George Monbiot (climate activist)

[0] Welcome, welcome, welcome to armchair expert, experts, on expert.

[1] I'm Dan Shepard and I'm joined by Mr. Mouse.

[2] Hi, and Mrs. Mouse.

[3] Oh, yeah, Mrs. Mouse.

[4] Hello, I'm Mrs. Mouse.

[5] We have a very encouraging expert today.

[6] I found this to be one of the first bit of good news I've heard in reference to climate change and all the different ecological issues we're up against.

[7] Our guest today, George Monbiot, is a climate activist, an author, and a columnist for The Guardian.

[8] He has written several great books, Farrell, Rewilding the Land, Sea, and Human Life, Heat, how we can stop the planet burning, out of the wreckage, a new politics for an age of crisis.

[9] And his new book, which again is very encouraging, I don't have the stomach to have someone remind us how fucked we are.

[10] That is not this episode.

[11] This is like very encouraging, exciting news.

[12] And it's all in his new book, Regenesis.

[13] feeding the world without devouring the planet.

[14] Everyone's very smart in this episode besides me. No. Well, you're in the middle of your hormonal activities?

[15] Okay, yes.

[16] Yeah, you were all, you were blasting.

[17] Yeah, it was really hormoned up.

[18] So, without further ado, please enjoy George Mambia.

[19] Wondry Plus subscribers can listen to Armchair Expert early and add free right now.

[20] Join Wondry Plus in the Wondry app or on Apple Podcasts.

[21] Or you can listen for free wherever you get you.

[22] your podcasts.

[23] He's an object I'm sure.

[24] Hello, can you hear us?

[25] Yeah.

[26] How you doing?

[27] Great.

[28] You sound particularly good, wouldn't you say, Monica, audio -wise?

[29] Yeah, really clear.

[30] There's a timber.

[31] British?

[32] Very British.

[33] Do you find that when you travel to the states, people elevate your intelligence, one standard deviation.

[34] Yeah, it has the opposite effect here in the UK.

[35] Well, I think for us it does, right?

[36] I think when we travel to the UK...

[37] Oh, yeah, it's embarrassing.

[38] It's kind of like a real thick southern accent in the U .S. People have to overcome that.

[39] It's so weird, isn't it?

[40] And we have the same thing, of course, with regional accents here in the UK.

[41] But, I mean, it's turned around a bit.

[42] You know, accents like mine no longer are the sort of passport that opens all doors.

[43] But it is ridiculous.

[44] There's sort of prejudice associated with them.

[45] Actually, you know, stand back and think, my God, this is our whole heritage here, listening to all these different accents.

[46] That's our history.

[47] Yeah.

[48] Yeah, it's pretty cool.

[49] You know, the time that it really kind of became pronounced here was when Lennox Lewis was the world boxing champion.

[50] And Americans were so overwhelmed with his huge intellect.

[51] And he probably is really smart, but I don't know that he was smarter than Muhammad Ali, but we really, just that accent told us, this is a learned man. Yeah.

[52] I mean, we're here to talk about regenesis, but of course, I ended up watching your TED talk.

[53] I'll just blanketly say it's about story, which is of great fascination to us.

[54] We talk about it all the time.

[55] Always more interpersonal story.

[56] Identity.

[57] How active that is and impenetrable to data.

[58] If you're up for it, I would love for you to just break down the story that has most traction historically for us, the restoration story.

[59] Because I think weirdly, it'll dovetail nicely into Regenesis.

[60] The restoration story isn't a story in its own right.

[61] It's a narrative structure around which you create the story that you want to tell.

[62] And the structure goes something like this.

[63] The land has been thrown into disorder by evil and nefarious people working against the interests of humanity.

[64] But the hero or heroes stand up against these evil and nefarious people and against the odds, overthrow them, and restore harmony to the land.

[65] Now, this is a very familiar story.

[66] It's the Lord of the Ring story.

[67] It's the Harry Potter story.

[68] Harry Potter!

[69] That's her favorite.

[70] Yeah, yes.

[71] The Bible.

[72] The Bible, yeah.

[73] And the Bible, indeed.

[74] And actually, it is also the narrative structure that has informed just about every political transformation there's ever been.

[75] In fact, it's very hard to think of a successful political transformation which hasn't appealed to people using that narrative structure.

[76] Now, there's a lot of debate about how many basic plots there are, right?

[77] Some people say there's three, and some say there's five, and some say there's seven, and some say there's nine.

[78] It's always an odd number for some reason.

[79] It's this single narrative structure.

[80] It's a one which hits the note every single time.

[81] And it seems very difficult, in fact, to conceive of a political shift unless you're telling a story that is fitted into that narrative structure.

[82] I guess I've heard Kinsian, and of course I hear neoliberalism or neoliberal all the time, but I don't think I really knew what either of those concepts were.

[83] Well, you just hit us with the first Kinsian movement and then it being replaced by neoliberalism.

[84] Because I think that's a concrete example I think we can all identify with in our current politics.

[85] So John Maynard Keynes was a British economist who really came to prominence when he wrote his general theory in the wake of the Great Recession and said the way these laissez -fifers, fair.

[86] Victorian and Edwardian economics have been working in this country has been a catastrophe because it's just meant that the rich get richer, the poor get poorer, that destroys demand.

[87] You don't have an effective consumer economy if only a very few people have the money.

[88] But by taxing people, by spending back into the public sector, you generate employment.

[89] By generating employment, you generate income, and that income generates consumption.

[90] And so the wheel keeps turning.

[91] That's a ridiculously simplistic way.

[92] of putting it, but that is basically Keynesian social democracy.

[93] And that became the dominant mode of thought across the world.

[94] I mean, super dominant.

[95] Scarcely anyone dared contest that for 40 years, really, particularly during what the French call Le Tront Gloriers, 1945 to 1975, the 30 glorious years, where there was full employment or very close to it, everybody was properly housed.

[96] There was a strong social safety net.

[97] There was a strong social safety net.

[98] There a massive investment in public health, in public education, in public services all round, and people were basically pretty well off.

[99] Society was much more egalitarian than it had been before or since.

[100] Now, a small group of people did oppose this, and they were people who, to begin with, called themselves neoliberals.

[101] And after a while, they stopped calling themselves anything.

[102] And they kind of preferred to sort of work without a label.

[103] It was much harder for people to identify what they were fighting.

[104] And to begin with, they were super marginal.

[105] and there were people like Friedrich Hayek, Louvre von Mises, later on Milton Friedman, were some of the famous names here.

[106] And they took almost the opposite tack.

[107] They said it's the state taxing us and spending our money, which is an oppressive force.

[108] And if it's not contained, it will inevitably become more and more oppressive until it's become totalitarian.

[109] And what we need to do is to do the opposite of what Keynes has done.

[110] Keynes' story was the laissez -faire economics perpetrated by nefarious people working against the interests of society has brought disorder to the land by creating this extremely inagalitarian society which has destroyed demand and the hero or heroes who are the working and middle classes will stand up to this against the odds overthrow it and through public spending public services or the rest of it restore harmony to the land the neoliberal story was exact opposite the land has been thrown into disorder by powerful and nefarious forces in the shape of the state, taking our money, spending our money, and oppressing us by doing so and by regulating entrepreneurs.

[111] But the hero of the story is a self -seeking entrepreneur, a self -seeking business person who is going to kick back against the intrusions of the state, carve out their sphere of enterprise, and in so doing, create an enterprise economy, which will restore harmony to the land.

[112] and when Keynesian economics ran into big trouble in the late 1970s, they had been working on this story for 30 years and they were able to step forward with this really quite refined, fully formed narrative where they could say, you're looking for an answer, here's the answer.

[113] Now, the big problem that we have today is that when their story collapsed in 2008 and collapsed spectacularly, really sort of fell apart, practically and intellectually, we hadn't prepared a different story with which to replace it.

[114] So we came forward empty -handed.

[115] And that's why we're still stuck with neoliberalism, even though it's failed.

[116] Okay, so great.

[117] Now I'm in your TED Talk, but I get to ask questions real time.

[118] Two of my thoughts when I hear those is, A, both stories are true, in a sense.

[119] I look at unions in the U .S. There's this great period of union labor.

[120] It then becomes pretty fucking corrupt.

[121] It becomes a grift in its own right.

[122] does collapse a lot of industries.

[123] So it's what little segment of the story do we want to isolate and then hope to replicate?

[124] Because similarly, I'd argue the neoliberalism story works great in Silicon Valley and medical breakthroughs and rising the overall metrics by which we would measure all human suffering.

[125] So, okay, what is that phase that we can isolate?

[126] One other learning from politics that I take is you can't go back unless you're a fascist.

[127] Fascists can always go back.

[128] You can always reinvent, recapitulate fascism.

[129] I don't know why that is, but it has this remarkable capacity for repetition and reinvention.

[130] But other politics do not.

[131] And one of the big failings of recent Social Democrat movements is that they've responded to neoliberalism by saying, let's go back to Keynesianism.

[132] There's just no appetite for that amongst young people, because it's like, oh, here's my granddad telling me that the system in his youth was the right system.

[133] And I'll add, we're watching shows about Margaret Thatcher saving the UK from this paradigm.

[134] So it's like we're also aware of the hero stories within it.

[135] Well, yeah, and the problems that Keynesianism encountered in the late 70s have not gone away.

[136] Moreover, the strategies used by Keynes' opponents have not gone away.

[137] In fact, they've only become more refined and more effective.

[138] And it was partly because international financial organizations breaking the capital controls, which were essential to a Keynesian economy, found that way of undermining it, that it was effectively destroyed in the late 70s.

[139] And they haven't forgotten how to do that.

[140] If we were to try to go back to that system, we just hand it on a plate to the opponents of that system.

[141] But most importantly, to my mind, while Keynes proposed some excellent solutions for the mid -20th century, his system was premised on perpetual growth and stimulating consumer demand so that we just want more stuff, more goods and services all the time, and that generates growth, and growth is good.

[142] In his time, that made perfect sense, but we now know we're in a planetary emergency, and that is driven above all else by economic growth, by the sheer volume of economic activity, our climate breakdown, ecological breakdown, all the other forms of Earth systems breakdown.

[143] And so we need a new story.

[144] And I believe we have quite a few new stories to tell.

[145] We've just got to decide which ones to concentrate on.

[146] Yeah.

[147] Okay, so here's where, now maybe we can dance a little bit.

[148] This great term, Adam Grant taught us, which is like just a friendly, gentle pushing of ideas.

[149] So I like yours.

[150] What you put forth is a story of community.

[151] Maybe you could say it concisely for me, so I don't butcher it.

[152] So the land has been thrown into disorder by the powerful and nefarious forces of neoliberalism, or rather of the corruption of neoliberalism, where it got captured very quickly by billionaires, by some of the richest people on earth who funded it, built up think tanks, built up international organizations around it, and turned it into a doctrine which ensured that public protections were stripped away, taxation of the rich was stripped away, regulation of the rich was stripped away, public services were effectively destroyed.

[153] In fact, democracy was severely undermined because they said, well, you don't need democracy.

[154] All you need is economic choices, buying and selling, and that will determine who should come out on top.

[155] Who the winners are, who the losers are.

[156] And those are the right winners and the right losers.

[157] And if you're a loser, tough, it's because you deserve to be a loser.

[158] And if you're a winner, it's entirely due to your own skill and professionalism, even if you inherited all your money.

[159] It's a really weird doctrine.

[160] By developing these crazy doctrines, they've thrown the land into this order.

[161] We have extreme inequality.

[162] We have collapsing public services.

[163] We have a reaction to neoliberalism in the form of these new demagogues, Trump and Bolsonaro and Modi and Orban and Erdogan and Boris Johnson, who is saying, well, you know, politics has failed, so we will come and rescue you from the failure of politics.

[164] But actually politics failed because of the kind of people who are now backing them.

[165] And so they're come to rescue us from their own dysfunction, effectively.

[166] So it's given us all this profound forms of disorder.

[167] The heroes of the moment are those who want to rebuild society, but not to rebuild it necessarily along any particular political lines, not a grand doctrine, but just to rebuild it, to have functional communities, to have functional services, to have functional neighbourhoods, and to rebuild it from the bottom up.

[168] And I believe that the new democracy will be primarily a local democracy, which then builds upwards and taken to its further extent in Rajava, the enclave in north -eastern Syria, where local people have basically carved out this space in which they can run their lives through participatory democracy.

[169] The local level, the village or borough level, is the primary political unit, and all decisions are then delegated upwards to administrators who have no political power.

[170] It's a remarkable system.

[171] There have been similar, remarkably successful participatory budgeting in the Brazilian city of Porto Alegre, the community decision -making in the Icelandic capital, similar initiatives in Madrid and Barcelona, the V -Taiwan program in Taiwan.

[172] All these have been developing participatory, deliberative democracy while at the same time building local community around local needs.

[173] And from that, I see a great renewal coming.

[174] This is the means by which we will restore harmony to the land.

[175] Okay.

[176] So maybe I don't have the pushback I had planned on having.

[177] What was it?

[178] I'll tell you.

[179] And I think it's pretty anecdotal and driven by the fact that I was just in Europe, and I can't stop talking about this.

[180] My main fear is that all stories lack some humility.

[181] I think all stories presuppose they know what works for humans, generally, globally, broadly.

[182] And I go to Austria, and boy, you could eat off of the floor of any place there.

[183] And that place is run like a Swiss timepiece.

[184] It's perfect in its order and its discipline and its civility.

[185] You cross the border, as I did, through the Dolomites into Italy, and now everyone's driving like an asshole or someone from L .A. Everyone's loud.

[186] There's graffiti everywhere.

[187] Things are filthy.

[188] Nothing really works that good.

[189] But the food's delicious.

[190] People are laughing.

[191] They're with their families.

[192] They're gesticulating.

[193] And I look at that and I say, you know, everything's just tradeoffs.

[194] There's a value to what's happening in Austria and there's this great value to what's happening in Italy, far be it for me to say which should be graphed across the globe.

[195] I almost think utopia is every option under the sun.

[196] What personality type are you?

[197] Where are you comfortable?

[198] What is the thing you believe in?

[199] Not a global story, not a global agenda, not one binary solution.

[200] I think I'm now learning in the specificity of what you're saying that because it's on the local level, perhaps that is an option that's on the table.

[201] It even happens within the United States.

[202] There's this great push for all of us to think either like New York or Nashville.

[203] And my thought is, A, if you like the Nashville way of life, live there.

[204] If you like New York, live there.

[205] Granted, it would require great mobility.

[206] Maybe that's the big push I'd have, is that people were educated on the options, and then they could get themselves to the places that they felt in accord with.

[207] But we have to be cohesive as one as well.

[208] That's where things get hard.

[209] Which, by the way, we always have been, I just think as our awareness, of what's happening everywhere locally through internet, 24 -hour news cycle.

[210] I think generally I lived in Michigan.

[211] I grew up there.

[212] I didn't know what the fuck was happening in Florida.

[213] I didn't know what was happening anywhere.

[214] I knew what was happening in Michigan.

[215] I had opinions about it.

[216] And then somehow all the money funneled into the U .S. And we were still a huge economy.

[217] Now everyone's concerned with whatever other states doing.

[218] And it's this mass fight about whether it's going to be left or right as opposed to what's wrong with pockets of either.

[219] We do also need the global view.

[220] But the amazing thing about participatory democracy is that it works better in practice that it does in theory.

[221] You know, you can come up with all sorts of reasons as to why it wouldn't work.

[222] You know, people would never make rational decisions.

[223] People would just pursue their own interests.

[224] And yet there's something about the process, which is transformative.

[225] Democracy becomes a habit.

[226] It becomes a hobby.

[227] I mean, the amazing thing in Porto Alegre is that after several years of this participatory budgeting, people took to the streets for their taxes to be raised.

[228] And the reason for that was that they could see that when they're in charge of the budget, their money goes a lot further when they're pooling it than it goes individually.

[229] So if you're trying to get to work, you could buy a banged -up old jalopy for $2 ,000 and then spend two hours in the traffic jam going to work and two hours in the traffic jam coming back.

[230] Or you could contribute $100 to a monorail system, which is funded by the community as a whole, which will get you there in 20 minutes.

[231] Your money goes a lot further when you're doing things together.

[232] we make space and acknowledge that there are many people that wish not to participate in anything on planet Earth, which is totally fine.

[233] I think you and I have a certain constitution which desires community and interaction, but I wouldn't say that's everyone.

[234] So I think it was about 10 % every year of people in Puerto Allegra who participate in.

[235] It's basically the people who show up.

[236] Oh, interesting.

[237] They seem to be much more representative than our representatives are because it was the ordinary folk turning up.

[238] And in fact, the level of participation was great.

[239] in the poorest neighborhoods.

[240] So it's exactly the opposite people to the ones that you'd find in the US Senate.

[241] And it again has this transformative effect.

[242] It made people see themselves as citizens, not just as passive recipients of policy or as consumers.

[243] Now, this ties in with something else I'm really obsessed about, which is what I call private sufficiency, public luxury.

[244] So the promise of the system under which we live, neoliberal capitalism, is that everyone is a temporarily embarrassed millionaire, right?

[245] We're all going to make it big time.

[246] Temporarily embarrassed.

[247] It's a great way to say it.

[248] We can all have everything, right?

[249] One day we'll have the swimming pool and the private jet and the supercar and the homes scattered around the world and the rest of it.

[250] Now, you're only going to step back for a moment to see, hang on a moment.

[251] There's an issue here.

[252] Number one, people who are extremely rich are extremely rich because other people are extremely poor.

[253] It's called exploitation.

[254] It's a very longstanding practice.

[255] That's how you get extremely rich.

[256] But number two, imagine that everyone did strike it big and did get their super car and their private yacht and their swimming pool and their tennis courts and all the rest of it.

[257] Not only is there simply not enough ecological space for that.

[258] I mean, we cook the planet at about 10 minutes if that was the case.

[259] There's not even enough physical space.

[260] If everyone in London had their own swimming pool and tennis court and the rest of it, London would be the size of England.

[261] England would be the size of Europe.

[262] Where would everyone else live?

[263] Well, all I'm hearing is a population problem.

[264] No, no, no. That's not the thing that needs to change.

[265] This is a money problem.

[266] This is a luxury problem, right?

[267] So the private sufficiency bit is that we all have our own modest home which meets our needs and everything in it which meets our needs.

[268] But if we want luxury, we pursue that in the public sphere.

[269] We have great public swimming pools and public tennis courts and public art galleries and public museums and public playgrounds and public health systems.

[270] and public transport systems and the rest of it and really luxurious, really high quality.

[271] And two things happen if you do that.

[272] One, instead of taking space away from other people to pursue your luxury, you're creating space for everyone.

[273] Because if you're expanding your private domain to pursue your luxury, other people are going to have to shrink back to make way for that.

[274] But if you're doing it in public, then you create that space.

[275] But two, because you're sharing the resources, it's far less of an environmental burden.

[276] than if you're each pursuing your own dream of extreme and impossible luxury.

[277] And what you see with participatory budgeting in particular, is that almost inexorably, automatically, it sort of drives in that direction.

[278] That's what people opt for.

[279] Okay, so it sounds lovely.

[280] Like, I'm in.

[281] In theory.

[282] In theory.

[283] Okay, now let me just tell you, if you've gone to the public places here in the U .S., an individual that has a plot of land, and let's just say by their own sweat, by their own toil, they build themselves a 12 ,000 square foot house.

[284] There's no victims.

[285] They did that themselves.

[286] They dug a swimming pool.

[287] Whatever the thing was, they just wanted that, and they had the willpower and the work ethic to do it.

[288] That person treats all that stuff in a very specific way.

[289] The public stuff that is here, often it's destroyed and treated like free shit gets treated.

[290] So it is a great idea.

[291] I love it.

[292] I think it's a little optimistic.

[293] I also think it would work in some places, and I don't think it would work in other places.

[294] It's reversing the idea of the American dream a little bit, which is tricky.

[295] People that are handed things treat those handed things they didn't work for differently than the people that killed themselves to have it.

[296] But with participatory democracy, you're not handed it.

[297] You built it.

[298] Well, the 10 % that showed up did.

[299] Yeah, sure.

[300] But that 10 % is a community because, you know, 10 % you're, your auntie's going to be in there, your goddaughter's going to be in there, your best friend's going to be in there, even if you're not in there.

[301] And you build the trust in a way that the representative system just doesn't build.

[302] You know, you have that trust in your next door neighbor or your auntie that you will not have in that senator who you'd never met.

[303] And I'm not necessarily saying we do away with all representative democracy as well, but that it's just incredibly crude.

[304] And it leads to exactly the situation that you're talking about where we don't feel we own it.

[305] We don't feel it's got anything to do with us.

[306] It's them.

[307] They did this.

[308] They left this for us.

[309] And if we want our dog to shitting it, fine.

[310] And if we want to spray graffiti on the fence, fine.

[311] We'll do that.

[312] But that's very different matter from the situation where you say, yeah, we built this.

[313] This is ours, which is the same impulse as the private story you're talking about.

[314] I'm not opposed at all to people working hard and pursuing their own dream and stuff.

[315] But it's just like, how are we going to accommodate it?

[316] Where is the space for everyone to meet that expectation?

[317] to meet that dream?

[318] I jokingly said it, but it's true that of all the liberal and conservative agendas, you don't ever hear anyone suggesting we might want to scale back from 8 billion people.

[319] Because I guess implicit in the scaling back is that all these models, it is dependent on growth or minimally safeguarding what we have.

[320] Now, if you talk about having the population, you're having the economy, you're having the everything.

[321] Is that the reservation?

[322] The most glaring issue is there's too many of us, even in this book, which is fantastic, Regenesis.

[323] Implicit it is that we got to feed eight billion people.

[324] All these things are destructive because you need six million chickens in that warehouse, the 40 ,000 square foot warehouse next to the river.

[325] What do we think about, to me, the enormous elephant in the room?

[326] Everyone says no one talks about this.

[327] I've heard thousands of people say no one ever talks about this.

[328] And everyone's talking about it.

[329] And they all say, well, population is the issue.

[330] And I just don't buy this.

[331] that.

[332] And here's the reason.

[333] I mean, it's absolutely true that every increment in population adds a little more environmental pressure.

[334] But almost all the population growth on earth is happening amongst the poorest people on earth.

[335] And the formula for the impact that human beings have is called I equals P times A times T. And what that means is impact equals population times affluence, times technology.

[336] And if the people whose numbers are growing, which are the very poorest of the poor on earth, have no A and no T, no affluence and no technology, and what technology, I just equals P, and that P really counts for very little when it's not being multiplied by anything.

[337] Your wish is coming true anyway.

[338] Population is about the only environmental metric, which is slowing and peaking, whereas all the rest of them are just going through the ceiling.

[339] Population is slowing very fast.

[340] It's down to 1 % growth per year now.

[341] That's a massive decline.

[342] Oh, that makes me happy.

[343] Does that make you happy or no?

[344] I'm fine with that, but I don't feel that's going to be the decisive thing.

[345] By the end of the century, it will have peaked and will be in decline.

[346] Whereas, you know, we're not seeing that with consumption.

[347] We're not seeing that with all the other things, which are the real drivers.

[348] And really, you know, when people say, we need to reduce population growth, you say, well, A, it's happening.

[349] But B, actually, the small amount of residual growth that's happening is fourth wave growth, which is four generations on from when there was that huge population peak earlier in the 20th century.

[350] And so it's like a storm that brewed in the early, Atlantic, and you're now seeing the waves come from that storm.

[351] And the people who are arguing with those waves are literally arguing with the mathematical function.

[352] And they're standing on the shore telling the waves to go back.

[353] This is demographic momentum.

[354] It's not because of current policy that there's any growth still going on at all.

[355] I got you.

[356] I got you.

[357] Okay, great.

[358] I'm so glad we took that time to talk about story.

[359] And I'm so glad that we heard yours.

[360] I love it.

[361] I don't know how I feel about humans across the board.

[362] If everyone was you, yeah, I'm signing up for that system.

[363] Oh, God, what a disaster that would be.

[364] Okay, so your book, Regenesis, Feeding the World Without Devouring the Planet, is above all things just about farming.

[365] And I think you must be aware of what a deep story farming is in this country.

[366] I don't know how it compares to the UK, but here, I would say the most stable foundation of the Republican Party is farming.

[367] It is almost the emblem of what we're trying to conserve.

[368] If you're a conservative and you're conserving a way of life, implicit in that is a harmonious time when we grew food.

[369] Is it as politicized in the UK as it is here?

[370] There's no challenge to farming here, almost none whatsoever from anyone.

[371] While we are highly critical of the fossil fuel industry, the chemicals industry and stuff, farming, there's like a moral force field around it.

[372] You don't cross it.

[373] So you leave it to the industry to sort itself out, to regulate itself.

[374] And that has never worked.

[375] Well, what do you think drives that?

[376] Part of it, obviously it's an absolute necessity.

[377] You can't avoid it, though we can certainly avoid certain kinds of farming, which are very damaging and produce very little.

[378] We should pursue a farming which is low impact and high productivity.

[379] A lot of farming is high impact and low productivity.

[380] But there are these deep root metaphors, particularly the pastoral myth, the idea of man and beast in harmony in the landscape.

[381] And this goes back a long, long way.

[382] It goes back to the poet Theocritus, writing in the 3rd century BC, looking back to his native Sicily from the busy cauldron of Alexandria, and imagining, nostalgically, the shepherd sitting under the trees, talking, playing music, having sex with each other, not doing any actual work.

[383] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[384] Living this perfect bucolic life, in fact, he called his poems his bucolics.

[385] And he conceived that situation as the essence of harmony and innocence, whereas the city, where he was, was all evil and corruption.

[386] And that gets picked up by Virgil.

[387] There was a parallel, very powerful strand, of course, in the Old Testament, which was written by the descendants of herders who looked back to a time when their ancestor Abraham's herds darkened the plains, looked even further back to the ancestral conflict between the tillers of the ground, Kane and the herders of beasts, Abel and the beloved of God, who was killed by Kane, the tiller of the ground.

[388] and they had almost identical story to the ones that Theocritus and Virgil were telling.

[389] And then these two traditions came together, the poetic tradition and the religious tradition, big time in the European Renaissance, with people like Dante, Petra, Boccaccio, and they use these pastoral myths really as a sort of description of the good society.

[390] The good ruler is a good shepherd, the good subjects of the good sheet.

[391] They get picked up in England by Marlowe, Spencer, Herbert, Shakespeare, of course, and played with in lots of interesting ways.

[392] And that carries on for a couple more centuries through euloges such as Milton's Lysidas and Shelley's Adonais until it dies away in the 18th century.

[393] And then that comes back big time in what we in England call the 20th century, the 19 -somethings.

[394] First of all, with these books for very young children, and about 50 % of books for pre -literate children are about farmyards.

[395] I don't know how it is in the US, but here.

[396] and it's all like one rosy -cheek farmer, one dog, one cat, one cow, one pig, one horse, one chicken, all talking to each other, all living in harmony like a family, no idea of why they might be there, what might be going to happen to them.

[397] And the livestock farm is conceived as this place of peace and harmony and comfort and security, whereas, you know, I worked on an intensive pig farm when I was a teenager, and I could tell you, it was nothing like that.

[398] It wasn't Charlotte's Webb.

[399] It wasn't Charlotte's Webb.

[400] Stay tuned for more armchair expert, if you dare.

[401] We've all been there.

[402] Turning to the internet to self -diagnose our inexplicable pains, debilitating body aches, sudden fevers, and strange rashes.

[403] Though our minds tend to spiral to worst -case scenarios, it's usually nothing, but for an unlucky few, these unsuspecting symptoms can start the clock ticking on a terrifying medical mystery.

[404] Like the unexplainable death of a retired firefighter, whose body was found at home by his son, except it looked like he had been cremated, or the time when an entire town started jumping from buildings and seeing tigers on their ceilings.

[405] Hey listeners, it's Mr. Ballin here, and I'm here to tell you about my podcast.

[406] It's called Mr. Ballin's Medical Mysteries.

[407] Each terrifying true story will be sure to keep you up at night.

[408] Follow Mr. Ballin's Medical Mysteries wherever you get your podcasts.

[409] Prime members can listen early and ad -free on Amazon Music.

[410] Guys, it's your girl Kiki, and my podcast is back with a new season.

[411] And let me tell you, it's too good.

[412] And I'm diving into the brains of entertainment's best and brightest, okay?

[413] Every episode, I bring on a friend and have a real conversation.

[414] And I don't mean just friends.

[415] I mean the likes of Amy Polar, Kell Mitchell, Vivica Fox.

[416] The list goes on.

[417] So follow, watch, and listen to Baby.

[418] This is Kiki Palmer on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcast.

[419] I got to pause you, George.

[420] I'm so sorry.

[421] I'm sure Monica's thinking the same thing.

[422] I don't think outside of a movie I've ever seen anyone with a literary knowledge.

[423] Oh, my gosh.

[424] It's staggering.

[425] It really is.

[426] Yeah, I don't know how you just walk through all of those.

[427] I just want to go back even further as an anthropology major.

[428] We know that farming and agriculture is what allowed for specialized everything.

[429] Before farming, I can't dedicate my time to learning how to work with iron.

[430] I can't dedicate my time to medicine.

[431] It is on the back of this agricultural revolution that all sorts of.

[432] specialized knowledge stems.

[433] It's like the genesis of all other things.

[434] It's there in the formation of our language.

[435] It's there in the formation of our technology.

[436] Just about every aspect of culture is informed by farming.

[437] And of course, it also led to a massive revolution in our diets.

[438] So much that we take for granted, be it bread, be it cheese, is entirely the product of the agricultural revolution in the Neolithic.

[439] It's woven into the fabric of our being.

[440] Yeah, look at the lactose intolerant rates among Asians, 90%, 95%, anyone from the Middle East, 5%.

[441] I mean, it changed our genetics, which is wild.

[442] Yeah.

[443] It's powerful.

[444] Implicit in that, it's beyond reproach.

[445] Like, it's like any other thing that shouldn't evolve and be given an inventor's eye in a technology revolution, you know, it should just not be tampered with because it's pure.

[446] Yeah.

[447] So my heretical position is that nothing is beyond reproach.

[448] Everything should be subject to challenge.

[449] and that everything should be subject ultimately to the same set of standards.

[450] We think that one sector, trashing the planet, exploiting workers, that it's unacceptable for them to do it, then the same thing should apply to other sectors.

[451] Now, it just happens.

[452] Unfortunately, the farming, on which, of course, we are utterly reliant, is the worst thing we've ever done to the planet.

[453] It's by far in a way the greatest cause of habitat destruction, the greatest cause of wildlife loss, the greatest cause of extinction, the greatest cause of soil loss, the greatest cause of fresh water use, the greatest cause of land use, which is perhaps the most important environmental metric of all.

[454] It's one of the greatest causes of climate breakdown, of water pollution, of air pollution.

[455] It's just top of almost everything, and yet we don't go there.

[456] We don't want to see it.

[457] we don't want to tread onto that sacred ground.

[458] Yeah.

[459] Maybe we think it'll be like when we got critical of the police and they stopped policing there.

[460] It's like, don't piss the farmers off.

[461] They'll fucking just make enough food for them and then we'll be screwed.

[462] Because we do need it.

[463] Yes.

[464] It's necessary.

[465] Now, I was depressed to learn this from you.

[466] And again, this is the mountain of you can't do the right thing.

[467] Let's break some hearts right now.

[468] And let's start with organic pasture -fed beef.

[469] So grass.

[470] Uh -oh.

[471] Yeah, exactly.

[472] Uh -oh.

[473] Just walk us through what's wrong with grass -fed beef.

[474] So this is the most damaging of all food products.

[475] Oh, no. I mean, for the last eight years, you feel guilty if you're eating corn -fed beef.

[476] You're like, well, that's mean to the animals.

[477] It's creating more methane.

[478] It makes them explode or something.

[479] You know, like, you're just living like, oh, fuck, I'm going to spend the extra amount.

[480] It doesn't taste as good, but morally, I must.

[481] Let's do it.

[482] And now you're fucking pulling the carpet out from under us.

[483] Okay, walk us through it.

[484] I have this effect on people.

[485] Spread more misery than almost anyone else in life.

[486] This is why you don't want too many of me. Look, I agree with everything you say about intensive and industrial livestock production, right?

[487] It's horrible.

[488] As I say, I worked on an intensive pig farm.

[489] It is horrible.

[490] Causes massive pollution.

[491] The animals have to be fed on grain, which is brought in, often from thousands of miles away.

[492] and the grain growing requires a lot of land as well.

[493] But the only thing worse than intensive animal production is extensive animal production.

[494] And the reason for that is that extensive farming, by definition, uses more land to produce the same amount of food.

[495] And land is the crucial metric because every hectare, every acre of land that we use for an extractive industry is land that can't be used for wild ecosystems, such as forests, wetlands, savannas, natural grasslands, on which wild species are living.

[496] And the great majority of species on Earth depend on wild ecosystems for their survival.

[497] And that's another way of saying that planetary systems, Earth systems, depend on wild ecosystems.

[498] Because if one tips, we get domino effects and the whole lot can go down.

[499] Well, I think that's important.

[500] If you're on the other side of this debate, you might go, well, yeah, I get it.

[501] Poor ecosystems.

[502] But obviously, I've got to prioritize keeping us alive.

[503] So I'm willing to make that trade.

[504] Why can't we make that trade?

[505] Sure.

[506] So I'm among the very few people who were taught complex systems as part of their education, and that's because my background is as an ecologist.

[507] Now, complex systems are almost everything that's important to us.

[508] Your brain is a complex system.

[509] Your body is a complex system.

[510] The planet is a series of interlocking complex systems, the atmosphere, ocean, forests, soil.

[511] These are all complex systems.

[512] The financial system is a complex system.

[513] The food system is a complex system.

[514] and complex systems do not behave in the same way as simple systems.

[515] If you put the plug in your wash basin and turn on the faucet, you know that there's a linear relationship between the amount of water coming out of the faucet and the level of water in the wash basin.

[516] That's how a simple system works.

[517] Complex systems do not have that linear incremental function.

[518] They're self -regulating within a certain range of stress and they can absorb stress and absorb stress, and then suddenly they reach a tipping point and they collapse into a completely different area.

[519] equilibrium state.

[520] In some way, we just saw that with global shipping and the supply chain.

[521] Granted, it didn't collapse.

[522] We did see how vulnerable it was.

[523] Yeah, we haven't seen it yet.

[524] So what's happened with the global food system is it's lost a lot of its resilience.

[525] So complex systems are either resilient or they're fragile.

[526] So with the global financial system in 2008, what we saw came very close to that tipping point.

[527] And the only reason it didn't tip was that trillions of dollars were poured in around the world in order to push it back into its safe equilibrium state or relatively safe.

[528] Now, the food system is looking very much like the global financial system in the approach to 2008.

[529] On one estimate, four corporations control 90 % of global grain trade.

[530] They're integrating vertically.

[531] They're integrating horizontally.

[532] Massive mergers and acquisitions are still continuing.

[533] They're all too big to fail.

[534] The exporters have polarized into super exporters, importers into super -importers, much of that global trade now needs to pass through a series of choke points.

[535] The Turkish straits are one of those choke points, and they're effectively closed because of Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

[536] The Suez Canal is another choke point.

[537] Last year, that was closed when that giant ship got wedged across it, the Ever Given got wedged across the Suez Canal.

[538] If those two things had coincided, the food chain would have snapped, and about a quarter of the world's population would suddenly have seen their shelves clear, and there'd be no food.

[539] What's the Ukraine grain?

[540] That's a significant chunk also.

[541] It's almost a third of the world's wheat exports and 9 % of the world's vegetable oil.

[542] And this year, after that was effectively blocked, India came forward in March and said, look, don't worry about the shortfall in Ukrainian grain, right?

[543] Because we've got a bumper wheat harvest on the way.

[544] We're going to become a super exporter this year.

[545] We'll fill the gap.

[546] Four weeks later, they said, about those exports, we've had this massive heat wave.

[547] It shriveled the grain on the plants and we're imposing an export ban instead.

[548] And so you can see how the geopolitical and the environmental shocks just can hit this system from two sides of works.

[549] So the food must pass through these choke points.

[550] The problem we've got is that as the global trade system has harmonized, you know, and the corporations have pursued the same standards everywhere, everyone has been moving towards a global standard diet produced by the global standard farm, same seeds, same machinery, same chemicals, all the rest of it.

[551] And the corporations have demanded the same type of port infrastructure, the same roads everywhere so that they can use the same ships, the same lorries and all the rest of it.

[552] You think, well, that's going to smooth the flow, isn't it?

[553] You're going to see food travelling around the world more easily.

[554] And up to a certain point, it does.

[555] But then the corporations can say, oh, hang on a moment, because everything's been smooth so well, we don't need to keep reserves anymore.

[556] So there's switch from stocks to flows.

[557] So basically, the world's food reserves are floating at sea in container ships.

[558] And it takes only a small disruption to snap that just -in -time chain.

[559] Wow, yeah, I didn't even think so.

[560] When the ports got clogged as they did here, now you had all this rotting food.

[561] Yeah, yeah.

[562] I mean, there's enormous potential problems here with this.

[563] It's a very fragile system.

[564] It could collapse.

[565] Now, when the global financial system came close to collapse, governments were able to bail it out with future money.

[566] You can't bail out the food system with future food.

[567] Yeah.

[568] Right, right.

[569] You actually got to eat it.

[570] We've wandered a little from the idea of complex systems and tipping points.

[571] The food system could collapse.

[572] In fact, it's very hard to see how it won't collapse unless drastic action is taken because it is looking very much like finance.

[573] We're seeing those wild fluctuations in value, very much like we did with finance approach to 2008.

[574] Systems theorists call flickering, which means that you're coming close to a tipping point.

[575] When the output values of a system are fluctuating wildly, that is when you really start to panic.

[576] And it wasn't caused by Ukraine.

[577] This is an inherent problem which has been there for several years now, but Ukraine has made it worse and has revealed the problem.

[578] We are the same problem in a whole load of Earth systems.

[579] And unless we move incredibly fast to shore those back up and to push those back into their safe equilibrium states, those two will tip.

[580] And that tipping is beyond human comprehension.

[581] Because if one Earth system goes down, it pulls down others and it pulls down others and others.

[582] You get this domino effect.

[583] And basically, the Earth system.

[584] system of systems goes down, and it switches from the equilibrium state that we call a habitable planet into a new equilibrium state for which we have not evolved, and most of the species on Earth have not evolved, which we call an uninhabitable planet.

[585] Mm -hmm, mm -hmm.

[586] And some mass extinction.

[587] Happy birthday, Monica.

[588] Early birthday, present.

[589] Yeah, I guess I was just going to compare the whole airplane analogy.

[590] A commercial airplane never crashes for one reason.

[591] Almost never.

[592] There's so much redundancy in all these different ways.

[593] ways that almost every airplane crash is the result of three or so things having gone wrong simultaneously that's brought it down.

[594] And it seems like Ukraine, COVID, we're at the three or four unforeseeable things piling up.

[595] I hate to fire a surface to air missile, your analogy, but an airplane is a complicated system, but not a complex system.

[596] And a complicated system is one with many parts, but parts which are arranged to behave in a linear fashion.

[597] Anything with an engine in is a complicated system, but it's not a complex system.

[598] It doesn't behave in these stochastic, these random ways that a complex system does.

[599] But isn't because weather is implicit in the application of the machine, it now is a complex system?

[600] Because, again, weather's always one of them.

[601] It's affected by complex systems.

[602] I mean, I'm being a pedant here.

[603] I like it.

[604] I like it.

[605] I like it.

[606] And I'm fighting back.

[607] Weather, weather.

[608] That's complex.

[609] People say that pedants only want to show how clever they are, right?

[610] But the correct syntax is pedants want only to show how clever they are.

[611] That's similar to this joke.

[612] Tom Cruise told me recently, name -dropping is always off -putting.

[613] I heard exactly the same thing the other day from Zadie Smith, yeah.

[614] Okay, okay, in your book, we look at the three main categories of food, which are staple crops, grains.

[615] and such, fruit and vegetables, and protein and fat.

[616] Of which you say, which is insane to me, there are 75 billion animals currently under our domestication.

[617] 75 billion killed every year.

[618] Oh, my God.

[619] So they're killed in batches.

[620] So if you think of the chickens or the pigs, they're emptied out every few weeks, and a new lot are brought in.

[621] So in the course of a year, 75 billion are killed to feed us.

[622] Wow, wow, wow.

[623] We're trying to get that number to a trillion.

[624] That's the goal.

[625] Oh, my God.

[626] So you have solutions, suggestions.

[627] There's new technologies that can address all three of these columns.

[628] Let's maybe get into staple crops.

[629] There's lots of really fascinating and promising technologies, but a lot of them have got downside, some of which aren't widely understood.

[630] So I'd like to focus on one which I find particularly exciting, which is perennial grain crops.

[631] Almost all the grain we eat comes from annual plants, plants which live and die within the course of one year.

[632] And large areas of annual plants are quite rare in nature and generally only happen in the wake of a disaster.

[633] So there's been a landslide or a wildfire or a volcanic eruption and the land is bare.

[634] And then these annual plants which are adapted to reproduce very quickly and cover the ground very quickly.

[635] They've got lots of seeds and they scatter them and they spread fast.

[636] They'll fill that gap and they'll dominate for a year or two on that bare land and then the perennials will move back in, the longer -lasting ones, sort of the long grasses and the trees and the rest of it, and they'll swallow them up, and the annuals will disappear again.

[637] So in order to grow our annual crops, we need to create a disaster every year.

[638] We need either to plow the land or we need to spray the land to kill everything else that was living there.

[639] Early hunting gatherers with torch?

[640] Yeah, absolutely.

[641] Because almost all our grain crops are annuals, we just have to destroy in order to grow them.

[642] those crops.

[643] And then once we're sowing the seeds, we have to pamper them.

[644] We have to destroy all their competitors.

[645] We have to destroy anything which might eat them because they're very tender in those early weeks and throw loads of fertilizer at them and use lots of pesticides.

[646] And then we bring them to fruition pretty quickly, course of just a few months, and then we harvest them, and then we start the cycle all over again.

[647] And that damage is incremental.

[648] every year there's a bit more soil is a bit more degraded soil is a complex system it can absorb quite a lot of degradation because it stabilises itself it's got these self -regulating properties you push it beyond a certain point and those self -regulating properties become self -amplifying properties and then you get hit by a major external event such as a drought and a major drought in a highly degraded soil will raise erosion rates 6 ,000 fold effectively overnight and that's called a dust bowl.

[649] The destination of most soils on Earth is dust bulb because of what we're doing to them.

[650] We know about the famous dust bowl in the U .S. in the 1930s, but there have been many others before and since, and we see more and more land becoming permanently, irreversibly degraded around the world.

[651] The expansion of the Sahara is also somewhat a product of this, too, yeah?

[652] Yeah, exactly.

[653] I mean, this is historic dust bowl.

[654] So basically, desert is where we're all heading if we don't turn this around.

[655] and one of the most exciting technologies for turning it around is the switch to perennial grain crops.

[656] Now, this has been a dream of scientists for over 100 years, but for the first time now, it is being fulfilled, primarily driven by this amazing group in Salina, Kansas, called the Land Institute, which has been scouring the world, looking at thousands of potential candidates to become perennial grain crops or to be hybridized with existing crops, And it's had some remarkable successes.

[657] So there's one now which is fully commercialized, has gone all the way, which is a variety of rice that it's developed with the University of Yunnan in southern China.

[658] And there are thousands of hectares of this rice already being cultivated.

[659] There's been cultivated six years in a row and still produces the same yields as annual rice does.

[660] How frequent is the harvest in a perennial crop?

[661] It's the same frequency as in annual crops.

[662] If you're in a place like Yunnan where you can harvest twice a year, it's twice a year.

[663] But if you're in Kansas where it's once a year, it's still once a year.

[664] Because you're basically following the seasonal cycle in the same way as you do with an annual crop.

[665] But you're not having to break the ground every year.

[666] You're not having to start all over every year.

[667] You've got much deeper, much longer routes, which are finding a lot of their own minerals.

[668] They're finding the water in the ground.

[669] You're not having to pamper them nearly as much.

[670] They're likely to be more resistant to weeds, to pests and all the rest.

[671] rest of it, you can integrate it with biological controls much more effectively potentially than you can with annual crops.

[672] They're also much more resilient.

[673] So one plant, the Land Institute's been experimenting with is a perennial sunflower.

[674] They were growing their blocks of perennial sunflowers next to their blocks of annual sunflowers and they got hit by a major drought which completely wiped out the annual sunflowers and the perennial sailed through because their roots were down, they got tougher above ground structures, they're just a lot better adapted to coping with weather extremes.

[675] Won't the market forces immediately promote those?

[676] Those require a social push.

[677] It seems to me if they're immediately going to reduce 80 % of their expenses as far as planting, ripping up, the petroleum, all that stuff.

[678] Yeah, I mean, this is why in Yunnan farmers are biting their hands off to get the seeds.

[679] They're desperate for the seed, partly because it massively reduces soil.

[680] erosion because you're not having to plow the paddies every year and the terraces aren't slipping off the hillside, but primarily because they've got a massive labour shortage there, as a lot of the young people who left for the city.

[681] And if you're not having to plant every year, well, fantastic.

[682] You need much less labour than before.

[683] And so if you get it right, yeah, the market will do it for you.

[684] But it is ridiculous that one of the most important of all technologies is being developed by this small non -profit in Salina, Kansas, you know, which isn't getting the big backing it needs.

[685] So the money needs to be in the R &D, and we urgently need a load of that.

[686] Well, okay, so here's where it gets really complex and why I don't believe in the neoliberal or the Kinsian.

[687] Okay, so I'm the U .S. government.

[688] Generally, we've always subsidized corn.

[689] We do that because it stores really well.

[690] Now all of our products have corn in it.

[691] That's problematic in its own right.

[692] But if the U .S. government were to say, you know what, we're going to subsidize, first and foremost, this rice, there's going to be a tractor lobby, there's going to be a petroleum lobby.

[693] By helping the farmer, ironically, it's going to probably take a huge toll on several other industries.

[694] Every industry goes through major technological change, right?

[695] If it didn't, you and I would be communicating with quill pens on parchment.

[696] Which sounds romantic to me, given your literary background.

[697] Yeah, but is probably less efficient than Zoom.

[698] Every technological shift, there's winners and losers.

[699] The answer is not that you protect the legacy industries.

[700] You don't protect the parchment industry.

[701] You don't protect the quill pen industry.

[702] You protect the people.

[703] You're going to lose out on this.

[704] So we're going to find something better for you, which is going to see you through this.

[705] Now, the powerful position governments are in with this is a huge proportion of the world's farmers are totally dependent on farm subsidies.

[706] Governments collectively spend half a trillion dollars on farm subsidies, 500 billion dollars a year on farm subsidies, a lot of which goes to livestock.

[707] Almost all of them are highly environmentally damaging these subsidies.

[708] They're highly regressive as well.

[709] All taxpayers are giving money to some of the richest people in the world through these subsidies.

[710] But it puts governments in this powerful position.

[711] They don't have to ban anything.

[712] They don't have to tax anything.

[713] They just say, we're going to pay for something different.

[714] We never finish that thing about livestock, did we?

[715] But instead of paying for you to ranch, we're going to pay for you to restore ecosystems.

[716] And by the way, the thing about ranching is its huge amount of land that it uses.

[717] So there was one estimate showing that if all the corn -fed cattle, grain -fed cattle in the US, were to switch to pasture -fed instead.

[718] You know, that's where you got your meat from.

[719] You would need 270 % more land.

[720] So you'd had to take over the entire land surface of the United States.

[721] You'd have to demolish the cities.

[722] You'd have to cut down the forests.

[723] You'd have to water the deserts.

[724] You'd have to de -gazette the national parks.

[725] The whole country would be a cattle ranch, and you'd still be importing a lot of your beef from the Amazon, as you do today.

[726] It's a catastrophe in environmental terms.

[727] leave that as a loose untied end, but I'll argue that we introduced just the perfect amount, which is like even the way you thought might be better is also shitty, because I think that still sets the stage for how you would handle protein and fat.

[728] So unless there's another staple crops portion, that's fascinating and exciting.

[729] A lot of books are just doom.

[730] I really liked Bill Gates' book about environmental collapse because he ultimately has a bazillion solutions.

[731] But all Gates has his solutions.

[732] He's a problem.

[733] He's a problem.

[734] He's a problem.

[735] He's a politics denier.

[736] You know, he says all we need is a technology.

[737] That's going to sort everything.

[738] And actually, no, you know, that's not how the world works.

[739] It works through lobbies.

[740] It works through powerful interests, pushing their particular view of things and their particular demands.

[741] For instance, if you're looking at climate issues, what counts ultimately is not the new technologies you introduce, it's the old technologies you retire.

[742] It's leaving fossil fields in the ground.

[743] Otherwise, it's like saying, well, you know, I don't understand it.

[744] I've eaten six big Max at a tub of ice cream, but I also had a salad.

[745] Why aren't I losing weight?

[746] Right, but I think these things have to work in concert.

[747] You have to worry about what you worry about, and he is going to be the person that can bring a technology to market better than anyone else.

[748] Well, possibly.

[749] Look, we have an enormous water crisis.

[750] The water crisis is really a desalinization crisis, and the desalinization crisis is an energy crisis.

[751] It's not.

[752] I mean, it's just not.

[753] The only water that you can reasonably produce through desalunization because of the expense is drinking water.

[754] You can't produce here.

[755] irrigation water that way, unless food is going to be 10 times as expensive as it is today.

[756] Because of why?

[757] Because of electricity.

[758] It just takes a load of energy to produce.

[759] Back to Bill Gates, you have a new nuclear technology that is impervious to meltdown that is running on the excess fuel spent fuel that we don't know what to do with.

[760] Yeah, I'm all in favor of that too, but you're still never, never going to get down.

[761] Basically, the water which farmers use today is free water.

[762] De -salinization is never going to be free water.

[763] It's all.

[764] always going to be many times, whatever technology you use, it's going to be many times as expensive.

[765] That's okay for drinking water, potentially.

[766] It's not okay for irrigation water.

[767] It really isn't.

[768] It's never going to be okay.

[769] Are you so against that solution because you're fearful if we say, well, none of this is a problem because we'll have this nuclear technology and it'll create as much freshwater as we want.

[770] So don't address these agricultural issues.

[771] I'm also in favor of those nuclear technologies, and I think they can do a great deal for us.

[772] I've been pushing the cause of small modular reactors for a long time.

[773] It's just we've got to be real about these things, not live in some fairyland.

[774] And a lot of this stuff is just fantasy.

[775] There are laws of physics here, and there are laws of economics here, and you can't buck them.

[776] But there are amazing things you can do.

[777] There are fantastic new technologies, and we're just about to talk about one.

[778] But they're not magic.

[779] None of this stuff is magic.

[780] And you need the politics.

[781] You need the political economy as well.

[782] What I'm afraid that it sounds, or at least it sounds to me like, is that for some reason you have to be in opposition to one thing to stay true to the thing you're talking, as opposed to all things can be working in concert.

[783] I am in opposition to one thing, bullshit.

[784] And my whole job, 37 years of it now, has been bullshit detection.

[785] There's a lot of it about.

[786] And I don't think there's a single technology Gates is pushing that I disagree with, but I'm against the bullshit which says that all we need is a technologist.

[787] And we can just leave everything to sort itself out if we've got.

[788] the right technologies.

[789] You can't.

[790] You have to get political as well.

[791] We agreed that we distilled all of the water issues into energy issues.

[792] We're in an agreement on that.

[793] Well, we did for the purposes of this conversation distill them into energy issues, but actually there's a low, I mean, if you look at the Indus Valley, the Indus Valley could be the world's big flashpoint, and if it is, it's triggered by water, because the Indus is going to run out of water.

[794] 95 % of it is already exploited.

[795] They're intending to raise the use of water by 43 % in the next 10 years.

[796] There's an Indus Water Treaty, a very good one, between India and Pakistan, but it says nothing about what happens if the flow of the river starts to decline, which it will mid -century because it's got higher than natural flow because of the glass is melting so fast.

[797] Well, that obviously isn't going to continue.

[798] And yet there's this continued, massive demand for water by all the powers in the catchment, which include three nuclear -armed powers, none of them are giving way on this.

[799] And it's absolutely blinking terrifying.

[800] It's the biggest irrigated area in the world.

[801] Hundreds and millions of people depend on it, and no one has got a strategy for it.

[802] Now, that is not about inherent issues with energy or even with water.

[803] It's just about not sorting the politics out.

[804] It's about diplomacy.

[805] It's about a whole lot of stuff.

[806] It's actually far more complex than people like Bill Gates make it.

[807] Okay, so I concede to all that.

[808] But we agree that 75 % of the globe is covered in water.

[809] That water has salt in it.

[810] So I think we could agree we don't have a water problem.

[811] We have a water with salt in it problem and a transportation of the water problem.

[812] Sure.

[813] And then so the next thing you have to say is, currently we have a pipeline issue, and we also have a still salt in the water, which is an energy problem.

[814] If you had endless free energy, if it were really free, and you had enormous amounts of infrastructure, I mean, it's not just energy, It's a huge amount of concrete pouring, which itself is a big issue.

[815] Loads of steel.

[816] It's recommissioning all the oil -moving devices to water -moving devices.

[817] Okay.

[818] I mean, if we had all that, that would be great.

[819] But I just don't see that world materializing any time soon.

[820] I mean, that energy is not going to be free.

[821] It could be cheap.

[822] That's not the same thing.

[823] Not by a long, long chore.

[824] Anyway, we digress.

[825] I liked it.

[826] I hope you did.

[827] Yeah, yeah.

[828] No, good.

[829] Stay tuned for more Armchair expert.

[830] if you dare.

[831] Okay, so can we do fruits and vegetables?

[832] Yeah.

[833] Again, there's lots of really fascinating innovation, but I want to home in on one approach, which is really an amazing thing.

[834] So the global pioneer of this is a guy called Ian Tolhurst, or Tolly, as everyone calls him.

[835] He's a farmer here in England, which is quite surprising because, you know, we're not really known for recent agricultural innovation, but he's done something quite remarkable.

[836] He's a guy who left school with, No money, no qualifications, and yet he wanted to farm.

[837] I mean, how do you do that, you know, if you haven't got any money?

[838] Well, he managed eventually to rent some very poor land, 40 % stone, considered only good enough for pasture.

[839] And yet he wanted to grow vegetables on it, which are considered a very hungry crop.

[840] And he experimented a bit, and then he slowly started hitting on something, which started to work.

[841] And 34 years on, he has raised the fertility of his land, massively.

[842] He's raised his yields massively, and throughout that time he's used no fertilizer and no manure.

[843] What he seems to have done is to anticipate these remarkable new developments in soil ecology, where we now understand much better.

[844] First, that soil is a biological structure.

[845] It's like a coral reef.

[846] It wouldn't exist without the creatures that live in it.

[847] It's been built by them.

[848] And secondly, that those creatures mediate the relationship between plants and the minerals in the soil, particularly bacteria and fungi.

[849] The plants can't get their own minerals.

[850] They need their symbiotic relationships with bacteria and fungi to extract minerals from the soil.

[851] And he sort of knew this and sort of instinctively grasped this.

[852] And through meticulous experiments, I mean, he's a brilliant scientist.

[853] So when I told him that, he was quite taken aback because, you know, he's never studied any science, but he's got this data going about 34 years, he's got these perfect meticulous records every single year and every year he changes one variable.

[854] So it's like a perfect scientific experiment.

[855] What he's done, first of all, is to effectively seal the soil, to make sure that the soil is never exposed to the elements.

[856] So there's always something growing on every square yard of soil.

[857] So he's got these what he calls green manure crops, these crops which pull up nutrients from the subsoil and bring them up to the, surface and they're covering the soil all the time.

[858] They're growing under his vegetables.

[859] They're growing around his vegetables.

[860] When he takes the vegetables off, they fill the gap and he'll plant others through them or he'll undersow them underneath the vegetables he's planted.

[861] So he just keeps the whole system sealed so the minerals can't wash away.

[862] And then among many other things, he adds, and this is a crucial thing which doubled his eels from one year to the next, one millimeter of wood chip per year on average.

[863] Tiny, tiny amount of wood chip.

[864] And that seems to add exactly the right amount of carbon to stimulate the bacteria in the soil, to lock up nutrients when they need to be locked up.

[865] In other words, when the plants don't want them, which is a crucial aspect, is called immobilization in soil science terms, and to mineralize them, in other words, to release the nutrients for the plants on demand, when the plant requires it.

[866] Because it's turns out the relationship between plants, bacteria and fungi is phenomenally complex, far more complex than we ever imagined it was.

[867] To give you an example, of all the sugars plants made through photosynthesis, between 11 and 40 % of those sugars are dumped into the soil.

[868] It just pours them into the soil.

[869] And before doing so, it turns some of those into compounds of tremendous complexity.

[870] There are massive chemical names, you know, which cover a whole line of text.

[871] And it just looks like pouring money down the drain.

[872] You know, why do you go to all this effort to produce all these sugars and all these incredibly complex compounds only to tip them into the soil?

[873] Yeah, not an efficient machine.

[874] It's worse than the internal combustion engine.

[875] Yeah, well, so you would think.

[876] But it turns out that what plants are doing is talking in a chemical language and they're talking to the bacteria and fungi in the soil, or rather only to a very few of them, particularly to the bacteria, and particularly to one or two species amongst the huge number of species in the soil.

[877] And it's sending them a very precise chemical signal and saying, wake up, because the bacteria exists in a state of dormancy until this root hair breaks into a crumb of soil and then starts transmitting these complex chemicals, which are precisely tuned to particular bacterial, sometimes even to a particular genotype of a bacterial species.

[878] When the bacteria has woken up, they flood it with sugar.

[879] The sugar is a food which the bacteria needs, and so the bacteria then multiply exceedingly, very, very fast, within this very narrow zone around the root, which is called the rhizosphere, right?

[880] And the risosphere has some of the densest bacterial communities on earth.

[881] And those bacteria then, in exchange for the sugars, provide the plants with minerals, but they do more than that.

[882] They also create a defensive ring around the root, excluding the pathogens which might attack the plant.

[883] They produce growth hormones which help to boost the growth of the plant.

[884] But they also help fire up the plant's immune system.

[885] So even if the plant is being attacked above ground by aphids or caterpillars, it'll send a signal down into the rhizosphere and the bacteria will bounce that signal back with a different chemical and that stimulates the plant's immune system which can then fight off the aphids or the caterpillars.

[886] It sounds like a really cumbersome way of doing it, but that's the path dependency of evolution.

[887] Well, it also sounds magical.

[888] Like, that's way too complicated for something without a neocortex to do.

[889] It's quite mind -blowing, but it also sounds familiar.

[890] And you think, hang on a moment, I've heard this story before, this sort of intense concentration of bacteria, supplying nutrients, fighting off pathogens, firing up immune systems.

[891] Oh, wait, hang on a moment, it's a human gut.

[892] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[893] And basically, the rhizosphere is the plant's external gut.

[894] Oh, wow.

[895] Check this, right?

[896] There are roughly 1 ,000 phyler major groups of bacteria in the world.

[897] Almost all the bacteria in the human gut are in 4 phyla, right?

[898] And almost all the bacteria in the rhizosphere belong to 4 phyla.

[899] They're the same 4 phyla.

[900] Oh, that's crazy.

[901] Oh, man. We're learning more and more about this.

[902] I mean, in 2020, there was a paper published in nature called soil as a composite extended phenotype of the microbial metagenome, which was the first time we really understood what soil is.

[903] I was talking to the authors of the paper the other day, and they say, yeah, we're going beyond that now.

[904] And they didn't quite use these words, but basically they're saying, we think soil might be alive.

[905] It has these weird properties which only living creatures have.

[906] I mean, they didn't say we think soil might be alive, but that's what I'm deducing from what they're saying, because it's like when soils lose their carbon, the average microbial genome length decreases radically within the soil.

[907] I mean, this is what they're talking about, a metagenome.

[908] It's like the soil itself has a genome.

[909] None of this is yet published, this latest stuff.

[910] I mean, since this 2020 paper, they haven't yet published.

[911] And so, you know, I can't vouch for any of this, but it's basically, it's looking just mind -blowing.

[912] I mean, it's so bizarre.

[913] It's like Solaris or something.

[914] It's living feel.

[915] These are top scientists from some of the top universities in the country who are collaborating across the UK and elsewhere and coming at it from physics, from biology, from maths, from chemistry, applying medical techniques.

[916] And as we begin to understand it, it's transforming our conception of life on earth.

[917] So a farmer in this paradigm is really going to be nurturing and growing three or four things, not just the crop, right?

[918] It's going to be tending to the fungi.

[919] It's going to be tending to the bacteria.

[920] It's going to be taking in all these elements.

[921] Tully said, I'm growing biodiversity.

[922] The vegetables are a byproduct.

[923] Yeah, wild.

[924] So if that is implemented and scaled up, what does that get us out of?

[925] It gets us out of manure and fertilizer and maybe pesticides.

[926] So, yeah, he's eliminated pesticides as well.

[927] I mean, it's amazing.

[928] He has revolutionized it.

[929] Some growers have managed to replicate what he does.

[930] Some haven't.

[931] We don't know why.

[932] We don't know why it works in some places.

[933] and for some people and not for others and we're still trying to work all that out and I mean there's so many mysteries we haven't cracked yet but what it enables us to do yeah is to cut out fertilizers and manure now if you look at the planetary boundaries work which scientists led by the Stockholm Institute have been developing you see all these places in which we've exceeded the planetary boundary you know we're depleting biodiversity too much we're changing land too much we're using too much water etc but where we've gone furthest beyond the planetary boundary is in nitrates and phosphates, nutrients, where we're just loading the earth's systems with too much nutrients.

[934] What's called eutrophication, which is overfeeding.

[935] We see eutrophication in the soil, in freshwater systems, in marine systems.

[936] We're also seeing a lot of the nitrates turning into nitrous oxide, which is a very powerful greenhouse gas.

[937] It's an absolute catastrophe, and one we're not really tuned into.

[938] There's not a single river in England now in good chemical condition, because of this huge overloading by nutrients, most of which are coming from farming.

[939] Some people are familiar with these enormous algae blooms in the Hudson Bay and then the resulting enormous deserts of no oxygen in the water where fish are swimming in and just dying by the thousand.

[940] Dead zones, yeah.

[941] It's quite stark when you see it.

[942] If we can cut that out, the transformation would be incredible.

[943] Now, you know, I have to say there's a huge amount of work to do to generalize that and we don't know if we can yet but it's a very promising and interesting line of research yeah to me tallie's like guy he's the one guy who did cold fission in his backyard we've just got to figure out how to get that elsewhere yeah okay now the one that scares all of us me number one i love beef you can hate me for it i fucking love protein and fat i want it i'm gonna eat it there's gonna be a branding issue for you but i want to hear your solution for protein and fat.

[944] Sure.

[945] So the things everyone needs is protein rich foods, fat rich foods, but they are the things which are hammering the planet hardest, particularly those that we get from livestock.

[946] You know, you've either got your intensive livestock operations with their terrible animal cruelty, their enormous pollution, or the grain which needs to be grown to feed them, or you've got your extensive ones which are just covering huge tracks of the planet.

[947] So while we all complain about urban sprawl, right, and we're right to complain about it because it's bad for the countryside, it's bad for the city as well.

[948] It doesn't compare to agricultural sprawl.

[949] 1 % of the planet's surface is urban.

[950] That's it.

[951] Whereas 40 % of the planet's surface is agricultural, which is pretty well all the usable land, apart from the protected areas which is now moving into.

[952] The rest is like desert and rock and ice and stuff.

[953] Of that 40%, the 12 % is crops.

[954] A large proportion of which are going to animals are being fed to livestock before they're fed to us and so you lose most of their nutritional value in doing so even the crops isn't just for humans but the 28 % of the planet's surface far more land than we use for growing crops that's for grazing and that's all land which could otherwise have been wild ecosystems and out of that grazing of animals fed by grazing alone we get just one percent of our protein.

[955] This is a phenomenally profitable, wasteful, inefficient way to produce food.

[956] I mean, it's a catastrophe.

[957] And fine, it made sense 5 ,000 years ago.

[958] But why are we sticking with this neolithic way of producing our food in the 21st century?

[959] I mean, what the hell?

[960] And now we don't have to.

[961] Because what I think of as the most important environmental technology ever has come along just when we need it most.

[962] And it's called precision fermentation.

[963] Oh, what is precision fermentation.

[964] So this is to prove that I'm not against the technologies.

[965] It's the context in which they operate that we've got to attend to.

[966] But this is like a sophisticated form of brewing.

[967] And we have been using brewing, obviously, for a very long time to produce our beer, to make yeast for breadmaking, to make bacteria for yogurts and for cheese and all the rest of it.

[968] And this just takes it to a slightly more elevated level.

[969] It's not all that new.

[970] NASA developed one aspect of it in the 19th.

[971] 60s, and even so, it's not rocket science, it's just basically better brewing.

[972] But what you do is you brew microbes in vats, and out of those microbes you make a flower, which is just basically the dead bodies of the microbes, but it looks and feels just like flour.

[973] And the particular version of this I went to see in Helsinki, Finland, uses a soil bacterium called cupriavides necator, and the flour it produces is 60 % protein and 30 % fat.

[974] It's incredibly rich in protein and fat, more so than just about any other thing.

[975] And you can turn it into just about anything very, very simply.

[976] So this would be a Beyond Burger that was actually still animal protein and fat.

[977] Well, it's beyond Beyond Burger.

[978] So, you know, we're not talking about plant -based here.

[979] But I'm saying it tastes delicious like a hamburger.

[980] You can basically produce bacteria to produce any ingredient that you want to make into a protein or fat -rich food.

[981] And it'll be far better meat substitutes than the ones we're making out of plants.

[982] A lot of the plant -based meats are really quite disappointing because they have a long list of ingredients, super -processed.

[983] They're using things like coconut and soy, which have strong tastes and textures, and so they need to be hidden.

[984] And so you need all these ingredients to disguise those with.

[985] Whereas in this case, you can just turn out whatever proteins and fats you want, and they're there, they're ready.

[986] How scalable is it?

[987] How big can you make this?

[988] That's big as you want to make it.

[989] I mean, it's really simple.

[990] It's just a factory turning out protein.

[991] Much more scalable than livestock.

[992] I mean, in order to scale livestock, we've had to destroy off the surface of the planet.

[993] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[994] Have you eaten some of the products?

[995] Yeah, so I was the first person outside the lab in Helsinki to eat a pancake made from this flower.

[996] That's a small flip for man. Well, you slide your jokes.

[997] I mean, you throw it away, as we say in the comedy game.

[998] The amazing thing about this pancake was it tasted just like a pancake.

[999] But in order to get there, you had to reverse the process for making a pancake.

[1000] Your normal Western pancake is like you start off with wheat flour, right?

[1001] And it hasn't got enough protein in to make a pancake or fat.

[1002] And so you add the fat and protein in the form of eggs and milk, right?

[1003] But in this case, if we'd just cook this flour with water, we would have made an omelette because there's so much protein in it.

[1004] So you had to dilute it with wheat flour to make a pancake.

[1005] Oh, wow.

[1006] And it was just like a pancake.

[1007] I mean, it really, it tasted like one.

[1008] It had the same sort of succulents.

[1009] It was nice.

[1010] There's something about a very protein -rich food where you just want it.

[1011] It's like as soon as you smell that flour, it smells very much like eggs, right?

[1012] It's like scrambled egg is the smell you get.

[1013] And it's just, oh, that is good because we're really tuned into it, right?

[1014] The human brain just latches onto protein.

[1015] A million years.

[1016] Straight out of the vat, this is delicious, you know, but the things you can do with it, I mean, not only does it give you the potential to replace pretty well any animal product very quickly but also a whole lot of the damaging plant products like soy and palm oil and coconut which is the most damaging of all incidentally of plant products not as damaging as animal ones but also it's got the potential to trigger a whole new cuisine just like the agricultural revolution did in the Neolithic this could just transform the way we feed ourselves because we can create things which no one is thinking of just as the first farmers to domesticate a wild cow in the Neolithic, weren't thinking about Kamenbear.

[1017] Or how about the mestizo maize farmers imagining what happened to corn?

[1018] Oh, yeah, no, quite right.

[1019] We can't picture where this is going to go, but it is potentially transformed.

[1020] Oh, my God.

[1021] I am very excited about that one.

[1022] As someone who tries to have a 40 % protein diet, that could be unlimited.

[1023] Do you know how many grams of protein this pancake you had contained?

[1024] I don't, but I could work it out.

[1025] If the flour was like 50 % microbial, which probably was, and you've got 60 % of that.

[1026] So you've got like 30 % protein, which would be about right for a pancake.

[1027] And if a pancake wet weight is about 200 grams, so you're talking 68 grams?

[1028] Yeah, it's pretty good.

[1029] Oh, baby.

[1030] Oh, wow.

[1031] I am horny for this technology.

[1032] I cannot.

[1033] It's really cool.

[1034] It is.

[1035] And the thing is, it's so, so efficient.

[1036] You've got this modular production, so you've got potentially digital cost.

[1037] curves.

[1038] You've got a tiny land area producing a huge amount of product with a very small amount of water.

[1039] The feedstock, incidentally, for this outfit in Helsinki, is hydrogen.

[1040] That's what the bacteria.

[1041] Hydrogen -oxygenating bacteria.

[1042] So you basically just need electricity to make the hydrogen.

[1043] You know what you're saying about desalination.

[1044] This is actually much closer to the model, because you're talking about replacing a more valuable product than water.

[1045] Water is super cheap.

[1046] So to get to that level, you have to go many orders of magnitude further down the line than we've ever gone in any energy production.

[1047] But protein isn't nearly so cheap.

[1048] And so in order to undercut the cheapest source of protein on earth, which is soy, you're very nearly there, even in the lap.

[1049] And as soon as you start hitting those cost curves, which are going to be quite similar to digital cost curves, because this is modular production in a factory, you're going to see this very steep drop.

[1050] But listen, the really exciting thing is the land area.

[1051] If you were to do this all in one place, and I'm very much do not advocate that we do it that way because I want to see this as a highly distributed system.

[1052] But if you were, you could produce all the world's protein in an area the size of Greater London.

[1053] Oh, I find that impossible to believe, but that's so exciting.

[1054] Very.

[1055] Then you've got this potential, right, to rewild the world, to restore ecosystems across unimaginable, huge tracts of the planet's surface, to bring back the forest, to bring back the wetlands, to bring back the natural grasslands.

[1056] And in doing so, not only do you stop the sixth great extinction in its tracks, but you also draw down a great deal of the carbon dioxide we've already released into the atmosphere because the trees and the wetlands, they turn that into solid carbon.

[1057] Now, because we've left it so late, because we've been pissing about with this issue rather than tackling it head on, we now know that to prevent 1 .5 degrees centigrade of heating, 2 degrees, or even potentially more, it's not enough just to decarbonize our economies.

[1058] We need to do that.

[1059] We've got a vacuum as well.

[1060] Yeah, we have to draw down some of the carbon we've already produced.

[1061] And the quickest, most efficient, cheapest, and most benign way of doing that is ecological restoration because by doing that, you're also solving the crisis of ecological breakdown.

[1062] And you're pushing planetary systems back into their safe equilibrium space.

[1063] And so you've got this potential unleashed by precision fermentation, which goes beyond the potential of any other technology.

[1064] This is why I call it the most important environmental technology on Earth.

[1065] And we're only just beginning to grasp what this could do.

[1066] Oh, this is fascinating.

[1067] This is like when I heard about CRISPR the first time, I think.

[1068] This is Harry Potter.

[1069] Yeah, a little bit Harry Potter.

[1070] In the best way.

[1071] The Restoration Stories, hero might be fermentation of protein.

[1072] Wow, this has been like no other conversation we've had, George.

[1073] It's been so fascinating.

[1074] And I got to say, abnormally optimistic, given the subject matter and what we have to learn in the first half of the book, which is we're fucked.

[1075] And the second half is actually quite hopeful.

[1076] So I hope everyone reads Regenesis, feeding the world without devouring the planet.

[1077] And also read George in The Guardian where you're a columnist.

[1078] I assume you're still a columnist for the Guardian.

[1079] Yeah, yeah, they're still put up with me. And then if that doesn't slake your lust, check out his TED talk as I did.

[1080] It's been a pleasure.

[1081] I recognized, I don't know about you, Monica, but I did the math about three quarters of the way through this, conversation where I was like, oh, fuck, it's a lot later for George than it is for us.

[1082] You're barking on 10 p .m. over there or something?

[1083] Heading towards nine, but the issue at the back of my mind is the children.

[1084] They turn into vampires about this time.

[1085] I have seven and nine.

[1086] I hear you.

[1087] Please tend to your children.

[1088] Thanks for taking so much time.

[1089] Yeah, we really, really enjoyed it.

[1090] It's been a real pleasure.

[1091] I hope we get to talk to you again.

[1092] I'd love to.

[1093] Stay busy, stay loud.

[1094] Keep telling us the truth.

[1095] Oh, thanks, guys.

[1096] Really great to meet you both.

[1097] Bye -bye.

[1098] And now my favorite part of the show, the fact check with my soulmate Monica Padman.

[1099] Hello.

[1100] Hi.

[1101] Hi, boys.

[1102] Hi, Monica.

[1103] Hi.

[1104] How's it going over there in Birmingham?

[1105] That's the best.

[1106] We're having so much fun.

[1107] Tell me about it.

[1108] Went to a barbecue joint next door.

[1109] Ironically, in North Carolina.

[1110] style barbecue in Birmingham.

[1111] Of course, Ruthie's very upset, as she should be.

[1112] Yeah, she said, she's wanted to take me to Birmingham and show me all these places, all the food.

[1113] Yeah, so she's like, you go to Birmingham and go to a North Carolina barbecue.

[1114] Bad husband.

[1115] Yeah.

[1116] Then I think she was expecting us to say it was horrible, but it wasn't.

[1117] It was good.

[1118] Sure.

[1119] Well, I can understand.

[1120] If you guys were in Duluth right now, I'd be upset.

[1121] But what would we have to do in Duluth to piss you off?

[1122] Oh, we ate at White Castle instead of Chrissies.

[1123] Oh, big time.

[1124] Yeah.

[1125] Yeah, I get it.

[1126] I don't know what people could fuck up in Milford.

[1127] I'm not even sure that I'd care.

[1128] I think I'd just be sad.

[1129] I couldn't be there to take you around.

[1130] Yeah.

[1131] Well, funny enough, and I was even thinking, should Aaron and I have a stand -alone podcast exploring this?

[1132] Because I bet this is a male problem that needs to be addressed, which is, oh, this is a tough one.

[1133] There's something, and while it's just limited to us, too, I'm not going to speak for all males.

[1134] But there's something about your lady bringing new things to you, where you're like, no, I don't think I'm going to like this.

[1135] You already like this whole thing.

[1136] You're super into this show or you're super into this song or you know about this thing.

[1137] there's this terrible inclination we've been talking about it a lot where it's like why is it do we feel the need to go like I don't think I'm going to like that you think of even spades I was the last to join spades because you guys was already your thing and I'm like well I don't you know it's that you're all's thing and my I don't know I got to be original or I got to be the one yeah the stubbornness is oh way up there it's repulsive we've been bonding over it like what's wrong with us why because I was saying, oh, go ahead, you're going to what?

[1138] No, I was going to try to lend you some compassion, but I'm actually having a hard time.

[1139] Yes, the repugnant quality.

[1140] I do think it's pretty rough because there's nothing that you've ever said to me to try that I have been like, no, I don't like it.

[1141] I know.

[1142] I'll be like, oh, my God, this person I love and trust has this cool recommendation.

[1143] I'm definitely going to, I'm excited.

[1144] Yeah, at its core, I think, as he and I delved into it.

[1145] And by the way, I'm only bringing it up to say it's repugnant.

[1146] And then maybe some other dude out there is listening and go, oh, God, I do that, I do that too.

[1147] I don't know that it's gendered.

[1148] I think it's personality.

[1149] You're probably right.

[1150] It's probably personality.

[1151] So if you have this personality type, which I think at the core we explored honestly, which is like, oh, I think my value in a relationship is that I know what's happening and I'm going to be bringing you the cool stuff.

[1152] and if you're bringing me the cool stuff, then what purpose do I serve?

[1153] Am I even interesting?

[1154] Do you care about me?

[1155] Do you love me?

[1156] I think that's my role is the out in the world exploring shit to be able to report back.

[1157] It's very stupid.

[1158] I know.

[1159] I know.

[1160] I'm with you.

[1161] It's okay.

[1162] I'm glad you're being honest about it.

[1163] No, you're not stupid.

[1164] Those are real feelings.

[1165] But I think, you know, a goal should be, because when I, hear that i hear oh there's no respect sure the respect is only going one way and it should definitely be going both ways and i think both things can be happening like you can be giving great ideas and thoughts and and also you should be able to receive them it's also like how you define yourself like i think both of us stupidly were like we're into punk rock we're into all this alternative stuff and And if you like me, it's because I'm dabbling in this other world and I'm not mainstream.

[1166] I don't know.

[1167] It's twisted.

[1168] I don't think it's because either of us are bad people.

[1169] No. It's just a peculiar instinct to feel threatened that this person likes something.

[1170] And God, what if you don't or what if you don't get it?

[1171] I even was texting with Ruthie today and she had us go to this biscuit place.

[1172] Like, you have to go, you know, you have to get biscuits a block away.

[1173] After fucking up on the barbecue, we decided we've definitely got to do the biscuits tomorrow for Ruthie.

[1174] Sure.

[1175] Before we get out of this town.

[1176] So I got us a family -sized biscuits and gravy.

[1177] And after I went back to the room, we left because we thought, wow, that was a bad move for Dags to do before an interview.

[1178] Eat a fucking.

[1179] Oh, fuck.

[1180] A gravy boat.

[1181] Twelve biscuits in a bucket of gravy.

[1182] Yes, she said, so how was it?

[1183] And then I had to pause before I text it back because I thought, well, now where am I supposed to say?

[1184] It was the best biscuit I ever had, which wasn't true.

[1185] Okay, we're getting to the heart of it.

[1186] I like this.

[1187] I can lend compassion out because I know it's half.

[1188] you're afraid of letting someone down ultimately.

[1189] That's what's happening.

[1190] You're afraid that if you take in what they say, then it's up to you to then reinforce their love of it or feeling of it or whatever.

[1191] It's very codependent.

[1192] Yeah, it's kind of like when someone's staring at you open up a gift on Christmas.

[1193] You're just filled with anxiety like, God, damn, I hope, like I give the right reaction to this.

[1194] Yes.

[1195] Oh, I hope that's what it is.

[1196] I think ours is a little shittier, but I think it's also a combination of the thing.

[1197] That's what I'm hearing.

[1198] That's what I'm hearing about that conversation.

[1199] Like, you want to say the right thing.

[1200] And you're worried about saying the right thing instead of saying your truth, which is they were good.

[1201] Yeah.

[1202] Or whatever they were.

[1203] I don't know.

[1204] Well, yeah.

[1205] I ended up saying they weren't great and they weren't horrible.

[1206] I'm going to give you a D on this response.

[1207] No, that's your truth.

[1208] It's okay.

[1209] But I also said, don't take it personal.

[1210] Please, baby.

[1211] Yeah.

[1212] Because I thought that is my truth.

[1213] Like, wow, I'm not super impressed.

[1214] I would, you know.

[1215] But at the same time, she doesn't love Coney Islands like I do.

[1216] Exactly.

[1217] Exactly.

[1218] I also don't think that's, I mean, maybe that's her expectation, but maybe it's not.

[1219] Like, if I took you to the little diner in Duluth, I would not expect you to love it.

[1220] I think the fun is, I went here before, stay.

[1221] You know, this is a piece of my history, so it's fun to share.

[1222] Yeah.

[1223] Not that you have to take away that same thing.

[1224] I owe Ruthie a trip down here.

[1225] Yeah, I think she'd like that.

[1226] All of her places with her.

[1227] Yeah, that would be it.

[1228] Well, I think the two things that we both, like, we're in this conversation that we admitted was, so Ruthie was really excited about Dune coming out.

[1229] I remember.

[1230] I think we were all on a vacation together when that happened.

[1231] Yeah.

[1232] And she's counting down the days, and she had read the books.

[1233] And I can see where Aaron's already getting nervous, like, oh, God.

[1234] So, of course, Aaron felt when you fall asleep, like 20 minutes in.

[1235] And then you hated it.

[1236] He told me it's terrible, right?

[1237] So then I, despite that, and I put it off for a while, because I was like, I know Aaron hated it.

[1238] I bet I'll hate it.

[1239] I eventually watched it.

[1240] I was like, this movie is fantastic.

[1241] He loved it.

[1242] He loved it.

[1243] I'm thinking, well, I can give her some support for this.

[1244] But in blasting Aaron about it, I too, like, Kristen loved Tenacious D, right?

[1245] And she had a whole phase of her life where it was like, she listened to Tenacious D for over a year.

[1246] Well, then she had a new phase of it last year.

[1247] And then she was introducing the girls to it.

[1248] And the girls loved it.

[1249] They loved Tenacious D. Mind you, I love Jack Black.

[1250] Sure.

[1251] But I just felt, I guess, left out of this thing they were experiencing that I couldn't really, I couldn't latch onto it.

[1252] And then I felt on the outside of this thing.

[1253] And I came to not just not love tenacious deed, but then I was like, oh, I hate this.

[1254] I hate this album.

[1255] I hate when it's on.

[1256] When it's on in the car, I feel just very on the outside of the house looking at everyone.

[1257] It's ridiculous.

[1258] I have that, I think, because sometimes if something's happening, if everyone's like rallying around something, and I'm like, what is everyone doing?

[1259] Yes.

[1260] Like, there's something about it that feels kind of high school clicky.

[1261] Yep, yep.

[1262] Or that it's disingenuous that they even, you start questioning, they can't really like this thing this much.

[1263] That much.

[1264] No, they just have made it now a thing and they've made it a click.

[1265] And like, now, yes, now I hate that.

[1266] And I hate all of you guys who are participating because none of you have your own opinions.

[1267] And now I'm mad at everyone.

[1268] So, yes, I can totally relate.

[1269] Actually, I had a moment like that this weekend.

[1270] I won't tell the details, but I had that same thing.

[1271] And then I came on when I was like, this is, I'm, this is ridiculous, of me. Yeah, same.

[1272] Like, we're right now in the part of the timeline where we're like, this is a character defect of our, and neither was a proud of this.

[1273] We're just kind of like.

[1274] Talking it through.

[1275] Comforted by the fact that we're both shitty in this way.

[1276] It's human.

[1277] And that ideally we should definitely be embracing and supporting all things someone we love loves.

[1278] Yeah, but no one likes feeling left out.

[1279] As much as you think you are immune to that, I don't care about that.

[1280] It's vestigal.

[1281] Like, you'll die if you get left out.

[1282] Yeah, yeah.

[1283] And I won't be able to fake it.

[1284] Like, oh, this fear that I'm not going to be able to fake.

[1285] It'll be obvious.

[1286] I don't like it.

[1287] So now I'm mad at it at all.

[1288] Why is everyone else faking it?

[1289] They can't possibly like it.

[1290] Why are you so good at faking it?

[1291] Okay, well, that was the low point of our trip.

[1292] I mean, that was our exploring our, our character defects.

[1293] Is there anything you want to add to that before?

[1294] No, except for that it's always comforting to know somebody else is doing it too.

[1295] Yes.

[1296] Because I start to think, wow, you are an asshole.

[1297] Right, like a bad.

[1298] Yeah.

[1299] I'm a bad.

[1300] I'm a misanthrope.

[1301] Sure.

[1302] That has been the beauty of our friendship for 35 years.

[1303] I don't know that either of us said anything where the other person was like, Really?

[1304] I mean, maybe we're just bonded by our shittiness on some level, but I'd like to think we're growing and elevating the nice people.

[1305] Yeah.

[1306] I think you just give each other the full benefit of the Dow, and so there's never going to be that thought.

[1307] If only we could do that with everyone.

[1308] Yeah, everyone should get the Aaron Weekly treatment.

[1309] Like, if he comes...

[1310] I'd appreciate it.

[1311] Yeah.

[1312] I'd give you the gut.

[1313] What are you fucking talking about?

[1314] Some days, some days you do, some days you do.

[1315] If anyone's ever gotten the Aaron Weekly benefit of the doubt, it's my friend Monica.

[1316] Okay, now for that, the fun stuff.

[1317] Okay.

[1318] Okay, Aaron's Instagram message was the best.

[1319] I almost got emotional reading it.

[1320] It was so well said.

[1321] Oh, I loved it.

[1322] Do you read it?

[1323] Yes.

[1324] Yeah, I made me realize what's happening.

[1325] Like, I just have so much swollen heart this last few days, and I guess I didn't even think about the aspect that he and I have done this so many times.

[1326] And we've done it in a geometro.

[1327] We did it in a 84 Mustang.

[1328] We did it in a different geometro with an even worse color.

[1329] We slept in the car.

[1330] You know, we had a $3 Wendy's budget.

[1331] Yeah.

[1332] Peanut butter cookies.

[1333] Salami sandwiches with Doritos on them.

[1334] Just gerritos on white bread.

[1335] Yeah, cool rins sandwiches.

[1336] Side of ramen sometimes.

[1337] Yeah.

[1338] Yeah.

[1339] Yeah, so the fact that we're on this bus is, fucking comical for us we can really feel it it's so silly and incredible and awesome and you have to take moments out to talk to your wives like this is all lovely and your kids yeah we have to check each other on how to be good yeah yeah yeah it's nice it's really wonderful so we're having a great time um Aaron's taking lots of photos of me peeing while I drive the bus oh I should send you some I got a couple shots, two different peas.

[1340] One, you kind of don't know what's going on.

[1341] You're like, what are these two maybe up to?

[1342] Not just that, but why is Aaron involved?

[1343] And he's standing up while driving 85 miles an hour in that thing, peeing into a cup.

[1344] Both shots, they're, yeah, I looked at them this morning again, too, and I laughed so hard.

[1345] They're so worthy of people seeing, you know, there's no penis in them.

[1346] Okay, so it's PG.

[1347] It is.

[1348] It's PG -13.

[1349] Yeah, it is.

[1350] Ast -triques.

[1351] Ast -treaks in them.

[1352] Oh, my God.

[1353] How are you able to not get it everywhere while also driving?

[1354] Well, here's a neat thing is I've been peeing in the car forever, and I really know how to do that.

[1355] You just pull your penis out of the zipper, but you're holding the cup at quite an angle, and then the new task is like not letting it overflow because the cups at an angle.

[1356] Well, you have the freedom in Big Brown to stand up because the ceiling in it is taller than I am.

[1357] And then I was like, okay, well, it would be silly to do that old thing.

[1358] I should stand right up.

[1359] There's room to stand, but then I realized, oh, you can't really stand and drive with both, feet still in your pants.

[1360] So then I, the second go around, I just took my pants completely out.

[1361] So I am, you got to wonder what the other motorists are thinking, because I am nude from the waist down standing.

[1362] And I'm free then to just let gravity in the cup be vertical.

[1363] It's the best in -root peen I've ever had.

[1364] Big Brown only stops for diesel.

[1365] That's the only thing it stops for.

[1366] It doesn't stop to pee.

[1367] It doesn't stop for food.

[1368] It stops for diesel.

[1369] That's when it stops.

[1370] What about Haanis?

[1371] Well, Aaron's free to Haanis in the head while we're driving.

[1372] Yeah, we've had a few ideas.

[1373] I think we can figure out how Dex can shit in there.

[1374] I might have to play a part in it, but we also thought about a five -gallon bucket between us, and we're both peeing.

[1375] At the same time.

[1376] Yeah, we figured we'd have to set up a tripod for the picture because it would just be so amazing going that fast on the freeway.

[1377] We're both standing up being.

[1378] Which I just sent you the pig, so please.

[1379] Oh.

[1380] It hasn't come through yet.

[1381] I'm waiting.

[1382] Okay, but you got to be a little careful.

[1383] Well, also, I know.

[1384] You actually don't because you don't care.

[1385] You don't care who sees your penis or anything.

[1386] But.

[1387] Oh, shit.

[1388] I sent it to the other, Monica.

[1389] Oh.

[1390] Oh, okay, well, you're good for her.

[1391] Talk about something out of context.

[1392] Yeah.

[1393] Oh, God.

[1394] What a fucking text or is he?

[1395] All right, let me explain this.

[1396] Let me just do some damage control.

[1397] Someone today brought my postmates, and I normally don't ever open the door.

[1398] But I did because I thought it was Liz.

[1399] So I opened the door and he dropped the food and then he looked at me and he said, I know who you are.

[1400] And I was like, oh, okay.

[1401] And then I was like, oh, no. Like I, you had a safety concern.

[1402] It was like who I am, where I live.

[1403] And I didn't.

[1404] So then I'm just saying for you with your penis out in the car.

[1405] Yeah.

[1406] You know, just people might, not my, definitely know who you are.

[1407] What the probably bigger fear is almost a legal one slash a public relations one, which is if you just saw this, you'd have to conclude.

[1408] Like if I saw this, right, Aaron, if we saw this on the road, we go, this guy's trying to show his penis to everyone that.

[1409] That's what it looks like.

[1410] Wow.

[1411] We sent it to Charlie immediately and he said, I do not know what's going to.

[1412] going on in this photo.

[1413] Because in the first one, you can't see the cup.

[1414] See, the second one, this is a little maddening.

[1415] I probably didn't say it out loud, but I've said enough throughout my life to Dex.

[1416] But the cup is down there on the seat.

[1417] That's the beauty of having a large penis, too.

[1418] Like, it just fucking is hanging down and peeing into that cup.

[1419] Like mine standing up would still have to be up.

[1420] I know.

[1421] I'm not confirming they're denying that aspect of the story.

[1422] Oh, my God.

[1423] Aaron, do you see in the second picture the hand rest is going straight up Dax's butt?

[1424] Nope.

[1425] The armrest, the armrest.

[1426] It does almost look like a sexual.

[1427] All right, so yeah, back to what another motorist would think.

[1428] It looks like a crazy person driving an RV trying to show the people in front of him his penis because no one else could see it.

[1429] is unless you looked in your rearview mirror.

[1430] Mind you, we're not even close enough to anyone to be in the rearview mirror.

[1431] But additionally, yeah, if you saw your trucker on the side, you would think I was sitting on that armrests over and over again.

[1432] Back and forth.

[1433] And funny enough, I'm constantly on the lookout in other trucks and other vehicles to find something going on.

[1434] That would be similar.

[1435] Half as funny as that, like that would be from a stranger's point of view.

[1436] The fucking best ever.

[1437] I can just imagine the two of you seeing someone doing that.

[1438] You would not stop laughing before 18 hours.

[1439] It'd be the greatest thing that could ever happen to us.

[1440] Yeah, like we wouldn't be upset.

[1441] We would be grateful immediately.

[1442] Oh, you'd love it.

[1443] Yeah, first you'd just be like, why is that guy driving that semi standing up?

[1444] Oh my God, his pants are off.

[1445] Is he pooping?

[1446] Yeah, it would be so exciting.

[1447] David Ferrier said the other day that you get away with so much.

[1448] Me. Because of your charm.

[1449] Oh, wow.

[1450] I wonder what he was thinking of specifically.

[1451] It was when you were talking, you talk, you use the phrase spraying my eggs.

[1452] Oh.

[1453] Like who's going to spray my eggs?

[1454] And then I said it.

[1455] I said, maybe that person can spray my egg.

[1456] And he was like, what?

[1457] And I was like, oh, that's Dax's thing.

[1458] And then he said, oh, my God, he gets away with so much.

[1459] Okay, that makes sense.

[1460] The other thing, I guess the other update was that we saw two AVett Brothers shows back -to -back in Indianapolis.

[1461] How was it?

[1462] So good.

[1463] It was so fun.

[1464] And it's so, again, talking about like addressing our shittiness, having gratitude for the fact that we're sober on this trip, that we are nice to the people we meet and that we're not owing people apologies.

[1465] All in keeping of that, I think we're also open to this, you know, there's all these beautiful lyrics in those songs.

[1466] One of them being, he sings his boy's strong like a trussle.

[1467] You know that song?

[1468] His baby was just boring.

[1469] He said, I want to kiss you on the forehead.

[1470] And we're, you know, like, we're in up a spot in life where it's like, hey, I want to kiss you on the forehead.

[1471] And I'm fucking crying.

[1472] They're murder in the city.

[1473] Never forget.

[1474] The only thing we're sharing is the love that lets us share our name.

[1475] Fucking crying.

[1476] Yeah.

[1477] I like this place.

[1478] Yeah.

[1479] We're ready.

[1480] Then we were talking about Metallica.

[1481] I didn't know this, but Aaron was telling me that James Hatfield had like a kind of a mental.

[1482] I wouldn't want to call it breakdown.

[1483] I didn't even see it.

[1484] But he had a, he stopped a show to say he was suffering so much.

[1485] He had a moment.

[1486] He had a vulnerable moment.

[1487] Yeah.

[1488] We didn't even know.

[1489] Now we have a lead singer, which gives us no job because we were going to be the lead singers and the vulnerable boys.

[1490] But now James Hatfield can't be singing.

[1491] But Aaron was saying it was really cool because the audience's reaction was really positive in embracing of it.

[1492] We were saying, well, yeah, you probably don't find yourself at a Metallica show because you're happy, go lucky.

[1493] Everything's going great.

[1494] Yeah, like it's an outlet for this.

[1495] I don't know.

[1496] And now we're ready for the Avert brothers and sharing love and kissing your babies on the head.

[1497] Yeah, we're both happy with the direction.

[1498] Yeah.

[1499] The days of the days of guys peeing while they drive a motor home are ending.

[1500] You know, like there's only a few of us loved out there.

[1501] I'm not so sure about that.

[1502] So that's our update.

[1503] Oh, I do have to say this.

[1504] So many wonderful and beautiful armcherrys responded to us with really generous offers.

[1505] Unfortunately, everyone I've read is they've all been properties in the north.

[1506] They're not on our path.

[1507] Yeah.

[1508] Everywhere I read about.

[1509] And now we're so far south.

[1510] I didn't see anyone.

[1511] We're now, we're going to hit Mobile, Alabama today.

[1512] We're going to stay at an RV park by the water.

[1513] Then we're going to head over to Austin.

[1514] And so we're kind of dialed now.

[1515] I'm so glad you brought that up.

[1516] I wanted to figure out a way, too, to say thank you.

[1517] Oh, they were such beautiful, kind, inviting messages.

[1518] That's so nice.

[1519] Yeah, we just powered through a shit ton of states quickly.

[1520] Yeah.

[1521] If you're going to fire up the bus, you've got to put at least five.

[1522] 500 miles behind you.

[1523] You know, we did 900 one day and we did 500 yesterday.

[1524] Wow.

[1525] Wow, wow, wow, wow.

[1526] Well, that's the rule.

[1527] Monica, do you, is there anything you want to update Aaron?

[1528] You know, Monica had our eggs harvested yesterday.

[1529] Oh, I've been following.

[1530] Okay.

[1531] I'm proud of you.

[1532] Yeah.

[1533] Yeah, I'm very proud of you.

[1534] And I don't know if you read any comments, Moni, but the episode where you started crying over Delta, people really loved and they were very with you.

[1535] you and fell you.

[1536] So I hope you know that.

[1537] That was very sweet.

[1538] Yeah, I love her.

[1539] Yeah, and just, you know, we love you.

[1540] Everyone loves you.

[1541] Everyone, that's nice.

[1542] Last thing I want to add, because Aaron was doing cameos while we were together, and I was popping in some of them, you know.

[1543] Yeah, that's exciting.

[1544] I love hearing him do his cameos, because we'll be in the bus, and I'm in back doing God knows what, and I just hear, hey, Jen.

[1545] I'm thinking, he doesn't know a Jen.

[1546] Hey, Abigail.

[1547] I'm like, Aaron's got a friend now for all that Abigail.

[1548] So many female friends he's got.

[1549] This guy's got a lot of female friends for a married dude.

[1550] And then I put it together and they're so fun to listen to.

[1551] So, of course, I encourage everyone to get a fun cameo from Aaron because he's so good at them.

[1552] Oh, thank you.

[1553] And I might pop into them.

[1554] You never know who will pop in.

[1555] You just don't know.

[1556] You never know who I'll be with.

[1557] Yeah.

[1558] I was going to ask you guys something, and now I have forgotten.

[1559] It's my birthday tomorrow.

[1560] Oh, I know.

[1561] Big day, 824, 824 -8 -7.

[1562] 8 -4 -8 -7.

[1563] 35.

[1564] Stay alive.

[1565] Got to stay alive.

[1566] That's the name of the game from here on out.

[1567] Oh, God.

[1568] It's just, yeah, you're right.

[1569] struggle to stay alive for the next however long.

[1570] Okay, so we have some facts.

[1571] I found myself repeating this one to people much higher than normal.

[1572] I found it so, like, encouraging.

[1573] Didn't he say, he said there was four phyla of bacteria that grow around the roots of the plants to make them work, and they're the exact same phyla that's in your gut?

[1574] Yes, it was pretty fascinating.

[1575] And when we were recording this, I was lost.

[1576] Like, I really was like, oh, no, I don't understand any of this.

[1577] You obviously did.

[1578] You were keeping up, but I wasn't.

[1579] And then listening back, I was able to.

[1580] So if you guys, this might be a two -listen episode.

[1581] Oh, okay.

[1582] And it's worth it.

[1583] It's worth it because it is really interesting.

[1584] Oh, I thought it was like, everything's bad news.

[1585] You only hear bad news.

[1586] And this dude had like three pieces of very encouraging news.

[1587] It's rare that those come across the wire.

[1588] I felt optimistic.

[1589] You know, he's just so smart.

[1590] Mm -hmm.

[1591] Okay.

[1592] Does population growth happen most in poorest parts of the world communities?

[1593] Yes, the world's poorest countries have some of the fastest growing populations.

[1594] The population of low -income countries located mostly in sub -Saharan Africa is projected almost to double in size between 2020.

[1595] and 2050, accounting for most of the global increase expected by the end of the century.

[1596] Mm -hmm.

[1597] Mm -hmm.

[1598] That was another thing we didn't see eye to eye on.

[1599] He thought population was moot, not even worth chatting about because it's already projected to go down.

[1600] Yeah, he says it's at 1%.

[1601] That's a fact, too.

[1602] Yeah, population growth is the increase in a number of people in a population or dispersed group.

[1603] Global human population growth amounts to around 83 million.

[1604] annually or 1 .1 % per year.

[1605] Still feels like there's too many people here.

[1606] All right.

[1607] Yeah.

[1608] 8 billion is a lot of people.

[1609] Yeah, but.

[1610] We could probably get by with four.

[1611] Okay.

[1612] In the past we did.

[1613] But some of those people are people you know.

[1614] No, I'm not saying that we should call the herd.

[1615] I'm just saying in the future.

[1616] In a dream world where people didn't reproduce more than themselves.

[1617] That would be good for the planet, I'd guess.

[1618] I mean.

[1619] Well, yeah.

[1620] Because you already made kids, so it's kind of unfair for you to say it.

[1621] Because you also say that's the most fulfilling thing that you've done.

[1622] Yeah, I guess my argument would be against a dozen kids.

[1623] I guess that's what I don't want to offend anyone in the audience.

[1624] Yeah, we've got to be careful.

[1625] So, yeah.

[1626] I guess a lot of people aren't having kids.

[1627] So if you have a dozen, everything's groovy.

[1628] I don't want to have this fight with anyone, but.

[1629] We're not fighting.

[1630] Yeah, not you.

[1631] I know, but I'm just in the world.

[1632] We're not fighting.

[1633] Okay, lactose intolerance by race.

[1634] African American and Asian ethnicities see a 75 % to 95 % lactose intolerance rate, while Northern Europeans have a lower rate at 18 % to 26 % lactose intolerance.

[1635] Yeah.

[1636] And I'm Asian, as we know.

[1637] But, but you're not.

[1638] By the way, I don't think Indians follow the trend of...

[1639] Really?

[1640] No, I don't.

[1641] I mean, I would need to look that up to...

[1642] really say it out loud, but I'm looking at it.

[1643] I actually don't think they are nearly as lactose intolerant as, say, Chinese or Japanese people.

[1644] Okay, I found it.

[1645] Almost 60 to 65 % of people in India are lactose and intolerant.

[1646] Boom.

[1647] That's a huge difference.

[1648] 60 to 90?

[1649] It's still a lot, though.

[1650] No, you're directly between Europeans and Asians.

[1651] 90, 30, and 60.

[1652] Well, was it 90?

[1653] It was 75 to 95.

[1654] That's because you included Africans.

[1655] I said that in the episode.

[1656] Africans are 75%.

[1657] Asians are 90%.

[1658] Oh my God.

[1659] Yeah, if you had just done Asians, it would have given you 90%.

[1660] Okay, I'm doing it.

[1661] Okay, let's see.

[1662] That's wild.

[1663] Yeah.

[1664] It's like turned into a game show.

[1665] There are likely to be at least 40 times more people suffering from lactose intolerance in an Asian country like Vietnam than in a northern European country like Denmark.

[1666] In fact, in fact, an estimated 90 to 100 % of adults in East Asia and 80 % in Central Asia have an impaired ability to digest lactose.

[1667] Dax is right.

[1668] Dax, you are right.

[1669] One more piece of proof that you're not Asian.

[1670] I'm so sorry.

[1671] A hundred percent you'd be lactose intolerant.

[1672] I am lactose intolerant.

[1673] I drink oat milk.

[1674] I do.

[1675] I have honest when I eat ice cream and milk.

[1676] To sign a great health, as you know.

[1677] I know.

[1678] I take it.

[1679] You could type in what percentage of Europeans have Hannis Ria weekly?

[1680] Ooh, weekly, ding, ding, ding.

[1681] Aaron Weekly, 100 % of the week.

[1682] My daughters just told me they start school next week.

[1683] I heard them talking together.

[1684] I wonder if Hannis Rias is going to be on the bus.

[1685] And I'm like, wait a second.

[1686] No, no, no. I said, what?

[1687] I said, his name is Honest Rias?

[1688] And they said, no, his name is Hanas, but we call him Hanas Rias.

[1689] But not to his face.

[1690] Oh, no. Oh, no. Oh, their sisters, they got to have some inside jokes.

[1691] I guess, to be fair, also, like, he wouldn't even know.

[1692] That's a made -up work.

[1693] Right.

[1694] Right.

[1695] They're like, you're Honest Rias.

[1696] You're like, okay.

[1697] What is that?

[1698] It's an Egyptian term for something?

[1699] What is that?

[1700] Scientific term?

[1701] It means diarrhea according to my dad and his best friend.

[1702] Oh, my God.

[1703] My 12 -year -old dad and his 12 -year -old buddy.

[1704] They're on a road trip, but they're peeing standing up.

[1705] They think they're still in high school.

[1706] Okay.

[1707] Okay, Dax, can you tell us, because you guys talked about desalinization in water.

[1708] And you guys were talking as if everyone knows what that is.

[1709] It's like Ukiang, like we think we know, but when we start trying to explain it, we don't.

[1710] So can you explain it, please?

[1711] Yeah, and I don't know that I'm going to be right on this, by the way.

[1712] I don't know this as well as I know the helicopter thing.

[1713] But in general, to get the salt out of the water, you have to boil the water so that it, then evaporates and then it recaptures it above it.

[1714] And the only thing that makes it to the recapture is just H2O.

[1715] There's no sodium in it anymore.

[1716] So then what comes out of that process is salt -free water.

[1717] So you can take the salt out of seawater.

[1718] It's just incredibly energetically costly because you have to boil mass amounts of water or heat it to some degree where it's going to, you know, turn into just H -2 -0.

[1719] But they do it on a grand scale in Israel already.

[1720] That's how they're getting all their water.

[1721] Yeah, that was one of the other things he and I didn't totally agree with.

[1722] I mean, I think that's everything.

[1723] That's our biggest problem right now is water.

[1724] And the fact that we aren't ramping up to have 60 deselenization plants along the Western Coast and Eastern and the Gulf is a little crazy to me because we have a solution.

[1725] We also have a nuclear option.

[1726] But we don't have energy for it.

[1727] Right.

[1728] It just would take so much energy.

[1729] And right now, as much as California even has solar and wind, it's still predominantly either coal -fired or natural gas -fired generators that make all of our current electricity.

[1730] One of the hiccups is like, oh, I have an electric car.

[1731] You do.

[1732] And it's generated by a coal -fired.

[1733] You know, none of it's great yet.

[1734] That's why people have to get on board and start embracing nuclear energy, the kind that our friend, Bill Gates has created where it can't melt down and it runs on previous nuclear waste because once you have that, that needs to boil water anyways because that boils water that turns steam power generators to make the electricity.

[1735] So there is, in theory, you could be spitting out fresh water off of that process.

[1736] He said 1 % of the planet's surface is urban.

[1737] What I see is in 2010, the global urban land was close to 3%.

[1738] So we might have underestimated that.

[1739] Yeah, but that was 2010.

[1740] Maybe they got rid of some, got rid of some.

[1741] No, they didn't.

[1742] I think that was a little bit of an underestimation.

[1743] He said there's not a single river in England that's in good chemical condition.

[1744] That is true.

[1745] Those are my facts.

[1746] Those are good facts.

[1747] We've been watching alone.

[1748] Ah, aha.

[1749] I guess that was one update we missed is that I just need to publicly applaud Aaron's heroism.

[1750] Heroism.

[1751] Oh, we definitely have to talk about this.

[1752] Yes, because it also involves you.

[1753] But how do you say that word?

[1754] Is it heroism?

[1755] Heroism.

[1756] Heroism.

[1757] Yeah, you change it to an A. That's so weird.

[1758] I got to applaud Aaron's heroism because he handled the two different mice we caught on the bus.

[1759] That's so funny.

[1760] I was saying, what have I done?

[1761] Besides sit there.

[1762] No, I was super impressed.

[1763] You handled those little baby mice.

[1764] You know that was me. I know.

[1765] That's the only thing that got him through it is just thinking, well, Monica's also a mini -mouse and I'm not afraid of her.

[1766] Yeah, I was like, these are Monica's eggs.

[1767] Baby Monicas.

[1768] Oh my gosh.

[1769] Tell us about it.

[1770] Well, I posted two videos.

[1771] So if you wanted to see what that looked like, it was pretty funny.

[1772] And what I need to say is that Aaron, too, is very afraid of the mice like I am.

[1773] But the part that was probably funniest, which was not captured on film was first night we slept in the bus together I heard a goddamn bag of ruffles being opened in the middle of the night and at the front of the bus and I'm in the back of the bus and Aaron's at the front sleeping and I'm like fucking Aaron took off his breathing mask and he's now he's 3 a .m. He's like pounding ruffles and I was kind of like you know a little concerned about that I'm disappointed I would have felt more sad like oh he's struggling with something now he's eating those whole bag of ruffles in the middle night anyways and then I woke in the morning and I was like do you were you pounding no ruffles and he's like no I didn't fuck with no ruffles and I'm like oh then there is a mouse because I heard one the night before I thought I heard one by my trash can then and then Aaron you had heard I heard something too yeah I just like little scurries I just really I didn't know that even thought that there maybe was a mouse but yeah I thought oh these are some weird noises here that's is eating ruffles next to me so when we woke up we put all this together and we were like okay well there's definitely a mouse on the bus we got to get traps so we we got these traps Aaron went in by himself to the to the hardware store and he came and I was even thinking God I hope he gets the kind that doesn't smash it because I don't think ethical things aside I didn't want guts so anyways he came out with one that he traps oh great We're optimistic that might work.

[1774] We put it out.

[1775] And then we're lying on Aaron's bed, the bed in the front of the bus, when we're watching alone, and we're both up there crunching on our chips and stuff.

[1776] And I don't know why I glanced to my left and fucking there he was.

[1777] On the bed?

[1778] No, right under the bed we're laying in.

[1779] I look at it, I see him and I go, oh, my God, Aaron, he's here.

[1780] And then he fucking shot under the counter of the bus.

[1781] Then under the dionette, then Aaron goes, he's climbing the wall.

[1782] There was a broom leaned against the wall, and this guy ran up the broom.

[1783] And then we were like, oh, fuck, he can get on us for sure in the middle of the night.

[1784] Oh, my God.

[1785] And then Aaron goes, oh, my God, I feel like the elephant that's afraid of the mouse.

[1786] And there we were, yeah.

[1787] Two grown men, 500 pounds of human.

[1788] terrified that this little mouse was going to crawl up.

[1789] We both thought he was going to crawl up our, like, the pants of our legs.

[1790] It's just so fast.

[1791] Lightning fast.

[1792] In fact, when he went from under the bed to under the cabinet to under the dynet, one second, I actually thought there were several now running around.

[1793] Oh, God, ew.

[1794] Did you guys see poops?

[1795] That's the first indicator.

[1796] No?

[1797] I didn't see any poops.

[1798] Wow.

[1799] Kristen had, this is a thing.

[1800] She was hip, but there was a mouse a week before, and I was like, there's no mouse on the bus.

[1801] I was just afraid the girls were going to be panicked, so I'm forcing myself to, you know, I'm a gas litter.

[1802] This is a circle back to the beginning of this episode.

[1803] That's right.

[1804] I gas litter and said, there's no way there's a mouse on the bus.

[1805] How would it get here, blah, blah, blah.

[1806] And by God, she was right, because she had seen poop.

[1807] She saw poop.

[1808] She saw some poop.

[1809] But until we decide there's a mouse on the bus.

[1810] That's not true.

[1811] Oh, you guys have been walking around and poop.

[1812] Okay, so.

[1813] I can relate, as everyone knows.

[1814] I've had a house.

[1815] Absolutely, you just went through this.

[1816] You lived this.

[1817] So things darting all around the motorhome, and then we're like, well, we have the trap out, and it's got a tootsie roll in there.

[1818] It's got a nice piece of Colby Jack cheese.

[1819] We were like, we don't know if he's got a sweet tooth or a savory tooth.

[1820] Let's put both in there.

[1821] And then all of a sudden, Aaron goes, we got him!

[1822] he's in there and I'm like oh fuck now what yeah I was like well what the fuck now do we put here just pick this thing up yeah well he run out of the little trap so as you saw in the video then Aaron expertly and humanely and bravely releases this little guy little guy runs directly at me first order of business is to run at me and I think I can feel it going up my pant leg on my thigh into my anus like that's we concluded the ultimate fears that thing somehow runs into your anus to find safety.

[1823] That didn't happen.

[1824] He went out and do a field next day.

[1825] He got a second one.

[1826] And this one was kind of broke our heart because he had peed on himself in there.

[1827] Yeah, they peed and pooped and, like, turned into Honest.

[1828] Yeah.

[1829] And he was just drenched and sweat, I assume.

[1830] In the trap?

[1831] Well, yeah, I think he was, we probably got.

[1832] He got him during the night while we were sleeping and didn't know it in the morning.

[1833] He probably had a lot of time in that.

[1834] Someone, Dax filmed that one, or both of us thought, oh, no, he's dead.

[1835] Yeah, we were waiting to drop it out.

[1836] But then he ran out.

[1837] He did, yeah.

[1838] The video didn't show just what bad of shape he was.

[1839] We were in a bad mood for like an hour after.

[1840] It took the Ava Brothers show to get us back on track after that little guy was.

[1841] Oh, that's sweet.

[1842] You guys are so mixed messages.

[1843] It's like first you're gaslighting Kristen and then you're sad about the mouse.

[1844] It's like, that's a lot.

[1845] Yeah, we were very sad about the mouse.

[1846] Yeah, then we thought, should we just let them back and...

[1847] Yeah.

[1848] Get over ourselves.

[1849] Like, how bad is it?

[1850] So would eat some ruffles in the middle of the night?

[1851] And also there's the notion that he started showing himself to us felt inviting and like he was ready to...

[1852] Yeah, he didn't go for that Tutsueroon cheese for like we were gone all day out of that bus.

[1853] Yeah.

[1854] And he waited until we got back and wanted to join the party.

[1855] So we thought, maybe he just wants a party.

[1856] Yeah.

[1857] And we had an idea.

[1858] Where was he going to poop?

[1859] We were going to put something out, I forget.

[1860] Yeah, we were going to put an oatmeal lid.

[1861] Bob's Red Mill upside down.

[1862] And maybe he'd just poop in there.

[1863] And also we figured he was going to sleep on the carpet now that we're friends.

[1864] That's more comfortable.

[1865] We would just see him snoozing when we woke up.

[1866] And we go, go use the bathroom, we need to go into the lid for a little pee -pee and poop.

[1867] Be a good boy and go in your circle.

[1868] You're very cute.

[1869] But now you know, because I feel like when I had my mouse, you were pretty judgmental about my behavior.

[1870] Well, I don't know.

[1871] Okay.

[1872] Yeah, you want me to become friends with it.

[1873] I did.

[1874] I did.

[1875] I did.

[1876] Instead of getting it out of my apartment.

[1877] I'm doing anything to you.

[1878] I'm not, I didn't then do to myself.

[1879] I too thought we should become friends with it.

[1880] I'm just saying, like, it's okay to not want a mouse in your space.

[1881] Like, it's okay.

[1882] Right, yeah, yeah, that's fair.

[1883] I also, yeah, you're right, there's no difference.

[1884] I was going to say he was eating some of the bus.

[1885] He was eating, he ate some of Aaron's sheets.

[1886] That's how Kristen discovered it.

[1887] Yeah.

[1888] Some of the sheets were eating.

[1889] Yeah, they eat stuff and they poop and they have bacteria.

[1890] In a pinch, they can just eat a vegetable.

[1891] sheet, which is crazy.

[1892] Oh, my goodness.

[1893] Okay.

[1894] Well, I love you guys.

[1895] Oh, we love you.

[1896] It was so fun to all check in.

[1897] It was.

[1898] And you guys are good people.

[1899] Oh, thank you, Monica.

[1900] You are.

[1901] You're a very good person.

[1902] We're out here trying to do good work.

[1903] It's doing the Lord's work.

[1904] Heavenly Father's work.

[1905] You're doing great.

[1906] All right, well, have a wonderful rest of your trip.

[1907] Okay, we will.

[1908] Bye.

[1909] Bye.

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