconds, you'll get it

2 seconds. I can't quite cover all the keys. I was just trying. It's very hard. Are you wiping, though? Yeah, are you wiping, though? Answer the question. Alright, here we go. We've got our leaderboard pulled out.

That didn't work for me at all. Okay, ready we go. We've got our leaderboard pulled out. That didn't work for me at all. Okay. Ready? Yeah. 5.8. Wow. That's a pretty good first score. I was trying to get 5.9. Very, very close.

You'll have two more attempts if you want to try to get faster than 5.8. Can I try to get slower than 5.8? You can. What is the decimals on that? 5.844. Okay. So you can either try to get exactly 5.9 or you can try to go for our leaderboard. I'm going to try to go as fast as I can and I bet I'm going to get a 5.9.

Even better. That would be a huge win. All right. Ready? Yeah. And it just resets or do I have to reset it uh when you hit enter it does reset got it 6.2 damn it all right one more time here we go one of us 5.9! Wow.

5.973. Wow. That's pretty close. That's pretty good. Oh, I had to get 5.900? Technically, this rounds up, but I'm impressed. You were three hundredths of a second slower. I am very impressed.

Than Dr. Mike. So, yeah, just in case you're curious, your 5.8 puts you 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. Wow. At ninth on our all-time leaderboard. Three, really good. Wow. Right above Doug DeMuro, right behind our local dad, Andrew Manganielli. Yeah.

Well played. Thank you very much. 5.8. But I feel like if i get a trophy for 5.9 that's got to go that's got to be my score what's the significance of 5.9 i was just guessing you just made i just thought i could maybe do it he just nailed it i but i i went a little over it's pretty close i went a little over and a little under we don't keep track of this but 5.8 might have been the best first round score we've ever tom scott might have beaten

that on his first round i can't quite remember yeah but that's a pretty great first i gotta tell you i'm a terrible typer i only use these fingers what do you think our slowest all-time time is if your 5.8 is terrible what do you think the worst? Did anyone get disqualified for having a bad attitude or something? We did have a certain someone start off by saying, I am a bad typist. Really bad. Like Hunt and Peck. And he was not last place.

Wow. Yeah. I guess I'm going to say 12 seconds is the max. David Blaine was said subject. He got 8.8. Wait, David Blaine is the slowest? Oh, he was said I'm a bad.8 wait david blaine is the slow oh he was head of a bad time yeah yeah what was the slowest uh our local our local brandon he got a 9.4 okay so no one's even no one's no one's been over 10. yeah yeah okay that's good you only have tech heads on the yeah we've got capable keyboardists here nice who's got the fastest score tom scott

at what 3.5 out it the f*** out, Tom Scott. It was insane. It was insane. He was like, yeah, I think I can do it. Done. That's some classic Tom Scott. I'm standing here over a keyboard. There are 26 keys that I need to hit in the precise order.

That's for sure how it started. He was like insistent about doing it on his Dell laptop. Wow. Yeah, because he had the keyboard down. What a guy. What a God. Okay, so to round this out, we usually ask guests, is there anything that people don't generally know about the topic that we're talking about that you just really want them

to know? Do you want these commenters to be like, huh, that's a fun fact about the climate that they just had no idea about um so i want to i think i want to stress that they probably don't know how ignorant i am on the topic how ignorant like everybody is on the topic like these are these are subjects that like we were we're talking about this on the ride over and we were like trying to wonder exactly how solar is curtailed and where the electricity goes when like it's produced or it's not produced. And there's just so much to every single part of this that I am like

so surface level aware of, even after like a couple of months of study. So like these are complex, difficult topics that if somebody is like, oh, I'm an expert in how solar works, they're not. They're super not. And so I think that should, number one, let me tell you how you should feel about this. Empowered to go out and learn. But more than anything, just like you, you get to pick what you learn today and you get to pick like how far along a subject you get into. And it's probably worth your time To understand the climate crisis as deeply as you can you'll never waste your time researching this stuff so by all means please go research because there's like a bajillion things that I have no clue about and

I'm gonna spend the rest of my life trying to figure them out. Yeah, if you can make it that far I Just get shot it's been a sting operation from waveform oh my god i think david you meant climate change mega death not not like not like big oil what is this podcast but i think in general it is you're right it's a good idea to to learn about the world we live in, about this planet. We only have one of them, so it's pretty important. Yeah. Worth looking into. Yeah. This has been really fun. Like I said, we'll have you back. We'll talk about EVs. We'll do this again.

Deal. But until the next one, where can they find you on the internet? Okay, yeah. YouTube. I have a YouTube channel called Climate Town. Check that out. We have 24 videos out or something, so it won't even take you that long to go through them all. They're bangers, though. They're like 20, 30 minute big time pieces. That's sometimes not how people describe bangers. I think they're like- I think on YouTube 2023, when I see a 25 minute video on my soapbox, I'm like, I'm popping the popcorn. This is a good one.

Then they are indeed bangers. B to the last thing is only yeah, yeah, here's only that's a good like That's my website bangers only dotnet bangers only Link plugging time. Yeah, sorry. No, it's totally fine. I I'm gonna go there after this and Yeah, so that's that's the YouTube channel, The Climate Denier's Playbook. Check that out. That's me and my comedy partner slash friend,

Nicole Conlon. She got a plug. She writes for The Daily Show, so she's really smart and really funny. Those are the two big ones. Follow us on Instagram. We're just at Climate Town and at deniers playbook everywhere we have a patreon page

if you're feeling like you got an extra five bucks that you want to throw my way that'd be cool the plug sound is going to make me really self conscious about what's what I'm plugging in that we have a whole lighting cue with it too oh really that was a plug for the lighting cue this is cool and then also if you if you want to just get a lighting cue with it too. Oh, really? That was a plug for the lighting cue.

This is cool. And then also, if you want to just get a little goofy with it, I have a billiards channel. If you just type my name. We can make this one serious. Okay. Since the dawn of time, mankind has wondered, how do you hit a ball with a stick into another ball into a hole?

And all these questions and more are answered at the YouTube channel, Raleigh Williams. Yeah. But don't do the climate town ones first. Don't do that one first. Only if there's, if you've, you are like,

I need more vitamin him in my life. Like then go check that out. But not before you check out Climate 10. There it is. Thank you guys so much for watching, for listening, for subscribing of course, and for liking and we'll read your comments. Catch you guys in the next one. Peace.

Wayfarm is produced by Adam Molina and Ellis Roven. We are part of the Vox Media Podcast Network and our intro outro music is by Vane Sill bingo so close first take you guys ready for the next section yes yep all right all. Let's get it. I'm about to recycle a bunch of jokes. Nice.

Okay, perfect. David, whatever you're doing, keep doing it. Yeah. I don't know what it is, but you got it, brother. Yeah. You're going to make it in this town, kid. Yeah.