Stewardship & Sustainability Series

Episode 53 - DJ Spooky (aka Paul Miller), Google Artist in Residence and CSO of Global Brain

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DJ Spooky (aka Paul Miller) is Chief of Strategy for Global Brain, and is a composer, multimedia artist, editor and author. Paul is the first Artist in Residence at Google and the first Artist in Residence at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. His DJ MIXER iPad app has seen more than 12 million downloads in the last year. He has produced and composed work for Yoko Ono, Thurston Moore, and score of artists and award-winning films. Miller’s work as a media artist has appeared in the Whitney Biennial; The Venice Biennial for Architecture; the Ludwig Museum in Cologne, Germany; Kunsthalle, Vienna, Austria; The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh and many other museums and galleries. His book, Sound Unbound (MIT Press) is a best-selling anthology of writings on electronic music and digital media.

Inthis discussion, Paul shares his views on rethinking capitalism,Earth as spaceship, our sense of Locality, the creation of a “MassiveSocial Sculpture,” the myth of rationality, the myths ofadvertising, the crisis of democracy, nature deficit disorder, sleepdeficit disorder, and the immense imperative to work toward mentalhealth, ethical culture, social justice, climate justice, and asaner, biomimetic future. He calls us to “pull carbon out of theair,” to “plant trees,” and to “cultivate algae” to helpheal our planet. Recognizing the fundamental necessity of an informedpopulace for a well-functioning democracy, DJ Spooky suggests that“sunlight” (ie: transparent information) is the antidote topolitical pathology.

DJ Spooky also discusses his personal well-being practices, which include lots of walking and drinking tea and fresh-squeezed fruit and veggie juices on a daily basis. Keep an eye out for his “Massive Social Sculpture” works. More at: djspooky.com.

Transcript

(Automatically generated transcript for search engine optimization and reference purposes – grammatical and spelling errors may exist.)

Welcome to the YonEarth Communities Stewardship and Sustainability Podcast Series.

Today we’re in a beautiful garden here in New York City visiting with Paul Miller, also

known as DJ Spooky.

Hey Paul, what’s up man, how you doing?

Great, how you doing?

Excellent.

It’s a muggy, humid day in October.

I just got back in the town and it’s crazy to see that humidity still makes it feel

like you’re in mid-August, I don’t know if you’re in the audience, you can see it’s just

rained recently and it’s very unseasonal for October.

Truly, yeah, driving in we noticed it was 95 degrees in the car coming down the Hudson.

Yeah.

Well, we have some things to talk about clearly with that in mind and before we do let

me just introduce you to the audience here today from the Why On Earth community.

Paul Miller is chief of strategy for global brain and is a composer, multimedia artist,

editor and author.

Paul is the first artist and residence at Google and the first artist and residence at the

Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.

This DJ Mixer iPad app has seen more than 12 million downloads in the last year.

He has produced and composed work for Yoko Ono, Thurston Moore and scores of artists

and award-winning films.

Paul’s work as a media artist has appeared in the Whitney Biennial, the Venice Biennial

for Architecture, the Ludwig Museum in Cologne, Germany, Kuntstala Vienna, Austria, the Andy

Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh and many other museums and galleries.

His book Sound Unbound published by MIT Press is the best-selling anthology of writings

on electronic music and digital media and, of course, Paul, a lot of the work you’re

doing now is very related to the climate crisis in this global situation that we’re in

as well.

And I thought I just kicked things off by asking you as an artist, a writer, a musician.

How are you connecting the dots to what’s going on with the global climate crisis?

Well, right now is a really interesting crossroads for humanity and what’s amazing is that

on one hand we have, you know, this year 2019 was the 50th anniversary of the landing on

the moon.

It was the 50th anniversary of the creation of the internet and was also the 50th anniversary

of Woodstock.

So 2019 is a crazy year and it’s also the 70th anniversary of the founding of Communist

China as well, which I was talking about.

So recently in Beijing, they just have this huge march, you know, a sort of hyper-militarized

Chinese kind of nationalism thing going on and it was really fascinating to see how China

has basically become its own kind of ecosystem at every level.

So when I say ecosystem, political, economic, and above all, global, you know, they’re

very focused on global economics.

Meanwhile, in the West, you’ve been seeing a sort of Trump and the sort of rise of nationalism

or white ethnic nationalism and other kinds of variables that really destabilize the idea

of democracy.

So what we’re seeing here is a kind of a critical threshold of both democracy, social justice

and climate justice, all of which are interconnected.

So for me at least, it’s really the next couple of years a very critical kind of ways that

the arts can open up new ways of thinking.

My motto right now is we need better critical thinking and that’s where I think the arts

can really be helpful.

And you’re coming at this with a background in science and you collaborate with scientists

a lot as well.

And I imagine that we have different domains of thinking and really sort of rules of the

game, if you will, and what I hear you advocate for in listening to some of your recent presentations

and talks is that we have to stay focused on this rational discourse as we’re dealing

with these turbulent times.

When you say rational, I actually am a big fan of the irrational.

What’s happening right now is the West really thinks of people as the myth of rationality

was the foundation of modern capitalist consumerism, but people are all hyper-consuming way

more than they need.

So because of that, that they’re driven by advertising and advertising, if you look at

the ecosystems of Facebook and the ecosystem of Google, they’re data mining you, selling

your data and then creating billions dollars industries.

So what’s incredible is that we really have to rethink capitalism.

And that doesn’t mean I’m advocating for people to all wake up and just burn their money

or just, or switch over to cryptocurrency or whatever, but there’s no silver bullet.

While people are entraped by capitalism as a kind of a consumption machine that can make

people aspire to a lifestyle that is unsustainable for the planet.

So you average American waste is something like 80 to 90 pounds of clothes a year and

they literally just thrown away or for that matter, you know, the average American is

not necessarily informed about, you know, global politics or if they throw away a plastic

bag, the plastic bag might be there for 150 years, end up in the middle of the South Pacific,

someplace, etc.

So there’s this kind of layers of complexity and nuance that most people, I mean, I think

people are beginning to realize that there’s a deep amount of time that goes into any human

endeavor, you know, so when you go by, you take the subway for example, yesterday I took

the subway in from LaGuardia because traffic was insane and I didn’t feel like taking

a taxi.

So I’m on the train reading a book, I’m whizzing past all the cars stuck and traffic

on the VQE, you can see in the distance there’s this huge gridlock.

And our cities aren’t made for cars for example, nor are like daily lives, I mean, but

people, you know, these are, that’s just one variable, cars, fast fashion, crops that

are mono crops that sort of deplete soil, these are all things that go into the production

of mass society, mass culture.

So these are things I’m trying to kind of give people to rethink.

And how does that show up in your art?

Right now, I’m a big fan of what I call tools for critical thinking.

So when people think of art, they usually think of like a painting on the wall or sculpture

or this or that.

I think a good conversation to be art, which is like what we’re having now, or for that

matter, there’s this kind of ephemerality that sampling and collage and DJ culture kind

of uses as a basic foundation.

And most kids are growing up with that kind of social media meets music kind of context

of soundclouds, Spotify and so on.

So one could argue that it’s like a massive social sculpture.

And those are things that I’m kind of thinking about as we transition into 2020 with the year

coming up.

So massive social sculpture, that’s an amazing concept.

How do we, how do we plug and play with that?

How do you see that playing out in 2020?

Well, I mean, what’s been fascinating right now is like, there’s a term called murmuration.

And so when you see it, like I’m sure many people see this where you see an entire flock

of birds switching on diamond, they’re all following each other.

And the birds are actually navigating using the arithmetic field.

They’re also making a mathematical structure of them entire flock.

So if you ever see birds, they’re kind of, they’re flying in usually a geometric form.

So two with humans, except our flocking mechanisms are social media.

You can quantify that and see how people relate, click, like, and so on, which of course

is what the foundation of most of these Amazon, Facebook, and so on.

That’s what they’re doing.

But how is that art, which is fascinating, because like we’re now, those are, we’re in

a data-driven society.

And that data that we’re generating and giving away for free is being optimized for machine

learning and other kinds of things.

So how you turn that into art is kind of a fascinating moment.

So I’m a big fan of what you call data visualization.

So I took a studio to Antarctica a while ago and made a series of music composition pieces

based on weather.

And right now, what I’m doing at Google is we’re looking at the Saharan Desert, which

is in radical transformation right now because of the growth of different airstreams over

the Sahel and the Saharan Desert are changing.

And the fact deserts are growing, in fact, many people are noticing that the deserts

are growing to the north.

So we’re taking some of that weather patterns and turning that into music compositions.

Wow.

And those are just projects, but again, they’re very specific with that data based initiative.

So if any of our audience wants to check any of this work out, where’s the best place

online to do that?

The best place is just my website, it’s djschoolheat.com.

And there’s different subsites on the site.

One is the easiest to remember is djschoolheat.com slash Antarctica.

But there’s plenty of other stuff.

The Google product will be on my website in about two weeks.

Great.

Okay.

And because we don’t publish in real time, two weeks maybe in the past, maybe in the

future, we shall see.

Oh, there’s a great joke.

I forget the stand up comedian who like to say, hey, someone came up to him and said,

I want to show you a picture from when I was younger.

And he pauses and he says, all pictures are from when we were younger.

So we’ll see how that all ties out.

But we’ll probably publish around the time that that is live on your site as well, the

Sahara project.

And of course, we know that there are now mobilizing at the local level, the regional

level, the national level, even the multinational level, efforts to build soil, reforist and afforist

all around the deserts, the goby, the Sahara, et cetera.

And so as you’re gathering some of this mega global data for art and artistic expression,

there are also folks on the ground working to halt the advances of the deserts and ultimately

the hope and the intent is to reverse that.

Yeah, no, the deserts, right now the star of the show is the oceans because everyone’s

kind of really tightly focused on oceans and reforistation.

But I think deserts are the hidden variable that’s really going to be causing a tremendous

amount of Veil people.

So I’ll give you a quick example, which is where everyone’s complaining about refugees,

not complaining, but just realizing refugees will be one of the most destabilizing forces

in the next 15 to 20 years as we move further into climate change.

The borders that were drawn by Europe in the 19th century, most of which were in Africa,

you know, because of various treaties, or you have stuff like the Sykes-Pico agreement

after World War I that set up the borders of Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and so on.

All those borders are drawn by the collapse of the British Empire and on top of that,

the kind of European colonial initiatives that between the two wars.

Most of the major conflict areas are exactly in those regions because people were put in

the nation-state that were fictional.

But then on top of that, if you’re looking at Libya and its relationship to Italy or

the refugees going through the Mediterranean, they’re all fleeing basically semi-failed

nation-states.

And those nations are semi-failed because climate change is destabilized and disrupted

all of their abilities to grow crops and to be able to have a sustainable process that’s local.

So too with Honduras and all the Guatemala, you know, a lot of the people that are fleeing

to the border in the US are also coming out of Central America where they’ve had droughts

and other things going in Northern Bolivia.

A lot of farms have been destabilized as well.

So climate refugees then trigger right-wing lunatics because they may always need a bogeyman.

So if you look at the 1930s in Europe, you know, the idea of purity or being able to create

a project of nationalism that was one of the main triggers of World War II.

We’re right in that powder-cag moment again.

I think if you look at what’s been going on in Brazil, what’s been going on in Central Europe,

America obviously in Japan,

there’s these leaders that are optimizing for nationalism because it helps them consolidate power.

So mobilizing hate and fear.

Yeah, hate and fear.

Which generally, if you’re…

That’s where you’re getting to a crisis of democracy, right in the custom of climate change as well.

Right.

I’m just making a quick note here.

So I want to come back this notion of this massive social sculpture.

That’s such an amazing concept in term.

What are you envisioning?

And what are some of the events you’ll be creating in 2020?

What are some of the things folks can be thinking about or looking out for?

Well, the reason I use the term social sculptor is because we have to really think about impermanence and femberality.

Those are going to be really fascinating components of rethinking capitalism.

So generally, capitalism aspires to permanence and market forces trying to squeeze as much value as a short term thinking.

So most people, businesses and stuff, they’re looking at a lot of profit and loss and so on.

But a social sculpture means me and you are creating a structure.

There’s an artist named Joseph Boyce who was really popular in the 1960s.

He was a big inspiration for me.

And there’s more current artist like Olifer Eliasin, who’s really fascinating.

He has a retrospective at the Tape Modern in London right now, where he’s been doing quite a bit about environmental activism.

But those are just two different examples.

Joseph Boyce or Olifer Eliasin.

But for me, a sculpture is something that is a form.

Like somebody has put solid objects in place, they usually put it out in a pedestal.

But if you’re thinking about a different kind of sculpture, it’s about an idea.

It’s a form, but it’s a form of thought.

So that’s why I’m saying social sculpture because people can then create new shapes and new forms.

One of my favorite books when I was a kid was Edwin Abbott’s book Flatlands.

Where this dot is in the middle of a two-dimensional field, and then the sphere comes down, and says,

then the dot feels like you can see everything.

And then as long as you have overview of that different dimension,

so Edwin Abbott’s book was called A Romance of Many Dimensions.

Him, Lewis Carroll, you know, they’re artists of thinking.

Like there’s a couple other books that will change your idea about perspective.

Like Douglas Hofstetter’s book Goldal Escherbach.

Is a really good one.

So I try and think about it as the overview effect of everyday life.

The overview effect is about when you leave Earth and you can actually see the great blue marble in the distance.

You realize we’re all in one planet. There’s no borders.

And that means it’s a pan-humanist kind of thing.

And all those nation-state borders are just fiction somebody drew on a map someplace.

So that’s what I think in the better world right now.

What I mean in the world, I mean in the political world, not just geography.

We have a more enlightened approach to thinking about climate refugees and how they destabilized

clinical and nation-states.

But it’s probably going to get more harsh and weirder of a next couple of decades.

Because people still have the romance of the nation-state, like the board.

That’s what the right wing keeps saying.

The borders there isn’t that.

But if you look at what all these people are fleeing, it’s mainly the common denominator is climate change.

I mean that’s a huge component.

We had an interesting conversation earlier today with Jonathan Granoff,

who works with Nobel Peace laureates worldwide about the creation of the nation-states

in the 17th century in Europe.

And he had a very similar commentary.

And I’m so struck that the digital communication technology is enabling a rapidly emerging global society

where increasingly many of us, whether scientists, artists, farmers, all of the above,

are thinking about refugees and concerned about the fate and plight of people all around the world right now.

And we know that we’re dealing with 60 million, perhaps 65 or more,

million refugees currently, the greatest number since the end of the Second World War.

Our friends in the CIA, the intelligence, the defense communities are dealing with projections

that make that an order of magnitude greater in our lifetime, quite possibly.

And so this is a severe and serious existential crisis for all of us

when you have that degree of dislocation.

My hope is that artists like you and thought leaders like you can help plant the seeds,

spread the thought forms, the form of thought we call sculpture to help mitigate that

and so that we don’t end up in those scenarios.

Well, I mean, this is where you’re at across roads.

I think our species is being driven into kind of like this paradox

because capitalism requires ever-expanding markets, growth of markets,

sort of addiction to growth.

So we’re always consuming more and more and more and more.

And then other people around the world are looking at that, especially China,

the American consumer model, is like we’d need two or three earths just to satisfy.

If everyone on this planet lived like an American, you know,

but meanwhile, the geopolitical issues are like very clear.

I mean, we’re in a hyper-militarized culture, most of the devices we use,

the internet itself, wasn’t the military system as well.

So these are all things that we have to be, I think, clear and aware of.

But if you look at any social movement that’s caused to a change,

I’ll give you one example, Susan B. Anthony and the Women’s Suffrage of Movement.

I’m a huge fan of that was non-violent, Mahatma Gandhi, all these people

who said we can’t take it anymore, but they didn’t take it into some sort of huge revolution

or like Marx or Stalin or, you know, instead they said we need a peaceful, non-violent change

to change the way people live.

And that’s, again, shaping a new sculpture, shaping a new form.

But this society itself, you know, is kind of…

And that’s where global culture really has potential to change a wave in the American hyper-consumption model.

I mean, I’d give us five to ten years if we really, really can’t get that, you know,

changing the course of the Titanic.

The iceberg isn’t an iceberg, it’s a meteorite, you know, like we are the meteorite at this point.

So if you think about the metaphor of changing the course of the Titanic,

it’s like we’re rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic right before it hits this huge…

Well, now the iceberg is going to be all melted, so we’d have to…

A different metaphor.

Yeah, different metaphor, but…

What I find so compelling about the Titanic metaphor is that there were many people aboard that ship

who were absolutely convinced that ship could not sink.

Absolutely, even after it struck ice.

What does that tell us?

Well, there’s a couple of theories about that where having a belief that you know is false is fascinating.

Especially with the era of Trump and, you know, sort of the Fox News demographic

that you cannot reason with them, you cannot present them with facts, you cannot say that every scientist has agreed to…

Except for maybe 2.0% of like scientists would say that climate change is happening and humans are the cause.

98.9, maybe.

But people still won’t, you know, the climate deny kind of demographic.

It’s mostly emotional.

You know, they don’t really think about facts in a way that you can present a clear cut case, connect.a.b.c.

You know, yes.

So we need new tools to kind of bypass that demographic.

Because eerily enough, the Fox News demographics generally over the age of 50, generally over even 60.

And they’re the prime Trump demographic that’s…

They’re blocking our tremendous amount of stuff and leading our species to extinction.

You know, just…

If we don’t play our cars right, the planet will be here when everyone says, oh, we need to save the planet.

I’m like, no, the planet’s the most resilient system we have access to.

The problem is we would need to save ourselves because we’ve then disrupted all of the patterns of the planet.

So these people, you cannot reason whether you cannot show math to you, you cannot show data, facts, anything.

You know, you need to hit in a different dimension around their points of resistance.

So, you know, one of my favorite things as we do the Y on Earth community mobilization work all around the country,

we’re working with all kinds of demographics, all kinds of people.

And what I have found is that everyone relates to soil and to this notion of growing food.

And we have memories of grandparents and great grandparents gardening if we don’t do that yet ourselves again.

And it’s something that really is common ground in so many respects.

And it gives me some hope and we have tremendous challenges.

But it gives me some hope there are themes and memes we can be working with and working on that reach across some of these incredibly challenging divides that we’re facing right now.

Well, that’s where I think when people say social justice or climate justice, those are things that really are dear to my heart.

And none of the issues right now are about this notion of what is privilege.

So a lot of people will say, okay, why privilege is this or the idea that most people who are going to be hammered by climate change are in the poorer countries that never produce the main components of what’s causing the problem.

And women and children to boot on top of that.

By the way, can I get another cup of tea?

Thank you.

Let me take the opportunity to just thank George and Dusty.

We’re here at the Westview News offices in the village in New York City.

And we’re working or cooking up some collaborations with these wonderful folks.

So stay tuned for that in the future.

And I want to give a shout out.

We’re here at the Westview News office.

So when you think about systems thinking and the idea of like,

he had this phrase of Earth as a spaceship,

my model right now is that a lot of the billionaire class

are going to remote islands.

They want to build spaces to take us off Earth.

All of these things that are like, you know, fine.

I mean, at a certain level.

But on the other hand,

how do we get people to think that the mission to find

a new place is on Earth?

Right.

So I actually firmly believe that we need to refocus

some of the issues around giving people

a relationship to get out of what some psychologists

call the nature deficit disorder.

Yes.

So when, for example, when I go to Aspen,

I usually go for a 15 to 20 mile hike.

My last summer, I hiked out the Crested Butte,

which is one town over.

It’s stunningly beautiful.

And then there’s other kind of ways to renew

the creative spirit.

I mean, because living in New York,

I live near here.

This is the Westview, which I live in Tribeca.

You know, even just walking from Tribeca,

up here, was like three or four different neighborhoods

worth of different contexts.

But there’s that sense of locality,

just being in one place that you still have access to

in a certain major city.

And I think the worst thing America did was invent

the front lawn.

The front lawn, as we know it, is toxic.

And usually people are putting all this crazy weed killer,

the monocrops, they make the same kind of grass.

It’s wildly inefficient distribution of water.

All of those things are actually deeply problematic

for all the aquifilters around most major cities.

So once you get people living in an urban context,

it’s actually the greatest thing you can do.

And I’m a big fan of that.

A lot of people when they say,

oh, eco-activists, they actually ignore the city.

Which is kind of wild.

Like we’ll talk about species,

laws, and other kinds of issues.

But you’re all critical.

Don’t get me wrong, by the way.

And right out there, it’s like it’s critical to say,

you know, all of the above.

But cities are going to be a key component

to rethinking humans’ relationships in nature.

I know that sounds paradoxical.

No, I love it.

I love it.

But there’s so many things we can do in all major cities

to just make for both the better quality of living

and use better materials, better architecture,

better design.

And that’s where Buckminster Fuller

kind of really had a very powerful meaning for me.

You know, absolutely.

In the Winner’s community, we are now collaborating

with a number of partners and allies in New York City

and have a bunch of events that we’ll be doing coming up

later this year, as well as next year, 2020.

And the greening, the permaculturization

of the urban centers is one of the biggest opportunities

we have.

I’m struck to note that New York City is considered

one of the lowest footprint cities per capita

in the United States.

And it’s one of the walkingest cities, right?

People here tend to be much healthier

and you notice that cognitive performance

and things that go along with lots and lots of steps every day

also seems to be at a higher level

than we find in other parts of the country.

We know there’s science that now has been established

showing the connection between walking a lot

and things like cognitive performance

and immune system performance.

And this is real.

This is real stuff.

Yeah, on average, I do what I call the quantified self-side,

usually keep.

Today, I was busy because I just got back in the town

and I was sitting.

I don’t normally sit.

I usually have a standing desk.

And then I’ll have walking meetings.

So normally, what I would have almost suggested

is we could have recorded this podcast walking

through certain neighborhoods you’re going to see.

Yeah, next time.

But the urban context, because people gather,

it creates a more cohesive social unit

in a certain sense that allows people to really,

I think, understand use of resources in a different way.

When I visit other states,

the tragedy of the suburbs, you know,

it’s like they really wiped out a lot of stuff

but they made an entire aspirational lifestyle,

especially after World War II,

with a GI bill that a lot of people go to college.

First thing they were conditioned to do

is get a credit card, get a new house,

probably get more and more to a mortgage kind of approach,

which was a huge gift to all these banks.

But at the same time, they made everyone hyper and debt.

You know, so there’s just amazing statistics

about capitalism and resource depletion

that are very clear about consumerism.

Like people are conditioned to over consume.

But if you’re in a city,

there’s kind of a more temperate approach.

You know, I really think that you really have to think

about things in a different way,

and that allows you to be more,

both critically engaged,

like because, for example,

when I arrived, you fly in,

I flew in from Aspen,

you can see all the roots are painted black, for example.

And that makes sense.

New York, a heat island in the middle of the summer is the optical quality of the black

tar absorbs heat.

Anybody who’s ever been in New York in the summer, you know what I’m talking about.

In Beijing, they’re now mandating to paint the room’s white to help with reflecting

sun.

The Chinese are all over solar.

I’m really intrigued with how solar energy and then there’s these new carbon capture

towers that begin to put it up around Beijing because they have such problems with air

quality.

In Denver, they just mandated on all new commercial buildings living roofs through the same set

of issues.

Yeah, the living roof thing is really fascinating too.

That’s a whole movement and like same with urban farming, all of which I’m a big fan

of.

Again, this is where I’m going to kind of do a reveal here, which is that I travel a

lot, right?

So sometimes people will be like, like Greta Thunberg just came from Sweden and on a ship

and said, had zero carbon, but meanwhile, they had to fly in her team.

And then when she goes back, she’s going to be so, but if you actually do a quick analysis

of how much carbon is being put in the air, you know what puts one of the largest components

is actually fashion.

Fashion puts about 9% carbon in the atmosphere, whereas travel airplanes, someone’s usually

about 2% airplanes.

So fast fashion basically is a critical dimension because a lot of people in the city will get

into all sorts of new, I’m going to be kind of what you call upcycling.

Upcycling, yeah.

Yeah, so these are kind of rough drafts ideas, sketches of things to come.

But behind the camera, we have to give a shout out to Joni on this because Joni Clark

worked with Gunter Polly writing the book called Upcycling.

Oh, Upcycling.

Upcycling.

Yeah.

So yeah, these concepts are really coming into a vogue now.

And it’s absolutely tremendous to see how it’s emerging in places all over.

And I’m a big fan of getting people to rethink materials.

Yes.

Most of our buildings are written on 19th century building code.

For example, poor and official air conditioners are terrible.

Number one on the drawout list.

Yeah.

Here we are behind a building.

And you can hear all the air conditioners around us amusingly off because they use America

uses 110 volts versus Europe’s 220 if you ever been in Europe used to have to bring

it a big adapter and all this stuff.

But you would hear a different hum because of the electric, the sheer volume of electricity

going through the mantle of the buildings and concrete.

So there’s certain things with quality of life where you realize area on a huffington is

a really interesting figure.

She has a new podcast about sleep deficit disorder, which is another thing.

So you have nature deficit and then you have sleep deficit.

And so many people sleep right now is getting scrambled by all these weird machines we have

around us that one could argue we are in this kind of again, like a mental health crisis

yes, based on how our disruption of nature.

Yes.

So what are some of your practices with your very busy lifestyle that enhances your health

and well-being and helps you maintain balance?

I’m curious because I know a lot of our audience also has busy lifestyles for a variety of

reasons.

Curious if you have any tips or pointers or things that you might share with us?

Well, I think walking and drinking tea are pretty much the best things you can do.

I’m a big fan of also fresh, sweet fruit juice.

I usually have, like on the way up here I stop for a second and I, one today I usually

have like a shot of wheatgrass.

Wheatgrass is really good for you and I drink a lot of tea.

So simple things.

I mean, I know that sounds, some people are like, oh, what vitamins and everything you’re

taking.

I take a little multivitamin in the morning.

But then, you know, just walk and that’s, these are simple things that cost no additional

money and cost no additional consumer stuff, tons of benefits.

Yeah, and the benefits are very clear.

So I think sometimes we, in the era that we’re in, we always think that we need a technological

solution, like the silver bullet.

And there is no silver bullet right now, it’s just, it’s just huge.

Yeah.

Well, some people are calling a silver buck shot these days, kind of.

You want to hear.

There were a lot of stuff against the wall and see what sticks, you know, but half the

battle will be deep programming out of the colonial capitalist model of the 19th and 18th,

19th, 19th, 20th century industrial capitalism.

Yep.

Because, as you were mentioning earlier about e-books, things like that, they actually,

amusingly enough, like, a lot of my friends have, like, a Tesla.

And I, you know, Tesla, God bless, I love Tesla, there’s no problem.

But if you just do the math really quickly, like, back to the math and kind of mathematics,

the fossil field of power is the electrical plant that then powers the electrical grid,

then it goes to the Tesla.

Yeah.

Still has a component of carbon release, you know, and so, walking is no, you know, it’s

you and your two feet.

And I, if I could convince more people to walk, I think that it would change the face

of the earth right now.

You know, in, in why on earth, we have a chapter called walk and, yeah, yeah, we have

a chapter called walk in why on earth in the book and in there we talk about people

joining the faraway club and the take the stairs club.

Yeah.

Yeah, we take the stairs club.

So, like, if somebody’s driving to the grocery store, if they happen to be in that kind

of light style, park far away from the door, get those extra steps out of the part

you’re close to the door, right?

Yeah.

Right in it, right in it.

By the way, it’s starting to rain.

Yeah.

And I don’t want your equipment to get.

Let’s, uh, do you want to keep rolling inside or do you want to, uh, yeah, hold on

everybody.

We’re going to, we’re going to go inside.

So just hold on, we’re getting a little sprinkle out here and we’ll resume momentarily.

So here we are, Paul, we’re inside now and a nice gentle rain outside, glad we could

get in before that really got pouring.

And while we were moving equipment around, there was actually a question that Dusty asked

here at the newspaper about geoengineering and I thought it was actually a very interesting

conversation, quick conversation that we had.

What were your thoughts in terms of dealing with geoengineering as one of the ways we

might help prevent massive storms and or deal with some of the other systemic challenges

that we’re facing?

Well, yeah.

I mean, geoengineering is basically, we are in the Anthropocene era.

We’ve already done the geoengineering.

But the human presence with traces of radiation and traces of all sorts of crazy chemicals

in the atmosphere and so on.

That’s already begun.

I mean, if you look at the Earth before stuff like Chernobyl or Fukushima, historians are

now dating that they can find radioactive isotopes pretty much anything that’s modern.

So we’re all being bombarded with crazy, all sorts of radiation from X-rays on over

to dust from some of the early nuclear tests that’s still circulating.

Here we are in Manhattan, for example, where they had the Manhattan Project for World War

And if you actually walk around where the galleries are up in Chelsea with a guyger

calendar, that’s where they stood with the plutonium and uranium.

And Columbia University was on 120 fifths and they’re still radios.

And so the timeframe for all of this, Chernobyl’s like 50,000 years, maybe Fukushima’s

maybe 100,000 years.

This is way past where we’re not thinking past 500 years on out, even the climate models

that people are looking at.

So when you say geoengineering, I’m very cautious about that because there’s a mathematical

term called the law of unintended consequences slash the butterfly effect, which actually

leads straight to what you call chaos theory and other kinds of chaotic functions and weather.

So weather is a hyper complex system that they’re now having, they’re realizing it’s one

of the hardest things to quantify.

So there’s different climate and weather is short term, climate is long term.

So these kinds of things, like if you say, oh, let’s just put sulfur in the atmosphere

and I’ll bring down, you know, the sun’s reflection point is, so it’ll make a cooler

temperature.

Amazing enough that already happened with a volcano that exploded in the late 18th century,

but then that led to stuff like the French Revolution and the American Revolution because there

was a tremendous amount of crops, failure and other farm stuff that was killed off by the

colder.

It was like a mini nuclear winter for the world at that time because of the sheer volume

of dust that this one volcano had exploded in the South Pacific.

So halfway around the world, you then see revolutions, governments collapse and so on and

so on.

So these things are all connected.

It’s just, if you mess with one thing, it’s going to have a network effect.

It’s going to, or a domino effect with many other things.

So the easiest and most simple solution right now is pulling carbon out of the air, planting

more trees and then algae.

Those are the three things that are cheap, not that difficult to do and have really serious

long-term good, you know, algae is one of the, I think it’s going to be the South weapon

because it pulls down a tremendous amount of carbon.

Definitely.

And so does weed.

Like if you plant hemp, hemp actually pulls down a lot of carbon.

Four times as much as many trees per acre, right?

Yeah.

And we can make all kinds of materials out of hemp to displace the petroleum-based versions.

So I’m totally down with that kind of innovation.

So that’s just a different kind of geoengineering because right now, if you fly from Colorado

to New York, you’ll look down and you’ll see all these weird geometric co-op lands that

are all genetically modified corn because of the various corn subsidies that the government

gives to the farmers.

They have other kinds of monocross or monsanto and pesticides, all of which then get into

your bloodstream if you drink water or no, there’s an article recently which I’m a very frequent

tea drinker.

And I said there’s microplastics in tea because the plastic bags when you put the dip

in it was out.

Oh man.

Is there any way you can do that?

Natural materials.

Yeah.

The guidelines we talk about in the book Why on Earth is when it comes to food and when

it comes to materials.

If our great, great, great, grandparents wouldn’t have utilized them or recognized them, that’s

one way to be confident they’re going to be relatively safe.

And now we’re returning, we’re getting through this plastic era, hopefully, and getting

back into biological-based materials to work with, whereas we would have been using plastics

for the last several decades.

Yeah.

I’m a big fan of bio-limicry.

The idea is nature has already given us so many solutions that we just need to get deep

programmed out of the industrial 19th century model, and then that will be, I think, a big

part of the idea of a solution based approach to climate change.

So right now we’re barely scratching the surface in terms of solutions because of the shock

of how fast the weather patterns have been changing, and the fact that we’re having

record floods, record storms, all the stuff that’s going on like now.

I’m using up some of the most right-wing places in America or in the South, Mississippi,

Alabama, Florida.

They’re all going to get hammered with huge record-level storms, and my heart goes out

to the Bahamas that just recently was destroyed, wiped out with this one storm.

And then you see Trump with a sharpie, or he just kind of draws a line on a map and

says, oh, that’s the weather, you know, that’s like that.

Oh, absolutely.

So these are things that we, I think, we live in a fact-based world, and I’m a big, big

fan of science, and that’s why I think scientists are amazing.

I love working with them.

But I also am a big fan of these days like my motto is, you know, reality has a liberal

bias.

You know, mainly because reality is based in humans’ willingness to learn, like we need

to be open to new information, we need to always be available to change, because a new

information might come in, and then a newer information might come in.

And if you’re mentally closed to new information, then you’re probably going to have a two-minute

event of cognitive dissonance going on, which does that sound very Trump, you know.

So these are all things I’m thinking about, yeah.

Well I got to ask, because I’m curious with all of your performances and your shows

all over the world, do you have like a most favorite city to go to and to spend time

in?

Do I have a most favorite city?

You know, if I could synthesize some things from different cities, like I really like

San Francisco, for example.

But now with the housing crisis in the tech sector, you know, I’m a fan of even, like

the fact that it always feels a little bit like spring, you know, the cold and fog.

I’m a big fan of what’s going on in Aspen, for example.

Aspen, San Francisco, New York, I definitely am a big fan of New York.

Those are three places on earth that I really enjoy.

Berlin, Beijing, I like, but again, I could do without the pollution and the mass car thing.

But they’re going to be a while before they were there.

Actually, I’m using the Chinese are intensely focusing on electric cars right now.

So maybe 10 years from now, Beijing will have clear skies and the other ones driving

quiet electric scooters around, you know, but you know, I love Hong Kong as well.

Hong Kong is one of my favorite cities.

So, no.

Beautiful.

But I wouldn’t mind just picking it a chunk of each of those cities and synthesizing it

kind of a collage city.

Right.

Yeah.

Well, in a strange way back to William Irwin Thompson’s met an industrial village concept

that we’ll have to chat about some other time.

I just am so glad we could connect here in the city with your busy schedule and everything

that’s going on.

It’s just a few days after climate week currently.

And so there’s a whole lot happening.

And you know, Paul, I want to make sure if there’s anything else you’d like to say or

share with our audience before we sign off for today to give you an opportunity to do

that.

Sure.

Here we are on 2019 and we’re at a crisis of democracy around the world.

You’re going to be seeing a lot more natural movements and people who stoked in the

phobia fear and kind of terror for a political gain.

The best antidote is sunlight.

You know, so I think we really need to kind of rethink how we look at both democracy

and democracy.

That doesn’t mean I think democracy is a lot more robust than we give credit because it’s

much more about norms and it’s much more about, you know, kind of accountability, except

when you have a unique toxic cocktail like what’s going on in the US or in a couple different

countries.

But to have a functional democracy, you need an informed populist and the people that

read, that care about facts and information and one of the greatest fears of ancient

Greeks was the demagogue who was able to like, you know, play dough in the republic would

say why, you know, if you have a nation state, why would you have everyone vote on the

captain for ship if the guy didn’t know how to make the ship go or, you know, I’m just

thinking of some metaphors out there, but the problem is democracy requires a consistent

belief in accountability and the exchange that makes a robust society work.

Right now because of Fox News, because of all this right-wing fake bullshit stuff, it’s

really a crisis moment and I grew up in Washington, D.C. in the, it was more in 1970 and Nixon

was in office and I, you know, my mom was a historian of design and my father was dean

of Howard University’s law school.

So I just grew up in a household that respected information and made a point to have this

idea of a civic discourse, like a place where civilization, you know, civic can kind of

come together for a conversation where people will say, okay, we have facts with information

that’s have a robust discussion and see what we can do to choose for a better path.

But right now, we’re in a polarized world right now, which personally I’m fine with

on certain levels.

I’m fine with polarization because the Trump demographic is really causing much more

harm across the spectrum than people are really giving credit, like the libertarian stuff,

the white national stuff, the hypercapitalist sort of repacity of the Koch brothers or

Peter T.L. or other, you know, they’re just pillaging, you know.

So I don’t mind people making money, you know, okay, I don’t care, there’s a recent

thing with Bernie Sanders that a billionaire shouldn’t exist.

You know, I don’t, I wouldn’t mind seeing more of just a better allocation of resources

in a smarter way.

I don’t mind if someone makes money and they have a cool invention or they do something

clever and they make money, but, um, man, how much money do you need?

I mean, you know, even if you spent, you spent $10,000 a day, there would be a very rare

person who could go through a billion dollars, you know, $10,000 a day is a tremendous

amount of money, but that’s a drop in the bucket.

Right.

If you were to think about, you know, a billion dollars is, you know, that’s a thousand

million, right?

So that would take what, uh, many years, many, many, many, many years, many, many days.

Just $10,000 a day is more money than many people on this entire planet, huh?

Yeah.

That’s right.

In their entire life.

Yeah.

No.

I’m just using that as an example.

So income inequality, climate change, and above all social justice are all tied together.

And there’s very clear choices we can make to make things better, but the problem is we

have a lot of inertia, so we can act around to the bathrooms there.

Yeah.

No.

We can wrap up right now, if you’d like.

Okay.

I just, you know, Paul, it’s great to have the opportunity to visit with you today.

And on behalf of the rest of the Wieners Community Network, thanks for taking the time.

And, uh, look forward to seeing you out there at another event sometime soon.

Thanks for all the work you’re doing all around the world.

Okay.

Peace.

The Wienerth Community Stewardship and Sustainability Podcast series is hosted by Aaron William Perry,

author, thought leader, and executive consultant.

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about me

Meet the host: Aaron Perry

Aaron William Perry is a writer, public speaker, impact entrepreneur, consultant, artist and father. The author of Y on Earth: Get Smarter, Feel Better, Heal the Planet, Aaron works with the Y on Earth Community team and Impact Ambassadors to spread the THRIVING & SUSTAINABILITY messages of hopeful and empowering information and inspiration to diverse communities throughout the world.

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