Imagine a world where we live sustainably. We are not there now. I mean, we’re not remotely sustainable right now, and that means 8 billion people, governments and corporations, all living sustainably. You can have a few people living unsustainably, but not most of the population living unsustainably, because the average of sustainable and unsustainable is unsustainable. Most people can’t imagine a world in which we’re living sustainably and if we’re living unsustainably, it’s only amount of time until we run out of something.

You’re listening to A Climate Change, this is Matt Matern. I’ve got Joshua Spodek on the program. Dr Spodek is a PhD in astrophysics. He’s taught at NYU, leadership and entrepreneurship. He’s written some books. He’s a four time TEDx speaker.

He’s featured on The Daily Show, and he has a new book out Sustainability, Simplified, The Definitive Guide to Understanding and Solving All, Yes, All Our Environmental Problems. Welcome to the program. Here’s the book cover. Everybody should go out and order one great book, and I’ve had a chance to read a lot of it, and looking forward to talking to you about it, Josh.

Glad to be here, glad to talk to you again. And in all that stuff about me, there’s also we’ve been on each other’s podcasts before.

That’s true. Josh has a podcast called This Sustainable Life, which is an excellent podcast. Everybody should check that out. I believe it’s on all the major podcasting platforms, right Josh?

Yes.

So tell us a little bit about the book, and I do want to weave in the story of breaking out here in California, and I think it’s news around the world, the California wildfires, and how your book intersects with the issues we’re dealing with here in California.

There’s a lot in the book, it talks about my journey. Let me set some context for why I wrote it and where it came to be was that I, you know, a PhD in physics. I had started companies. I knew all about leadership, and I’d grown up. I don’t remember a time when I didn’t know about sea level rise, ocean acidification, plastic pollution, deforestation, things like that. And most of my life, I felt like there wasn’t really much I could do about it, certainly into my 30s and 40s, and I felt like I got to do something.

I mean, I’m vegetarian, I would take the subway instead of driving or taking a taxi when I could. But I didn’t really feel like I was doing much. So what could I do? You know, I avoided straws. It didn’t really seem like it would do much. I tried to think of what I could do. I mean, a PhD in physics, maybe I could work on fission or fusion, but the more I looked into them, if they could work to solve our problems. I didn’t see what I could do, and ultimately I felt like, well, what can I do?

And I just got angry at like, environmentalists who were telling me to do stuff that they weren’t doing, and the news was just like, I know the problems, but what can I do? And that’s where things began, when I first started really acting on my own and finding contrary to what I always expected that living more sustainably actually improved my life. I mean, I thought it cost more, I thought it would take more time, I thought it’d be inconvenient. I thought it’d take me away from family and things like that, and that’s all the messages that I’d received.

The first thing I did was start avoiding packaged food, taking responsibility for the garbage that I produced myself, that I couldn’t blame anyone else for. And I’m in New York City, there’s great prepared food all over the place. There’s great food. Is great food has flown in from all over and it took me time to learn to cook on my own, but it got better, which is to say, it got cheaper, more convenient, more tasty. And I saw two things. One was the leader in me. Saw that there was intrinsic motivation. I really enjoyed it. I didn’t expect to.

And nothing that I’d heard before was intrinsic. It was always here’s what you have to do to fix this problem in Bangladesh and so forth. And the entrepreneur me thought, if most people are like me and think that living more sustainably makes their lives worse, there’s a big opportunity here to help people improve their lives and improve the environment in the process. And really, hundreds of millions, billions of people feel this way.

That’s a movement. So that began this whole process of developing a leadership technique designed to spread, designed for bottom up and a top down approach. That top down is to work with influential people such as yourself and movie stars and elected officials and CEOs, as well as working with regular people on the street to teach this technique of living more sustainably, a mindset shift to seeing this something enjoyable, followed by a process of continual improvement and the ability to share that with others.

And then began once I started living more sustainably, discovering, how did we get this way? Why is our culture so we have this dominance hierarchy? It’s very we feel like we can’t do anything. We feel despair, and it’s so much easier to just go with the flow and collude and deplete and extract that’s where the money is, and why does have to be that way?

So the book traces all these things that causes the understanding these problems before we can solve them, and then I come up with a bunch of solutions as. Wow, but the big thing is this movement of the top down and the bottom up approach. I don’t know if that’s too much all at once.

Yeah, one of the things that struck me in the book is you talk about addiction to what you call doff, and maybe you can explain DOF to the listener, doof I would say you call doof Okay, so all of us doofuses that are consuming golf, and I think that that resonates with me. And I can see my addiction to the fossil fuel economy, to the plastic economy, to the consumption economy that has us buy more and more and more and more.

And what are your thoughts about how you break free from this addiction to this lifestyle model, which essentially everybody around the world, or not everybody. That’s not true. Just certainly Western civilization, and more and more China and developing countries as well are picking up this addictive behavior.

Yeah, a pretty solid business model in today’s world is customer captivity. You know, create some product or service and make it so that you’re the only provider of it, and then make it very difficult to switch. And addiction is top on the list of that. It’s very difficult for people to get out. And there’s social media. Everyone knows about. Aussie content, tobacco, things are designed to addict. And most of us have some sort of addict. I mean, for me, social media, for me, was Reddit.

You know, I just had years of I’ll just go on for like, five minutes before I go to bed, and three hours later, we all know the story. We’ve all been there. I’m like, what I just do for those three hours. And I can talk about family members who are in prison for things that came from their addictions, from being prescribed things, and friends who committed suicide in the midst of addiction as well.

So I don’t want to play light here, because for me, for years, for me, it was like Ben and Jerry’s, Doritos, and those Snyders of Hanover pretzel bits with the flavor on them that I just I would tell myself over and over again, don’t get them anymore.

And I would make all these rules like, okay, only finished this much on this day and this much on that day. And I never would. I always felt guilty about it. I couldn’t stop. And, you know, I had Michael Moss on the podcast, who wrote Salt, Trigger, Fat, and he talked about how these things are designed to addict.

And I will not call Doritos food. It comes from corn and whatever extracts of other food, but it’s no more food than, in my opinion, cocaine or crack is coca leaf. Coca leaf is a leaf, or poppy and heroin are not the same thing anymore.

So I wouldn’t call heroin poppy extract. And I don’t call Fritos food, it’s “doof.” So doof is food backward, and that way we don’t confuse these things. Because it’s very tempting for people to say, you know, Josh, you live, you have access to farmers markets and things like that. But what about a single mom who’s got three jobs and three kids, and, you know, she can’t go to the farmers market and she can fill her kids bellies with more from McDonald’s with $1 which actually is not the case.

There’s research that shows like fresh, necessarily fresh, but fruits and vegetables, and you can get it cheaper if there’s access, which do does its best to push out fresh food availability from neighborhoods. But no matter how hungry a child is, if you give them Coca Cola, it does not help in any way. If you give them Doritos or Fritos. It does not help in any way. It’s more expensive. But if we confuse doof with food, then people might think, well, it makes them less hungry for a little while, but meth would do that too, which is a plant extract.

So where does this take us? Where does your model lead in terms of next steps? How could it affect society in ways that will solve all of our environmental problems?

It occurred to me at one point that imagine a world where we live sustainably. We are not there now. I mean, we’re not remotely sustainable right now, and that means 8 billion people, governments and corporations, all living sustainably. You can have a few people living unsustainably, but not most of the population living unsustainably, because the average of sustainable and unsustainable is unsustainable. How would we get there? I ask a lot of people this, and most people don’t really have they can’t imagine a world in which we’re living sustainably and if we’re living unsustainably, it’s the only amount of time until we run out of something, to say nothing of the predictions of how things could be.

How can we live sustainably in the era of, say, AI, which AI is sucking up ever more power, in the world of crypto, which also is sucking up tons of power. How is it even possible with technologies like that, with essentially being impossible to say, hey, we’re not going to engage in using AI going forward, if it’s possible.

I think the way to get there is to return to sustainability, let entrepreneurs figure out how to solve problems. And if it’s not possible, then there are many things in the past that we our culture, has done that we simply don’t do anymore. Slavery comes to mind child labor comes to mind that they could create wonderful lives for some people at the expense of others. And we’ve decided that, you know, we don’t put a tax on slavery. We don’t put a tax on child labor.

We might put a tax on cigarettes, but we don’t put a tax on cigarettes to children who can’t consent to birth defects and cancer. We don’t allow it. And so to me, if we want to have the things that we cannot be done sustainably, I think that is to say, if they destroy other people’s life, limiting property, I think those things have to go the way of slavery, of child labor, and I think we’re better off for it. What would those things be that you would say need to be completely off the table.

Well, in the book, I talk about an amendment that would be in the style of the 13th Amendment. And I use the language of John Locke, who the framers of the Constitution used, also his language. And there’s a loophole right now, if I put poison in your food, that’s a crime. If I put poison in the air or water, knowing that it’ll reach your lungs or your digestive system, somehow that can be legal. Now we made smoking indoors illegal, at least in New York State.

I’m not sure if that’s nationwide, and people really objected to it at the time, but now I don’t think anyone wants cigarettes back in the bars and clubs, because we know the second hand, smoke kills people, it causes cancer, it causes birth defects, and I propose that we have an amendment that says you can’t destroy other people’s life, liberty and property when just because you put it in the environment first, and a couple other things.

But from there, like free speech, it’s not defined perfectly, but it would be defined over a democratic process, through the judicial system, over time. I’m a big fan of democracy. Sometimes people ask, you know, what would you do if you do if you were a dictator? I’m like, that’s not my direction.

I would call for free and fair elections as soon as practicable, but in the meantime, to put in a law that says you can’t destroy other people’s life, living property, which is, I think, what government? I think many people agree that’s one of the roles of government, and then reuse democracy to set the rules for what’s allowed and what’s not allowed. I don’t pretend to dictate to others.

Isn’t it true already that there are laws that protect life, liberty and property? If you do pollute my property, I can sue you. There are laws that prevent air pollution. The problem is, they’re not being maybe utilized, and it’s very difficult to bring polluters to justice, but there are lots of laws that say that’s wrong. Many of these laws, in actual practice, what they do is, can’t do it, but we will permit you to do it in certain cases.

So the government is permitting the destruction of life, labor and property, and in the process, it’s gaining power and revenue. By power, I mean the bureaucrats, the people in charge have the power to do things. And this is, to me, a giant moral hazard. If a government permits by and by permit, I don’t just mean allow, I also mean issue permits so that they gain revenue. So a government getting revenue for what it’s designed to not allow is at least a moral hazard. More so it’s going to grow these things. It certainly creates the incentive to grow these things.

You’re correct in the to some pollution is allowed under, say, the Clean Air Act or the Clean Water Act, and the level of pollution is determined by our legislature as to what is, quote, “the reasonable amount.” I guess that’s the democratic process. The problem I have with that is a, influenced by polluters, but B, that it’s not prosecuted vigorously when polluters do engage in in massive amounts of pollution, when farmers allowing pesticides to run off into waters. Who’s ever prosecuted for that?

Yeah, I want to go back a step, because my book is not about the law, and there’s like a tiny little point at the end of where things go. My book is about changing hearts and minds. It’s about you personally, what you can do to change yourself, to be able to enable to see what’s possible any law would come after overwhelming popular support.

So I’m not about marching to city hall or marching to the Capitol building, not at the beginning. It’s to help change American and global culture. The first step, it’s not so much about the y intercept. It’s much more about the slope, because if someone is moving in that direction, they’ll get much farther than someone who just makes a big jump and often tends to go back.

So it’s to change culture from seeing living more sustainably as a burden or chore or risking reverting to the stone age, or if we live more sustainably, and the Chinese and Russians don’t, then they’ll beat us in the market, or maybe even militarily, or I’ll never see my family again. Or, you know, there’s some Mad Max dystopia.

There’s a lot of that going around. And in this, in my experience, and the experience of people who go through my workshops, it’s not that it’s it’s wonderful, it’s joyful, and as people embrace it more, they feel gratitude. So I don’t want to get focused on the nuts and bolts that come after the mindset shift and the continual improvement that people really enjoy.

I mean, it leads to more time with family, more control of your finances and your career. It’s really liberation from feeling so trapped. So I’m glad you started by talking about addiction, because most of us can’t imagine a life otherwise, and it’s very similar to addiction.

So what do you see as the first step on this process to living a more sustainable life?

So here’s something that I can. Really put into words, but I can say this what I call the sportic method, which is a step by step process that people can learn. And the book refers to a how to book, which is a free online download, and it walks you through this process. I can’t describe it any better than I can describe listening to Beethoven.

You’ve got to hear it. You’ve got to experience it to really get it. But people who go through it love the experience, and it evokes emotions and motivations relevant to the environment that are particular to each person, and then enables them to act on those emotions, those feelings, as opposed to, so this intrinsic motivation that’s there in all of us, as opposed to this extrinsic like this, is what you have to do.

So where do people get the book to or the workshop book to walk through this process?

Okay, so it will be at spodekmethod.com As it happens, you haven’t really copied the book. Technically, the pubdate is February 18, but the New York Times did this giant two page story on me in November, and so my publisher moved mountains to get things earlier. But the website isn’t up yet. But spotted method.com – spodekmethod.com.

Yeah, tell us about what you’re doing to roll this out. Obviously, the book is a big piece of the puzzle of getting people to understand what the work is that you’re doing. What else are you doing besides the book?

Yeah, we’re building this whole community site. Because I started doing the workshop a few years ago, and I knew somewhere down the road an alumni community would be important. But the very first participants kept coming back week after week, years after they did the workshop. And so for a while, we had this loosely connected alumni community that’s tightly forming.

So spodekmethod.com is also where the this community that’s been going on in the background people can join. And people describe it like a breath of fresh air. They say things like this, is what I’ve been looking for my entire life, because so many people they hear, you know, here’s 10 little things you can do via environment, or maybe fusion will fix everything and all the stuff that they can’t really act on. They can’t really they feel like they’re swimming upstream, and here’s a place where they feel like they’re swimming downstream.

And not everyone around us, those of us who take on living more sustainably, not because we’re just acting on our own, we’re just one person out in the woods, but because we know that this is something that we all will prefer, in the same way that if we could go back to 1860 we know that people, even those practicing and profiting well off of slavery, Will. They would prefer it. They might not think it, but we know that they prefer after slavery is gone, even if they were benefiting from it financially.

Personally, a big part of the book is to connect how the dominance hierarchy. I’m not drawing a parallel here. There’s a dominance hierarchy that existed and had one manifestation in slavery and has another manifestation today in our polluting and depleting culture. You have to go to the book to really get that part.

But to be free and liberated from that culture is very liberating, and that’s what joining this community, it’s fun, it’s liberating. It’s freeing. It’s swimming downstream instead of upstream.

Well, certainly, you know, it sounds good. I’ve certainly tried some of the work that you are putting out there, Josh, and I appreciate it. And I think I certainly could use a big push in moving in that direction, because the addiction of fossil fuels and prepared foods and things like this are pretty powerful, and it’s challenging to kind of overcome that mindset, to really make big changes.

Yeah, I’m not sure when this goes up, but the most recent episode that I posted on my Podcast, episode 800 the numbers around number so I remember is with this woman, Lorna Davis, and now she’s retired, but she was a senior executive, a CEO of these major multinational companies and and she did the workshop. We spoke before the workshop, which was, I think, episode 794, Episode 800 links to her first, episode two.

And so we recorded before the workshop and after the workshop and before, I think you’ll hear she’s like, pretty skeptical. She’s like, Josh, you don’t go out to restaurants. You’re boring because I cook at home a lot afterwards. She’s like, I love cooking avoiding like, she loves shopping now, to avoid packaged food too.

She’s committed. I never talked to her about this. Her she came up with that on her own. She’s going for 2025, no flying, all these other things that she’s she’s just doing because she no one’s telling you to do it. She just wants to do it, and she’s experimenting.

And it’s, it’s like to hear this from someone, and you know, she lives in New York and Connecticut, and she’s originally from South Africa, so she was flying, I think she said, like weekly, and just stopping, not for the environment. That’s the side effect, is to improve her life, where Evelyn, this woman, who she’s one of the main teachers. Now, she began taking the workshop. She didn’t even come to me for sustainability stuff. She came to me for straight leadership coaching, and ended up taking the workshop.

Now she’s one of the instructors. Let’s see, she’s got three boys and like, they don’t do screen time anymore. I mean, they have time on the screens. But she’s like, Yeah, there’s nights when we have our game night and we just do it because it just happened. It came through the sustainability things, the stuff about where she had to spend time cooking for them now they’re cooking for themselves more. They’re maturing faster because she gives them more responsibilities.

She also said another side effect, she said she’s in better physical condition than ever before in her adult life. And that wasn’t the point. She just began riding her bike more instead of driving. The car and began eating more healthy. But she didn’t go to eat healthier. She ate just more delicious, and it ended up being more healthy. So I don’t I could talk about all these effects that people having, and they like to share with each other.

So like, one person figures out, oh, here’s how I can do this. You know, I’m not a parent. She’s a parent. Other parents pick up from other parents. Singles pick up from me, and me from them. And different people pick up in different ways. And some people go full on. She’s not flying for a year. For a lot of people, that’s a really big deal. For some people, it’s not a big deal. Some people just try things out. It’s, you know, everyone grows at their pace that the people who are, you know, the ones who participate in the online community.

It’s they’re really like, learning from each other, sharing from each other, give each other the high fives. It’s it’s totally inspiring. I mean, I knew I was onto something tapping into intrinsic motivation, rather than extrinsic. And I knew, as an entrepreneur, if I could get a service that would work, it could work. Seeing it actually happen is just they tell me, I inspire them, but it’s nothing compared to the inspiration I feel from them.

Well, that’s great. I mean, I think community is super powerful, and it kind of harkens back to the beginning of Alcoholics Anonymous, back in the 30s, and it was a very small group, but then it kind of caught fire and became international movement with millions of members and, quite frankly, a ginormous impact around the world. And I guess the question is, to a certain extent, it may take on a life of its own beyond you, and that’s, I would imagine, kind of the goal is that this community kind of takes off, and people start working on being more sustainable at the grassroots level.

Yeah, that’s what’s happening, and it’s wonderful to see as an entrepreneur. I love when a project, this is like my technical term, takes on a life of its own. You know, I could get hit by the proverbial bus, and it would keep going. Now, Alcoholics Anonymous is a big model, and the book talks about it. I mean, I have lots of experts in the book. I have lots of experts on the podcast. And I want to clarify one big difference, is that, and I don’t again,

I don’t want to make light of anything but polluting and depleting the behaviors that come from that. It’s sort of like alcohol, where I get the party and someone else gets the cirrhosis, or, you know, the problems, because if I pollute, maybe I fly around and I get to go to Bangkok or whatever, and then other people, their islands are submerged by water, and other people are displaced from their land to get to the fuel and the minerals underneath.

And other people, their children, are born with birth defects, and yet I’m enjoying it. So that’s a big difference between prohibition and my proposal for an amendment. I’m not telling people what to do with their own bodies. It’s what they do that affects others.

Yeah, certainly that has got to be factored into the equation. And the problem with kind of our modern economy is that GNP measures just ever growing gross national product, but it does not seem to take into account the externalities created by the pollution and by the health effects of creating products that are polluting, or food that is not nutritional, and worse, and not nutritional actually harming, damaging, and to me, that would be a an earth shattering change is if we really start measuring gross national product, taking into account the effects of our pollution, the effects of eating doof.

Yeah, I say consuming doof because I don’t call it eating, but yeah, I mean, you talk, you talk about an externality, and many of these things are externalities. Now, I would distinguish if I throw a banana peel in your yard, in principle, it may decompose. You know, if I throw tons and tons and tons, it might not work.

But if I throw plastic that doesn’t decompose on a human lifetime time scale, and I contend that to call that an externality, or if it’s like just outright poison, although plastic, I think, certainly in large amounts, is poison, or the stuff that comes out of it into our food and so forth, but to call that an externality, I think, is a, what I would call a category error, a poison is not or something that doesn’t break down is not something that does break down like I can if I pay you for the mess that I made in your yard.

Well, some people would say, if I put anything in your yard, that’s my destroying your property, which the government is supposed to protect. Now, that might be a small crime, like a misdemeanor, but if I’m, like, totally wrecking an environment, or, in the case of, say, the Colorado River doesn’t reach the ocean anymore. These are not externalities.

Some things are externalities, but some things are just, what a category, a different category of things we recognize that with, you know, if I just outright dump mercury in the Hudson River, I think no one would say that’s an externality, and then people are dying from it.

Yeah, it’s a crime. There’s certainly levels of pollution which the gradation would be criminal to mass criminal. And then maybe somebody who’s much, you know, a misdemeanor is, you know, throwing some kind of small amount of oil out on the side wire, a thimble full. Was a lot different than a million gallons.

So for instance, yeah, in the case of something like the things I talked about before, like slavery, child labor, these are not externalities. To take away someone’s liberty and enslave them is not something that we’re like, oh, we give someone a slap on the wrist, or we tax them. Actually to tax that would be to involve government in profiting from it. We don’t do that. We don’t allow those things.

Well, I guess that’s the question is, how do we define the categories of what falls into absolutely no never and what in your mind kind of falls into that category. Again, that’s a democratic process. I mean, what is free speech? What is freedom to freedom of assembly? You know, we have to define these things. It’s not yelling fire in a crowded theater, it’s not libel, but it can be satire. So we have to figure those things out. And it’s that’s the next step. But I think the first step is overwhelming popular support.

You know, in 1820 there was not overwhelming popular support to end slavery. In 1865 you know, it barely passed, the 13th Amendment that is to end slavery, to make slavery legal, big loophole in it for criminals, but so imperfect, but still, I think big step forward for this nation.

I don’t think anyone, I don’t know anyone who wants to repeal that, and I think that will, that’s what will happen with this amendment, is that I don’t think there’ll be a transition time, and then I think no one will want to repeal it after some time, and the future generations will look back at us the way we look back at them and say, How could you take so long to do what you knew it was right, but you just you enjoyed the comfort convenience, but you knew, I mean, Jefferson knew he spoke out.

He, you know, he’s some of the most amazing, eloquent words on freedom, against slavery of all, and yet he didn’t free his slaves and then undermined his credibility and integrity. I mean, to this day, people say Jefferson didn’t mean all men are created equal. If he did, he would have freed his slaves, but he didn’t. He meant all white men are created equal, or something like that. And that’s what we’re doing today. We have many people saying all the best things about sustainability and living clean and green and renewable, and yet we don’t practice it. It turns out, a big character in my book is Robert Carter the third, who actually was a classmate of Thomas Jefferson’s and a neighbor of George Washington, who also did not free his slaves until his will after he died, Robert Carter the third freed over 500 slaves, the most of any individual.

And after he did it, Jefferson was still saying, we can’t possibly do it. The races can’t live together. Things that we know today came out of his trying to reconcile living one way, saying one thing and doing another. And I think we’ll enjoy it more the way we know Jefferson would have preferred his life if he’d freed his slaves during his lifetime, and if we live significantly more sustainably, all of us, each of us, will prefer the change. I think we know that. I think it’s hard to imagine, and that’s what the spellback method helps with. But I think we know as well as someone then would have known, that more freedom, more liberty, that’s what we want, even if it’s hard to imagine the middle steps.

Well, I think it’s well said, everybody should go out and get Sustainability Simplified, The Definitive Guide To Understanding And Solving All, Yes, All Of Our Environmental Problems. By Josh Spodek, great book, very provocative and quite possibly world changing. So Josh again, thank you for being on the program, and we’ll be following you and looking forward to you continuing to lead on this issue, because it is vital to the planet.

Matt, thank you very much.