Seth Godin on How to Change Your News Inputs and the Future of the Planet

[Music] seth it's so good to have you back on the podcast welcome well thank you for having me it's always a pleasure to talk to you yeah so um you wrote a blog post recently about the beatles documentary get back and you had a very interesting take on the different contribution of the members of the beatles and i thought that would be a very interesting place to start first of all congratulations on watching an eight or nine hour documentary my wife and i found it fascinating and she wants to watch it again i've had another good friend of mine say it was the most boring documentary in the history of documentaries but clearly you liked it too yeah i mean if it's not for you it's not for you i would have watched eight more hours of it i was fascinated by so many parts um first of all let's think about the fact that the most famous musical group in the history of the world at the peak of their popularity decides to invite a documentary film crew to watch them write and record an album in three weeks and then perform it live all at the same time that they're pretty sure they're gonna break up like what what was the incentive it was just fascinating to watch that dynamic and so i tried to decode it the second thing that was interesting to me is people say that paul and john are geniuses i don't think that's true i don't think that people are born with musical talent i think we earn it it's a skill and they were super skilled and what i was trying to figure out is what is it that we learn about roles by watching this documentary and here's what i came up with moringo is essential because ringo doesn't bring much in the way of ego to the table his role is to allow people to do their thing george it made me sad to see needed to be punched in the face by john and sometimes paul if every time he comes in with a song he prefaces it with this is not very good and then he doesn't look him in the eye and he sits there hunched over that's his method his practice but paul paul is the reason for the documentary because paul needs that he needs that audience that deadline and most of all he needs to make john smile that he is there showing up doing his rifts not for the fans he wrote the fans off years ago he has no patience for screaming 12 year old girls that becomes clear throughout the whole thing he is there to put on this little show in the service of the big show and john john mostly brings in his stuff pre-workshopped and john needs to seem like he's above all of it and what i take away from it as a creative and as someone who talks to creatives is you should figure out who you are and why that practice of whatever you've got is your practice and this is the key thing is it helping you and the prob the reason the beatles broke up is their practices ultimately conflicted and they couldn't survive with each other and if you're a non-productive artist you make one album every 40 years it could be because your practice is flawed on the other hand if you can show up and show up and show up and that work is you're proud of it well then you found a practice that helps you thrive do you know who you are most like in the beatles did you recognize yourself um i like solving interesting problems and i don't want to care what most people think about the work but there's a few people i care very much and so for example the reason that i keep working with the same book publishing company is not because it maximizes my profit it's because if nikki likes something i did i can do it again and having that opportunity to stake a claim in the ground promise them i'm going to hand over a book and then do it and have nikki say that i solved the problem in a way that she's pleased with that is fuel for me nikki would be your editor nikki's editor nikki papadopoulos and the other cycle that really works for me is when i hear from somebody who i don't know who understood where i was coming from and uses the work to teach somebody else in a way that surprises me that is fuel for me i need a little bit of that because i don't want to be pedantic and i don't want to be descriptive in my prescriptions what i want to do is open the door for people and if they begin to get the joke in the rhythm and they can do it without me and they can teach other people that's what i want to do again has that always been a big thing that makes you tick because i've seen that in your work you know i subscribed to your blog i listened to your podcast read your books etc but you really seem to have a genuine interest you're not the guy sitting back going look at the body of my work please enjoy it you seem to be very interested in the work and particularly interested in students and what your students so to speak are doing has that been an evolution seth or mo you know a lot of us have an origin story and my origin story started in 1977 teaching canoeing just north of you and you and i have talked about this up in algonquin park canada and that's where i became me and i just keep trying to recapture that experience of what happens if you get a bunch of 14 year olds who don't think very highly of themselves who have had all the bumps in the road the typical 14 year olds have had and help them stand taller and breathe better and become generous respectful human beings who teach the others that's it that's what i'm hooked on and i would still be doing that to this day if it wasn't seven hours from here are you going back this summer i am in five weeks and this will be my for my 42nd summer teaching up north fantastic i'm so excited that the borders are open and you get to do that again yeah i missed the last two years oh yeah haven't we all one thing that's really interesting is you and and feel free to nuance this or even reject the question but you don't have either much of a team like in terms of a staff but like when you get your email you answer very quickly you do your own scheduling i've got to ask about that because people would say like when you type seth into google your name and material come up so it's not like you don't have a small audience how what are some key why did you make that decision or why are you making that decision and what are some keys to keeping seth organized so um again this goes back to our practice and if you're going to be a manager you should be really good at managing and if you're going to lead a team a large team you should devote a lot of time to that many people who have been in my shoes have been distracted by scale so my friend tom peters at one point had 50 people working for him and at that point he wasn't good at managing 50 people nor was he good at being tom peters he was keeping a lot of balls in the air and what i decided to do i mean i built one of the first internet companies i sold it i was one of the first vice presidents of yahoo um so i know how to fake my way through that kind of work but it wasn't how i wanted to spend my days so i have i write every single word that you see with my name on it and i have no staff zero on purpose and that's because when i have hired people it has been to build something bigger than me and we you know we helped create email marketing we helped create effective online education and other things but in all those times i'm doing that i can feel myself stretching muscles i don't really want to stretch because there are people who are better at it who thrive at it more than me and so my discipline is don't go to meetings don't watch television and figure out how to create enough space in my day that i have no choice but to fill it by saying something interesting you do cut out a lot of meetings if you have no team don't you yeah you really do what um how do you manage the volume you must be inundated with requests with speaking with emails all of that stuff how do you manage it well i'm not sure this is a universal question but i will try to universalize it um figuring out what you're going to say no to is really important so you don't have to do it over and over again so i decided to say no to twitter seven years ago and no to facebook eight years ago and i said no to being on social media so that takes care of a whole bunch of problems i don't have to think about i do have an unhealthy relationship with my email because it gives me a dopamine endorphin hit on a regular basis and i feel sort of like i should keep that going even though i shouldn't so that's my vice but i don't read the comments for a reason because what i found was that's just more incoming and it never made me a better writer it just made me skittish what have been the implications the impact of the pandemic on you as a writer a thinker i mean all of our travel got erased when looking back would you say oh i'm pretty much exactly the same or do you think it had an impact on your work or what you do or your future i think we're all asking questions like yeah yeah and if you're not you should be um [Music] yeah i uh i ask myself questions like that all the time you know i think that uh particularly in the united states events around race and cast gave a lot of people with privilege a chance to think even more deeply about how they were contributing and what problems they were causing my work on the carbon almanac made me think really deeply about me flying to paris giving a speech and flying back the rise of zoom and the fact that you and i are talking right now on riverside helped me realize i can do my work without going somewhere so i don't go places anymore i don't i haven't been on an airplane in two years and i'm not getting on one i turn down every gig i get now if i can show up on zoom i do and i do that three or four times a week happily um and if i can't i wish the people well and a new generation can go do that if that's their choice in terms of my writing i am significantly more aware of all of our lack of immortality and the human condition in almost every country in the world with a few exceptions is to pretend that we are immortal until we're not and mick jagger still does rock concerts and you know good for him but not for me so thinking a hard about the impact we're making the trail we're leaving behind um it's not like we need to get through today to get to tomorrow today today's what we got and how we're going to make the best of it so is that a permanent decision like no more airplanes for seth period well i've made permanent decisions before and changed them yeah i can tell you about a hundred days after sleep in 100 days in a row i slept in the same bed for the first time since i was five years old and i was like oh that's what that's like count me in so i don't miss it i have no pangs of missing it like i miss walking into the office of yoyodine when there were 45 people there on the team waiting for the next thing i missed that i don't miss it enough to do it again but i miss it i have zero missing of being backstage hearing that there's a delay wondering if i'm gonna hit my flight back on time being in the room with people i miss people but i don't miss the process fair enough i think our culture many people would argue we have changed culturally over the last two years too oh yeah a lot more isolated more bitter what are the changes you're seeing and then i've got a couple of follow-up questions beyond that but what are some of the changes you've seen socially culturally well i did did you say the word bitter uh perhaps i did yeah okay i i would like to say i am seeing the opposite that the headlines and the people with traffic on social media are trolls and these are people who are willing to trade self-respect for attention and we can ignore them if we want but the human beings that i am volunteering with on the carbon almanac the people who i interact with my friend in italy who's dealing with a health problem the folks who i know who just graduated from medical school the kids who are coming up i'm seeing the opposite i am seeing a true desire not for scale but for quality not just quality in what kind of clothes am i going to wear but quality and what is my life going to be like what are my choices if i'm going to be next to somebody who do i want to be next to and for me you know it used to be that what i did for a living once a week is i got on a plane if the week was free and you had a gig i would probably come and now i'm like i don't know how many more gigs i'm gonna get to do let's think about why you're even doing this gig and whether i'm the best person to do it or whether you should call this person because quality is something that we sort of left behind in our race for more um yeah i think it is true that the baby boomers who have made the world about them since 1960 are now making the world about their demise and it doesn't have to be that way this is the last cycle that the generation in charge is going to be in charge but that doesn't mean that's most people most people aren't that most people are looking for possibility and deciding the possibility doesn't have to be a storage unit stuffed with stuff they're never going to use again i've been thinking a lot about changing inputs because i think you're right the trolls have dominated broadcast media headlines social media etc when you think about changing your inputs how do you or do you have some sources that you're like ah this is how i want to get my news these are the people i want to connect with like do you have any recommendations i guess is what i'm asking on changing the inputs because you're right it's garbage in garbage out if you want to increase your anxiety just do what everybody else is doing yeah and i think it's worth repeating that if you know if there's a stand-up comic who every time you watch them it makes you a little bit misogynist just stop watching them you have no obligation no obligation to know what wolf blitzer thinks of as the breaking news because the fact is the world got by just fine when breaking news took 24 hours and if you can wait six hours to get it filtered before it shows up on your desk you're not gonna miss armageddon i promise if it's ready for you it'll come for you so with that said i love finding a blog with a voice of authenticity and authority that isn't doing it for the money that isn't doing it for the attention and i'll just add it to my rss reader and that's what shows up and if a troll comes across my path i just don't right back there they just you know you just block them and move on because you can't teach the world a lesson but what you can do is the same way you don't eat frosted flakes three times a day you don't have to inhale stuff just because everybody else is you can take a deep breath and say what is my work who am i trying to change what change am i seeking to make in the world and how do i outfit myself so i can do that and be better at the same time i think about that on a regular basis because you know i'm taking july off this year in july you're going to be up in algonquin park um and let's let's be honest up in algonquin park you don't get a signal even if you tried if you're in most places in the park and you can be off the grid for two weeks a month and it's amazing how the world keeps spinning without you how you missed all the drama etc and yet say all that because you're unplugging from some sources but i also listen to your podcast and i subscribe to your daily blog it's not like you're short of ideas can you talk a little bit more about your input sources because you come up with the most interesting stories i've never heard of and the most interesting people i've never heard of so clearly there is input going on this is not seth sitting in his own little universe pontificating you've got great inputs well thank you um i don't watch news i don't watch cable news i don't watch television news i don't watch social media news i don't want to know about breaking news i saw 911 through the window of my office it didn't make me better knowing it 10 minutes before anybody else and most of the things that you are referring to happened backwards what happens is i see something in the world i don't understand that i can't understand why that would succeed i can't understand why that would not succeed and then i come up with a theory as to why and how that would be of use to people who read my work but now i need to pin a story to the theory to help it sit with people so then i go looking for a story that makes my point not the other way around and anyone can do this it's just about deciding to notice things and one story that i haven't told in a while which i think is really useful for someone who's thinking about this back a long time ago when you and i were starting out they didn't have voicemail when you called an office the receptionist would answer the phone if the person wasn't in they would write down on a pink slip of paper while you were out who called and what their number was and then when you came back from lunch you had to pick up your pink slips but not other people's pink slip so there was an actual industry of how do we sort and store these little pink slips so my first day of my first job there's 30 people who work there and on the receptionist desk is a plastic carousel with a spinner on it with 30 slots after me they had to buy a new one 30 slots and on each slot with a dymo label maker they had written the name of the person and the people were in order of chronology because you added people when they got hired so i walk in the first day and the reception says this is where we put the slips you spin it till you find your name and then you take your slips out and i thought to myself there must be a reason for this but i'm gonna have to look at this thing every single day spending spinning this is silly so i reach over and i grab a paper clip from the paper clip dispenser and i put it next to my name this hurts no one and now i just got to spin to the paper clip and i'm fine and with i'm not making this up within four days the entire thing was festooned with flags and post-its and different colored paper clips and it made it it saved everybody a minute a day of spinning you just spin to your paper pipe cleaner or whatever you put there and the reason i tell the story is not because i'm a genius because i'm not i'm telling the story because i'm sure other people thought of this and they decided it wasn't worth the risk and i did it because it felt generous to me to say you can do this too and that's my method i've been using the same method ever since well you've got a project that you have been working on you call it the most important project of your life and i've got it in my hand it's called karma carbon albanac it's not too late you've got it in your hand it's an incredible book seth can you tell us a little bit about its origins i think it's important when we face a problem that we talk about it i can't think of a problem that has gone away because we refuse to talk about it and in almost every area of our life conversation not argument not yelling but conversation leads to coordinated action and here's what i discovered i wrote my first blog post 16 years ago about climate change and it didn't solve a problem a blog post isn't going to solve the problem if it would have i'd write one um the problem is going to be solved by systemic action we cannot you know we made a trillion plastic bags last year i'm not exaggerating usually when you use the word trillion you're exaggerating i'm not we made a trillion plastic bags last year so if seth and carrie stop using plastic bags it's not going to make any difference whatsoever but if we create systemic solutions we will be honoring the people who came before us and the people who came after us because systemic solutions will create possibility and clean up our act but the only way to have systemic solutions is to have a conversation the only way to have a conversation is for people to share what is actually happening not what's you know shaded or amplified or exaggerated but what is actually happening so i used to make almanacs for a living before i was a well-known author i made the business almanac made women's almanac the celebrity almanac and i thought there's a bunch of hacks here and there are too many facts here and the reports that the united nations puts out are indecipherable and things seem to conflict and a lot of people are lying why don't we just organize it why don't we add cartoons and graphs and tables and help people see and our motto is don't take our word for it you can look it up because we have a thousand footnotes all throughout and so i said i'm not gonna build this myself and so i'm gonna volunteer and i'm gonna find other volunteers and within a week 300 people in 41 countries were helping and in less than 100 days we built a 97 000 word almanac fact check proofread illustrated laid out and to the publisher on time and so that's what this is this is a chance to have a conversation so seth their climate optimus and climate pessimists and you know do you think like how bleak do you think the situation facing earth is and how hopeful are you that we can mitigate or reverse the problem now the subtitle is it's not too late so i take it there's a bit of optimism there but what's your view on the future of the climate and the planet i am both i am an optimist and a pessimist here's the reason i'm an optimist um in uh the 1880s i the city where i live in new york where when my great grandfather got here uh people dumped raw sewage in the river and they did it because it was convenient and cheap and when they discovered it was killing the oysters and killing the people they didn't say to everybody oh please if it's convenient for you please stop dumping stuff in the river they said don't dump stuff in the river anymore and now it's clean in 1920 if you tried to cross the street you were getting hit by a car because there were no rules for cars and pedestrians were dying right and left and in the last few years the medical establishment has come together in an organized but not centralized way and saved the lives of millions and millions and millions of people we are capable of building and delivering a cell phone to billions of people around the world human beings can do amazing things when they work in sync in community so if we hurry things are going to happen good things are going to happen we are getting closer and closer to uh really beautiful efficient systems that will allow us to live better than ever before on the other hand since you and i began talking more than a dozen creatures went extinct and they will never come back and that's more than 100 a day and the ice caps are melting and once they melt they can't be refrozen and once miami's underwater miami's gone for good so it's not a horror movie it's real life and the science is really clear we can be both we can be optimists and pessimists pessimists about the natural world really waking up and telling us to stop and optimists about what happens when we put the market to work when we put community to work to save things yeah you know i even hate to go here but there are a good share of climate deniers out there i don't know the exact percentage and uh for some reason seth you know my own community my own tribe christians there's been a a statistically disproportionate number of climate deniers in the christian community so i just i think we need to go there and just address this why would someone who would be a denier and just say no seth you know over the years there's been ice ages and there's been heat waves and this is just normal why would someone like that what would you say to them well i think there's two people in that camp there are people in that camp who are trolls who want to have an argument and will never change their mind no matter what and we shouldn't waste any time arguing with someone who just wants to have an argument because they're not going to change their mind no matter what all i can ask you is please get out of the way the thing is what if you're wrong because if i'm wrong and we end up with clean free solar and wind power and air we can breathe and a stable resilient society for no good reason okay but if you're wrong i'm not sure you want to live with that but to the second group of people i would say this in 1982 an engineer at exxon wrote a long memo describing what was going to happen to the climate and we reprint that memo two pages of it in the almanac to a tenth of a degree he was right about what was going to happen to the world 40 years later this is an exxon scientist and he's basically blowing the whistle saying we're in trouble we're in trouble and exxon buried that and then started a disinformation campaign but even the oil companies now are saying it doesn't do us any good to be rich if we're all dead and so what i would say to someone who has a good heart and good spirit is at least get up to speed so we can have the conversation don't judge the data before you look at the data take a look take a look at the photos we're publishing a a book of 150 photos from around the world take a look at the photo of what happened in china six months after they went to lockdown it's astonishing you can look it up on the internet right now six months after china went into lockdown satellite photos show that for the first time you can see the city that the nitrous oxide disappeared it's just gone because they stopped making more of it and eight million people died from coal in 2018. eight million it was one of the five leading causes of death in the world no one made that up you can look it up so given that that's the case that eight million people are gonna die from coal should we burn coal i think it's a pretty simple question you don't have to know a lot of science to answer that question you know it's interesting the version of the argument or the argument you just made is like a version of you've probably heard of pascal's wager um yeah you know christian preachers have used that for years it's like okay well you're an atheist but what if you're wrong wouldn't wouldn't you rather live as a christian and try this out because if it turns out that christianity is right well isn't it better to live on the side of faith than the side of you know non-belief now i don't think that's been persuasive for everybody but i think that's a really good point and i love how you're talking about this becoming a conversation and um you know rather than an argument because so much of what happens online is polemic or political or partisan do you have any theory or thoughts on how this has become a partisan issue like we managed to turn a pandemic into a partisan issue which i never would have predicted but we did it and so much has become political and and i'm just curious like why why what is your theory on why this becomes so difficult two-part theory the first part is there is a long deep thread of uh it's none of your business stay out of my life and particularly in north america but in many parts of the world it's none of your business dad in my life but at the same time i have never met somebody on any part of the political spectrum who says we shouldn't have a speed limit for school zones because that's fine you can have a speed limit for school zones that you can say you can do what you want in your yard but don't dump your waste on my yard because your business ends when my business begins so one of the challenges of trying to turn climate into a political conversation is it doesn't really line up with that because of a sudden somebody who has you know more money than whoever is flying a private jet over your house and ruining your kid's life is that okay or not the second half of it is that what politics has become is not governance but a chance to take topics out of conversation now when we say and we just got a note from a university that we offered copies of the almanac too they said we can't take this book it's too political and it's wait so you're saying you can't look it up you can't talk about it that's what political means now and when people the oil companies don't want us to talk about it they're going to tell us it's political because now we can't because we're not supposed to talk about things that are political i can tell you that republicans and democrats in the united states people in more than 40 countries all worked on this book and we don't all vote the same way and we don't all care about the same stuff because science is science and almanac is a collection of data there are flags in many countries the almanac lists the flags the almanac didn't decide what the flags are they just listed them so what is going on here with this is political is simple there are people who have an agenda and they want to change the way other people think they don't want you to think for yourself and part of what it is to have a conversation is not to say what does the boss think not what does the people in my tribe tell me to think it's after i think for myself i can decide where i want to be on this issue and the issue is truly existential whether or not you have kids the thing is we are going for the first generation to leave things significantly worse than we found them and i'm not proud of that and i don't want to just leave this to the next generation yeah one of the uh one of the things that i think an argument that i hear on a regular basis deals with the economics of climate change it's like well we have a lot of jobs in the oil industry we have a lot of jobs you know in traditional fossil fuels um what are some of the economic implications of climate change right so solar and wind at this moment are cheaper than oil and gas in many parts of the world and they will get cheaper still there's almost no economic reason to build a coal plant or an oil refinery anymore because the math just doesn't work now when the internet came along travel agents bookstore owners lots of people said oh no no no don't do that because our jobs are threatened but we did it anyway because it made things better and more convenient along the way and many of those people have now found other productive things to do now in the united states there's about 100 000 full-time coal miners it's not a lot of people canada is one of the five biggest producers of oil in the world there's a lot of money there but almost all the money that is being produced by oil in canada is going to a handful of really really wealthy organizations it is not going to typical humans when we build off-grid energy that's free and clean the amount of productivity that will be created is enormous and the transition is going to be hard of course the transition is going to be hard what's the alternative how much is it going to cost us to make it so that the next storm new york city subways aren't under water how much is it going to cost the people who own ski areas in british columbia to find something else to do when it stops snowing in british columbia i can go down a very long list of things that somehow we'll find the money to pay for but it would be far easier and cheaper to simply do a different thing all day based on resilient sustainable approaches yeah i think it was uh tony fidel maybe in an interview with tim ferriss who said that the world's first trillionaire with a t will probably be the person who cracks the climate change code the problem that we have you know in the same way steve jobs made a boatload of money when he revolutionized in a popular way technology everything from computers to the phone to ipods to beyond that you know that's the argument what are some of the opportunities economically when it comes to climate change so here's one that i just came across last week um this company figured out that you can take the shells from shrimp and make them into packing material that is super efficient doesn't smell and is super easy to recycle you just dump it into your garden and they're going to make a fortune that's not good news for the people who make those super annoying styrofoam pellets that are going to ruin everybody's life i don't feel bad for those people because i had a really good run and if you're the the insurgent you know as jumper says it's creative destruction it leads to the next thing and when we think about you know fast fashion we went from having two or three seasons a year for clothing to new styles coming out every week and as a result five to seven percent of all the carbon we're spewing is because we're buying making and buying clothes we don't need and there are entire countries like chile that are under many feet of trash because these fast fashion companies just dump stuff there and now it's against the law you can't bring your leftover sweaters to chile and dump them on the shore the point is that if you want to make a living making sustainable clothes that we can wear for a long time you'll do great great because the number of people who want to buy them is very large and so again we see the shift no one complained when the gap got everyone to switch to khaki the people at heart shaft nerd marks didn't say oh we've worked so hard to make suits how dare you switch to khaki well we're gonna switch again and the thing that i got to insert here is everyone who's listening has heard the phrase carbon footprint and been told that we need to lower our carbon footprint what you will learn from the almanac is that that phrase was invented by the ad agency ogilvy and mather in the 1980s and their client was british petroleum and their client hired them to invent carbon footprint for a reason because if you feel like a hypocrite you're not going to speak up and the fact is we're all hypocrites and whether or not you have a spiritual faith or not if you've been in a room with someone preaching at you they're a hypocrite too and yeah we need to let the hypocrites speak up because how are we going to get better because there's no one who's not a hypocrite and you don't have to wait until your carbon footprint is zero to lead to systemic change what you can say is i already use a hundred times more carbon than someone in borreli india or somebody in burundi and i'm never going to decrease it by 99 times so given that i'm not at the bottom of the carbon ladder what am i going to do about it and the answer is systemic change if we change our systems people will change their choices and if we change our choices we will ratchet this in the other direction yeah i'm a little bit concerned about that because i'm going to costco tonight and there's things i want and costco to me i mean they're in many ways a very ethical company they pay their employees a living wage they do good things but that clamshell packaging like tell me about it like seth it drives me crazy and so part of me feels guilty i've got a recycling bin in my backyard that's about the size of a small house and it'll go out there and i hope it feels worse i thought the next thing i say carrie okay then please say it they're gonna burn that plastic they're not gonna recycle it i know i know that's probably true isn't it six percent of all the plastic is recycled the rest of it is burned and they in you know who invented plastic recycling the plastics industry invented it and they did it so we would leave them alone so we wouldn't feel guilty and what we could have done instead is to say you're never allowed to empty the bin the bin's just going to keep getting fuller and fuller and full and then you would speak up because actually costco doesn't want to have clam shells clam shells are more expensive than the alternative but it's the system that requires clam shells because they trained all their suppliers to put stuff in clam shells to prevent shoplifting and so now we expect a certain thing that when you get you know i got this remote it came in a little cardboard box and deep down like well that was i spent a lot for this why do i only get a little cardboard box and then i realized wait a minute i don't want it to come in a clamshell i'm just used to that and so once we price carbon fairly we will make different decisions and costco will make different decisions and logitech will make different decisions and things will get more convenient not less but i still remember years ago someone wrote a dismissive article about amazon they were comparing going to the local bookstore to buy a book to opening their browser establishing an account with amazon typing in all their information typing in their credit card learning how to use amazon and buying a book and they were right for the first book it's way more convenient to go to the local bookstore but for the 400th book guess who wins and the same thing is true here we're going to build a better world for more people if we change our systems yeah how does that even begin i mean because i think about it and i thought you know if i was a manufacturer it would make sense like patagonia has made some big changes and i notice you know patagonia is kind of cool right now as far as fashion goes but they've you know they sell really good stuff if you're done with it if you don't donate it you send it back to patagonia they turn it into something productive etc how do you get other employers and manufacturers to embrace that attitude so let me start with the neighborhood first and then i'll move on if someone's listening to this you have 10 friends in your neighborhood if you and your 10 friends go to the board of education you can probably get the cafeteria to have meatless monday because it's not that hard right every monday all the teenagers can have anything they want but there's no meat meat is one of the single largest producers of carbon in the world carbon greenhouse gas turns out methane is 80 times more powerful for 10 years than carbon is and only 10 of you got one-fifth of the days of the cafeteria to be meat-free well if you do that the people who sell stuff to cafeterias will start to sell more things that don't have meat in them and if they do that the people who provide them so now the system has changed not because you and your family have meatless monday but because the whole school district has meatless monday and then if i think about it from the point of view of amazon or patagonia if amazon has to pay for every package they send out knowing that if they don't the community has to pay for it amazon's going to really quickly change the way they package the stuff they send you aren't they and all of a sudden the engine of capitalism which so many of your listeners applaud will work in the correct direction instead of stealing from everybody who has to get rid of all the stuff even though they didn't volunteer for that the people who are paying for it will get rid of all the stuff and so then when you start to say to uh this system as it starts to pay attention you know how you can make a lot of money you can make a lot of money by using less carbon than you did last year and if you said that to wall street you can bet it would take about 14 minutes for a whole bunch of companies to change what they do for a living because that's profitable and now you've got all these people who are making stuff with the intent of using less carbon and we've solved all these other problems with capitalism we can solve this one as long as we are being honest about the inputs and the costs what are some of the other innovative solutions like i mean it is a very thick book with a ton of great ideas on the personal and societal level what are some other things that really caught your imagination as you know this could be leverage that could change a lot like one or two things that man if we did this we could really move the needle so it's important to understand we didn't make up any of these things what we did was we looked at hundreds and hundreds of us looked at it everything we could find said if this is interesting and true we're going to list it and we have a form on our site for every single page has its own page where you can let us know if we made a mistake and so far we have found one and it was tiny so with that said uh a billion people on this planet don't have electricity and i don't know if you've ever been to a village at seven o'clock at night that has no electricity but it's astonishing to see and once people can get electricity they tend to say thanks and they tend to want more and so how are we going to electrify the last billion houses well one way we can do it is build the coal plant and we can do is burn stuff but the other way you can do it is realize we don't have to build a grid and that grid doesn't have to be controlled by a despot we can create situations for off-grid power and there's a company called d-light that's doing just that so d-light shows up with a box a little bit bigger than a toaster and it's enough to charge your cell phone and give your kids light to read all night to do their homework with and once you've done that you have probably made a little bit extra money because you've been able to do work because you have light and that lets you buy a slightly bigger one and now you can get a sewing machine and on and on and on so we got a billion homes to electrify isn't that a smart way to do it and it's they're already up to more than 80 million people around the world now have access to electricity because of that insight and we had 150 years to do it with oil and kerosene and we couldn't and now in just a few years we can do it with solar when we think about how people are switching their transport the number one fastest-growing form of transportation in the world is the electric bicycle electric bicycles are super cheap and are actually more efficient than walking that we can go further with less energy on an electric bike than we can by growing food and eating it and as a result we're going to see an entire generation of city dwellers take mass transit into their own hands by going around in electric bikes instead that means that the cities are gonna have to respond with appropriate regulations and bike lanes and things like that but again what we know is that 40 cars take up way more room than one bus and we're going to have to do something if the population is going to keep growing and we keep multiplying and the laws of physics don't get suspended just because we met well so when we think about things like electric bikes we think about windmill in your backyard when we think about the power of using hydrogen to power things because hydrogen you can't get hydrogen you have to make hydrogen and you make it with a windmill or a solar panel and then when you're done burning it it just turns into water vapor nothing else and it's silent and safe so there are all of these things happening around the edges but what's missing is there isn't a market as much as there should be because we are still selling oil to cheap people are dying every day because of national arguments about who owns the oil because of the pollution that oil causes they're dying we're killing them so that we can drive somewhere a little cheaper and if we priced it fairly we would make different decisions what are some personal choices i mean this is something that's been important to my wife and i for years i mean we started recycling when there was bear any barely any recycling and probably before they burned all of it but you know we started making decisions like that trying to buy organic as much as we could and you know i'm also very conscious i mean being on video a lot you you feel the pressure to have a new outfit every season or something like that but i remember my grandmother's closet and it was tiny seth it was the width of my my imac that i'm looking at you on you could you could put your sunday clothes your work clothes and a spare set and that's it like you go to a 1920s house tiny closets you go today you've got a room this size and that's the master walk-in closet for all of your clothes so we're trying to reduce we're trying to recycle but what are some some small decisions you can make that perhaps actually make a difference okay so i'm going to repeat i'm a hypocrite but i will also tell you i've been a vegetarian for more than 30 years and i haven't been on an airplane in two and my whole house is electric vehicles but that doesn't give me any authority it just tells you i've been thinking about it and as a hypocrite what i will tell you is this you can go for less or you can go for more and there are both threads in the environmental movement less says we should have fewer humans humans should have less convenience and we should be cold in the winter and hot in the summer and we should eat less and do less that's a really hard thing to sell and the other thing we can sell is more and that means more possibility and more connection and more opportunity so what i believe you should do is not fall into the carbon footprint myth but instead say every time i spend a dollar i'm sending a signal to the market so if you buy things that are in glass even if they cost a dollar more than things that are in plastic the market will pay attention if you buy an unproven electric car thus making a company like rivian an instant success it makes it so that more companies are going to want to be like vivian now that rivian might not be perfect you might be on the waiting list for a long time it doesn't matter you're getting more by leaning into what could be next is it perfect no but nothing is perfect the point is we are signal setters and we can send signals either by working in community by writing letters by doing you know in my community uh leaf blowers are fairly common and leaf blowers didn't exist 30 years ago a leaf blower gas-powered leaf blower puts out as much carbon in one hour as driving a car from where you live to los angeles and back think about that and it's also really noisy and not that safe so if you say to the gardener please don't use a leaf blower they will nod but they will keep using it because they're under competitive pressure to do so because if they don't you're gonna you know someone else will hire them in my town they made leaf blowers against the law and as a result the gardeners have no choice but to switch to electric leaf blowers and they have responded by saying wow this is quieter and more convenient and we like it better but it only happened because 40 people wrote a letter to nikki the mayor and said enough of this nonsense we can't do this voluntarily just like we can't ask people to stop peeing in the river let's just say no more leaf blowers and then they'll be gone really really fascinating anything else seth that you think is worth noting and i appreciate and my children and grandchildren don't have any yet but maybe one day i will uh will also appreciate i think what you're doing and so many other people are doing well thank you there's a bunch of free stuff at the carbon almanac.org including a kids book which has been downloaded tens of thousands of times it's beautifully illustrated there's a photo book there's a daily email there's 40 podcasts and you can switch your search engine and if you switch to a search engine called a cozia with one click two clicks maybe um it's faster and less ads and more privacy than google and they plant a tree every time you do 43 searches and i personally have planted hundreds of trees since i switched and it doesn't cost me anything and i feel good about that yeah i've switched browser as well it's very easy to set up so we'll put the links in the show notes to all of that and i got to ask you buckminster fuller why did he make page 328 okay so do you remember those yellow envelopes that work with the red string on them oh yeah okay yeah those were what inter-departmental memos exactly yeah yeah we're showing our age here but the way it would work to save money on xeroxes and carbon paper someone would write a memo and then they would put it in that yellow envelope and write the name of the person who got it next and drop it in the interoffice mail and it would be delivered to them and then the next person would keep reusing the envelope and it would travel its way around the office and so the back cover inside of the almanac is one of those envelopes and what we are trying to say to you is now that you've made it to the end write your name here and go hand it to the next person because we are not here to sell books none of us make a penny i'm a volunteer i don't care if i only sell two of these as long as it keeps spreading and moving on so when we listed the names in the back we thought what would be clever we listed the first person who identified the greenhouse effect and carbon gas we identified we listed uh i think the person who did that very valuable work of uh measuring carbon in the atmosphere in hawaii and then because i've been a bucky fuller fan since i was 12 we listed buckminster fuller that's fantastic okay so the website again for this seth is uh carbon almanac.org yes you can put the the in or not we got them on the okay fantastic and of course to find you just type seth into any browser or even yokosia and you'll find seth godin seth thank you i really appreciate what you're doing uh with your life but also with your impact and you've helped just millions of leaders around the world including i'm pretty sure almost every single listener of this podcast so thank you for being so generous with your time thank you for leading the work you do really matters i appreciate the time thanks thank you for watching the carey newhop leadership podcast on youtube i hope it's helped you thrive in life and leadership and if you haven't yet checked out the art of leadership academy inside you'll find everything you need to lead grow and run a church and now a word from our sponsor belay if you've ever struggled with bookkeeping watch this video because not only is it going to increase your peace of mind but you're going to wonder why you waited so long [Music] then it's tax season i still need all of your vendors w9 forms from last year here that's nice sweetheart but i'm not thirsty a belay bookkeeper really is that where we are now i took care of the forms for dan this morning they are already in your inbox so okay let's let them enjoy their day never miss a moment modern staffing from belay please you know there's not even any realty in there but while she's a young girl let her have fun have fun today sweetie get out go you are being ridiculous

Channel: Carey Nieuwhof

Views: 3,858

Keywords: Carey Nieuwhof, Carey Nieuwhof podcast, Carey Nieuwhof leadership podcast, Carey Nieuwhof blog, Carey Nieuwhof content, Carey Nieuwhof YouTube, leadership talks, church growth, burnout, Carey Nieuwhof burnout, Art of Leadership Academy, Carey Nieuwhof Academy, Seth Godin, Seth Godin podcast, Seth Godin books, Seth Godin purple cow, Seth Godin tribes, Seth Godin website, akimbo, Seth Godin akimbo

Id: __sGemSFkb0

Length: 54min 27sec (3267 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 16 2022