Unknown: 0:02

The cosmos is within us. We are made of starstuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself. Carl Sagan.

Mark Rubin: 0:13

Welcome to the lessons from nature podcast, modeling the secrets of the bees, hosted by Mark Rubin. If you hear my voice, you're alive. And if you're alive, you must have come up with solutions to problems you've encountered in your life. The benefit of overcoming problems is the opportunity for personal growth, resilience, and the acquisition of valuable life lessons. It will be smart to consider the value of overcoming problems at a planetary scale. As Queen Claudine says, and honey as money. Our code exists in nature, it's shared with future memories. creating harmony in nature, means planting habitat and trees. Today on the lessons from nature podcast, we'll be discussing secret 23 from honey as money, which is called buying time. It's about the idea that we can convert money into time by investing in things that stabilize our ecosystem and create money along the way. I'd like to introduce my co host, David who he's a catalyst for creating a better tomorrow. David Hall is a futurist thinker and a keynote speaker. He has keynoted numerous conferences across the country and internationally. In the last 14 years, he has delivered 1200 presentations and keynotes on six continents and 16 countries. He's written 14 books, and is the co founder of a global nonprofit to face the climate crisis, called this spaceship Earth can be found at this spaceship earth.org. David will co host for episodes with me. We will discuss futurology through the lens of a human business of making money learning skills, curating communities, implementing new technologies and creating habitat, and also developing regenerative business systems to enable us to thrive. Welcome, David. It's great to have you here on the futurology series.

David Houle: 2:10

It's great to be back. Mark, thank you so much for having me. So today, David, we're

Mark Rubin: 2:15

talking about buying time. And when I say buying time, I literally mean using money to power technology, tools, education, that can stabilize our ecosystem, our water availability, food production, and reproduction, so that we can improve our habitats. And we can make things better for future generations, rather than making things worse. So today, I'd like to talk with you about a few of these areas. And specifically talk about things we can do practical things we can do in terms of investing in things to improve things for the future. How does that sound? That was great what I do for a living. So let's begin with one of my favorite topics, which is energy. So Energy is the capacity of a physical system to do work. Okay, so basically moving things around, and it takes energy to power work, this idea called work. And we've talked a little bit on the last couple episodes about renewable energy and infrastructure. And so specifically, what I want to talk about here is investing in renewable energy, infrastructure and research to transition towards a cleaner, more sustainable energy system, which will reduce our reliance on fossil fuels and mitigate climate change. What are your thoughts on this?

David Houle: 3:36

Well, a lot of them were right to start with energy in the sense that we've been using the wrong energy, and we need to use the right energy, we need to move from fossil fuels to clean. So in the last 17 years, for example, the amount of solar is gone from 1% to 12%, of energy use, and that's a really good sign and the costs are coming down. Most people know of wind and solar. And that's what they think alternative energy is. But there's all other kinds. There's nuclear, there's geothermal, there's early development, and where research monies need to go into wave energy. The other thing that is really huge is battery technology. Because batteries are the underpinnings of both renewable energy, which is variable wind and solar. If it's overcast, there's no wind, you have to have stored the energy from when it was windy or when it was sunny. And of course, the other thing is electric vehicles EVs, the limitation on both clean and clean slash variable energy, and EVS is the limitations are battery. So there's billions, if not 10s of billion dollars going into battery technology, probably on a scale of what's going into AI today because that will revolutionize both transportation and energy, and transportation and energy as economic categories each represent about 20% of the global GDP and 20% of the US GDP. So the clear thing on that is that 40% of our global economy is about to get disrupted between now and 2040. So what investing in the future means is to, to make sure that transition goes as smoothly and as quickly as possible.

Mark Rubin: 5:32

That was a great summary of this topic. So thanks for that I have a thought, something I've been thinking about. And I've read a little bit about this. But maybe since you you're good with numbers, maybe you know, this, you know, energy, battery storage, and transportation are all linked together, I think of my car that I have on my driveway that I probably drive 1% of the time 1% on the course over the year, my car sits on my driveway, 99% of the time, I've read that a battery system in a modern electric car can power house for up to three days, one to three days, depending on what you've got running, especially air conditioning is the big the big drain. Now, I'm also my background before that worked for the utility in Washington, DC, which was based on coal and nuclear and gas turbines, and later went to micro turbines, which are small jet engines that are used to produce heat and electricity. But what I learned was the idea of of the daily curve of the demand profile of energy in a day, which is that through the course of a day normal day, is that the energy use after midnight is pretty much low lit until it gets too rough and people start waking up. And then the curve curves, you know, they start turning things on air conditioning gets warmer in the summer, and it peaks between like two in the afternoon and four in the afternoon, then it goes back down. And what I learned from that one of the projects I was on was on demand shaping, which was demand side management, which was basically incentivizing people to put energy efficient equipment in so they could shave off the peak, because the problem was on these curves is that the equipment they need to operate to manage the peak are less efficient than the base load, okay, then the equipment that runs like the main part of the this curve, and then play all these mathematical games, with efficiencies and machinery to be able to keep up with the demand curve at the lowest cost. And that's the object one of the objectives of the utility company. And so I imagine, you may not know this, but if you had a million electric cars with batteries sitting in the garage, doing nothing but plugged in, would it be possible to take like to play a game where the battery storage in the cars could be used to do peak shaving and sell a little bit of electricity back to the grid and offset the cost upfront capital costs of a car by selling this energy capacity storage back to the grid was this viable idea?

David Houle: 7:50

Yeah, I mean, it's basically what's being done now in the sense that the concept of an Eevee is as follows. You're in your garage, you plug it in to charge it overnight, when the cost is low, then the theory works. If you know we're we're pretty much have a hybrid work situation, if you have to drive to commute to work, what you do is you go to a parking lot that has chargers, and you sell off some so for example, if you've got to Evie that's got 300 mile range, and you're stuck the morning fully charged, and you're 20 miles away from work, you know that you can sell off all the kilowatt hours of energy from your battery in your car, while you're working during the day at higher rates. So you've, you've spent money on lower rates overnight, you're selling back at higher rates. And that's being done in a minuscule percentage of the of the US and the world right now. But it is being done. And that's that's the whole model or charge overnight and use your car as a source energy for your house during the day. So it becomes an actual container of energy that you use personally. So either sell it back at higher rates, or you charge it at lower rates and use it for your own personal needs at higher rates. So there's no question that's going forward. But the other thing I want to say is what happens with the battery breakthrough and the autonomous vehicle breakthrough is that you said you probably under estimating the average American drives their car 10% of the time they own it, which means 90% of the time, it's not being utilized. And usually for Americans the car is the second largest purchase after the house. Would you buy a house at full price if you only lived in it 10% of the time so I always use the example I currently live in a housing developments got 103 homes. Most garages are two cars some are three car based on just a random drive by Those 103 homes probably have 200 to 250 vehicles, a lot of which are just staying parked in an autonomous vehicle future, where a car can go 24 hours a day and just stop every 12 hours for an hour charge. So they're doing 22 hours, they're constantly going, this housing development 103 homes would only need, you know, somewhere between 25 and 30 cars going all the time you commute, school, back in school, out like that. And so the point is that the future of efficient, clean transport in America is not so much reinventing a new infrastructure because it can't really be done at cost, but rather, taking the existing structure, which is the interstate highway system, but with a half to two thirds fewer cars, right. That's why there's so much money going into battery and charging up when the rates are low and selling back when the rates are high. Makes perfect sense. I mean, it is a it is a market ready to happen.

Mark Rubin: 11:11

I like the idea of having no traffic because the roads are designed as best they can to minimize traffic with what they projected 40 years ago, but so reducing the cars by 75% reduction. Problem solved. Next up, let's talk about another big issue. As things get warmer and dryer, where I live in, I'm sure other parts of the world get gets wetter at different times as water, and water is necessary for living things. And so the idea here is investing in efficient irrigation systems, wastewater treatment, and community based water resource projects to be more efficient and thoughtful in how we allocate water. What do you think is a solution? Or what technologies or solutions are you aware of that could be invested in now to improve the efficiency of water systems?

David Houle: 12:07

Well, the first thing is just to rethink the use of water, right? I mean, the United States, early on was largely populated by Europeans, and largely people from the UK, which is now the UK. And that was a very wet and damp climate. So lawns was what aristocrats had. And so this concept of lawns caught on in the United States. So I'm, I'm in Sarasota, Florida right now, and I've got a lawn. And the amount of irrigation for that lawn is the equivalent over the course of a year of 17 small sized swimming pools. Wow. Right. So who needs lawns? So the first thing to do is just to get the homeowners associations in the United States, and everybody who has been trained, oh, I want a lawn with a white picket fence to realize that that is very damaging for the future of your grandchildren. Because your grandchildren may not have a water if you want a lawn today, right? So so the first thing is use, like for example, I'm not a golfer, but St. Andrews is the is the home of the origination of golf in Scotland. And it's all rough, right? Except for the greens. You know, you fly into Vegas, you're flying to Phoenix, and you look down and you see desert, and then you see a golf course, and it's all green. There's no need for that, just to make the Greens green. Right. So the first thing is to realize, to get rid of lawns and get rid of entry, heavy use water, it's not for human survival lawns don't do anything are purely ornamental. The second thing understand there's different levels of water, because the water in your faucet that you drink, put in a cup and drink is the same water that goes into the toilet. So when we see a dog drinking from the toilet, oh, that's awful, but it's the same water, right? So what you need to do is use again, have the water that comes into the faucet that you drink, and then goes down the drain, or the washing machine, or whatever uses water gets recycled into grey water, which is then used to water your garden or whatever plants you replaced your lawn with. So there's multiple uses. There's some Earthships out in Taos, a gallon of water will be used four times different things. You know, by the end of that it's no longer a gallon, it's maybe a kite or something. And then it's used as fertilizer. So that that in itself is just rethinking water years. That's huge. Then of course you have the reality that 97% Of all the water on the planet is saltwater. So inevitably we're going to have desalination going on And right now, it's very expensive. But just like with any technology, once it scales up, it will drop in price. So what's the price of desalinization survival? Not a problem, right? So we shouldn't desalinate water launch, we should desalinate for our actual bodily function. So I mean, that's, that's really where it is. The first thing is to change how we use water.

Mark Rubin: 15:26

I, you know, you got me thinking about combining two things, the something that I read the other day, about the canals in California that move water around, what happens

David Houle: 15:37

when the climate warms, right, we have global warming is that more water is evaporated, yeah, right, or water in the atmosphere.

Mark Rubin: 15:44

But this is this is brilliant. They put a cabling system over the open canal. So imagine like a, like a 20 foot wide, like just concrete channel, they just suspend inexpensive, they just string inexpensive cables across. And they put a row of panels all the way across, and this system that they like what I saw, could produce enough power, I believe, for 10% of California, and save, I think it was like over a billion gallons of water a year, I was gonna add one more benefit of this approach is it doesn't take up any additional land energy production, which was a tremendous amount of energy, and also water savings, and efficient use of land resources in a way that doesn't like mess up. Other things, I thought was a brilliant idea. And I hope it scales because it seemed like a really good idea.

David Houle: 16:33

Again, it's reimagining things right changing our thinking.

Mark Rubin: 16:38

Speaking of that, about changing our thinking, the next topic is about food funding sustainable agricultural practices, such as organic farming, agroforestry permaculture thinking about soil and enhancing soil intentionally, while improving water efficiency and reducing the reliance on harmful chemicals. So food is critical for survival. So what do you what ideas do you have about food production?

David Houle: 17:06

Well, several, first of all, we got to get away from monoculture, the industrialization of farming, because what that does it take soil makes it dirt soil is an organic place that has lots of living matter in it, dirt is just in a dirt, right? So we're destroying the planet, by the way, we're growing our food. So we have to change that. So that there's multiple crops on rotation. And then there's, I'm not sure what the phrase is, but think of the concept of a meadow, the cows graze on it and fertilize it. And there's three or four different crops that can be utilized from it. So you're getting multiple use, rather than mono use. Then another thing is retrofitting and redesigning the existing installed base. So for example, particularly from COVID, there's a lot of retail consolidation going on, anywhere in the United States, I guarantee you go to any city, probably 100,000 or more, and we'll find it empty big box store that Walmart used to be a Kmart, and it's vacant, vacant big box store has no value, it's a liability, but make that an organic inside vertical garden. And you know, you can be in Minneapolis and have nine crop seasons a year. So those can be gardens and they're local, and we know the farmers and we know that it's local, we can go pick it up, which saves the money on the carbon on the distribution. So rethinking how we grow food and where we grow food in and of itself. Plus, about a third of all food grown in this country is thrown away because it doesn't look reprogramming what we think is edible food. And then of course you take food and you take it into composting. Right? So, you know, we've composted here and and that decreases landfill but also it gets really incredibly rich, vibrant soil where things grow a lot better. So just those things alone would solve most of the world's food problems.

Mark Rubin: 19:17

Those are really good examples and and to extend on what you said I'm related to the bees because you know project emulates about the birds, but monocropping bees pollinators are have specific flowers and plants than their bodies are physically is designed to interact with those plants to gather the energy the sugar and then move the pollen around. And by mono cropping the outcome of that is that local pollinators in that in the habitat can't pollinate the plants.

David Houle: 19:48

If you take your business model to its logical conclusion. You take places where there's people growing gardens or neighborhood gardens or community gardens And you just do the intelligent research of what plants can best utilize bees.

Mark Rubin: 20:09

Right. Without local pollinators. We can't grow food without moving bees from Florida around the country. Right? Okay, because of that the outcome is that by mono cropping, which basically improves efficiency and yield and money, it destroys local habitat for local pollinators and then requires us to do additional things to move pollinators from Florida all around the country to pollinate almonds in California, which is good that we do that great that we do that good for the beekeepers, good for the almond farmers, but at the same time to what you're talking about. It's about planning, okay, and about about really thinking through the system dynamics of what we're doing. Great. So let's move on to an important topic, you were discussing about changing the way we look at things. And to me, that's education. And so the topic is establishing community led programs and educational campaigns to raise awareness about sustainable practices, fostering a culture of environmental responsibility, and conservation. And the example you gave was taking your food waste and converting it into soil. So one small example of what an individual, you know, household or person could do,

David Houle: 21:21

again, I'm going to come back to reprogram our thinking, right, the average American has five pounds of waste, not counting biological waste every single day, take it down to four pounds, take it down to three pounds, there's a whole movement I've tapped into haven't participated in where at the end of a month, I've got one cubic foot of waste for the month. And people do that. So huh, how could you possibly do that? That's the first step in transformation, which is to show it can be done. Yeah. That you can you know, if you take a fuller ask, thought, that waste is a design flaw. There is no waste in nature, nobody can figure out any can point to any waste in nature. Because one birds dropping is a plant's fertilizer, right? So we're the only species that creates waste. How can we program ourselves to reduce it, right? The obvious places, you start with packaging, and you go from there, you know, your right to keep coming back to education. People don't know the consequences of their actions. If you teach them the consequences of their actions, chances are, they will change. So people are mindless passengers on cruise ship Earth, and we need to make them conscious passengers on spaceship Earth.

Mark Rubin: 22:50

Well said, Alright, last one. This one requires a futurist think Okay. Okay. Which is about science, right, which is about investing in research, r&d research and development, that focuses on sustainable development, environmental sciences, climate change mitigation, and equipping future generations with skills and knowledge to address what's coming their way in terms of ecological challenges. Now, these kinds of things, my experience in business, investing in r&d projects that may or may not result in, in something that is has an ROI. Okay, so basically, like, creating a system where the risk of not investing in r&d is greater than the risk of it not working, like the philosophy of that trade off, how can people become more aware of the idea that in order for new technologies to be created, there has to be an investment before and most of those investments will work out? But some will? So like, how can we improve this innovation cycle?

David Houle: 23:56

I think that there needs to be a doubling down by a big entity, with the statement of this is where we're going. That's number one. Number two, most of the technology because it can produce an ROI is going most of the money on technology is going into battery and clean energy, because that's the urgent need. Yeah. The consequences of breakthroughs there will spill out of energy, right? We always talk about, you know, all the stuff that we've learned that products that have come into existence, like Tang or something from the space program, right. So in the energy program, there'll be consequences that will spill over. What I'm deeply concerned about, is the belief that oh, well, technology and science will come up with a big technological solution, so we'll be okay. The problem I have with that Mark, is that most of the history of humanity, relative to our living better, is ultimately an encroachment on nature. All right. In other words, progress has often meant the defeat of nature. Progress was the transcontinental railroad. Yeah, affecting bison migration, I'm really concerned of thinking that technology will solve the problem. The problem is us. And we have to sell us first. That said, technology will sell problems, talked about autonomous vehicles that will lower pollution. Yeah. And we have to listen to science rather than fight science. I mean, that's what all the climate deniers did was, oh, you know, I don't care what you think. So science needs to act in a bio mimicry way, as much as it can, rather than think that nature is the enemy, or that what is happening is wrong. We created the problem, we can create the solution. We can't create a single technology that will solve 200 years of planetary degradation. There would there's no one single technology that will do that. There needs to be science. For science sake, right? Science Research for research sake, right? And science, technology inventions, for the sake of humanity. Science has to lead, but can't get. I don't know what the corporate version is egocentric.

Mark Rubin: 26:27

I agree to Lhasa egocentric everything is, the better for everything.

David Houle: 26:34

Everything that we've talked about in this episode, needs to be underscored with a sense of urgency. That's the problem. Today, humanity thinks we're changing our ways. But we're not changing fast enough. And so this is urgent, folks. What we do in the next 10 years, will determine the next 75. So we're at the fork in the road, it's an urgent situation. And in order to go from the detour of the road, we're on to get to the other road takes a lot of effort. So I encourage everyone who hears this podcast, to try to think of the one thing that they're immediately comfortable doing and just go do it. Whatever the category is that we talked about today, whatever you have an affinity for, you will engage in more directly and more completely than something you've been told to do that you don't want to do.

Mark Rubin: 27:38

Thank you, David, for my pleasure, my urgency of this one with you. All living things compete for resources, and human activity is reducing habitat and biodiversity. At this rate, I imagine a time when the only living things on Earth are people the food we eat, and pets. And shortly after that, I imagined the only living things will be people and the food we eat. We can turn this around. It will be smart to look at the rates of change of biodiversity in our habitat as an indicator of how much time we have left before we cross a point of no return. We can buy time by investing in solutions that stabilize our ecosystem in terms of energy, water, food, education, efficiencies and habitat. When we convert money into regenerative projects, we will buy time. If you enjoyed this discussion about buying time, please subscribe to this podcast lessons from nature modeling the secrets of the bees. The next episode covers taking action there are so much you can do. This includes learning the secrets of the bees through the bee box board game and playing the board game in real life. Through the bee box regenerative business system teaches the skills necessary to convert honey into money while creating habitat for all pollinators. Visit project honey Lake dot life for more information about living in harmony with the rest of nature. See you next time.