This Sustainable Life

Whitney's background and accomplishments are incredible and we start with them. He shares his beliefs and mindsets that lead to his high performance in business, philanthropy, fitness, family, and more.Then we share a fun part of how I invited him to this podcast. After he, in a friendly, helpful way, cursed at some of his newsletter readers in criticizing their behavior during the pandemic, I cursed at him in the same friendly, helpful way. The email got his attention. It led to us meeting in person to pick up litter in Washington Square Park (where he saw his first drug deal in the corner with the syringe drug users), then to recording in person at my apartment.When we spoke on the environment, I heard a common mix: he connected deeply with it, including majestic experiences at some of Earth's most extreme environments, and he also felt about its problems that he couldn't do anything meaningful.My favorite part of my conversation with Whitney was how he put up nearly every form of delay, resistance, and obstacle any other guest has responded to my invitation to act on his environmental values. I believe we were both patient, listened, spoke to be understood. After he found something to act on, you'll hear the change in his perspective on acting on intrinsic motivation versus what sounded to me like trying to save the world, or feeling you have to, but disconnected from intrinsic motivation.Whitney's book, The Art of Playing Defense: How to Get Ahead by Not Falling BehindEdit: Read my emails cursing at Whitney Tilson that brought him to my podcast Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We started from Ash's TEDx talks, which cover vulnerability, intimacy, and support. You can listen to our conversation on its own, but it won't hurt to watch them first.She could easily say, "As a lesbian, I have it so difficult," but she speaks more universally. Everyone has something difficult to share, hides parts of their identity, has been made fun of, has felt judged, shamed, or the like. She shares about opening up. She takes no high ground, nor victimhood. She reflects and shares insight mixed with plenty of humor and humility.I hide my share of things and welcomed her role modeling to open up more. I suspect you'll want to too. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The start of this episode's text:Regular listeners know I’ve been living with my apartment off the electric grid for two weeks, in Manhattan, not off in the woods.Most of the benefits are about connecting more with nature, being humble to it, not dominating it. I’m waking up earlier, for example, to work and read by daylight, so I don’t have to drain the solar-powered battery. Direct sunlight is free. Likewise, during a spell of three overcast days, I had to pay attention to my power use and take advantage of what sunlight I could to charge the battery.Speaking of reading by daylight, the great benefit prompting today’s post is nearly finishing a biography, Lincoln, by David Herbert Donald. I’m on page 507 of 600, not counting the over hundred pages of footnotes. Past the Gettysburg Address, he’s just been nominated for his second candidacy. Talk of amending the constitution is starting to appear. The war appears mostly won, though deaths mount, Confederate wins still happen, and no one knows how to plan for or handle reconstruction.I talk a lot about slavery relating to pollution. I’ve for years taken inspiration from British abolitionists around 1800 who looked across oceans to see people suffering for their culture’s indulgences. For the first time in history, according to podcast guest and author of Bury the Chains, Adam Hochschild, one group worked for another group’s freedom. Every argument you’ve heard to avoid giving up polluting, their peers used to avoid giving up slavery (what I do doesn’t matter, only government and corporations can make a difference, if we don’t others will, it’s not that bad, it will work out, etc), but they refused to accept the cruelty, injustice, and inhumanity. Through their work, and others’, without a civil war, England made illegal the slave trade and then slavery. I look across oceans and see people suffering and dying, displaced from their land or poisoned and killed on it because we fund companies and governments to do it by buying their packaging, fossil fuels, and so on.People commonly describe America as a racist nation, especially white Americans, especially white Americans who don’t act against racism. A Constitution permitting slavery and a three-fifths clause certainly back up that view. What do we make of all the people born into that system who did nothing to create it and who worked against it? Besides Lincoln, consider William Lloyd Garrison, Thadeus Stevens, Emerson, Thoreau, and everyone who opposed slavery from before the Constitution to today? What about the hundreds of thousands of men who fought for the Union, many volunteers, maybe not all fighting specifically to end slavery but many for just that reason?One could argue they should have done more. When they take down statues of Thomas Jefferson, who opposed slavery they point out he owned slaves. You can’t argue he created the system he was born into. How much could he do to change that system within his lifetime? Can you blame him for not ending slavery? Say you blame him for owning slaves, would his freeing his slaves changed the system? Alone, clearly not, but you could argue he should have acted his conscience and done what he knew was right, whether it significantly changed the system or not. Everyone knows everyone prefers being free to being enslaved.What could a free person, benefiting from living in a system of slavery or not, have done? How would they make a difference? Lincoln took a lifetime to reach a position where he could do things like issue the Emancipation Proclamation, which didn’t end slavery, and along the way embraced many crazy notions, like shipping blacks to Africa.See the rest here.Conversations with Lincoln author David Herbert Donald on C-Span Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We start with one of the great cases of a corporation choosing to act with integrity in the face of pressure and incentive not to. Mark was part of the team that chose for CVS drug stores in rebranding to stop selling cigarettes. The choice was superficially difficult in that cigarettes made them billions of dollars in profit and their competitors could gain market share. But it was easy in that if they wanted to identify with health, there was no question.Mark shares inside views of that story, then connects with leadership and integrity. We look at comparable cases, like New York banning cigarettes in the work place, people projecting losing business to New Jersey.Mark focuses on what changes behavior. He asked what someone can do. I suggested intrinsic versus extrinsic, which led to doing the Spodek/AIM Method. He participated and deconstructed it as we did it. You'll hear his enthusiasm for doing The Spodek/AIM Method, his commitment, and building on the technique. It seems inevitable that we'll collaborate beyond this one commitment. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Regular listeners know I love talking with professional athletes. They open themselves to failure every time they compete. They often make incredible feats look so simple and natural, we forget the years of dedication and effort that made it possible. Whether you want to play professional sports or not, you can adopt from them to reach your potential, which is one of my definitions of competition.I love talking to them because they share what happened behind the scenes. Almost always, as with Josh Martin, it means hard work for a long time, but that view is too simple. What enabled working so hard? They aren't gluttons for punishment, nor automatons. What's their mindset? What's their physical attitude?Josh shares these things from behind the scenes: how he started not playing football and not doing well in school to playing at Columbia, then the NFL. It wasn't easy. He failed over and over, didn't fit in, struggled academically, and struggled athletically. Listen to hear what carried him through.Since he lives in Brooklyn, we recorded in person, one of my first since the pandemic, which makes the conversation more friendly (my apartment looks a lot smaller with an NFL linebacker in it).Today he's an entrepreneur, which we reach at the end, and you can learn more at his home page.Josh's home page Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

More continual improvement: the more sustainably I live, the easier each next step. Business people know about continual improvement, also knows as kaizen, the Toyota Way.How do you go from the Wright brothers' airplane to a 747? Not in one jump. Continual improvement, part of the process I have to convey more.I share observations on my week without using the electric grid: about food, climbing stairs, timing sleep to use more sunlight, and more. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Douglas McMaster, founder of a restaurant that uses no trash cans, discusses topics such as fermentation and mycelium furniture. They also explore the challenges of sustainable living, changing food habits, and the problem of waste and consumerism. The speakers touch on the importance of regenerative agriculture, connecting people to natural food, and the difficulties of communicating radical ideas.

I share thoughts after two days using only solar power in Manhattan. After recording I turned off the circuit to the whole apartment. I'm on the roof now, charging the battery.The recording shares more. The main themes: freedom and continual improvement.Also fun and curiosity.Caption for the cartoon, which I refer to in the recording: "Look at that glassy stare, those vacuous eyes... He's been domesticated I tell you!"Link to a cspan video of Sebastian Junger, author of Tribe, which I refer to in the recording too. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The notes I read from for this episode:“Lead by example”. I’m not leading by example.“Extreme” implies values, as does “middle ground” and “balance.” Everyone is extreme by someone else’s views.Everyone I talk to says they are balancing, that extreme is too much. What are you balancing with if one side is sustainability? How can the answer be anything but growth and unsustainability? People will say family, work, making money, but it doesn’t change that they are fueling growth and driving a system we are trying to change. Nobody said changing systems is easy, but systemic change begins with personal change.Our greatest challenge is not finding theoretical solutions on degrowth.If we want others to live by values like sustainability and stewardship, how can we influence them if we live by the excuses they do? If they hear us live by growth, why shouldn’t they? What’s the difference?Every person who resist degrowth agrees they prefer clean air, land, food, and water to polluted and nearly all say they have to balance, not be extreme.I would only ask this challenging a question if I had discovered that every step toward sustainability, while often hard at first, improved my life.When I hear someone say I’m extreme, it sounds like calling a parent who changes their child’s diaper extreme.If you own a pet or garden, you’ve changed your life more than I have.“It’s okay for Lloyd to set an example of living a 1.5 degree lifestyle that many many people aren’t close to.” My point isn’t the logistics of how to do it, but our values and character. No one raises their kid halfway. We do it out of love, passion, joy, fun, and all sorts of reward, no matter how much poop, vomit, injuries.My goal is to help people live by values of stewardship and freedom our culture has led us to suppress so much we think we should balance them with dishwashers and flying to vacation.If you want to experience the world, get rid of your bucket list. If you want to love your family, don’t fly to visit them rarely.I don’t want to sound like I’m pushing too hard on them. On the contrary, I believe that all of us, when we switch cultures, will wish we had earlier. I feel like I’m suggesting to a parent who abuses their child that they’ll prefer not abusing it? I don’t want to suggest nature or Earth are human children, but we sure are abusing them.When you pursue sustainability enough, you go through many transitions. One big one is from thinking of yourself first,.If I sound uncompromising, it’s because nature is uncompromising. Too many people measure their sustainability action by how much they feel like they tried. That’s why they say it’s so hard, so that every little bit counts for a lot. But two things. One, nature doesn’t respond to your feelings, it responds to your actions.Two, it’s not hard! It only looks hard until you commit and sweat the withdrawal.Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth that ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one's favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamed would have come his way. Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it.The Growthbusters podcastThe Growthbusters documentary Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Gaya gets systems, how to change them, and not fall prey to rationalizations that sound tempting but are self-serving excuses like "individual actions don't matter" or "only governments and corporations can act on the scale we need." I loved this conversation for her knowledge and experience in what will reverse humanity's pattern of lowering Earth's ability to sustain life.She shares and elaborates on major points like that technology is just a tool that serves our goals and values. While we value growth over sustainability, technology will accelerate our pattern of lowering Earth's ability to sustain life, not decrease it. We share our frustration with technology fans who misunderstand how technology affects our systems, thinking making it more efficient will lead to less pollution despite centuries of increased efficiency increasing pollution.She shares about the value of individual actions to change culture and oneself, including her picking up litter with her family. She shares how sustainability creates joy since we are social.She hints at her upcoming book, which is available now.Gaya's book (Creative Commons license, so no cost) is coming out next month. Link to come.A brief summary of her work: The Limits to Growth model: still prescient 50 years laterAn brief summary: Data check on the world model that forecast global collapseEarth4All: the project supporting her book Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.