Transcript
Hey, this is the moment. I'm Brian Koppelman, thanks for listening. My guest today, my dearest friends, and certainly by now, the guest who has most frequently shared this particular stage with me, the legendary writer speaker, public thinker and now climate change editor, save in the world the great Seth Godin. Hi, Seth, the reigning champ back to defend his title. Yeah, absolutely. This is fun and and it's so great to pod in person with you. It's been years. I mean, we've spent plenty of time in person together, but we have not podcast and in person. I think for a good, a good while. So Seth has put together an incredible volume that's out on June, July 12th, on July 12th, called the Kaman Almanac. Well, that would be a book about bananas. The Kaman Almanac. This is the Carbon Almanac. What did I say? Firemen like Carmen Miranda. Oh, I still like the hats like red. Is that sorry? The carbon? Yeah, I'm gonna do a whole norm Crosby thing the whole time. Today it's going to be one malapropism after the next. The Carbon Almanac, subtitled It's Not Too Late. Further subtitled Facts Connection Actions, Seth wrote the foreword. This was an idea that he galvanized and put together set describe just to start here. And look, we're going to talk about a lot of the stuff we always talk about. I'm never going to have Seth here without asking him stuff about the creative life and about moving forward and about the world we're living in as human beings. But I've I've rarely seen you so consumed by something as I have seen you consumed by this project the way that it's animated, you lit you up every time I've been to your house. Some new development about it has come up at dinner. I can tell that it this. This feels like a mission. And so I just want to give you the floor a little bit. I have specific questions about it, but can you just explain what the Carbon Almanac is, why you put it together and what its purpose is? It transformed me. It was an extraordinary opportunity to hang with two thousand people in 91 countries every day. But I need to talk about Wales first. Great. So if you are an evil James Bond villain in 16 75 and you wanted to kill all the Wales, one way you would do that is by training a few henchmen to go kill whales. That would not work. The other thing you could do is figure out that whale oil is a good way to light your home, and within years less than that, there would be whale oil refineries and whale oil salespeople and whale hunters. And within a century, there'd be almost no whales left because the system would be created. And one of the byproducts of the system would be killing all the whales. The only thing that saved the whales was not telling people to eat less whale meat. We're telling people to not use well oiled but save the whales was kerosene. And the systems that are around us are really powerful. And I, as you know, have been writing about marketing and culture and systems for a long time, but never precisely naming it. And there are a lot of people who care deeply about how they behave in the world, about the impact that they have, and they have been brainwashed and indoctrinated by the fossil fuel industry into thinking that plastic can be recycled into thinking that their carbon footprint is the problem into thinking that until they clean up their act, they better not speak up. And what I wanted to do was I want my first blog post about climate change 16 years ago. It didn't solve the problem, so I figured another blog didn't fix it. I think a blog was to not work, but I needed to do something. And I said, If this is a systems problem, where is the system solution? So the second thing I wonder about is yoga mats was his yoga mat company called Guy Am. I'm probably not pronouncing right. In addition to making yoga mats make yoga blocks, and they are very mindful, thoughtful group of people that make most of the yoga blocks in this country, as far as I can tell. Yoga blocks, of course, made out of foam, which is made out of oil. But if you order a set of these yoga blocks, I know I'm ranting, you know? So if you order a set of these yoga box from Amazon, they come shrink wrapped in plastic and the plastic shrink wrap is surrounded by a belly band of plastic with the label. And that plastic belly band is inside a plastic bag, holding the shrink wrapped plastic foam blocks. And I reached out to the CEO of the company said, You know, it looks like you're trying to do the right thing, but what's up with all this plastic? He said, Well, we don't have a lot of choice because the retailers make us do it. And if I reached out to a retailer and I said, What's up with all this plastic, they would say, Well, if we don't do that, customers will complain because they're not pristine and our sales will go down and people. So there's a systems problem here. There's no evil villain, except that we got indoctrinated and brainwashed into thinking that we can fix this problem by having a compost pile. So the purpose of the Carbon Almanac to finish my rant is what would happen if there was an easy to read, easy to browse with cartoons, tables, charts, verifiable collection of stuff so that if you browse through it, you would know enough to talk about it. Because if we don't talk about what's happening, we can't possibly make it better. And right now, people aren't talking about it. That's what the book is for. Talk a little bit more about the way in which Wales were you. I know about this because the brilliant Darren Aronofsky, the great filmmaker, I brought it up to David and me about how the end of the whaling industry and what happened in America to the whalers was an amazing sort of opportunity to tell a dramatic story. And it's true. But what was the consciousness of America at that time regarding this meaning? Did they Americans living their daily lives using whale oil to light their homes and heat their homes? Or what did they think? There was another possibility. In other words, did they, if they thought about it at all, wasn't it only sort of like, what a miracle that we have this correct is that it's a miracle, and you can. I saw this firsthand when I visited a little village outside of Berlin in the sixteen hundreds. Now it was only ten years ago. There are a billion people on Earth who have no light at night, right? And if you want to get elected to anything in India, the way you do it is by promising people cheap kerosene because cheap kerosene is one of your biggest expenses. If kerosene is subsidised by the government, your expenses go down. So when do you light shows up with solar lanterns in these villages, a solar lantern is pays for itself in 90 days, doesn't burn down your house and doesn't give off noxious fumes, and it can charge your smartphone. They don't all buy a delight lantern the first day. They don't buy one first year. Why? Because the other thing was a miracle. The other thing was what my parents had, and we're not here to change things. We're here to live our lives. And the same thing is happening right here in New York City. It has nothing to do with where in the world you are. People want convenience. They want safety and they want people to leave them alone. And so when folks show up and say, everybody, you've got to switch what you do and you've got to use less plastic bags, everything else, people roll their eyes, turn off the podcast and go back. I also think part of that and I want to ask how I know you're aware of this and I want to ask how you're managing it. So. I read every word you write, right, I read the blog every day. I know every I read all your books. Some more than once I read them closely. Many before they're published over the last few years, I talk to you about them, but reflexively, I don't want to read this book. Yeah, because I feel powerless to make any change. The problem seems so big, taking all the political aspects out of it. The problem is, I mean, you can't fully separate it because, OK, I know that there is some number of people who are deeply opposed for lots of reasons to making any change. But even if I felt like everyone wanted to make a change in their hearts, they wanted to change it. It feels to me like not drinking water out of a water bottle that's placed a plastic water bottle will make no difference. Correct. And the fact that it will make no difference. And that in fact, even if I chose to eat less less beef, make very little difference. And so reading about the dire predicament that we're in? Yeah, it's a f**king bummer, man. So let me go to your question. Yeah. If I wanted to get elected to office and I said the first part of my platform is we're going to raise taxes by $50 billion to subsidize the beef industry. How far do you think that would go? Right? Even in Texas, how far do you think that would go? You're simply a total lone star. What you're saying? It's baked in and we paid you and me taxpayers the United States $50 billion to subsidize beef industry last year. Yeah, although you know, the farm subsidies are when you say the beef. But but the farms, but but farm subsidies, as you know, every year we watch politicians promise to keep the farm subsidies. And I hear you, I'm saying so when you ask that, I don't know, I actually think even when you say it to me, we're not subsidizing carrots. The point I'm making is, yes, that every single page in the almanac has a three digit number on it. And if you type that number into our website, it shows you all of the footnotes. We didn't make up anything. There are no points of view. I'm just I know that's true, of course. So I learned a ton. Like I learned the plastic recycling is a fraud that putting your stuff in upcycling bin is only saving time for the people who are going to burn it after they pick it up. That it was invented by the plastics industry, so we would leave them alone. When people hear this, they get sort of angry, right? And what we have the opportunity to do is solve a big problem that actually is pretty simple. By understanding only one thing, we have artificially lowered the price of certain kinds of fuel for one hundred and fifty years. And if we charge the right price for it, people could make a new decision, a better decision. And so, you know, the woman who was in front of me at the convenience store an hour ago said to the clerk, Does that Perry come in a plastic bottle? And I thought, Oh, this gives me a great example of a New Yorker who isn't going to buy it because it's in a plastic bottle. She had the paper bags and everything else. And the woman said, Yes, OK, great. I'll take it. And if that plastic bottle was priced properly, she would have said no. The glass was more convenient, please, because we have artificially subsidized the plastic bottle to make it cheaper than it's supposed to be. We should let people make good decisions based on the truth. And if we did that, this problem would get solved in less than 10 years. How do we empower? How do we convince? How do you with this book, send people, you know, draw a map that lets people understand the destination and that in fact, they can assist in us getting there? That's what I'm trying to ask you is. I believe that many of us feel disempowered in this, oh for sure and disempowered on purpose, right? Of course, yes, but but disempowered nonetheless. And this ties into your conversation with Sammy. So here's the thing. The percentage of the U.S. population that wants there to be zero gun control is not very big, right? The percentage of the population who wants it to be no choice is not very big. The percentage of the population that wants there to be gay marriage is bigger than those two numbers, but it's not everybody. And in every one of these cases and others, a small group of people persistently and consistently without getting distracted change the Constitution, the United States without a vote. Because our system, the market and the government is incredibly responsive to certain sorts of consistent, persistent focused behavior. And the purpose of the almanac is not for me or any of the other volunteers, and I'm a volunteer. I don't make a penny from this. Not to tell you what to do. It's to make you informed enough that you will figure out what to do and speak up and speak up and speak up. And the examples, OK, China in the last year built enough solar and wind facilities to replace 52 coal plants one week. That number is going to go up as these things start to happen. It turns out one coal plant makes way more of an impact than many cities worth of people. So what we need to do is, say, as a group to anyone who's running for anything, to anyone who is building any sort of company. Don't do that, please. And the number of phone calls that need to happen is very small. Give me 14. Give me a talking point to I was with very one of the most successful investors in the world last week. And. Someone who does not lean in a traditionally what you would call just generally conservative a right wing way, someone who thinks certainly thinks of himself as left center person. CARES about the world, cares about the environment, probably would use a reusable water bottle and bag it to store. And he said essentially that ESG investing in the end is going to have been responsible for the famine that's about to hit the world. ESG has some problems for that. But what he said was. The ramifications on our current lives. Mm-Hmm. The oil, so he there's an example he used. Exxon's. P, p, t e ratio, p e ratio, as you, I'm sure, know is much worse than it was largely because of partially because investors, institutional investors have been lobbied to put their money elsewhere or whatever the other sort of causes of that are. But the result is they haven't been drilling in the oceans as much for the stuff that comes up three years from now. Mm hmm. As you know, and I didn't know until I started really learning about this, the combination of so fertilizer is largely a byproduct of petroleum and all that stuff. The main ingredient in fertilizer fertilizer use is therefore down. The price of fertilizer has gone way up. Use of fertilizer has gone down. Crop sizes have gone down. Yields crop yields have gone down. Many people will be hungry over the next year. Who wouldn't have been hungry? This is the thesis. It's not my thesis. Many people would be hungry, will be go hungry around the world because Exxon isn't making as much oil. And I know how evil all that stuff, right? But but what's the response to that? How do you balance the urgent need to change the world going forward with the pragmatic and practical need that people should have food in their bellies? And if I'm wrong and what I laid out, I I don't think there's any giant factual problem what you just laid out. The first thing to begin with is that oil is a miracle. Coal is a miracle. This thing that comes out of the ground, you don't need any skill to get. It creates wealth, and the world we live in today would not exist if we hadn't done that the same way. Cocaine and LSD enables certain rock and roll singles to exist. That probably wouldn't have happened. The question is, after you misuse drugs long enough, can you keep making rock and roll songs, right? How long is this miracle good for? And. I think people who lean in a conservative direction, if they think about this, will come to the conclusion that this is the greatest thing they ever heard for a couple of reasons. First of all, it's going to lead to a significant creation of wealth as people find a new place that the internet was the last one because crypto scam, the internet was the last one, that all these great opportunities. Right? Number two, do you want to be off the grid or do you want to be on the grid? Because when you're on the grid, you are controlled by the government and a giant corporation. Exxon can turn off the spigot when you have your own electricity coming from the sky, it's yours. And number three, the idea that you should leave the world better than you found it doesn't feel to me to be anathema to the mindset of someone who I agree. But how do you balance the equities? So I'm going to do so. So then the question then is the wizard in the prophet? This is a book I recommend for everybody who's listening to this. It's spectacular. Who wrote that book? I. OK, I'll find out. There's a whole page about it in the almanac, the wizard in the Prophet is great audio book as well. And what it says is turns out there are two guys who only met each other once who both changed the world, and the wizard was the guy who figured out how to do intensive, fertilizer laden agriculture. And the prophet was the guy who said, We need to be smaller. We need to be environmentalists, we need to be careful. And the two of them are basically the duel of the 19th, right? One way or the other. And the wizard won the Nobel Prize for the Green Revolution for figuring out how to hybridized corn so that it could grow in various places and lead to all sorts of magical successes. What are the results of that is that populations can increase and people can live a better life. One of the other results of it is the soil's dead, and it turns out an enormous amount of carbon is sequestered in. Sadhguru talks about this a lot. He's really that this is sad guru's mission, and I spent time with him talking about this recently, and I know this is so cool about the soil. So here we are on the Titanic. Everything is fine. People are being fed. We're steaming across the ocean. Someone says, not me. So this is an iceberg over there and someone else is. But if we turn some of the water on this fancy tablecloth will spill. So keep going. And what we've got to do is realize that ESG is imperfect, that there are going to be real tragedies associated with the shifts that are going to happen. But we also have to acknowledge, is this really hard to fight the weather? Anyone who has ever lived in Buffalo, anybody who has ever lived in Texas, says when the weather wants what the weather wants, the weather gets with the weather gets and the weather is going to start. In a way, this is part of the challenge we're really getting to is why this is all emotionally challenging terrain, right? Understanding that it needs to change long for us to thrive. But it's also kind of a real life version of the trolley problem. Yeah, because where the train is steaming down the tracks and it's eventually going to kill a whole bunch of people. Yeah, everybody. But if we divert the train, it is going to kill some people who otherwise would be OK sooner. Right now, there isn't a conductor with a handle that they can turn the argument that I'm trying to make and that I'm hoping people will get what I got out of the almanac, but I didn't help put this in there. It's just true. We don't have anybody controlling the tracks right now, and in my little town, leaf blowers there are filled with gas and now against the law. Five months of the year. Why is that? Well, it turns out one hour, if you see a leaf bow is exactly the same as driving a Chevy from here to California one out, and they're noisy and they put all this. It uses that much, yes, gasoline and it uses it in a really dirty way because of the kind of engines. So every single gardener doing their best argued with every single customer saying, But it's less convenient. I have to charge more. They changed the law because 40 people spoke up, and magically, the gardeners have electric leaf blowers within a week. And I've talked to four of them. They love it because there are no noxious everything, right? Everything's better now. Are we going to have a transition like that in agriculture that easily? Of course not. But I would like there to be a system in place so that we are moving forward in the direction that we need to go. So a simple example again, another thing that most people don't know. The stuff that comes out of cows, methane is 80 times more powerful than carbon dioxide. That's just true, meaning that for every ounce of methane that comes out, it's as if you had 80 ounces of carbon dioxide. So if somebody knows that and they decide I'm going to eat less beef, OK, fine, whatever it's you're right, it's not going to make a difference. But if we put in place investment structures, tax structures, regulation structures so that we get to test to beef a lot faster, all of a sudden beef is going to get cheaper, not more expensive. People are going to get more easily fed. We're going to have a resilient forward motion. But if we wait until it's too late, we won't have the money to go do that. So you've always had this a really deep and wide social conscience and have always in your private time tried to make structurally the world a better place. What lit this party? But your work has largely been about human beings maximizing who they are so that they can do work that helps other human beings that touches them, lights them up, fires them up. You know, as you know, the book of yours that I give out constantly is the dip, which is about how to evaluate whether in whatever your pursuit is, you should quit or press on. These are very personal, very inspiring in a way, not cheap inspiration, but deeply inspiring works. They are not real and through, you know, the idea. And it's always in your books too, which is if you think you're selfish for doing this work, you should know that by doing this work in this way, you're actually serving the world. And that's a point you make over and over again in your speeches and everything else. It's all true. That's very different than this project. I don't think it is. I was well, you can talk about that for sure. Baked that into your answer. I'm going, but what lit you up, right? To to to make something here that is about a structural problem in the world that you noticed and how to fix a structural problem. In fact, you didn't do this as an individual. You did this as a team. So what lit the mission for you and why was this the way to prosecute the mission? Meaning this group of people? So the origin story is a science fiction writer named Kim. Stanley Robinson wrote a book called The Ministry for the Future, also an amazing audiobook. So it handed me the book three years ago. Two years ago, I read 10 pages. I put it down. I was so heartbroken, I couldn't read another page. Fortunately, I got the audio book and that got me through the beginning. If you want to skip the first ten pages, you can go back and read it later. This book describes a future seven years from now, where 15 million people die in one week in India from a heat wave. And then what happens? And it is ultimately an optimistic, positive exposition in only the way good science fiction can do it if it wants to, of how we figured out systems to solve this problem. And, you know, I was present at the birth of the internet. I started when the first internet companies. I wrote the very first book on cyber currency and just completely was a bystander on bitcoin. I'm fascinated by systems. When I wrote in my book, It's actually true, I'm embarrassed. I wrote a book called Email Addresses of the Rich and Famous. And in the first chapter of email addresses of rich and famous, I proposed how we could get rid of spam. So I see systems around us and the platform that I have been lucky enough to get mostly lets me talk to individuals about how they, when they do work, they are proud of the same way you have in your podcast. Make it better for all of us. And what I'm arguing, having no plan when I started organizing these volunteers. What I have learned is the way individuals are going to make a difference is by not recycling plastic. But by speaking up, by telling 10 people I didn't write, didn't cause this book to occur so that skeptics would buy it. No skeptic is going to buy this book. I bought it. So the people who get it? I bought it. I helped create it so that people who get it will give out five copies, because if you hand a copy of this to your friend, Brian, who doesn't want to read it, he'll browse to it. And suddenly some percentage of those people will say, You know what I need to do? I need to call that person I made a donation to and say, This is on my list. You know, I need to do. I need to call that company where I'm a good customer and say, stop wrapping the grapefruit in Saran Wrap when you send it to me because grapefruit already comes in a wrapper and it's going to save you a lot of money, and I'm not going to buy grapefruit from you anymore if you keep it. Because if one company stops wrapping grapefruit in plastic, that will make a difference. That's what we're looking at. What is the end result for humanity in first world countries? Hmm. If nothing really changes over the next 15 years, the biggest thing you're going to have to face if you live near the shore, which we do, is that the New York City subway will be underwater and they don't know how to fix it. The second problem so New York turns into Venice Park without the history. Yeah, I mean, the thing about the subways, it's all connected. So once once a station is underwater, you've got a big problem. The second thing is they're going to be 100 million refugees. What do you do about that? Are you just going to ignore them and let them die? No, because we have a connection to the rest of the world, even if it's just electronic. So those are two things wealthy people will find food. Wealthy people will find a place to live, and they'll just run more air conditioning. This is not what we're talking about. We're talking about is you benefit from being wealthy because you live in a world where you can live and if you have to move to a bunker to survive and watch on television. One hundred and fifty million refugees with nowhere to go. I think that would suck. Yeah, even the people inside in total recall are not having a good time inside that bubble. Yeah, yeah, they're in the bubble. But so they're better off than all the people who got vaporized. But but it's no fun. Yeah. And also, this is the only planet in the known universe that can support human life. So we got nowhere else to go anyway. Yeah, I've been thinking a lot about why. So so much of this stuff has been sort of known for a while. Oh yeah. You know, I used to read, I used to read this thing climate change daily. That would present both sides of the argument, like every article written by scientists for years, years and years. Twenty, you know, fifteen years ago, I started reading it and I would look at it on a weekly basis. And then, I don't know, about eight years ago, you and I were sitting somewhere and you said, there is no balance the other side. And you kind of walked me through it. And that was the end of that for me. I was like, Yep, I know that. That's right. That said, men, it still feels dispiriting because, oh yeah, I don't feel like, you know what? What can I do? I can give you this microphone to be on the podcast, right? I can, like you said, raise my voice. But beyond that. And I was thinking about, like, what? Is so challenging. Well, so we know what's challenging, people don't do pre-need funerals. People don't want to talk about which old age home they want to go to. Death is off the table. Unless you live in Tibet, you're just not allowed to talk about it, right? But in the almanac, there's a two page spread in which we Xeroxed and I hope they sue us. A memo from Exxon in 1980 to paragraph by paragraph Exxon, one of their senior scientists, describes to a tenth of a degree what the world would be like today. And he was right. There is a dispute about this. We're having an intellectual conversation. There's a deep emotional conversation to be had. And that is how far forward is your horizon? Yeah, it's fascinating, because just to tease it out emotionally, maybe other people go through the same emotional journey. And I'll tell you what I have. I've been thinking about this and what I want to prepare. I mean, you bring up Tibet. It's funny. I'm very much with the Tibetans about. The Tibetan monks in that you have to understand that you're mortal, like, I'm one of those, if I agree with you, we don't think about this. I think about, you know, Amy and I think about this all the time, constantly trying to understand that in a way that we can't, but trying to understand because this is the journey of living right. But somehow that's still personal, right? That's personal. And what I started thinking about was. When the. When the rhetoric. Even from the side, that's ultimately right. Is inexact, it can have the effect of letting the listener off the hook, and I'm going to give you an example. So I got really caught up in this. Right before you and I became friends, I think you and I met in 2012 or something like that, Tony. And it was right before that. Maybe the five years before that, I was reading a lot about peak oil and the peak oil. People said that you can't get oil from shale. It won't work. That's not really a solution. And when you would read the peak oil arguments and they would say, you know, the moment you read this, it's like a veil being lifted, you will be depressed. And it was true that you felt depressed if you bought into peak oil. Yeah, they were wrong about they were wrong about the root cause issues of what was happening, meaning they were wrong about the supply. They were wrong about what was available and the tech, the gestalt. They were right about the fact that relying on energy like this would lead to moments of great uncertainty and price gouging like we're in now. We're not in this situation now because of peak oil. But we are in this situation that they were talking about. Yeah. And so it seems to me that getting the rhetoric right so that we don't get let off because then you know, what happened to me was when I started to realize, can you do more research such as, Oh no, actually, there's enough oil. I don't have to worry about this anymore. Yeah, those f**kers were wrong and they got me all worried and worked up. And they told me it was a 10 year horizon that was 15 years ago. Yeah. Alex used to say the villager cried wolf and knowing the little boy cried wolf, and no one came. That's the whole story in one sense, right? Well, it is, but it. But peak oil is very relevant because well, but I'm saying that in order to get the attention of a lot of people, people have to catastrophize. Yes, and it was interesting listening to Sami talking about politicians because politics politics has shifted dramatically into consultants raising money and consultants who are raising money don't care about anything except raising money. And so they catastrophize everything all the time and whatever issue helps them raise the most money is the issue that they put on the table. The challenge is here, I think, are this first of all. Betting against technology is a tricky thing to do. Technology can do amazing things, but if we end up with resilient soil free solar power, free wind power and clean air, it's a win for everybody. I'm pretty happy to win for everybody and the if we just said no, what we're going to wait for is one more technical miracle just in time. Well, that's survivor bias that says it's happened before, absolutely. But if it hadn't happened, if we hadn't figured out what to do with nuclear weapons in 1959 to 1975, we'd all be dead. We got lucky. How did you make the decision? You're correct. How did we make the decision? How did you make the decision? You're a great writer. You're a writer who's able to engage people, the reader. You take a reader on a journey. You know exactly how to be witty and funny on the page and raise questions on the page. And you decided to use very little of that in the creation of this book. Mm-Hmm. I would think someone with who clearly cares this much about this issue with your facility as a creative force would have written this book. You some researchers and sure in galvanize this force to help you, but that you would have written the book so that it was totally a Seth Godin book. It seems to me you made a different choice. Can you talk about why you wanted to make this almanac in this way? That's a great point. First, it's not a book, it's an almanac. They're different things. Books have beginnings, middles and ends almanacs, and I've made more almanacs than any person I know of. I made the Business Almanac, the Celebrity Almanac, the Women's Almanac Almanac are designed for browsing, and they don't have a voice. They hear all the flags of all the countries. You don't like this country, not my problem. There's a flag for it because it's a country. And so I decided right at the beginning that what I was going to do is lean into the process because if I could lean into the process, I would learn something as opposed to just say something. And so what happened was Vivek from India showed up out of the blue and wrote seven articles that no one expected were going to happen. And then Paul, from Colorado, showed up out of the blue and said, Wait a minute, did you know about this, about ammonia? There would never have been anything about ammonia in this book. If I had run it, I didn't run it. What I did was when something showed up, I said, That doesn't sound like us, or that sounds like us. When someone said, I want to put in an detailed argument about this because this is what everyone should do, it's like you can write your own book. That's not what this is. This is an almanac. So my job was to be the process person and the the idea that it's going to sound like an almanac. But then other people said, Wouldn't it be great if we had a 12 page book for kids like go for it? And it ended up being a 74 page illustrated design free e-book for kids that's already been downloaded tens of thousands of times because someone did something I could never have done. So define what you mean by an almanac, not just something that has entries like it's the book of lists. Was that an almanac? The book of lists was inspired by almanac almanacs. So trivial aside. One of the big breakthroughs I had in my career was in running the most successful online game at the time. And. It turns out that the $64000 question in the whole game show TV's scandal of the 50s, yes, came from someone who made almanacs. And so the overlap between almanacs and trivia and I was fresh in my mind. I'm going to go all the way back to the farmers and to Ben Franklin. It is just a compendium of useful true information that you can look up. And what I found was every time I saw a report from the United Nations, my eyes glazed over. Every time I saw yet another website that went on and on about something. My eyes closed over. What I wanted was some of the work the way my brain works, the way the internet works, which is, Oh, look at this, I can go find out more if I want you so that these entries would be enticing the reader correct to go deeper if they hit upon something correct. That resonated in a certain way for them, right? And and did you and the group give feedback on the pieces themselves so that they're readable? Yeah. So the way we created the book is there's a piece of software called Discourse. It's open source. It's amazing. I customized it, invited everybody. First, it was just a month of scrum and people meeting each other, and then people started writing short articles. Every article got a three digit number, and then we moved the articles that met the standard to an online database called notion that everyone could have access to. And then every article got rewritten by people over and over and over again when an article got good enough that people said, We're ready for three of you to look at this. Three people would look at and go put a flag next when it worked. And if an article wasn't getting anywhere, we'd send in one of our best people to rewrite it. So there is, except for the Timu article, just about it. And the second one, just about every article in here was written by at least a dozen people. Looking back to the original sources and then we hired and paid to fact checkers. We gave them all our original sources and we gave the almanac and said, If there's anything in this almanac that's not in the original source, it comes out and they went through the whole book. The two of them to find things that we had asserted that weren't true. And so that this is a compendium of facts, correct? And if there are ideas there ideas that come directly from a set of incontrovertible facts and we credit the person whose idea it is because it's not our idea. If someone thinks that what we have to do is get more hummus in the soil, not the dip, but actual organic matter, we say this person is arguing that and since this is all so clear. Like. I am obviously pro planning a lot of the gun control, things like, you know, background checks, cooling off periods, no semi-automatic weapons and all that stuff, right? But I do recognize that culturally, not everybody who has a different opinion than mine in this issue is an evil person. I think politicians suck because they know better. But I know there are a lot of people for whom guns are passed down from their great grandparents and they're saying, I'm not going to use guns and they know they're not. They're not, by the way, they're there. It's a part of their family in the same way an acoustic guitar might be part of somebody else's family, right? So I understand where there's good faith on both sides at the retail level, not at the politicians, but the retail level. I understand there's good faith on both sides on this. I don't really see good faith on both sides. But why is the argument? Why are the arguments? The claims about climate. That purport to debunk everything in your book, language wise. Why has that side found a language that hooks a lot of people, meaning a lot of center people, people who are just trying to like, live there? What is it? Is it just because it's their wish they're tapping into wish fulfillment? Like what? Because you must have thought a lot about language with this. So why is their language kind of like in some quarters winning? Well, I mean, as a marketer, the mask, the easiest things to market are things that are irresistible because they are convenient, because they give a status and affiliation because they're cheap. So if you go to a health food store and they say if you take this placebo with no side effects, it will keep your hair from falling out. A lot of people are like, Oh, sure, I'll do that. And so if someone comes to you and say, Don't worry about this, you have the freedom to do that. We're going to keep subsidizing this and your personal freedom is endless. That's an easy sell. And part of the problem is the time horizon. How far in the future is this problem? And part of the problem is the geographic thing, which is, Oh, well, my truck is putting something in two year, but I won't be here because I'm driving down the road. That's your problem. Well, OK, this is great. I'd written this down to ask you. Yeah. So on those mattresses, always like urgent and important of the first things you deal with. But what people don't reckon with very often is an urgent and important problem. The results of which are not immediate, we think urgent and important means immediate, right? But I think you're arguing in this book urgent and important means you have to take immediate action, even if the results are now. You know, you may say 15 years. Some other people may say 50 years, but it doesn't matter if, if in 50 years, everything ends, it's f**king urgent. But how do you how do you market that correct? So part of the challenge and you know, you expose so much humanity in this podcast is understanding what the discount rate is. So I need to bring in just a tiny, tiny bit of math, which is if somebody said, how much would you pay me for a vacation home that you can move into 20 years from now? That's worth a million dollars. You probably wouldn't pay more than a few thousand dollars, even if you were certain that 20 years from now, it was yours. Because what human beings do is we devalue things that are in the future. That is the only way to make decisions. The question is, how much do we devalue them? So someone who is good at being on a diet says, I will give up the pleasure of eating this chocolate bar because I want to look good at graduation. Six. It because they can really see that date six months after they have a different discount rate than someone who doesn't. And the planet's average discount rate for the value of the planet. I don't have the source right here is that we think the Earth is worth $10000 a hundred years now. If you add it all up, that one hundred years from now is so far away. Yeah, that we would sell the destruction of the entire planet 100 years from now for 10000. So, OK, that's the problem. Correct. What's the solution? Well, that's the problem I get. I agree with you. That's the problem, systemic problem that is amplified by culture. So there are cultures. In the past, for example, Sparta, which had a warrior culture, or medieval Japan, which had a culture that was much more focused on honor and duty than ours. We have a culture that industrialists amplified a focus on convenience with a discount rate that rewarded today. So we have to change the culture. What will change the culture is the really cool thing because as you know, I love markets. I think markets individuals making decisions in an uncoordinated way to solve problems have made us all rich and soft. A lot of problems. There are fewer people in dire poverty now as a percentage than any time in the history of mankind, because it works if it is fed correct information. So what we have to do to fix it is the percentage of people who care about this, which is way more than 60 percent in the United States. The number of true skeptics is very tiny. They're just loud. The people who care about this need to consistently and persistently talk to the folks who build our systems and say, make it so that there is a different set of rules so the market can do the right thing. Me, that makes sense to me. You know, where I've understanding all the negatives of structurally of tik and its origins. One amazing thing about TikTok is that it has put me in contact with people I would otherwise not be in contact with because I mean, you know how curious I am. So if I go down a road, I will then get exposed for a period of time to a whole bunch of people from a culture that I'm not into, and I somehow stumbled into corn farming. Tik Tok. That's awesome. It's awesome. And I see these corn farmers, I see them hurting right now because of the fertilizer planting. I'm literally knowing they're going to be able to have much less money to pay their farm debt officer, put their kids into schools, feed their families like it's just very clear. And I also know that they're working insanely. Long and brutal days. So, like, that's when we talk about farm subsidies like we do have to sort of like, as I know you do, we have to understand these are people who wake up and barely have time to contemplate the idea. I meant notice. Oh, I know. I'm so aware. I'm so aware of talking about something else. But I keep going. Yes, you're talking about industrial. So talking about the industrial payoffs to people who use half of all the land in the United States to raise cattle? Yeah, half. I'm not arguing. I don't think most people wanted to sign up for this where I was trying to get to the wall, but I just didn't want it. I know that's why I wanted to know. That's why I was trying to say, I know that you've I'm fully aware that you grapple with you, grapple with the unintended consequences of all of this and are aware of the consequences intended or on that. These are smart people. There are hardworking people, they're vigorous people. And what we are talking about is drastically shifting the the way they live, their lives. And that's language one in which in which order. So let's say we have a problem in front of us. Why do we have coal plants because we can replace a coal plant without hurting one farmer? And if we start by replacing coal plants, we can use the carbon we're saving to make fertilizer until we come up with better fertilizer. But there are still coal plants. Help me understand why are they still called? I can't frack. And in fact, I know the coal financially did very well for people in the last couple of years. But the thing is, there are only 100000 full time coal miners in the United States. Yes, right? When the internet came along in, every travel agent in America lost their job. We didn't have a big lobby of travel. What I'm trying to get to is right. That's what I'm really trying to get to. What I'm really trying to get to is. Again, because I agree with you, I'm trying to get to is how do you address these constituencies in a way that makes it clear that their long term self interest is actually in their self-interest now, and that's a challenge. My answer to you is this. The farm community for one hundred and fifty years has done an extraordinarily good job of persistently and consistently changing the behavior of the federal government so that they could have a tolerable way to make a living right. The people who are seeing the facts that are inside the Carbon Almanac are doing a terrible job of that because instead they're saying, I'm going to shame somebody for using a plastic water bottle, right? As opposed to saying you cannot run for president unless the first thing on your platform. Is this that the thing about your interview with Sammy? I learned so much from it, but he didn't bring it up at all because the fact is, it's not what helps them raise money. It's not would help someone get elected. It's not what people ask at every town hall. If those three things changed, then the system, which you cannot go to a town hall in Iowa without talking about farm subsidies, you just can't. So how is it possible that you can have a town hall in New York without talking about climate change? Well, it's a really that's a question I would put back on to you. Why is that not the conversation? I'm saying I am. I have empathy for the people who for short term reasons, want the world to not change when it comes to fossil fuels. But we don't need their support. What we need simply is the people who already care about this to stop getting hoodwinked by carbon footprint and speak up and organize. That is the thesis that came across. And what do we do? I say this. What is the best language you've found in a short burst? To explain the problem. To a corn farmer who's. Having a fertilizer problem? Yeah. And what I would say is people got to eat and people are going to still need to eat. But just like we've changed the way we make just about everything else in our world, we're going to change the way we make it. Why is it in her self-interest? None of this is in anyone's short term self-interest, just like so many of the other issues that have changed our culture aren't in people's short term interests, right? The fact is that if you were, that's a happy gun owner 30 years ago, you didn't need to join the NRA, blah blah blah, because you were already doing it. That's a very deep. So this is a very deep and it's a very deep point. And I think maybe this is a mistake that most people who talk about this make and you don't. They try to sugarcoat that part of it and make it like it's a minor inconvenience for you to change what you're doing. I think it's much better to say part of this going to suck, but it's not in your short term. It's also a massive opportunity. We are just a couple of years away from being able to build a cheap building that uses solar power on the top and grows stuff on the inside wherever you want to build it so that instead of one acre of land, it's got four levels so that you can still be a farmer and you can be insulated from the weather much more efficient, much more reliable and get to where you need to go. That's not an easy transition, but there's what's on the other end where the only way to feed seven billion people without completely. Let me just put one to say, as people get richer around the world because of culture, they switched to beef and it's everyone in the world starts eating the way the people in the United States. We need a whole other planet just for the cows, right? You can't deny that math. That's true. So should we say no one else is allowed to eat meat? We made a rule? Or should we say we got to figure out how to make meat in a way that you can be happy with the job that you do and people can be happy what they eat? If only Frank Zappa hadn't died, he could have made an album called The Planet for the Cows. Now how is that album? How is that album not exist? All right, I have a couple of weirdly sort of related questions. I've never had a couple of things I never asked you really relevant to this, but does our generation even really deserve a voice in the direction of the future? Like what's? Sometimes I feel like the truth of the matter is we should just shut the f**k up. And like, it's not our day, it's truly not our battle. I feel sometimes. So here's a thesis that I've not heard other people say out loud since nineteen sixty one, everything has been about the Baby Boomers. When we were in our team, I'm Gen X. It was about us. It was about rock and roll, right when right when Vietnam came up, it was because baby boomers were going to get drafted. So was, yes, you know what's happening now? We're all dying. And that's why you've got grouchy, angry people who are in, yes, parts of the political spectrum. And it's why all of a sudden it's the issue of the day. So it's easy to say the article was shut up and let the other people do it. What I might say is at some point you start to think about your legacy, at some point you say, I have enough money to make it to the end, I've earned some influence. What am I going to do with it? But and that's why I hope that the people who want to leave things better than they found them will speak up without worrying about those sort of short term consequence. Because I do think like, you don't really talk about politics much and I don't want to. But it occurred to me when I was watching the last couple of cycles like. Maybe if you're over 65, you shouldn't get to be president, you know, and that that because you're you're the people who are being led your work, your concerns and theirs aren't the same. Have you thought about that at all? Yeah, actually, I heard you talk about it with Sammy. There are so many interesting game theory things that we could do if we were the author of Our Future. Like the whole thing that someone came up with, which the button for the nuclear bomb needs to be put in the chest of a Secret Service agent. So the only way to have a nuclear thing is for the president to cut off its head with a sword, which it was just a button, right? Right. And so democracy sucks, but the alternatives are so much worse. And yes, it's heartbreaking to see media companies that shape the culture make a profit from division because when someone makes a profit from something, they do it more. Well, you have been deep in the research on the next season, the super pumped. And you know you don't have to go so far to understand the ways in which certain things sometimes get weaponized. All right. There were a couple of questions that people had that I just get a grandma and look at. OK. Actually, this is the other part, I'm so glad someone just asked the state, Jim Samuel on Twitter asked this question, and I know he meant it about the creative life, but it actually ties into some question of mind about all this, which is, is it ever too late to start this problem? Is it like, you know, either personally, but also with this issue, because that is also what people think. There are many people who think. Because of what the people said 20 years ago and because every five minutes people are saying, if we don't make this change in a year, it's too late. So is it too late? I would say. In general, there are lots of times it's too late to start. And I have felt that way about parts of my career and freed myself from not just the guilt, but also the frustration of starting something later than would have been productive if things have curves. Things have leverage, right? The question here is it is entirely appropriate for us to have a thoughtful conversation and say, it's good. That's the end. Let's just enjoy ourselves. Who should make that decision? If some weird science fiction thing happened and the last kid who was ever born was born today, four years from now, would we say, I'm sorry? The school's really dingy, but we didn't have the money to fix it up 10 years from now. Were we able to say to that kid, I'm sorry that there's no place for you to hang out, we just don't care enough to take care of it for you. I can't imagine that we would do that. The last kid, the last customer, the last viewer there, their treasured. So I don't know how to be a thoughtful human. At the same time, I say it's over, doesn't matter, burn more stuff. So even if we have to die trying. It feels like trying is a key part of our culture and our humanity. And so I don't think it's too late to start. I also know from the facts in the almanac, we are right on the cusp of some technology and cultural breakthroughs that can reverse this problem. The Carbon Almanac. It's not too late. Facts connection. Action Forward by Seth Godin. Can people pre-order this now? I would hope that they would hit the Carbon Almanac dot org, and I hope that you will give it to someone you care about. Seth. Thanks, man. I could talk to you for hours and hours. We have, and every time is a joy. You can find Seth's blog. He every day something of great wisdom is produced on that blog. Just type in his name and it will come up. You can also subscribe to his in the email version, which is what I do. So that's just waiting for me every morning. And Seth doesn't tweet, so I can't give you his Twitter because who cares? There isn't one, but he doesn't. I'm so proud of you for diminishing Twitter, and I just want to say last word a cozy a dork. Echo Essayé, a Cozy Dawg is a search engine with more privacy, more speed and more delight than Google. And every time you do 50 searches, they plant a tree. How cool is that? Search and get trees planted? Yeah, I've I've way, way, way diminished my time on Twitter, and I'm so much happier. Better for it. It's so much better. Exactly. Yeah, everybody diminish your time on Twitter. OK, see you next time. Thanks for listening by.
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