Lessons from Nature Podcast

Project Honeylight: Observation 36. The Good Thing. 2020

April 17, 2024 Mark Rubin Season 1 Episode 36
Project Honeylight: Observation 36. The Good Thing. 2020
Lessons from Nature Podcast
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Lessons from Nature Podcast
Project Honeylight: Observation 36. The Good Thing. 2020
Apr 17, 2024 Season 1 Episode 36
Mark Rubin

Observation:

The most crucial observation in this story is the protagonist's lifelong commitment to creating a positive impact on the environment. From a young age, they were inspired by concepts of energy balance, survival skills, and efficient resource allocation. This led to the launch of "Project Honeylight," focusing on sustainable living and resource conservation, profoundly influenced by influential thinkers and personal experiences.

The Lesson:

Commitment to environmental sustainability and learning from various disciplines can lead to impactful global eco-projects.

How this is Helpful:

  1. Inspiration: Shows the value of lifelong learning.
  2. Awareness: Encourages connection with our environment.
  3. Action: Demonstrates the possibility of individual impact.


Questions for Reflection:

  1. Goals: What can I do to contribute to environmental sustainability?
  2. Influences: How have my experiences and learning shaped my views on the environment?
  3. Lifestyle: In what ways can I make my daily life more eco-friendly?


For more ‘Practical Dreaming’, visit https://www.markianrubin.life/practical-dreaming 

Show Notes Transcript

Observation:

The most crucial observation in this story is the protagonist's lifelong commitment to creating a positive impact on the environment. From a young age, they were inspired by concepts of energy balance, survival skills, and efficient resource allocation. This led to the launch of "Project Honeylight," focusing on sustainable living and resource conservation, profoundly influenced by influential thinkers and personal experiences.

The Lesson:

Commitment to environmental sustainability and learning from various disciplines can lead to impactful global eco-projects.

How this is Helpful:

  1. Inspiration: Shows the value of lifelong learning.
  2. Awareness: Encourages connection with our environment.
  3. Action: Demonstrates the possibility of individual impact.


Questions for Reflection:

  1. Goals: What can I do to contribute to environmental sustainability?
  2. Influences: How have my experiences and learning shaped my views on the environment?
  3. Lifestyle: In what ways can I make my daily life more eco-friendly?


For more ‘Practical Dreaming’, visit https://www.markianrubin.life/practical-dreaming 

00:00

My name is Mark Rubin, and I'm a dream weaver. I hope these widgets help you weave your dreams into reality. My mind is full of models. And when I was 10, I decided I do something good with them when I was ready, and in particular one do something good with my model of energy transfer, which is a visualization of thermodynamics. And it also is a visualization of business systems. And when I was fed thought about it for a few years, and when I was 15, I decided that the good thing that I would do with my models was to launch an Ico project, a global Ico project, based on this model of energy transfer 1985, I decided I call this project The Lorax project. That's I'll come back to in a minute based on from the Dr. Seuss book, The Lorax, where people spoke for the trees, really, it was a metaphor for taking care of our habitat, the environment, like around us living things. By the time I was 15, I had I had learned about Carl Sagan, and Cosmos, and space and time and the pale blue dot that we're on, going 90 miles per second around a star. And I thought that was cool, that we're just passing through on this rock together, at times and at times alone. I also went to a wilderness school run by someone named Tom Brown, Jr. It's called the tracker school. And I learned basic survival skills, you know, just the basics of like, you know, could you make it, you know, week or two in the woods by yourself with nothing and survive? It was about understanding where you were? What were the opportunities and risks around you? How could you improve your level of comfort? What are your basic physiological needs at that moment in time, and this isn't connecting a person to their surroundings. I'd already observed at that point, when I was 1415. Most people are completely disconnected from their habitat. And through things like you know, heating and cooling, air conditioning, driving, and entertainment, where people occupy their minds with things they find interesting and exciting, because that feels better to them than just looking around. or listening to the wind, or wondering how many birds are around me what kinds of birds are around me? Which way is the sun moving? Which way are the shadows moving? How fast are they moving? What time is sunset? What time is sunrise, I learned that there and also there I learned about Buckminster Fuller, who was super genius, and inventor of many things, he had a game called world game that I read about in one of his books. And this game was about resource allocation. And this really appealed to me. Buckminster Fuller knew, for example, the energy balances of things based on available information. So basically, how many cows are there? How many chickens are there? How many tons of wheat, how many tons of corn, how much coal back then how much oil, how much natural gas, nuclear power, whatever the resources were hiring humanity, food, energy, water, and technologies available that were either coming or already in place. And the idea of this game was to allocate resources in a way that had the greatest advantage for the largest number of living things for the longest period of time. It is I believe, it's like a long running game like either months or years. But the idea is that could you understand the system well enough to clean energy balance that was net energy positive in some way. And then you wouldn't have to run out of energy or fight over energy. And this would reduce war. And one of the things I remember about this world game, or maybe it was Buckminster Fuller speaking at something, where he talked about the idea that peace is less expensive than war. And then if we invested, I believe it was 90% of the money we spend on war, weapons of war, free allocated that money for weapons of peace, that we could do that for, I think it was like five years or less. And that would create a fair balance of energy, water food resources, using the ideas in world game so that there'll be less need to fight. So basically investing in two choices. We can invest in war, which is like weapons of war, or training for war, or, you know, different aspects of preparing for war, advanced weaponry, faster weapons, bigger weapons, more potent weapons, all kinds of though, or we could invest in peace, which is like clean energy, clean water, clean food, clean soil, health care, education, these are weapons of peace. And when people are happy content, have agency have sovereignty, then they're less likely to fight. And that is good for everybody because it costs less to get along than to fight. And when I say costs, I don't just mean money. I mean, like the whole scenario. And what I learned in this game and 1985, that there was enough resources on the planet, to feed everybody, but yet people were starving. And I didn't like this. It's the distance is so wealthy that we had the capability to plan and improve, maybe not solve because humans are messy, but improve the chances of long term thriving, rather than from what I could see increasing the chances of complete destruction. So I decided in 1985, to combine the philosophies of Carl Sagan, Tom Brown, Jr. and his grandfather's talking well, and Buckminster Fuller into this global ego project that I was calling at the time, the Lorax project. And I've since changed that name, because the nice people at DLA Piper, Dr. Seuss legal team, have informed me that the Lorax project is trademarked. And also, and they were so cool and nice. And I had bought a domain, I had built a website, done all this stuff. And anyway, I thought of a new name, project on the light, which I liked a lot better anyway. So life is lucky. And that's good. And what happened in 2022, things happened in early 2021. I knew a pandemic was coming in late December, mid December, I think, of 2019. And I was reading news coming out of China and other places and pandemics have come before and they will come again. And to early February 2020 is my wife had a stroke. It was serious. And she was in hospital, almost five weeks. And she's fully recovered now. And things are good. But it was dicey for a while, while she was in the hospital, things were shutting down. It was a scary time. And it was just me and my two daughters and my dogs. And we were just, you know, I think like a lot of people just trying to process what was happening and make plans to keep on truckin the best we could in that time in 2020. I had about 15 or 16 businesses at that point. I was just building businesses. And I guess I like in retrospect kind of got lost in it is it was never about maximizing my honey flow, or, or trying to prove anything, I was just doing business stuff because it was fun for me because I can visualize businesses and scale model. And they're like toys to me, like visually like a machine that you would play with, because I played with machines as a kid. And now I just play with them in the in this way, is a business as a system. And if you can visualize all the parts and pieces and how everything works. And you can tune it up and like change the gear ratios and swap out components and try different things and see what works better. I thought that was fun for a long time, the machinery around me in scale models. And I in 2020, I remember I had over my represent businesses spatially in three different ways. And one of the ways is with gears. And the gears represent the value of the money. There's three kinds of money, potential money, kinetic money, and theoretical money. All of us is represented by these spinning gears like a machine that is processing money. And I had over 300 years in my mind at all times, because I had created reports and computer software to feed me this data daily. So I can create the models and what I realized in 2020. And this is why it was like a strange epiphany. There was no benefit of me visuals in these businesses in the detail that I was every day because I wasn't doing any work. I had a whole gigantic team of people doing stuff. And they would feed me these reports and have a look at them and be like, great. add very little new ideas for these businesses because they've been running for almost 20 years so they're operating well. I was disengaged from the people doing the work, in part because I guess I was bored of the gears spinning around in my mind It wasn't fun anymore. I wasn't learning anything, I wasn't learning anything. Because it was the same business times 16 times different people, different markets, slightly different setups, but more or less the same machine. You know, like I said, there was a pandemic, I was isolated. And I was thinking, like, what am I doing with my life? Like, I had planned to do this project when I was around 55. And at this point, I was 50. And I was like, What am I waiting for? What am I waiting for? I guess, really, what it was was I had a milestone in my mind from when I was 15, that I would do it when I was 55, which was 40 years. And I wasn't 55 yet. So I was just building, building, building, building, building, so that I would have enough money to do it when I was 55. And I decided in 2020, I was gonna start this project and get it going. And that led to start thinking about like the mechanics of the project. So I plan to base this project on my model of energy transport. And I thought, how can I connect this project to kids and inspire curiosity? Because I learned in school, Curiosity is crushed by memorization. And being forced to memorize things in school or being forced to learn things that are not interested in or other people aren't interested in the myth of like, well, you should learn everything. So you can like pick what you like, I knew what I liked when I was like three. So like, I don't need to memorize the Magna Carta. I wasn't learning anything at this point. And I thought I would just it's time to start Project tonyalight. So I'm back to the kids. So what I wanted to do was was start the project, with the stories about witches for Dream weaving, because there's two things, I think they get crushed, or at least it is my experience, they get crushed by at least the educational system that I was brought up in a visit the East Coast of the US, Curiosity is crushed by memorization. And the printing press destroyed most people's ability to dream. I say that because we dream and pictures, or at least everyone I know who dreams describes to me the pictures of their dreams, like a like a movie in their mind. But how many people express themselves with pictures? Everyone, I almost everyone I know, only uses words, only uses words to communicate. But nobody dreams in words, who's dreaming them or who's reading a book in their dream of words. And I think what happened is when the printing press was was was invented, and to deploy religion and to deploy laws and to deploy ideas, there were no pictures and the movable type. for that. I think people were better at dreaming because they drew and also in growing up this idea of like doodling is somehow like not paying attention and doodling is learning. Doodling is organizing doodling is synthesizing doodling is thinking, when did it become bad or wrong? To sketch? Like, I only remember like maybe once or twice in my life where a teacher was like, what do you do? What are you doing doodling pay attention. What? And now we got these kids staring at phones consuming content, occupying their mind, creating distraction so they can feel entertained all the time. So someone can monetize their attention and sell them something or sell their data or something. Like what are we doing to kids? These stories are about dream weaving. And this is project honey late architecture now. And I also have a podcast called Lessons from nature podcast, where I describe the secrets of the bees through six scientific domains, which is physics, biology, psychology, economics, anthropology and futurology. After that I have a kid's book, honey is money the secrets of the bees that I wrote with my friend Dan Rome. He's the artist on this book, super genius great guy. And after the book is launched, I have a board game called B box the business of the bees, which teaches kids how to be a beekeeper in terms of business, like marketing, sales operations, HR Finance app and special projects. And I'm going to teach kids to convert money into money and some of that money will be used to create pollinator habitat. I mentioned earlier video I'm carbon negative for life now by playing these games I ended my lifetime carbon footprint. So the point of it is there something you can do to help all of nature's baby bees you can spend some of your honey converting money into trees. And that's that part of the project and then also after teaching the kids the board game. I did a deal with a beekeeping company, and we're gonna play the game in real life. And so a bee Business in a Box Kit to kids, which includes everything you need to cover those business functions I just mentioned, and teach the kids how to be beekeepers, but like with real money, and real honey and real bees, and deploy this globally, wherever this place where it's all going down is that honey Lake glamping, which is a glamping place I'm building right now in the woods of West Virginia. And I mentioned when I was 15, I plan to do this project. And I knew no one would ever believe anything I just said, based on my experience, and the movie back from the future had just come out. And I started to think about time travel. And like time capsules and like, like what could I do then in 1985 that will prove later that I plan this ahead. And what makes it believable, is I got my name on a deed in 1985. And money. I use my mom's to buy a piece of land in West Virginia middle the woods in the middle of nowhere a couple acres. So I could build a cabin on it and hang on in the woods and launch my global eco project and also show people the deed to be like I plan this. And I'm building there now. So I can demonstrate that it's possible to build a world where people live in harmony with the rest of nature. And when people come in on it like glamping and they get the eggs from a chicken coop. And they play with my little Nigerian dwarf goats. That will be dressed as bees and go on a hike in the woods and eat locally grown food and cook their own food over various grills smokers fire things, pizza ovens, that is demonstrating away and to live in harmony with the resumes because there'll be intense doing it. And that's also where the beebox board game world championship will be actually youth championship of the universe will be there. And that's cool, too. So this is an overview of project 90 late how I got to here. I'll link below a couple of diagrams that showed the project architecture where I'm at. By the time you see this I'm sure it will be outdated but you'll get the gist