This is a video about bricks. Now, if you’ve been watching this channel
a while, you may know a bit about bricks themselves, but you probably don’t know about the Brick
Tax of 1784. To help pay for the war with the soon-to-be-United
States of America, King George III began taxing bricks at two shillings and eight cents per
one-thousand bricks, leading manufacturers to increase the size of their bricks to mitigate
the tax. This resulted in— Alright, there’s no way the feds would sit
through all of that. Now let’s talk about our real subject: Why
the Washington Monument is actually a life-size statue of George Washington, and the secret
government documents that prove that America’s first president was actually a 500-foot obelisk
in a trench-coat-- What the… Oh my god. Employee: Sam! SAM! It’s happening! He’s calling! Sam: I knew this day would come. I just hoped we would have had more time. Employee: What are you gonna do? Sam: I’m going to answer it. Sam: Hello, Mr. Gates. Yes, sir. I understand, sir. Absolutely, sir. Thank you, sir. Employee: So? What happened? Sam: It’s time. We’re going to make a brick video. So here we go. Look at this: your friendly neighborhood brick. It looks harmless. Nice, even. You probably look at this brick and think,
“I bet that brick works its hardest and loves its children the same way I do.” But you’d be wrong. What if I told you that all this time, bricks
have been trying to kill you, your friends, and the planet. These reprehensible rectangular prisms of
evil are everywhere--at school, at work, at the park. In fact, you probably have a brick... in your
own home. We thought bricks were our friends, but it
turns out, they’ve been the villain all along… and concrete bricks are the most
sinister of all. Did you know that concrete production accounts
for 8% of global CO2 emissions? What’s that, you didn’t? Exactly. Because the bricks don’t want you to. In fact, if concrete production were a country,
it would be the third largest CO2 emitter in the world, behind only the US and China. Cement bricks have cemented their place as
agents of evil. And it’s up to us to do something about
it. I’m Sam and I approve this message. To understand why our bricks are killing us,
I first have to tell you about my grandmother. She... had a difficult life, growing up in
Sarajevo during the Bosnian war, but amidst the fighting and destruction, she always found
comfort in this family recipe, passed down from generation to generation, for ACI CODE-301-84
compliant Normal Strength Concrete. She recorded this oral telling of it just
days before she passed: What up my dillas this Auntie Emina coming
at you hot with fresh new 5-minute dinner recipe. Today we’ve got concrete, which may seem
kind of sus but actually really slaps when it go down your gullet. Now, first you’ve got to gather your ingredients:
you want some limestone, some clay, little bit of sand, gravel, water, gypsum, and a
juice box--preferably those dope ones with Big Bird on the side. Next, take big bowl and mix limestone and
clay together, and pop that bad boy into rotating kiln set to 1450 degrees celsius--I don’t
know what that is in Fahrenheit. I’m in friggin Yugoslavia. Now here’s some hot tea to spill: limestone,
which is stage name for calcium carbonate, is actually made up of Calcium, Carbon, and
Oxygen. When you heat that up supa hot fire, though,
limestone will split with calcium going over here, taking one oxygen with it, and making
calcium oxide. That leave one of these carbon bois and two
oxygen, which make it CO2. We take the calcium oxide, and mix that shizz
with gypsum, water, sand, and gravel to make concrete, and then we just let the carbon
dioxide fly away into atmosphere because it’s 1970s and there’s no way at all that that
would be harmful in any way. Alright my peeps remember to like and smash
that subscribe button. I’m out. Hello. This is Arnold Fitzgerald--Half as Interesting
Incorporated’s assistant deputy fact-checker for the south-east Pacific region. For liability purposes I am required to read
the following prepared statement: “The previous clip, featuring Emina Lara Hadžiosmanović,
known colloquially by the moniker Auntie Emina, included the assertion that “there’s no
way at all that that would be harmful in any way,” in reference to entrance of carbon
dioxide or CO2 into the atmosphere of the earth. After rigorous review, scrupulous consideration,
and fastidious auditing, third-party fact checkers have determined this claim to be
demonstrably false. According to data from the Portland Cement
Association, due to a lamentable combination of limestone breakup and kiln heating, an
average of 927 kg or 2044 lbs of CO2 are emitted for every 1000 kg or 2205 lbs of portland
cement produced in the US--and indeed, excess quantities of CO2, in and of themselves, can
be harmful in excess quantities insofar as that results in climate change--which is,
you know... bad.” Thanks Arnold, you make some interesting points. The good news is, there are two solutions
on the horizon to help us salvage our concrete comrades. Well, actually, there are more than two, but
we already ate up most of our budget on legal fees. So there’s a company called bioMASON that
essentially grows things called bio-bricks, and they were actually really nice. They sent us little samples of their bricks,
which are great as little paperweights or for throwing at the interns if they go for
unscheduled bathroom breaks. bioMASON even gave us footage of their process
to help with our explanation. The only problem is, it’s all in black and
white and it’s only 30 seconds long, and it has no sound. So we’re going to narrate. Here we go. We open on a building that is not made of
bio bricks. So surely this isn’t the building where
they... Nope sign says bioMASON, okay. Alright here’s a guy turning a thingy. A--oh, okay this is actually important. So that dirt looking stuff is called waste
aggregate, and it’s basically gonna get used as the scaffolding that the brick will
get grown on. We’ll come back to it. Let’s keep going. We’ve got some very dramatic forklift framing. Forklift guy forgot to put his second mask
strap on Oh, okay stop. So this guy at the big vat, what he’s doing
is actually important. So, remember how much fun you had in chemistry
class, when you had to learn a bunch of equations? It was awesome and you loved it, remember? Well great, because we’re going to do more
of that now. So, making a bio-brick is all about making
calcium carbonate, also known as CaCO3, also known as calcium carbonate. It’s basically limestone. I’m going to explain how to make it, but
I just want to warn you, it involves a lot of discussion of a chemical called urea, and
you’re all gonna have to be big kids about that. So, what vat guy is probably doing up there
is putting together a bunch of stuff: the aggregated waste, some water, some urea, some
calcium salts, and a special little micro-organism, who we'll call Jeff. Jeff releases a reacty-goo, or enzyme, to
make the urea, which is made up of all of this, reacts with the water, which as we know
is H2O, and it splits into two ammonias, NH3s, and something called carbonic acid, H2CO3. The ammonias react with the water to make
ammonium, NH4, and hydroxide, HO, which makes the solution basic, which then makes that
carbonic acid split into HCO3 and H. And then, the HCO3 gives its H to one of the HOs, to
make H2O, leaving CO3. Then that CO3 just grabs some calcium from
the salts, and boom, you’ve got CaCO3--calcium carbonate. That sort of latches onto that aggregated
waste from before, and it forms a bio brick. If that explanation was confusing to you,
don’t worry, I’m sure the rest of the footage will help explain. Okay we’ve got a guy hitting a thingy. Oh no it has a leak! Something that looks like the inside of a
printer. Alright vat guy is back but he forgot to put
on his other mask loop, and he’s pressing buttons, and then next to him, another guy
is pointing at the buttons, in case the first guy forgets where they are. Oh look more aggregate! Alright we got a big machine that looks like
Deadpool wearing a tophat. Giant stamp. Oh look it’s snickers bars! Mmmmm. Delicious. And yep, that building is definitely still
not made out of biobricks. And okay that’s the end. Hmm. That didn’t really help explain it. Soooo hopefully it made sense the first time. Bio bricks are just one solution, though. The other big idea these days is something
called carbon capture, and we figured, after the bioMASON people were so nice, we should
reach out to Capture-create--a carbon capture concrete company--and they’d probably be
just as helpful and accommodating to us. So we called them up, and here’s what they
had to say. So we left a message, and waited as long as
we could for them to get back to us, but we didn’t hear anything before we had to publish
the video. Totally no big deal though, we 100% get it,
people are busy… no hard feelings. In fact, as a show of good will, we figured
we’d just play their ad. Here at Capture-crete, we’re busy making
concrete bricks that will change the world. So busy, in fact, that we don’t have much
time for doing anything else at all, even returning phone calls. The first step in making our concrete is pre-combustion
carbon capture. You see, when fossil fuels are burned, from
the plants that power the lights in our house, or the phones in our offices that we don’t
check, they let off a bunch of things called flue gases: water vapor, sulfur oxides, nitrogen
oxides, and most importantly, CO2. But by placing a filter on the smokestack
releasing these gases, we’re able to separate the CO2 out. It’s not easy. In fact, it’s hard. So hard that our brains have to stay completely,
100% full of that information, leaving no room at all for remembering how to check an
answering machine, or how to extend the common courtesy of calling someone back. Anyways, now that we’ve got that CO2, we
have to put it into concrete bricks. We start with a material that’s a byproduct
of steel making, steel slag, which is full of calcium oxide, pour it into a mold, and
then “cure” it with CO2. They combine together to form calcium carbonate--a
solid that can support a structure. So now, you’ve got a concrete brick that
didn’t involve the carbon-intensive process of superheating a kiln, and instead of releasing
CO2, you actually absorbed about 1 kilogram of it into a brick. I know--it sounds so simple. And it is. Maybe. It might be more complicated, but how would
you know that? It’s not like we would actually take the
time to have a quick phone call to explain it to you. You’re just a dumb little idiot who runs
a YouTube channel with nearly two million subscribers, who wanted to tell the world
about our product, but we decided that YOU weren’t worth OUR TIME. FREE PUBLICITY?! NO THANKS!! WE’RE JUST SOOOOO BUSY MAKING CONCRETE!! CONCRETE CONCRETE CONCRETE!! WOOOOHOOOOO!!! Capture-crete: We care about the environment…
but not about Sam’s feelings. Alright, so what’s the point of all of this? Well, it really all comes down to something
Bill Gates says in his new book, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster. In it, he wrote, “All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A
Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House” okay that seems like the wrong quote. Um… he wrote, “U.S. Department of Energy, “History of
Air Conditioning,” www.energy.gov” nope that’s the citations… Oh, here we go. “By 2060, the world’s building stock—a
measure that factors in the number of buildings and their size—will double. That’s like putting up another New York
City every month for 40 years.” Look, neither bio bricks nor the jerks at
Carbicrete Capture-crete are poised right now to completely fix the problem of carbon
emissions in building materials, although--and it makes me furious to admit this--carbon
capture concrete technology is probably a bit closer. But they can both help. Plus, there are some other processes--including
alternative and recycled materials--that we didn’t even get a chance to talk about here,
because we wasted all our runtime holding a grudge against a concrete company. In the end, the real point is that we need
to be exploring lots of ideas, even knowing that many of them will fail. I think Bill summed up that point best, when
he wrote in his book, “We need to be exploring lots of ideas, even knowing that many of them
will fail.” And lastly, I’ll leave you with one final
quote from Bill’s book. In chapter three, he writes, “Hey Half as
Interesting viewers, they finally did it, alright? They made a bricks video. It’s done. They made it. You can stop spamming the suggestions page. It’s finished. Happy now?” So, just to be clear, this video really was
created in partnership with Bill Gates, and he really does have a new book out called
“How to Avoid a Climate Disaster,” and for what it’s worth, I’ve read it and
it’s really, genuinely great. He does an incredible job of laying out the
problem--or really, the many problems--at the heart of climate change, and then writes
smartly, clearly, thoughtfully, and realistically about the solutions. You can find out more about how we can all
work together to avoid a climate disaster at the link below.
The long awaited. Brick. Video.
I can't believe he actually worked with Bill Gates to make a video about bricks 😂
Whoever did the voiceover for the Capturecrete segment deserves all the praise in the world.
That was wonderful.
But what about the nebula one?
Who played the Jugoslavian grandmother? I feel like I recognise the voice, but couldn't place it
They did it!!!!!!!
We need the source for the stock footage of the business man kicking another business man in the nuts and then running away. (I believe it's at 11:57 in the video)
BRICKS!
More about concrete than bricks :/