Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
[00:00:14] Speaker B: Hello, welcome to Call It Like I See it, presented by Disruption Now, I'm James Keys, and in this episode of Call It Like I See it, we're going to take a look at a couple of unprecedented weather events that have been happening over the past few weeks and discuss an argument that we've seen pop up from time to time on why it has been so hard to get people on the same page as far as avoiding climate catastrophes.
We'll also react to science fiction again, invading real life with the recent announcement that scientists have cloned a ferret from genes that came from a donor animal that died over 30 years ago.
Joining me today is a man who, now that he has his money. Right. You can't tell him nothing. Right?
Tunde. Ogonlana. Tunde. Excuse me, bro, but were you saying something?
[00:01:10] Speaker A: Yeah, man, I'll never take that type of action no matter how much money I make. You can always tell me something, sir.
[00:01:16] Speaker B: Hey, there we go. There we go.
That's good to hear, man.
[00:01:19] Speaker A: I make sure I stay grounded.
[00:01:21] Speaker B: I'd be in a bad place if that wasn't the case.
[00:01:23] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. We wouldn't be good partners for sure on a show like this.
That's actually. Then I'll say this. You humble me, sir.
[00:01:34] Speaker B: Well, thank you, sir. Thank you.
[00:01:35] Speaker A: My weekly humility.
I'll go back to my grandiosity the other six days of the week.
[00:01:41] Speaker B: There we go.
[00:01:42] Speaker A: Anyway, go ahead. Sorry.
[00:01:44] Speaker B: Now we're recording this on July 5, 20, 20, 21, and it's summertime in the Northern Hemisphere and we're seeing record temperatures and electrical grids being strained in many, many places and even roads melting and so forth. And a lot of us are being left to wonder whether this is just another anomaly or part of a progression to something that could end up being much worse or in fact, just a new normal. Just what summertime means now. Now that we're feeling the effects of global warming just more acutely. So to start us off, Tunde, seeing things like the unprecedented heat wave that we had out west in the United States and also in Canada, and fires that come up in its wake or associated or just otherwise, what has stood out to you in these latest examples of the warming that is happening in the world?
[00:02:42] Speaker A: Good question. As you asked the question, what stands out? I think something that I saw on the news the other day, which was they were talking about this is the thousand year kind of event, you know?
[00:02:56] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:02:56] Speaker A: And I started, I was thinking in my head, wow, for the last decade I've been Hearing that this is the once in a hundred year event. This is the once in a hundred year flood or the fire or, or the storm.
And then two years later, oh, this is like the other once in a hundred years, meaning we had like 100 year events or every 500 year events until about 20 years ago, and now we're having like every 50 years.
So I think that's kind of what stands out to me actually in this moment is that it's kind of, it's like the severity of this stuff and I feel like the compound effect. And we talked about this offline a bit, which is.
It's kind of getting a little bit worrisome that it seems like it's getting drier and hotter. And then there's more fires which burn more, you know, foliage, you know, trees and all that, which are the number one things that can suck up the CO2, because that's what they breathe. Yeah. And, and it just, you know, I, at some point there's a feedback loop
[00:03:57] Speaker B: there that you're on the wrong side of.
[00:04:00] Speaker A: Yeah. And that sort of kind of stands out to me. I guess the second part is like this term that I've been thinking of this last week as I've been reading and preparing for today and taking all of this environmental information in which is equilibrium.
And we've used this term a lot in different conversations, the term ecosystem. Right. There's financial ecosystems, there's the ecosystem within our gut, you know, the microbiome type of thing. But then there's the traditional ecosystem, which is the kind of planet the world, animals, nature and how they all relate together. And I think, you know, there's like
[00:04:33] Speaker B: a code, there's a codependency that.
[00:04:36] Speaker A: Correct.
[00:04:36] Speaker B: We oftentimes don't know. That we take for granted. I guess I would say.
[00:04:39] Speaker A: Yeah, that's a great way to put it that we take it for granted.
And I think what's happening is the changes that are happening more rapidly. Maybe this is what I get concerned about now is like this equilibrium may, may break and then things start to spiral out of control. Like a tipping point. Yeah. And that's what I'm saying. Like the equilibrium between the amount of trees and, you know, humans. Right. Breathing in oxygen in and exhaling CO2 and the trees breathing in CO2, for example.
You know, that equilibrium seems to not be the same after all these years of fires because, I mean, we know about the ones in California. We focus obviously more on our own country and our media.
[00:05:19] Speaker B: We did a show on the ones In Australia a while ago.
[00:05:22] Speaker A: And then the Amazon is what worries me.
[00:05:24] Speaker B: Amazon, the ones in Russia, Siberia, Arctic Circle.
[00:05:28] Speaker A: I think the Amazon alone, just the Amazon in Brazil alone accounts for about 25% of the world's oxygen. So if that continues to get eroded, it's scary. So, yeah, I guess a lot of things start out more than I thought.
[00:05:41] Speaker B: Well, what, where you started was what stood out to me. It's the degree of change. Like when they're saying when these, like these, this heat wave that hit the west coast or, you know, the west and United States and in Canada, and they're saying, okay, well, our average temperature is, and talking Fahrenheit is 50 degrees less than this. Like, the temperatures they're seeing, they're record temperatures, but they're so much higher than the average that it's just like, I mean, we live in South Florida. Like, if we go 50 degrees over our average temperatures, you're talking in the mid-00, like 140 or something like that. Like. And obviously the climate is different here than it is there in terms of how hot it'll get or whatever, at least, hopefully. But the fact that you can go that much higher, and this isn't saying it's 50 degrees higher than it would be in the winter, this is 50 degrees higher than it would be than on average it is at this time of year in these places. And so that, to me, there's something there that to me is a warning sign. And I think to kind of put it in context on why it's such a concern and this goes into. I kind of would piggyback on what you're saying as far as the kind of like an equilibrium type of situation is.
This is the kind of pain. We've talked about this. I know you're a big, big believer in this. Just that people need to feel pain oftentimes in order to be spurred into action. Particularly when action involves things that are uncomfortable or things that are not. They're not accustomed to doing, doing different things. People need to feel uncomfortable, feel a level of discomfort in order to be spurred into doing that. At least in mass, like you have early adopters and you have people that can react more quickly, but in mass, people need to feel the pain. Well, the concern, I think, and this is kind of the well established concern though, but the concern is that, well, by the time enough people wake up and say, hey, we should probably adjust our behavior so that we're not continually adding to this feedback loop and ideally we can reverse this feedback loop where things Keep getting worse.
By the time that happens, we may be out of options, or our options where we can actually make a change may be very limited, and it'll require even more sacrifice than it would be if we can get to it sooner.
And so that's when I see things like the degree that we're dealing with now, where roads can't even stand up to it, where cities are saying, again, looking at the whole Northern hemisphere and other parts of the world, they're saying, hey, look, don't run any. Or I know this was happening in New York also, but just don't run major appliances. Don't run your washer, you know, because we're trying to hold the electric grid together. And if everybody's running their washer, hey, don't run your AC unit if you can do that. And so we're not built for this right now. Humans didn't. The world has been this hot before. Earth is going to be here. But humans, we didn't live when Earth was hot, like where it's going right now. And so the question will be if we still can be here when it does, if it gets hot like that again.
[00:08:37] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, that's an interesting point you make about the temperature. The heat, sorry, the temperature of the Earth, because a study just came out recently that we have reached the highest levels of CO2 in the past 4 million years, and that Homo erectus, the ancestor of Homo sapiens, developed around 2 million years ago. So if that was our ancestor, then you're right. Humans have never experience this level of carbon and heat in the atmosphere. So, yeah, it remains to be seen how we do with it. I think that without the artificial kind of conditions we've created to make ourselves more comfortable, like air conditioning and, you know, refrigeration and all that, I think it'll be very difficult. If you look at, just like you said, the example of what we just saw in the last two weeks, you know, 101 degrees in. In late June in Boise, Idaho. 111 in Seattle. I mean, these are temperatures that are like from a science fiction movie. I mean, we've never seen this before. And it doesn't mean.
Yeah, I mean, look, this could be an anomaly. You know, the Earth wobbled a little bit, you know, one or two degrees out of whack, and I got a little closer to the sun or something. But I think everything that, that the data points to is this is trending in the wrong direction for us. And the other thing that I find fascinating and particular preparing for Today because it kind of goes along with what we're talking about is, you know, humanity now has been keeping this data for over 100 years.
[00:10:10] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:10:11] Speaker A: And so that's what I found interesting that, you know, 2020 was the second warmest year on record. They started keeping globally temperatures around starting around 1895. So we've got over 100 years of this data, obviously, 126 years of this data. So, and it's funny, so I had to look up what's the first warmest year on record, you know, and it wasn't 1925 or 1911, it was 2016. So it's pretty recent. You know, it wasn't like 40 years ago then. The average, average rainfall is 5% higher at the beginning of the 21st century than it was at the beginning of the 20th century. So again, we've been keeping these stats as humanity.
[00:10:49] Speaker B: Yeah. And one gives us, by the way that what that does is it gives us it's still not sample size relative to the Earth, relative to the planet. There's not 4 billion years of sample size. But it gives us more sample size than overreacting to everything that happens in each individual year. Like, okay, you get heat. Oh, it's global warming. Oh, you get snow. Oh no global warming. And so it allows us to see trends and expand out the sample size so that we can be more sure that what we're seeing is actually what's happening and not just being a prisoner of the moment.
[00:11:23] Speaker A: Well, I got a couple of things just on what you just said. One is because I thought about what happened in Texas a few months ago where the extreme cold and I think one of the things that again, why it was probably better that it was changed, the kind of terminology was changed. It's just climate change and not global warming. Because really what it is is about the extremes of the weather patterns or sorry, both kind of edges of weather. Cold and heat get more extreme.
So you're going to get more extreme heat and then the potential for more extreme cold in certain areas or areas where they're not used to that level of cold.
[00:11:54] Speaker B: I think that. But that point is connected to, from what I understand, that's connected to what you were saying with the equilibrium, when the equilibrium is thrown out about. But actually it is a warming sensation. When you look at planet wide, like Venus, Venus is the example of this. Like Venus has out of control greenhouse gas. That's what they have in their atmosphere. That's why Venus is hotter than Mercury, even though Mercury is closer to the Sun. So we can see in another planet. Like. Yeah, when you get these greenhouse gases out of control in the atmosphere and the heat can't get out, then you can bake a planet. And so that's kind of. So it is. But you're correct in that the way we see it, the way we experience it in most areas is just a loss of the equilibrium of the temperature that's normally tied to certain areas.
[00:12:41] Speaker A: Yeah. And then the other thing, two more things I want to hit on and then, and then I know you want to move to. Another part of the discussion though is one is the kind of the good news that I found in doing some reading is that, you know, with attention to this stuff, we can make changes. And at some point, like we talked about, we might go too far where changes aren't that easy or they're impossible. But I just found a stat that in 1980, the average U.S. county had good air quality 59% of days. In 2020, that rose to 88% of days. And that was because of what happened. Think about 1980, you're only three years removed from the EPA that was created under Richard Nixon and Earth Day and all this. So you had. And then it reminded me of when we were kids too. Remember like acid rain, ozone, ozone hole, chlorophylls and the CFCFCs and all that stuff and spray cans. And what happened is the population decided, you know what, let's, let's not allow this to keep going. And the ozone hole actually closed and we don't have acid rain.
[00:13:44] Speaker B: Well, enough of the population and enough of the key people basically who are making these things are regulated leadership.
[00:13:50] Speaker A: Correct. And so that's what I read. And I was like, wow, in 1980 it was that much worse. And it's kind of one stat that's much better today. So that was nice. And I think we saw an example, a very small example of this last year with the shutdown. And remember all the photographs of downtown Los Angeles, you could see these snow peak mountains in the background for the first time ever because there's no smog. And downtown Mumbai and these big cities like Shanghai, that was the first time we could see, you know, the actual buildings miles away from wherever the photographer was. So that was interesting though.
[00:14:24] Speaker B: Well, on that point though, I wanted to ask you.
We see now that potentially it's harder to get people to agree on things like you're never going to get everybody to agree, but obtaining consensus in the modern age, with the way our media is fragmented and so forth it's nearly impossible to get people to agree on what color the sun is or what color the sky is or whatever. And so what's your take on a lot of the things, a lot of these arguments that have come up over time as far as, well, why we don't need to worry about climate change or why either climate denying or, or just any way people can do it to say we want to keep doing what it is that we're doing.
[00:15:08] Speaker A: I mean, it's interesting because there's a lot of moving pieces there. I mean, there was a great article that we read in preparing for this about Big Oil and the way that they've been funding the misinformation campaign for the last 30, 40 years. And climate change was some very good detail in terms of what's come out through lawsuits. And it reminds me a lot of the, of the, the kind of big businesses. Well, it's just a big business and blame all. All big business. Just tobacco, right?
[00:15:39] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:15:39] Speaker A: That for about, you know, 50 years, the tobacco companies knew that smoking cigarettes was bad for humans.
[00:15:46] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:15:47] Speaker A: And they lied about it.
[00:15:48] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:15:48] Speaker A: They covered it up. And I think, and I feel like these, what's come out in this, in this stuff about the fossil fuel companies is similar to the tobacco in that there's something inherently that we understand that there's gotta be some negative effect of this stuff.
[00:16:05] Speaker B: Right.
[00:16:05] Speaker A: Like.
[00:16:05] Speaker B: Yeah, like, if you smoke, there's no free lunch. There's no free lunch.
[00:16:09] Speaker A: And I'm just saying, like, if you smoke something and inhale it directly into your lungs, fire and smoke right in. Like, it's like, okay, it's not about hating cigarettes or hating smokers. You know, everyone's got a right to treat their body a certain way they want, but it just. Don't try and fool me and act like there's nothing wrong with it, you know, that your body's gonna be absolutely healthy and just as healthy as it otherwise would have been. And I think this idea of, you know, burning fossil fuels, if you just under, if you read it and understand the basic science behind. And we've talked about this on other shows about the concept of like a greenhouse. You know, if you lived in anywhere where it's cold and you see, if you just kind of make a hot box out of a certain area and you. And you enclose it, heat will trap in there. If. And as plants breathe out oxygen and their CO2 trapped in that greenhouse, as they breathe in the CO2, it rises the temperature. And that's the whole Point. And that's why they call them greenhouse gases, because it's doing the same thing to the Earth on mass. And so when you understand those kind of basics, it doesn't make it,
[00:17:15] Speaker B: let
[00:17:15] Speaker A: me put it this way, it's not a stretch to understand that this is happening at a much larger level. If we've been burning fossil fuels at the way we've burned them for 150 years. We've been doing this since the middle of the 1800s.
[00:17:26] Speaker B: I'll push back on you on one sense on that though, because the one thing that I'll say is I think it's hard to conceptualize. It's always hard to conceptualize with the size of the Earth.
We've talked about this.
When things are so big that a human being just can't conceptualize that the entire globe is very big, it's easy, I think, to slip into a mindset where there's nothing that me individually, I can do that would fundamentally change this planet, this huge planet. And so I think a lot of times when people are, when you have self interest, then it's easy to not see the big picture and how while your individual activity may not cause a big change, collectively activity can. And so I think that that's why with something like this, with the smoking one, I don't know that this would apply. But with the fossil fuel industry, I think that they could make that case to people that in the sense that, oh come on, the earth is huge, the earth can suck all this Earth can take it, so to speak. And the concept of self interest though, I think interweaves in this a lot because we get it, why the tobacco companies were lying to people and telling people that they were trying that cigarettes were. You'd be just as healthy smoking them as you would be without them. Or why the fossil fuels companies tell us or hide all this information about what the fossil fuels do and, and all that stuff we get that there's self interest there I've yet to really fully grasp. And you've sent me some interesting things and we've exchanged some interesting information as far as like what else is going on where people who aren't making money off of fossil fuels almost are adopting fossil fuels and defending their use in an identity sense. Like it's part of their identity. And one thing that we had talked about, like just this week we had saw and we've seen these articles pop up from time to time and on Blush, on initial, like when you first see it, it looks kind of far fetched. It looks like. What are you guys talking about? But the premise that we've seen keep pop up is that we've seen a anti feminism tied into and not necessarily causation but a correlation between that and climate denying and that and the drill baby drill mentality and just that almost that it's like taking control. There's a masculinity involved in polluting and burning fossil fuels.
What's your reaction to that, Tunde? Because I know we haven't talked about it directly, but we both kind of like it sounds far fetched to me just like as a premise. And then you read about it and then it's like, okay, I see what they're saying, but what's your thought on that, man?
[00:20:02] Speaker A: I mean he threw a lot at me so.
[00:20:04] Speaker B: Well taking it.
[00:20:06] Speaker A: Let me unpack it.
Bite the first little chunk off. Which was at the beginning, which is you're, you're, you're right in that the abstract nature of how large the earth is.
Like literally anyone that's ever been to the ocean, you know, and I'm not trying to be like simple here or phone in a plane over the ocean, right. You realize how big the Earth is. Like I remember I flew to Australia and you know, it's like 13 hours flying at 600 miles an hour over the Pacific. The whole time you're like wow, this is a pretty big planet. You know, and, and so that's, that's where I do think you're right that for a long period of time
[00:20:44] Speaker B: the
[00:20:45] Speaker A: fossil fuel industry was, was able to fund research or let me put it this way, fund propaganda was. That's a better way to put it that that discredited sound scientific research.
And I know you'll have some of these articles up on the show note, they're very good, we can't get into them today. But the level of detail, yeah, it's really like an espionage thing. You know, this would be like kind of what we read in Economic Hitman, like what the CIA would do going to a foreign country to manipulate the population or something. Like, it's just fascinating.
[00:21:18] Speaker B: So there's two things I want to mention on that just briefly and I'll let you jump right back in. But because part of what they did was actually just fabricate things like just come up with stuff to muddy the water, so to speak. But also what they did, which is also like to the great point that you made as far as how intelligence works a lot of times is they would exploit the uncertainty. The people who were trying to be true to science weren't able to speak as definitively because they're still studying it and you know, they're trying to really adapt as more data comes in and so forth. So when you were pushing up, when you're pushing propaganda, you can, you can be certain 100%, you know, your conclusion before the facts come in. So they put, they exploited that uncertainty as well. So it's both and it makes it very effective.
[00:22:02] Speaker A: Go ahead. Well, and it's funny because as I was reading that part, it reminded me a bit of the whole Covid thing last year. You know that like you're saying that people that are being serious about trying to find what's going on takes them time because they gotta go through a bit of trial and error, see what's going on. And others who have another agenda or who are paranoid and just maybe honestly don't believe anything that comes out of kind of authority, quote unquote, or scientists quickly latch onto something and are very absolute about it. And so I think now going back to this kind of line that I'm unpacking here and the bite sized comments responding to you is I think you're right in terms of it's kind of so big and grandiose that most people can't comprehend it. So then it allows for holes to be poked into what otherwise would be maybe salient arguments. And I think that up until this last decade, that's what we kind of started out talking about on the show today is it was hard to measure also, like, because again, we went alive in, let's say, 1895 when maybe we started studying some of this stuff. So in your lifetime it's like, okay, well, things haven't changed that much. And it's like amazing. We're in our 40s and now we're seeing it.
[00:23:12] Speaker B: Wow.
[00:23:12] Speaker A: No, things have changed. Like, I've never seen over 100 degrees in Seattle. I've never seen 100 degrees in Boise, Idaho. And I would say this too, from a regional perspective, and this is definitely more anecdotal for you and I, is we live in South Florida. And so we've also, I've say I've been here 22 years and I've seen a change in the South Florida weather patterns as well as the sea level rise. I mean, you know that we, we have a boating community here and all that. And I seawalls and I got friends and people I know that have to have their seawalls raised and all this kind of stuff over the years. Because just the sea levels rising. And that's what I mean is I think it's becoming undeniable. And so now let me take the next bite from your commentary is then we get down to culture and this goes. Now I think I'll be answering kind of where you were going with some of the thing about masculinity is if so if I need to muddy the waters and create an environment.
Because just like what happened with cigarette smoking, remember, cigarettes had a very an appeal to them at one point in our culture. Right?
[00:24:17] Speaker B: It was cultural appeal. Yeah. Like a cool something to do. Yes, good point, good point.
[00:24:22] Speaker A: I'm old enough to remember when I was a kid in the 80s, flying there used to be. That's amazing to think about it now, a cigarette section in a plane. Yeah. And I remember that I was in the non smoking section, which was like the first half of the plane, and the smoking section was in the back half of the plane. And I literally remember looking down and telling my mom, mom. Because I was like three rows away from the smoking section and I was like, mom, I can smell the smoke and it's bothering my nose. Like, all right, what are we going to do? We got to sit here.
[00:24:51] Speaker B: You're in one cabin.
[00:24:52] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. And so what I think happened was as the science began to come out that secondhand smoke could be just as dangerous as somebody smoking themselves. I think that's what also changed the narrative for the general public. Because then it was more of.
It was no longer like, okay, you're just making that choice for yourself. You want to go kill yourself and get lung cancer, that's on you. But now it's like, what happened Right now we're on this plane together, or we're in this restaurant or in this bar, and I don't want to get sick. I'm choosing not to smoke. And I think that's what's happening now.
[00:25:24] Speaker B: And you're doing it around me. You know, I'd like to say something, man, you kind of just blew my mind real quick.
Because when you tend to do that
[00:25:31] Speaker A: from time to time.
[00:25:31] Speaker B: Yeah, that's dope. That's dope. Because putting the culture together now, it makes sense to me. When I was younger and we see the move on or what was it? Move on? What was the non smoking one?
That had to be actually due to legal settlements funded by the tobacco companies. And you had all these organizations running commercials all the time. What they were doing was trying to change the culture around cigarettes and cigarette smoking. And now I see why such an. Like, what you just said explains to me why there was such an effort to do that. Like, why it wasn't just, okay, smoking is, you know, like, you can't do it in the restaurant. You can't do it. Like, it wasn't just they tried to put guardrails on where you can do it. There was a concerted effort to actually tell. To go in and repetitively tell people, no, this isn't cool anymore. This isn't cool anymore. And honestly, targeting the youth in a lot of ways before they're already ingrained in what their identity is. And so, yeah, like, you just. So I give it back to you because I know where you're going. But that's dope, man.
[00:26:37] Speaker A: And it reminds me, too. I mean, not to get on tobacco, but remember, it's part of changing the culture. Was also when we were kids, you know, Michael Jordan and athletes were like, don't do this. This isn't cool. Versus. I remember reading Daryl Dawkins book, remember Chocolate Thunder? He was the first guy that ever broke a backboard in the NBA in the 70s, and he was the first actual player ever drafted out of high school directly. And he was talking about, like, the late 70s in the NBA, and it was like the Wild West. And you. I remember you're talking about they would have a cooler full of beer and cigarettes in the locker room at halftime. They smoke cigarettes. Think about that. NBA players smoking cigarettes in the locker room at halftime.
[00:27:14] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:27:15] Speaker A: And 30 years later, they're out there telling us, kids, don't do this. This isn't cool. So it is a cultural thing and tied to things like masculinity because athletes obviously are the most alpha male, you know, in the society, along with, let's say, military and others. So going back to then, the cultural identity side is, you know, the fossil fuel industry, I think, with.
[00:27:35] Speaker B: With.
[00:27:36] Speaker A: With.
Not. Not intentionally necessarily.
[00:27:39] Speaker B: But it might have been, though. It might have been.
[00:27:40] Speaker A: No, but I'm just saying that our. Our culture of things like military, like cars. Right. The thing about the 70s and 80s, the muscle car, for example. So we've grown up in this. In this environment where things tied to fossil fuel were also masculine. Right. Like an army tank that' military. Like, you know me, I love fighter jets. I'm into all that stuff. And that's a very, like, alpha male masculine. I love watching stuff blow up when they drop bombs from the sky, you know, and that's all like, yeah, let's go. Let's go get it. And so you kind of that's what I mean by.
[00:28:12] Speaker B: I don't.
[00:28:12] Speaker A: I'm not saying, oh, that's intentional. I'm just saying that we kind of tie in this idea of oil strength, fossil fuel, and then this idea of drill, baby, drill, like this whole thing about the industrial revolution kind of on the back of oil, right? The engines, trains, cars, all this stuff. And then there's a part of that that just feels like masculine in our culture, like dominance. I'm dominating nature, I'm dominating the environment, I'm dominating money. Now that I'm a capitalist and I've got all these machines going and they're moving. That seems like a very kind of competitive, manly type of thing if you look at it from that way.
[00:28:52] Speaker B: Right.
[00:28:52] Speaker A: Like, I've got to be tougher and stronger and like more torque, more horsepower. All these things was men, you know. And so that's where I'm thinking that there's this and there's a term I read in one of his articles called the industrial breadwinner of masculinity. And it says, I'm going to quote here, it's a very interesting way to look at it. They see the world as separated between humans and nature. They believe humans are obligated to use nature and its resources to make products out of them. And they have a risk perception that nature will tolerate all types of waste. It's a risk perception that doesn't think of nature as vulnerable and as something that is possible, that is possible to be destroyed. For them, economic growth is more important than the environment. And I would say that is true in a sense that there is a strain of our culture that treats economic growth like religion.
It's like something that is sacrosanct.
[00:29:48] Speaker B: And this.
[00:29:50] Speaker A: And you, you said this to me and somewhere where we had a debate which was about taxes when I was arguing in defense of the current capital gains tax system and you were just basically telling me, yeah, but that's just because you haven't been shown a different system that might work as well. Yeah. And I think, and I'll find out, follow my sword on this is I tend to find view capitalist economics under a more religious lens in terms of, you know, just the way that our society and the way I've grown up in is like, okay, I like it this way. And I'm not comfortable when people start talking about economics a different way.
[00:30:26] Speaker B: I.
[00:30:27] Speaker A: This is the first time I saw how this fossil fuel, the industrial revolution and just our culture of the last hundred, 150 years has led into this Kind of raping of the earth without real regard for it. Because what it meant was gain for us as humans in our culture and also values and material dominance.
[00:30:50] Speaker B: Yeah, dominance over the earth as well. Like I, I found it to be like again I look at, I look at anything like this and you know, I look at it with a healthy level of skepticism. But I did. It was interesting to me. Like there were some salient points in terms of how. And again how you attack. How do you get people to be willing to defend fossil fuel use in the face of this damning evidence that keeps compiling. And you make it about identity, you make it about culture or you tap into the fact that there are identity and culture issues that as you pointed out that have kind of evolved along with it. Because from my standpoint I look at this thing like one of the things and one of the things we read was talked about how people who, when they again doing some kind of studies, you know, they're just test looking how people, people will tend to view someone who brings their own bag to the grocery store as more feminine regardless of the gender they are. They'll look at the person as more feminine versus someone who uses a disposable bag. And this just kind of, you know, this plays around in my head cause I don't, like I've never made that connection before. And so that to me was just like that's a thing, that's a real thing.
But these are things that have been studied. Like just because I don't think like that, I'm not going to say that nobody does. If you can demonstrate over again with a sample size that that's a tendency or something like that, that's fine. But it helped me understand, I've been looking for answers like well how are all these people who have nothing to gain or lose, whether they have an electric car or a gasoline car, like it doesn't really matter in one way or the other if you can do one or the other. It's just a place to get how to get around. But how do they become so locked in and so not just ambivalent about climate change or fossil fuels or greenhouse gases. Not ambivalent, but anti that actually this would be a concession I'm not willing to give up.
And then the other piece, just some of those articles, they will be in the show notes we're not going to go through them all but they tied it also to and said again not, not causation but a correlation between that and like the, an anti feminism and that Gets into that identity aspect of it where it's like the feminism is taking over the masculinity, the masculinity that has been culturally tied to this. And so it's like, oh, if you feel the masculinity is being threatened then you may respond to, you know, against feminism in that sense or against, you know, against what you view to be feminine and so forth. And so it's, I mean all of this stuff is like, I'm not a scientist, I don't study this stuff. But it was, it, I'll put it like this, it was an interesting view of a. What do we go to use this word again? A theory. Or maybe it's still even a hypothesis at this point. I don't know if they've tested it enough for it to become a theory. But it's just a mental, you know, people trying to come up with explanations on how things happen.
And you know, it was interesting and that's, you know, that's what we're doing here, talking about interesting things. So I it, but to me like tying it to masculinity, it does help it make more sense as to how people can be so committed to it to you know, just burning fossil fuels like people who aren't making money from it.
[00:34:09] Speaker A: Yeah, well the beautiful thing is the earth doesn't seem to give a about masculinity.
It's gonna get hotter and hotter.
[00:34:19] Speaker B: Well, let me tell you this, there's a certain mirror image with that because masculinity doesn't seem to give a shit about the earth.
[00:34:26] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:34:27] Speaker B: At least according to those, to these
[00:34:29] Speaker A: people that are making it my bicep curls and work on my abs so that when the friggin earth explodes that I look good. I'll be floating in space looking real good.
[00:34:40] Speaker B: If it gets hot, man, you just got to take your shirt off.
[00:34:42] Speaker A: Yeah, I know, that's what I mean.
And then I'll look really good while it's just like 1,000 degrees.
[00:34:48] Speaker B: There you go.
[00:34:49] Speaker A: No, but it's interesting because in reading they get into some of these male dominated organizations and so it's interesting. There's one which has been in the media in the last year or two a lot and it's the proud boys. And the only reason I bring it up is because they have one of the quotes from their oath and it's just one of the sentences, it says, quote, I am a proud western chauvinists. I refuse to apologize for creating the modern world.
And so I found that to be a very telling line from the, the ego, the kind of cultural emotion of that group. Because I think you're right. What it, what that to me is, is a reaction to is like, it's like a knee jerk reaction emotionally to some of the stuff we've seen over the last few decades of kind of with the climate and, and even about things like we're talking about feminism and YouTube movement and all this stuff. Basically I'm a chauvinist.
[00:35:44] Speaker B: Like a perceived attack, like you're perceiving an attack against you and you're coming up with all this stuff to push back on this perceived attack.
[00:35:52] Speaker A: Yeah. And that, and so that's why it is, it is like there is definitely a strain of, I think like you're saying they've hit on something with this tie in to masculinity as to why it seems to be so hard for us as a human society to deal with just addressing the climate and getting off fossil fuels. And what I was going to say is certain things like why this I think will be much more difficult for humanity than anything else we've ever faced as just humans is because you're also, you're going to have to get the world to buy in. And so I was thinking about things like the Paris climate, of course, or we go back 20 years. Remember it was 20 years ago, Kyoto Treaty that President Bush decided we're not going to do this. You know, so the world has tried for decades to try and do things together, but you always have some big nation that doesn't want to play ball. Lately it's been us. Before it was the Chinese.
I mean they're still, I'm sure, you know, wouldn't play ball 100%. You know, I wouldn't trust them to. You've got other countries like the Russians, you've got India, who actually are the
[00:36:56] Speaker B: Russians who are sitting on a bunch of oil.
[00:36:57] Speaker A: Yeah. And India with their billion and a half people, they produce a lot of oil of fossil fuel and pollution. And the other thing I wanted to point out too was, you know, when we go back to the, going back to the kind of early comments we made on today's show, going back to 1895, you might have had roughly just getting to about a billion people on the earth.
Now we're sitting at about eight and a half billion. So think about all these areas of the world, like all the coastline that was unpopulated back then compared to now. And now we have rising seas and all that. And so this is going to create some massive problems. In the next few decades. And that's where I was going to get at with finalizing this kind of masculinity point. I think what we're seeing, we're finally, I think, seeing the culture change now today, 2021, and it's been a couple of years in the making. But I would say this, you and I have both discussed in different times on shows usually about the economy, about things like ESG investing and the fact that Wall street, which is always considered, I wouldn't say Wall street was ever considered feminine, pretty masculine, money dominated. And they don't really care about being squishy and tree hugging. They care about money in Wall Street. They've been ringing that bell for the last two, three years, really consistently. That ESG investment is actually much more profitable in the long run than the kind of fossil fuel and dirty way of doing it. Then you've got another masculine kind of organization culturally, which is the Defense Department and our United States military.
They've been hammering this the last three years in a row. The national security, national threat.
Yeah, threat assistance, sorry, that comes out every January.
The climate change has been a top three or four every time. And you've got.
[00:38:47] Speaker B: And they're viewing it, by the way, as a, they're not viewing it as a tree hugger. They're viewing it as a vulnerability that they need to address so that they can continue being powerful. You know, like, yeah, we got, we got to be on top of this, you know.
[00:38:59] Speaker A: And then the other thing to finish off from a cultural standpoint, you know, Ford were recently with their F150 Lightning. And I just learned that they're coming out, the next one they're going to come out is a fully electric Mustang. So I like that as well, because ultimately those are things that were always considered very masculine in our culture, specifically the F150 truck and a Mustang, you know, the car. And so to have those two be the first of the major American carmaker to be the first electric vehicles, I think also says something to the rest of us.
[00:39:31] Speaker B: And actually, I wanted to end this with just a quick discussion on how if things are going to be made, either are or going to, if people are going to lean into making things about identity and not about, okay, what's the problem? How big of a problem is, what are our options to solve it? Like actually problem solving, but just making an identity to maintain the status quo, to gather power, to be able to wield power without accountability, whatever, if that's how we're seeing our politics and Things like that evolve. The question becomes, how are we going to solve big problems? Because you can always conceivably make something about culture, make something about somebody's identity, and people will then get all fired up and emotional about it and irrational about it. Because people are irrational. I mean, by definition. And I think what you just raised is the answer to that. Because what it. The reason. And this also goes into when you said, well, well, some countries will get on board, but other countries won't. What this requires, what this calls out for, is leadership. Once someone shows this works on a large scale, on a nation scale or region scale or so forth, once someone shows that it works and that money is still getting made, potentially more money getting made less, whether it's more money itself or it's more profit because you have less costs, less expense, you know, less waste of things that are happening like that.
Once someone shows proof of concept, then people are going to rush to it. That's the way it works is that somebody has to actually show leadership. Somebody has to show vision and make something happen. And then everybody falls in line. That like, you can make the argument 100 something years ago. That, and I think Woodrow Wilson's White House did make the argument 100 something years ago. Nobody's gonna. Nobody wants a car. What are you talking about?
[00:41:20] Speaker A: A car?
[00:41:20] Speaker B: People want horses and buggies, man, this is. Cars are whack. Horses and buggies are what was dope. And that changed, needless to say, and that's why we're in this discussion right now. But like, what you need is leadership. Somebody to show Henry Ford and that ilk showed, no, this is what's up. And then everybody wants it after that. And so everybody wants to do it. And so that's what we need is leadership right now to demonstrate how this works, that it works, and lay that blaze, that trail. And then I think countries would come on board, countries, regions, whatever. Because people want to be in the new thing, the cool thing, so to speak. And so that's what we're missing right now is, is somebody actually big, large scale showing that this thing, it has wings.
[00:42:08] Speaker A: Yep. And I would say this as we finish up, you know, the next thing I think the big battleground is going to be keep an eye out for water. Fresh water.
[00:42:16] Speaker B: Yeah. Oh, yeah.
[00:42:17] Speaker A: Because, you know, there's. There's obviously that's always important to human beings. But as we segue now and transition to this kind of, you know, the truly into the 21st century kind of information age, you know, there's Becoming big issues, especially as we have more droughts.
There's a lot of data centers in the kind of the Southwest and states like Arizona, Utah, Wyoming, all that. So as we have more droughts, there's more competition for fresh water resources because obviously human beings need water and so.
[00:42:53] Speaker B: And these data centers use water for cooling purposes.
[00:42:56] Speaker A: Correct. And I was reading that most of the large data centers use the equivalent daily, the equivalent amount of water that a small town of 30 to 50,000 human beings would use. Yeah.
So again, as we look for these solutions, as we maybe, you know, if more of us work remotely so we're not driving on the roads as much putting as much fossil fuels in the air, we're still sucking on the world's resources and now this will be water. So I think that that's something we need to be conscious of just as a society, as humans and try and develop it into our culture going that our mere existence, as long as we're not going to be hunter gatherers literally living off the land like that, then our existence will have an impact on the planet. And let's just continue to be smart as we continue to build new kind of just things, you know, infrastructure for our cities and new technologies. Let's try and incorporate how, you know, what footprint they have, let's say, so that we don't have to then go into something for a couple decades like we did with oil, only to learn that now it's going to be so hard to unwind it culturally.
[00:44:01] Speaker B: Well, yeah, I mean, I think to that point this isn't going to be the last problem we have to solve as a species. It's going to be continual. And I think it's a good point just that even things that we do to help us to lessen our fossil fuel use will create problems as well. And so those are problems we'll have to solve. And to some extent there's going to be a level of foresight we can use to do that. But to some extent it's going to be lesser of two evils and we'll have to, you know, we'll have to rely on further innovation. We all have to rely on there being answers that we don't have yet. But we have to keep trying to move forward, keep trying to push forward on the belief and even looking at history, this is kind of how it works, on the belief and understanding that someone will come up with an answer on our way to meeting that answer. But we can't just stay put, we can't just stay stagnant because we don't know the specific answer right now.
[00:44:55] Speaker A: So I just want to say this that I found fascinating is the calculations from those back in the late 1800s and the early 20th century and then those like the scientists who were doing the early calculations in the early 80s, they've all proven out exactly like they calculated back then. So it's amazing about mathematics and things like if you actually really do listen to that community, the scientific community that's doing these forecasts and like you said, when it's, when it's been tested and kind of worked enough, I'm not just saying the first guy with the idea, you listen to them, it's amazing how accurate they are. And so, you know, we on one
[00:45:34] Speaker B: hand though, but on the other hand though, and this is, this is something you brought up a few months back when you were talking about how use of, I think it was precious resources and things like that and how they thought they were going to run out, but over time they got better at, got more efficient at using them. And so therefore those projections didn't actually play out. Not because the way they calculated them was wrong, but they didn't foresee or couldn't calculate the future innovation, circumstances change there that would make us better at, better and more efficient. So all that stuff comes into play. But ultimately what you're going to need all across the board is leadership, you know, like, and so that's what we have to continue to hope that we're going to get some level of and not just looking to divide us on identity or divide us on culture or whatever. So one thing looking forward into the future or in this case looking back, the second thing we wanted to talk about, and this is, this is straight out of science fiction, like this is so what happened or what's been reported and what we've seen is that scientists have cloned a ferret. Okay, this is an endangered species and so this is good work, so to speak. Like, oh, we're trying to introduce more genetic diversity and the way they're doing that with cloning because obviously cloning is cloning the genetics, so you're not increasing diversity there. But they're taking a 30, an animal that died over 30 years ago and had some of its genetic material frozen, they are using that to create a clone now and then introducing that into the rest of them. So that, that, because that 30 year gene, a 30 year old genes, those aren't in the present endangered group.
But all that aside, the highlight here is that this thing, this animal was dead for 30 something years and they just cloned it and brought it back to life. Which sounds a lot like Jurassic Park.
[00:47:27] Speaker A: Yeah, that's the first thing I thought about.
[00:47:29] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:47:30] Speaker A: Like, wow, okay.
[00:47:31] Speaker B: Yeah. Now, they didn't put. They didn't pull it up out of a mosquito, but still, like, it was somebody who intentionally saved this stuff and stored it in a way that it could be again, they didn't have the answer. They didn't have the technological answer 30 something years ago when the animal died. But they stored the material but they would need so that when someone came up with the answer, they could use that stuff. And so, but Tuesday. All right, so that's enough of the background here.
All right. So are you as afraid of hearing, hearing this as I am or what's your reaction here, man?
[00:48:02] Speaker A: No, I mean, I wasn't really afraid. I kind of have no opinion on it in that way. But it's, it's. I just find it fascinating and like just this whole scientific revolution that just, you know, humanity continues to, to go, go on.
So, you know, reminded me a lot of things. Like you're saying the Jurassic Park. I started thinking about it. Like you said about cloning isn't something necessarily like, new. We had Dolly the Sheep, I think, which was 1996. So we're almost 30 years, you know, call it 25 years from that.
But you're right, that was a live animal that had its DNA taken out while it was alive and then cloned. This is the first time they went back on something that actually doesn't exist anymore and did it. And you're right, because I was reading in the article how whenever that last ferret, the species of ferret actually died in 1988, they quickly took the samples and stored them in some freezer somewhere. So this isn't like. And they preserve them well. So you're right. This isn't like digging up a dinosaur bone, literally, and then finding some little piece of DNA in there and creating a whole new dinosaur.
But it could be an interesting way to create a library for the future.
Meaning, like what from. And I didn't think about these two topics going together, but what we just finished talking about for the last 30, 40 minutes, which is, you know, if we really screw this earth up.
We know, but unfortunately we. Because we've done enough stories where it is sad. I mean, what is it that we, you know, I think 70% of the number of animals have. Have dwindled or something since I don't
[00:49:41] Speaker B: remember the exact but.
[00:49:42] Speaker A: And there's been something like there's problems. Yeah. And there's been actual species on mass that have gone. So what they could do is start getting DNA from random animals. I mean, and let's talk about animals today that we know are on the edge. Polar bears, black rhinoceros, elephants. I mean, look, we live here in south Florida. There's 400 manatees left in eastern South Florida. Yeah. The whole place, you know, it's like, how many boaters are out here running over them? So maybe this is a way that, you know, we can collect these samples from existing animals. And if, God forbid, we screw it up and they all go extinct, maybe if we. If we can survive all this as humans and, you know, a thousand years from now, some utopia, then we can at least bring them all back and apologize to them like, you weren't. You know, this was a natural selection. We did this to you. Welcome back.
[00:50:30] Speaker B: I mean, now, that's a good thought, man. I'm glad that you took the optimistic view here, because I look at this, and if they're doing this now, like, this is just the first.
Like, the first iteration here. This, to me, opens up a whole bunch of things. Like, this does open up a direct pathway to what you see in Jurassic Park. And I'm not saying you should be afraid of that because of what happened in the movie, but more so everybody who has access to this type of stuff and has labs and stuff like that is not working for conservationists and is not working to try to make the world a better place, so to speak. And so this is the type of thing, like, you're doing this.
I mean, what's to stop them from doing some type of Captain America thing where you start getting all like, this guy, you know, this guy's really strong, and this guy's really good. We're gonna clone this guy and make our whole, like, okay, I'm going into Toonday land now and creating an army of clones.
An army of clones. Science fiction.
This is Star Wars. And so I'm just saying, like, I'm not afraid. Like, oh, my God, what are we gonna do? I'm like, oh, boy. This. I see that. This type of. This direction, basically, which I think we have to go down the direction. I'm not saying you don't go down the direction, but we need to be very aware that there are a lot of places that this can go sideways, and we end up in a situation like, oh, my God, how did we get here? You know, we got an army of clones coming after us. Now, and I don't know, man, but ultimately, I mean, looking at what they actually did and, yeah, like, there is a lot of good that could be done here. Like, even the ferret that they had, there's still a few of those ferrets. But again, like, once you get down to those dwindling numbers, then the genetic pool becomes very limited. And having a robust genetic pool, having a lot of different variations of the genes, and then having a lot of those variations of the genes intermingle, so to speak, and have offspring strengthens a species. And when you dwindle down and only have limited genetic diversity, then the species just becomes weaker. Like, that's just the way genetics work. That's. That's when you have sexual reproduction. That's the whole point is to.
[00:52:39] Speaker A: Isn't that called inbreeding?
[00:52:42] Speaker B: Once you get down to a certain point? Yeah, it's basically gets down. It's analogous to inbreeding. And inbreeding is like the final. Like, that's the end. And that we know that just doesn't work that well.
[00:52:52] Speaker A: You know, it's funny you say that. We know a lot through things that we're all. Most of us in humanity are very familiar with. Like dogs. Right?
[00:52:58] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:52:59] Speaker A: Know that there's a lot. Unfortunately, there's a lot of breeds that have health issues because of that. Right.
[00:53:03] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:53:04] Speaker A: Their population has dwindled, or let's say there. Maybe there wasn't that many of them to begin with, so they keep getting kind of bred too close genetically.
[00:53:11] Speaker B: Well, and also it's a commercial enterprise. They're not. It's like there may be more diversity in some other part of the country or part of the world, but they're not trying to. They're like, oh, screw that, we're just trying to.
[00:53:19] Speaker A: Yeah, they're not shipping puppies all over the place. Yeah, yeah, I agree.
[00:53:22] Speaker B: No, that's. Yeah, it's a good point, man. So, I mean, it's. It's exciting that science is there, but then it's also like, okay, whoa, science is here now, you know? So, I mean, I don't know, man. The science fiction stuff is just. I mean, it's a joke, but it's real, though. I mean, science fiction almost kind of sets the places where our imagination can go and then science goes and gets there, you know, which, you know, like I said, it's cool. It's fascinating. At the same time, just like, oh, I've seen a lot of things go really poorly in science fiction. So, you know, like, we'll See how that plays out.
[00:53:57] Speaker A: All right. It's amazing. And, you know, that's why, I mean, look, you're right.
People could use this for all kind of nefarious ways. But I don't know, man. I think every time that we've seen that, we get scared that just certain things are going to be used for human, you know, all that. It kind of doesn't work out that way. And then the other thing is, I fear that it will be attempted. I mean, we already had it. Remember the guy in China who did the gene edited baby? I mean, he made a human being that was edited genes. So this has already been. And that's the one we know of. Right. I mean, we don't know what's going on in top secret labs and governments with all the resources they have and the scientists working on stuff, and these
[00:54:43] Speaker B: labs are not impregnable. Things can leak out of the lab.
[00:54:46] Speaker A: Yeah. And so, and so the thing is, is that, you know, that's where I hope that, you know, this kind of quest for perfection that humanity has been on forever. You know, whether it be, you know, the trying to find the Ponce de Leon's, you know, the spring of life, or, or these elixirs or the alchemy that they used to try and do back in the day to turn lead into gold and all that, there's always this quick fix thing that we have as humans that we want to just, you know, make it. I want to be the one that make you either fix everything or find this secret sauce here. And I think what we lose is the fact that the imperfection of humanity is what makes us beautiful.
And you think about it like, I think about how think about. And everyone listening, think about how different you might be from your parents or your grandparents or how different your kids are from you and all these different things. And imagine if we try to all control each other and if we're like a bunch of robots. I mean, there will be no diversity of beauty, you know, imagine. And I, and I think about it like I look at my own kids. There's so much different from me, but it's a good thing.
[00:55:50] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:55:50] Speaker A: If they all try to be, if I try to make them like me, that. What would that say about me?
[00:55:54] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:55:54] Speaker A: So I think, you know, as I. As we kind of finish this up here, I think, you know, for those listening, we all should ask ourselves, like, what are we trying to do here? And also, like, I read something the other day about like the scientists trying to, you know, this other group of scientists, you know, trying to search for immortality. Like, that a human could live forever. I'm like, I don't want to live forever. Like, you know, someone else deserves a turn on this Earth. Like, you know, what are we gonna do? We're gonna have 100 billion people here because none of us are dying. Yeah. And then rationing out things, you know,
[00:56:24] Speaker B: Like, I'll say this, and. Yeah, well, let's. Let's. We can close it up. But the thing about it, though, is that there's a fine line between the person who's pursuing immortality, whether it be Ponce de Leon and the Fountain of Youth or these scientists you're referencing there. There's a fine line between them and the guy who says, I'm going to create a spaceship that goes into outer space and, like, actually does it, like. And so, on one hand, we need people trying to do things that seem impossible to try to move our society forward. And on the other hand, like, we have people that are trying to do things that may seem impossible, that are like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. I don't know if that's a good idea, but I don't know that we can have one without the other, you know, because both of those seem to be part of the human condition. So it's. But it creates just this tension, you know, that you and I look at. Like, whoa, why are you guys trying. Why are you trying to live forever for four? Because I agree with you. Like, what. Why would that be a selling point?
You know?
[00:57:15] Speaker A: Yeah. So I'm tired already.
I'm only in my 40s. I can imagine. You're like 800 years old, like Yoda, you know? Yeah, yeah.
[00:57:24] Speaker B: So. But no, we can wrap it up from there, man. But we appreciate everybody for joining us on this episode of Call It Like I See It. And until next time, I'm James Keys.
[00:57:31] Speaker A: I'm tuned.
[00:57:33] Speaker B: All right, subscribe. Rate Review. Join us for the 100th episode next week, and we'll talk to you next time.
