This Sustainable Life

James is fascinating and, I believe, fascinated. He interviewed me as much as I did him.The recording starts mid-conversation since we were just talking but his engineer started the recording. You'll hear a few minutes in when we found out we were being recorded. Since his engineer mixed live as we went, I'm giving you the conversation unfiltered. No removing ums even.We talked about initiative, education, how to learn social and emotional skills, my category of ASEEP fields and how I teach, cold showers, exploring nature, my podcast strategy, and why it brought me to him.James has written and spoken at length on taking initiative, alternatives to mainstream education. He seemed fascinated by my teaching style. I gave him a copy of my book Initiative that he started skimming while we spoke. As I read, with enthusiasm.Talking about nature and the environment comes in around 50 minutes.We shared our mutual disdain if that's the right word for following the overly-worn path, also the problems with parroting doom and gloom. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Caspar leads a fulfilling life and helps people do the same.What's his expertise? How has he found purpose more than others? Why do corporations book him to help them with morale?He sailed around the world with his family. He lived a comfortable corporate life. He didn't have to do something out of the mainstream and independent.It forced them to figure out their narrative and purpose. Since most people don't challenge themselves that way, they don't learn about themselves so much. Were his choices easy? No, he had to figure it out by acting, no different than anyone else.His leaving the corporate world made him more valuable for the corporate world. Anyone can do it. Few do.It's like environmental leadership. Anyone can do it. Few do. The opportunities are global. Billions demand it.Caspar and his family show how much joy, community, personal growth, meaning, and purpose can come from acting on your values.Regular listeners may have picked up my trend toward sailing and sailors. My avoiding flying has led me into a wonderful community and amazing experiences.EducationAs a professor and having earned a PhD, education is a longtime interest, especially experiential and self-directed learning.Caspar and I talked about educating children outside the regular system, through curiosity. It turns out kids learned more when starting with what interested them.Like what motivates people to act environmentally or any type of following: telling people what to do doesn't work as well as asking their interests.I hope you hear from him to change things on the scale in your life as he did in his. He's no more or less human than anyone else. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I've learned in leading that you can lead people best when you meet them where they are. That means speaking their language and understanding their perspective.Many people I talk to take their cues from the Bible, including guidance on how to act regarding the environment. Among them, the term stewardship plays a key role.A steward is one who manages another's property, finances, or other affairs. Everyone views and means things uniquely, but I understand them to mean the world and everything living on it, if we steward them, they aren't ours, but we steward them for both the true owner and future generations so they can enjoy and steward them for their future generations.This episode explores the source of stewardship as an environmental role as the interpretation of dominion, replacing dominance and ruling with responsibility.I then apply that result to another key area waiting for interpretation: being fruitful and multiplying. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Brandon loves negotiation and teaching it. He learned from the top in the field and practices it apparently 24/7. We start our conversation by covering negotiation as developed by an FBI hostage negotiator---Chris, his father.More than the family nature of their business or the FBI basis of his training and technique, I enjoyed his educational approach to negotiation. Brandon wants to help you improve. Keep in mind, his view of negotiation is not the mainstream view where you just use tricks to defeat your counterparty under high-stakes tension.Listeners who have read my books or taken my courses, or know and appreciate what I call Method Learning, will hear that Brandon's teaching technique is like mine: you learn from practicing the basics.The conversation sounds tactical at the beginning---things like what words to use and what goals to seek in a negotiation.As we continue, you'll hear him reveal strategy, and it's not just to win. It's closer to how to live and participate in relationships.I hope you get as much out of the bottle example we talk about as I did, seeing the richness and depth available to grow a relationship in any negotiation. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Everybody talks about political polarization, the communication messes this nation and world are in, and how people who disagree can't talk to each other any more, so we can't resolve conflict.I do it too---that is, get into conversations where I shut down meaningful communication---though less than before, telling me that we can learn to communicate effectively. I've learned tremendously the times I've reversed that trend---that is, to listen to people I disagree with. I learn from them, probably more than I learn from people I disagree with.Today's episode covers an interaction within a community of people formed to increase dialog. Even in a community for that purpose, I find them not knowing what to do about it, even augmenting the problem.One of the problems, as I see it, is depriving students the experiences that teach the social and emotional skills to handle difficult social and emotional situations. Teaching more facts, knowledge, and abstract analysis don't help, yet schools at all levels pile on that strategy. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

When I studied physics and spent time in universities, I met a lot of Nobel laureates. Physics is Nobel heavy so Columbia physics connected me to 3. Other science departments led me to another 1 or 2. The business school led me to another.Seth Shelden and ICAN---the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons---won the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize "for its work to draw attention to the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of any use of nuclear weapons and for its ground-breaking efforts to achieve a treaty-based prohibition of such weapons"Their goal is a UN treaty like the one to ban land mines for nuclear weapons. After forming in 2007, about 2 years ago they achieved, with the help of many others, The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) is adopted at the United Nations by a vote of 122-1. The Treaty, which prohibits nuclear weapons and other nuclear explosive devices, will become law when ratified by 50 states.I wanted to bring someone on who is working on something many want but people don't see how. I hope you'll listen carefully. I picked up something I hadn't expected---a new frame for how to view nuclear weapons. It's not about the physics or engineering. I figure I know a fair amount about game theory and negotiation. While global thermonuclear war is beyond just a complex chess game, my frame still saw it that way.I disagreed with people who said nuclear weapons, through mutually assured destruction, created peace since World War II, but Seth suggested a different perspective than negotiation or brinkmanship.He doesn't look at the situation like two superpowers or even a moderate number of nuclear states. I'll let him describe it, but his view suggests different strategies than I would have come up with and makes important different players.Let's hear a new (to me at least) view on abolishing nuclear weapons. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

People ask me if I worry or lose sleep from my environmental habits in a world where most people pollute profligately and unnecessarily.In this post I try to illustrate by analogy how it feels. How would you feel if you were magically transported to the 50s or 60s and most people smoked and drove cars with no safety equipment but they all considered it normal? Or to 1850 Alabama and someone offered you products made by slave labor?Here are the results to a search on "Mountain Dew teeth," to which I refer in the audio. This click is safe, it's just text search results, but you may want to prepare yourself before clicking from there to images or videos, except that you see equally unhealthy things in the litter, exhaust, and pollution around us all the time.To expand on parallels with living in an environment accepting slavery, here are episodes 098: Would You Free Your Slaves? and 040: Which is easier, freeing slaves or not using disposable bottles?. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I've said it before and I'll say it again. Tom's Do The Math blog is one of the best site on internet. If you measure a site by how much it can improve a reader's life and human society, I challenge you to find one with greater potential. A couple peers include Low Tech magazine and Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air, which is a book that you can download for free.Tom makes the physics behind the environment and our interaction with it simple and accessible. If you don't like math, well, it's the language of nature, so it's important to understand what's happening in nature. But even so, the point of collecting data and calculating results isn't for the sake of the math. It's to get past it to get to your values and to act on them.The point of the math is to get past the mathWhen W. Edwards Deming initially apparently contradictory statements make sense, you understand the point of taking data and calculating results. He said:“Without data, you're just another person with an opinion.”and"Management by numerical goal is an attempt to manage without knowledge of what to do"Doing the math frees you from confusion to enable talking meaningfully about what to do.Regarding the environment, as long as people can think they can just switch to solar for everything that needs energy or that they can close some imaginary loop and recycle everything, they'll do things that lower Earth's ability to support life and human society. They'll feel confident and happy as they step on the gas, thinking it's the brake, driving toward a brick wall.Nature is the perfect mathematician. It doesn't react to your feelings about waste or aspirations but what you actually do.Tom's conclusions about solutions and admonitions against non-solutions point to what works. A path forward becomes obvious and simple when you understand the math and physics. You may not initially like it, but you can change what you like, as sure as most of us learned to like vegetables despite preferring ice cream as children.The result is clarity and mental freedom. The challenge, knowing what works and doesn't, is seeing the madness of people acting without understanding these things.The result is living by your values with confidence, not just hoping for the best. If anyone wonders where my views come from, it's analysis like Tom's. Also Low Tech Magazine, Limits to Growth, and Sustainability Without the Hot Air.There's a lot science that I support and value, but find inaccessibly complex, even with a PhD in physics. Tom's work is accessible. People think the science is hard and scientists confusing. It doesn't have to be.What the math saysTom's main conclusions point to reducing consumption as the most viable solution to our environmental problems. Without it nothing else works. You think you have a solution without reducing consumption? Read his blog. I bet he covered it and showed its limits.My experience shows reducing consumption as improving most Americans' lives, at least the first 80% to 90% reduction. Missing from nearly every mainstream message I've heard but clear from Tom's life, my life, and a few others is that consuming less brings joy, meaning, purpose, community, and relationships along with cleaning our air, land, and water.If you think reduction is an economic problem, read Tom's blog on his conversations with the economist because growth is a bigger problem.Meanwhile human societies sustained for hundreds of thousands of years without growth. Our growth since Adam Smith has picked all the low hanging fruit, high hanging fruit, and now we're digging under the sea for every scrap of oil we can find and polluting everything for a few moments of forced smile.Read Tom's blog and you learn we could create happiness, meaning, purpose, and community instead. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From our first conversation you know Tim's history as a musician and founder of the Eden Project. This time you'll hear the passion of a man who loves restoring the Earth's ability to sustain life and human society.He talks about the spirituality of his work, connecting to the Earth, eating, and growing. For city dwellers like most of us, he shares the potential for that connection available to all of us. We have to take the steps, but the emotionally rewarding results are there.As you listen to this episode about food, plants, land, connection, community, and many things wholesome, I recommend contrasting Tim's world with, say, Facebook or Doritos. In my experience, they disperse community, make connections superficial, and plasticize nature to create craving for brief, regrettable alleviation from that craving. Are they worth it?Usually I prefer second episodes to cover the personal challenge a guest did. In Tim's case we didn't, though it's hard to miss that he lives a life of having done so for years. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Laura and I go back a few years, from being on her podcast.We talk about her concept of emotional obesity: a parallel between physical health and emotional health. I find it a rich analogy on many levels. Characteristics of addiction to food that cause obesity resemble thoughts that cause emotional obesity.She describes her concept in more detail, but I find most helpful about it that it enables you to make yourself emotionally healthy in the ways you make yourself physically healthy. You'll note the parallels in problem and solution as she describes it.Think of thoughts you kick yourself with. If your friend said those things you'd leave that friend. Yet we keep doing it, unable to see that we can stop it.Dwelling in unproductive thoughts and blame doesn't help.We expand it to environmental obesity, where we look at addictive environmental behaviors, another approach that helps understand and solve behaviors we don't like. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.