1.21 Jigawatts: Energy Literacy and the Real Scoop on Fossil Fuels

As you can imagine, thousands of people were rushing up to the tape, to the door, and it was incredible. Um, but, uh, the one that I remember most, there was this one guy who came up to me toward the end of the day who said, uh, you know, I gave my spiel and he said, oh, well you don't have to worry about that. Okay. So I'm like, well, enlightened me. Why, why you going to populate Mars?

No. He said, ah, I've got this idea for how we can generate all the energy that we need and it'll solve all our issues with wealth and money poverty. And uh, I, I've got it be, he must be really well hidden or authorial. Well, my two guests, yes, those are good tries, but you'd be shocked to learn it's exercise bikes. What? So, yeah. So this guy says, here's what we do. We, we set up these gyms. We're going to put out an array of exercise bikes.

When you pedal on them, you're going to generate electricity and you'll have a little magnetic card reader thing in there and you put your card in. And based on how much Jason's already getting Nancy here based on how much electricity you generate, it'll fill your card with money and you can, you know, go about your day, uh, spending on whatever things you can dream of. Okay, I got to step up here. At the moment you could buy a grain of rice.

So there, there was this poster going around the Facebook. It was power your home for a day with a 20 minute workout and they show these like 60 year old guy in a recliner bike, drinking orange juice. And the idea was in 20 minutes he power is home and I'm sure yeah and I'm going, wait a second, wait a second. And it's a typical human can put out maybe a hundred watts, you know, for like 20 minutes or an hour,

If they forget to mention the 300 other people in the back, they're peddling the entire day. What are you going to do is think about one operation in your house. Okay. To run a load of laundry that's 500 watts. So, but by, by this person who visited me at the conference of it, by their take, you'd have five of these people for an hour, an hour to give you one load of laundry. Tell me 47 minutes and then the load I do, that's all we need right now. You just couldn't do laundry all day.

Oh yeah, no problem. It reminds me of a, have you guys seen that video? It's on Youtube, Robert versus the toaster. Oh yeah, it's amazing. So He's this German Olympic athlete, right? Huge Guide. No, no one of these long distance, you know, a cyclist. But one of those guys that are like print Springshot track guys. Yeah. Like the Lance Armstrong, they take like, what is it like stuff to make your hemoglobin work better. He mad a critter. So this guy's taking steroids and she is huge.

Just massive. In fact, it's like tree shrunk. He reminds me of a Mr. Incredible from the, from the Incredibles, you know the, the Pixar thing, he actually looks like that. He's an anvil of a man. So, so the, this video had him basically ca fee could toast a piece of bread, you know, just pedaling a bike. Right. Okay. And he was working his ass off. I mean, I don't even know what the equivalent of gear he would have been in. You know what I mean, how to pedal this thing.

But he was generating some things, I think, I'm sure his sprocket was the size of a Hula Hoop. Enormous. Right. And He, I think he generated like 700 watts and he held that for less, certainly less than two minutes. Right. Okay. Working his ass off to try to get this little piece of bread toast. And based on what you like, if one of us normal humans can ride for an hour at a hundred watts, that guy's doing seven times that. Yeah, for sure. Short.

But yeah, that's, that's, that's basically the output of a of a horse. Right. But like a couple minutes, that's probably his nickname. I think that's what they call steroids horse, right? Like, um, yeah. So he did that and he was spent at the end, I think he said something by how he could taste blood in his mouth.

He was tired and he just beat, and it was a little piece of bread that you got to get the butter on really fast if you want it to know it was white bread and you could barely see a brown hue to it. Exactly. It wasn't that good. Yeah. And they did that video, I think in order to help people sort of understand how much energy you take. Steven Tosta a piece of bread. So I once did that, it wasn't bred, but I was on this, uh, this kind of weird, I was on a cross country bicycle trip.

Okay. So I was, I was in bicycling shape and we had made it, uh, over the mountains and in the state of Washington and over a two to Montana and we stopped at a place called Libby dam. It's a, it's one of these big hydro dams, backs up a lake all the way up into Canada. Okay. Uh, they actually call it Lake Kuka Noosa, which stands for the Kootenay River, Canada and USA. That's great. What a great name. So inside this damn, there's exhibits to explain what's going on.

And one of the things they had was a bicycle hooked up to a, some light bulbs. So you peddle it and it'll light the light bulbs. And uh, I was able to wipe like half a light bulb for like half a second. Dm Flicker. Yeah. It was so sad. I was like, I'm going to tear this thing up above and biking across the country. Yeah. Nothing, nothing like Robert would've looked at you with pity. Oh, he woulda just squished me like an ant between his fingers. Oh my gosh.

Unfortunately people don't, they don't have that experience very often, right? No, they don't. They don't get that at all. So this guy that came up to you, you know, at this conference, well intentioned, I'm sure thought he had this epiphany, brilliant idea. Hey, we can address the obesity crisis in the United States and generate all the energy that we possibly need. Right. Just didn't really have a sense of, he's off. He's off by it. Like order several, several orders of magnitude.

Yeah. Well you guys know that whenever I think about these things, my twisted mind always goes to pop culture of course. And so I thought of a pop culture reference to how little we know about energy. So take a listen. This is from the movie back to the future.

Okay. So, uh, there's the controversy is that you actually can legally pronounced that word gigawatt. Legally it is not illegal. That's good. It's an alternate. An alternate pronunciation. But movie, No, no. Uh, originally. And so I think that their science adviser had pronounced it that way, but in the actual script they spelled it like Jay. I Gigo Lot. But, but that's the reality. What the hell is a joy? It's a digging number. It is a very big number. That's true. A lot of bike pedaling.

How many people does it take to pedal to a Gigolo point 21? GCAL and it's in a Delorean for guys that's not on a bike. I want a Delorean bike with those doors that rise up. That'd be side. Yeah, you could, you could make one. I mean, ever come at bikes, right? You just add those doors to it. I'm sure he could pedal really far with those doors on here. Did that movie come out the from 1985 that was a good year, man. I missed the mid eighties.

Yeah. Well, uh, here we are in the late 2000 and we don't know any better and we know just as much as we did then was supposed to be able to time travel by now. We should do Marty McFly last year he was like flying on skateboards, skateboards, that float, you know, where's that? It's a, it's a far cry from a, what we call a hover board now and what he had oh, in the shoes that tie themselves. Okay. So I think we've pretty much established that were energy idiots. We're completely illiterate.

So, uh, we were thinking about what would you need to know if you are going to understand energy. And I think you need to answer four questions and that's how important is it for what we're doing in society? How powerful is it? How cheap is it and how much of it is they're out there. Yeah, those are great. That's a good way to frame it.

You know, part of the thing I think about it, it says like a biologist and I look at at human evolution and evolution of society and how it's changed and something that's really weird about humans is that we have the ability to control what's called Exos sematic energy. So the so so refers to the body. So XO is outside of the body. Thanks for explaining that because that was a, that's like a $10 word, right? That's like a one point 21 gigawatt word. That's an sat word for word. Exactly.

So, so end of sematic would be like, you know the, the, the bike peddling energy, the pedal a bike. Exos. Sematic. Well there's some eggs though there cause it's a bike. Right? Well now the energy or applying to the pedals that's coming from your own body. You're burning calories and grown body or minister medic would be Donald Trump telling you to pedal. That's right. I got you. I'm just going to go back and watch some more back to the future while you finish this last, last more of that.

But a exosome Madec is then we control energy. That's not of our own body. And so, so the, the, the first one is like fire. So imagine building a campfire and cooking, you know, like mastodon roast over it and having a like a massive on drumstick or something like that. Okay. Pretty big. It's a big, it's a big job slot. I would feel pretty full. Kick your teeth with the tusks afterwards.

But I, you know, humans may have been using fire to cook for nanny thousands of years and it has affected, potentially are a digestive system and our brain development. Yeah. So it's a huge part of evolutionary theory out humans. The theories of basically that's what led to the huge advances in our brain development, right? All the things that we're able to do now or as a result of us being able to cook our food and not having to expend as much energy and digesting it and all that. Right.

And then we talk about the term horsepower refers literally to harnessing a horse and using it. Well that's literal too. You put a harness on the whole harnessing. Exactly. Exactly. That's what it is. It's literal. So that's, that's about 10 times the output of a person. A horse is about 10 times more unless you're that Robert and cyclist. Yeah. We could just put a harness on Robert Thinking Robert. But though like having to work all day and that APP, not much blood in the mouth. Exactly.

Exactly. Um, so when we, then we started to figure out how to say like windmills, you know, say in Holland or whatever or, or figuring out how to water wheels. And so he would try to extract energy from the environment and, and grow crops and take the straw. So prior to the industrial revolution, we were using x of somatic energy, but it was at a certain scale that was sort of harnessing from the environment with contemporary soul or flows either via animals or via water or wind.

Or you might get like an extra few years by burning plants or, or cutting wood, right. A few years of what, uh, of solar energy. Right. You can store it a bit. Sure. Yeah. And then, and then release it later. So that was also important.

But then what you were doing though, when you started, when we started tapping fossil fuels, as we were taking energy that was contained from previous epics of solar radiation and now burning that for the first time in millions of years in, it was compressed compressed energy, right? It was, yeah, very, it's very dense. So that's an important property and then doesn't compete for land use either. Right? So that's an interesting property.

You could have an oil well in the same and the same sort of area field that you had a farm on. So that's been sort of a transformation of our society through this various stages of sort of expanding our use of exosomes energy. I think one of the key things to understand too is that, and this is gonna sound stupid, but I think we take it for granted and that is energy itself. Forget the form it takes, but energy is, is effectively the, the thing that makes everything else possible.

Without energy, we don't function. I mean us eating food is a conversion of energy to calories that we burn, right? And so our, our bodies can't move without it. Our brains don't think without it. And so even on a small scale like that, without that energy, forget it, you know, bread and rice and you know, steak or whatever. That's all part of enda somatic energy. And that's important.

But the amount of calories we use for our own body metabolism is tiny relative now to what our society uses in the exos sematic sense. But it's all doing the same thing. It's maintaining not in the incense and not maintaining our body or allowing us to say play tennis or type on a typewriter and computers typewriter typing on a typewriter in 1985 [inaudible]. Yeah, I learned on an IBM Selectric, I think it was called the fun, Eh, dating myself.

But anyway, it's, it's the, the entire society now requires this burning everything we do with burning something, whether it's metabolic or it's actually like in a, you know, in an engine somewhere. I always like taking this down to some kind of an example that you can follow along. And the one that I thought of it had to do a share.

You and I got to work with some people that were involved in the textile industry recently and we were thinking about clothing and, and what a, you know, important part of the economy that is, it's uh, you know, of course agriculture and food is going to be the very base layer, but, but you know, kind of next thing you'd think about from a survival perspective is shelter and clothing and, sure.

And so I was thinking like what, what would the textile or clothing based on smaller energy flows back in the day, 2000 years. Monty Python's life of Brian, you seen that? Uh, not recently. Well, I remember the scene life from Brian where he opens the naked and blinds and he's naked. He's got no clothes. There's not a lot of clothing back then. Yeah, it's pretty simple.

They also did live in, in quite a warm, you know, he didn't need much, but the, the idea that, you know, you would get your clothing basically from what you could scrounge around you from whatever fiber was available, you know, the fig leaf around your waist or the deer skin that you could, I mean, way back and then when, when societies formed, you know, civilizations formed and people were sedentary, right.

In, in cities, you know, there were forms of textiles I came from far away, but they were such a sell luxury.

And then what's amazing, of course, once the industrial revolution comes along and you get to power things with oil or with coal, and you have the ingenuity that came along as well, to be able to figure out how to actually run a combine over a field of cotton and spit out, you know, the raw material that you, that you actually want. It was, it's just such a huge change. I mean, I just compare that to what you're talking about.

A share with the Silk Road, instead of waiting eight months for the perfect piece of fabric to be delivered from China over land by camels or whatever it is, delivering it now, you got huge machines harvesting, you're shipping that material off to East Asia, you've got people processing it, they're dying it in some other country gets shipped over to South America for final production back to the Walmart and North American.

Because the labor costs is really that the, the thing that is the driving difference in terms of, of how much it cost to do something. And what would an amazing transformation. People tend to think of the industrial revolution as being something that's about human ingenuity. You know? Uh, who was the guy who invented the, the, the gin, the cotton gin.

Yeah. I mean, there's these geniuses that come up and they have all these ideas, but it's the, it's this material conditions, the energetic abundance we have that allow them to develop and reality. And that's what's fascinating. So what you all are talking about is, yeah, we could, uh, we can achieve things based on what we collectively have in the way of knowledge and our intellect and our ability to invent.

But without that incredible power came from fossil fuels, we wouldn't have gotten there. So I want to turn us to that. I want to turn us to how powerful are the, the fuel that we're used to running society on a share? I know you, you hit on this in our first episode, it's almost inconceivable. For example, we talked about in our first episode we talked about a barrel of oil as an example, right?

So there's 42 gallons in a barrel of oil and when you actually compare that to thinking about like human labor, you know, we're talking about the, uh, the average output a person can put out, which is something like 70 watts and you extrapolate that over the course of, of a full day. Basically you take a barrel of oil, right? And if you run the numbers, it's the equivalent of 11 years worth of human labor, right? Working fulltime over 2000 hours a year. Right?

You're a little vacation time in there. I wish you to ask me. I would have been so wrong about the answer that I would have been. I would have proven myself for the idiot that I am. If people knew putting, he thinks about that. And could you possibly imagine that this thing, which by the way is kind of, you know, ruining our chances I was burning is ruining our chances of actually inhabiting this planet. But putting that aside, how could you possibly imagine this thing is so incredibly valuable?

Magical. It is match. I knew it was really powerful. I wouldn't have guessed 11 years. The Way I knew it was powerful is a one time my partner's car wouldn't start. So it was sitting in the parking lot next to the, uh, the complex where I live and the auto mechanic place was a half a mile away. And so I thought, I'm not gonna, we're not going to tow this. We're not going to pay to get a tow truck. I'm just going to push it there. These guys are laughing at me.

If you could see my, uh, my stick figure here in Corvallis. Yeah, at least it was flat. It was going to the gym. I mean, I'm in pretty

Well, luckily two friends of mine were just then coming back from crossfit, their bar, their athletes and I said, hey, can you guys help me push this to the, to the mechanic? And they're like, sure. So now there's three of us pushing it. It's like the hardest thing I ever did in my life. And when we got to the mechanics or the break was not, it was, no, it was in neutral. When we got to mechanic, there was a curb cut, you know, we had to push it up. The little, the little car, it was so hard.

We need to like rocket. Yeah, total failure. But a very good lesson in how much power, if there had been even a slightest inclined no Jedi dude, we'd be dead roles and roiled right back over. You'd be too tired to get out of the way. And what, what, what? How much gas would that have been? Like a tablespoon or something? Exactly. Exactly. Well then we take it completely for granted so that if you do the statistics right, if you look at at international cystics on energy use by nation, right?

The u s the average per capita use is 50 barrels equivalent of oil a year per person. And you said 11 years. Okay. In a barrel. So that's like over 500 years. Like Labor, human labor. Yeah. Each of us has is if we were year as, if there's 500 sort of mystical people working for us that we don't even see, and there's no HR department they can go to if they have a complaint. Right. That's incredible.

Yeah. And I think if you, you actually want to question how powerful is the energy and fossil fuel. You just have to look at the way humanity is overrun the planet. I mean, it's enabled us to take over, there's 7.7 billion of us also in our first episode. There's only, there's only about half a million great apes. Yeah. Right. Yeah. And we've, we've, we dominate and I mean look at the landscape itself. I mean, we're living in mega cities.

We've got industrial farms, we've got factories, we've got roads everywhere.

It's not quite $500,000 $147 and you know, now we're hovering between whatever 40 and $80 a barrel and that price, we're so dependent on it being cheap, you know, actually creates ripple waves in our economy if cause it changes too much, you know, too low or too high. But you compare that to $500,000 in terms of Cuban labor equivalent.

Yeah. So yeah, to not talking about sitting on your computer and, and you know, posting things on the Facebook. Right. But if you wanted to do that, you could a, it'll a kilowatt hour old run six laptops all day long. So I, you know, if you don't pay 20 bucks an hour for 15 hours at $300, right? So if you were to pay someone $300 for a day of hard work and that's not even paying them real well. Yeah, that's decent for labor, but equivalent, minimal teen sense.

You can't buy anything for 13 cents let alone a whole day's work. The Labor. Yeah.

You know, you just said, not only is it cheap, but it's so available, which is our fourth question. You know, how available is this stuff and how much are we using? I think of it as being so available that you never have to think about it. I mean, think about taking a family vacation. Right? Okay. Maybe you're going to go, I don't know. Last summer I went hiking in the mountains, right. And we did just a shit load of planning on how much food do we need per day.

I guess this is your a, you get hungry. This is your Indo somatic. Right? And it's like, you don't, yeah, you don't care about, so you know, you're hiking up and down hills, you pack your food very carefully. I didn't give a really a second's thought to how am I going to get to the mountains and he just jumped in the car and you just gotta to push a car there. Right, exactly. You just drive those rail head, just drive right to where you want to go.

And it's, so it's just there, uh, especially, you know, I know that's not the case for everybody all over the world, but here in the u s right, it's so available. It's just so part of our lives. And you talk about exponential growth in the economy, the exponential growth of consumption. This is all due to energy. I mean, since 1850, our energy use has increased by more than eight times per person, per person, per bird populations by people, right?

Yeah. Yeah. So we've had this massive change in how much energy we're using and it's, it's, it's such a short time. It's less than 200 years. And you know, we think of that as really, really long history, but yeah, and the truth is that for 99% of our history as a species, we were actually living off of the Wa people call solar flows or our solar income, right? We were, we were harnessing plants and the animals that eat plants and firewood and, and muscles, right.

Our own labor and the labor of domesticated animals. That's what we lived on. Maybe some wind for winter for windmills. That's what we lived on for 99% of that gives us comfort actually.

They think that like, okay, I'm pretty soft and I, and like I be scared not to have all this excess amount of energy I'm used to, but then I realized we travel around the world or if you think about history that, wait a second, I'm really just like those other people, either my ancestors or people in other parts of the world that don't have 50 barrels of oil per year for them available. So I could probably survive if I had a culture around me that helped me negotiate that.

I'm not me, I'd be dead in 10 minutes. But the crazy thing about it is that, uh, you know, you say, well, if it were taken away, and I think a lot of people think that it's going down, you know, oh we're, we're developing renewable energy now. We're just adding it. Yeah, it's crazy. We have a, a colleague at post carbon, a guy named David Hughes who studies kind of the, what'd you say, a shared the macro picture of energy, you know, looking at what's happening in the fossil fuel industry.

He recently gave us the stat that 50% of fossil fuel burned since 1850 has been, has actually been burned since 1991. So if you'd talk about all that, we started burning in 1850. Those was the year I graduated high school in comedy one. Ah, it's just shocking. And 75% since 1970. And so in our lifetime, that's my life. I was born in 69 so 75% of all fossil fields have been born in and basically in Bern. Bern. Yeah, I was born there.

There is a theory about fossil fuel being born in 1970 but uh, we're, we're not going to buy into that one. But that, that

In fact, it's not even adding on as much as fossil fueled growth growing more than it and then renewables right now. And it's just, it has to do more people consuming more, more energy and more things.

Well, so I think we've answered some of the key questions about energy literacy, but if you want to take it to the next step, there's a concept that I think we all got to know about and that's energy return on investment. The basic way of thinking about that is how much energy do you have to expend to get the energy resource that you're, that you're looking to use.

So like back in the early days of oil, you know, what did you, you just had to like take your pickax and then hit the ground and this gusher comes or shoot at a squirrel like Jed Clampett. That was, that was a great show. Beverly Beverly hillbillies. What was the name of the daughter? Jed Was it, I'm going to try Ellie Mae as a, she was a great wrestler. You remember that? She just kicked out. Well, Jason, you, you were a college level Aa that,

You know, you spend this amount of money to get this amount of money. It's, it's true in all forms of, of, of energy. It's an, it's an equation, right? So you take, you take a cheetah that's trying to chase down a gazelle on the African Savannah, right? There's a calculation that's happening there. If that Cheetah, for all the energy that it's expending, running 70 miles per hour to try to chase down this thing fails too many times it dies. Right in needs to get more energy out.

Not just in that one moment where it's chasing after that Gazelle and catching it, but he needs to get more energy out from that Gazelle for every time before that it's run and failed. Right. Right. Cause they feel most of the time. Right. So this is this just part of the physical world. And the thing that's so amazing about fossil fuels has been that the return on that is astronomical.

All that pressure, you know, just shooting up and now, right now what we're dealing with is needing to, you know, to put billion dollar deep oil rigs in the ocean to go down tens of thousands of feet, you know, to, to try to get oil from below the fucking ocean or going up to the arboreal forest in Canada and scraping up this bid Tamin, which is basically unfinished oil, you know, that we've got to cook or fracking, which is going down,

Okay, so in biology there's an ecology, there's what's called optimal foraging theory and it's just what you said, any organism is going to go find and locate the most energetically profitable resource. First they're going to forage optimally and then when that runs out they're going to switch. So like the Cheetah goes after the impala. Paul's get a little rare, they have a hard time finding them. So they go up to the higher racks or whatever. A smaller animal, let's abundant.

But they still good after a while though, if they, if they hunt out that, then they're going to something else like, like a little rat and the next thing you know they can't get enough rats and the Cheetah population starts crashing it. As soon as you understand optimal foraging theory, everything you just said of energy return on investment and you just look at what we're doing as a civilization going after this crap.

Basically in desperation moves and we, we call it, we like, oh, we've, we've unlocked this new resource and we just think we're all, we're all awesome and I go, you idiots. You're just like you're, you're following the declining quality of resource and an optimal foraging theory situation. That's a sign of desperation. Oh God. But we think because we have been for the last hundred and 50 plus years living on this bounty, we won the lottery. Yeah, right. We won the energetic lottery. Yes, we did.

Beyond the imagining of humans before us, beyond the imagining of other organisms on this planet, we won the lottery. I picked my hammers that came up and we feel like, you know, it's kind of like so many born on third base thinking that they hit a triple. You just feel like we are in this thing. It's gonna always be here and we're dependent on, in our minds at least, we're dependent upon this stuff being available, the stuff being cheap, the stuff being just incredibly powerful. You know?

So I love this lottery metaphor because lottery winners tend to blow their money on a good track record. So I was wondering like if, if we're looking at what are the dumb things that lottery winners spend their money on, what, what are the dumbest uses of energy that you guys see that, that make you go, we are an insane, there are so many of them.

I'll just tell you one that kinda sticks in my crawl these days because I've been, I've been seeing this, you know, here and there, it's such an expression of kind of where we are as a society these days drive up grocery store. Okay. I mean they have these concepts of drive Thru grocery stores where you're like literally driving your fucking car down the aisle. That's what I thought you were talking about. That's the laziest thing ever.

I mean, I think that those are probably still in the concept phase, but hey, right now you can dry. You could do that. Certain Walmart's Amazon stores have that. Like you basically go on your fucking computer, pick your nose ordered toilet paper or whatever you're doing right. You know, bond bonds or cheese doodles and you make good orders. I'm giving you a clue, a little glimpse into my, my shopping. But so you ordered this stuff.

Okay. Let's say you order some organic beef in there too, but you, you wanted this stuff and then you drive your three thousand four thousand pound vehicle by herself up to the drive through and some portion, you know, Schlub some kid or most likely, oh well we'll get there. But most likely it's, you know, it's somebody who should have retired a long time ago and can't write, has to, has to carry your shit out to you and load it up in the back of your car and you drive off.

Probably not even giving this a shot. We're gonna have to get your fat ass out of the car. We're making the progression to, yeah, always having your butt glued to the seat of your automobile. I hope they make it so you can drive straight into your living room. And we're not in space yet, but it's not far from that vision of Wally. You know those people sitting there basically in that movie, you know, just sitting there with the entertainment you giving me, you give me time to think.

Okay. And I've come up with one. Okay. So one of my pet peeves has been like a mini storage. Right. You, they get the roll up door and you just throw your junk in it. Right. Cause you have so much shit. He can't fit in your house somewhere. Ah, you know, my garage isn't dig enough anymore.

I'm not parking my car in the garage because the whole space there, I'm going to park it out front of my house and my guards is going to fill up with shit and they're like, oh shit, my garage is filled up with shit. So now I need mini storage. But it's Kinda step further. Okay. Because now they have climate controlled. Oh good. That's good for your shit. So yeah, you don't want your shit to have. Yeah, we're burning the oil to keep your stuff at a, you never touched him. Temperature.

How often do you go? This is, this is huge though for the Hannibal lectors that want to keep their body's cold and not stinking, you know, so I see that. It reminds me of a, you guys ever seen that George Carlin bit a place for my stuff. Classic bit, but, but he couldn't even imagine when he first wrote that bit. You know, that we would be, we'd be making sure that, that, that shit, it was kept up this perfect optimal temperature of 63 degrees or whatever you guys pick, like kind of sane stuff.

Uh, the, the same, the dumbest use of energy. The one that I found was, was ski Dubai. The, those two words together don't belong. Right. Where are the mountains? No, they, they put this glass structure up and they put, we were, where's Dubai? First of all for the, for the geographically challenged in the desert. Okay. Just to be clear, right. Arabian peninsula far from the polls. I don't know what the average temperature there is. What we're doing a good job of raising it, right?

Yeah. Yeah. We're working on that. So they built a sort of a glass structure and there's a ski mountain. They make the snow from God knows what water source tears of children. Yeah. They actually, they have penguins in there to the penguins are just looking at, I'm like, what the fuck is going on? And I go home. All right, so here we have two by people that actually skiing there.

Yeah. Yeah. Either ski instructors, there's a lift to take you to the top of a ski Dubai Mountain or whatever it's called. Yeah. Delusion Mountain. Yeah. I kind of want to go. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm sure it's on the bucket list of plenty of people. As long as you don't have to get out of your car and you can keep your ski gear in a climate controlled storage unit. That sounds like Kevin.

Uh, well, so obviously we've got some wasteful things going on, but I think we can all agree what an incredible gift fossil fuels have been.

I mean, how can you not be thankful for the amount of, you know, whatever that you said to 500 virtual people that work for, well, I've been getting called for Christmas, Christmas for years that I, I will say I think people are concerned about climate change or other environmental issues they tend to think of fossil fuels is in understandably, you know, as basically imperiling the fate of humans and other species on this planet. Right? So they, they tend to vilify fossil fuels.

Yeah. Again, understandably because there was this huge cost has been born, not only are these sources of energy that we've come to to be dependent upon a depleting, right. We just talked about they have this huge costs on human health and on the health of other species, but on the are very viability of living on this planet. So I think a lot of people don't, frankly, I would say they're very few people who walk around thinking their lucky stars for fossil fuels. Right.

I mean because if anyone's even thinking about it, which is maybe like a couple of percentage of the population, they're probably thinking about the problems that they cause very, very few people are thinking about what, like we said before, a lottery winning this.

This has been for us, it wasn't really a weird and you've pointed out several times this share that we really need them right now to use fossil fuels as a way to get off of fossil fuels to make the transition to renewable energy economy. It's such a weird paradox and contradiction. Yeah. It to me that kind of stuff is, it's kind of maddening as the essence of of crazy town. It's that here we are stuck in this system that doesn't work but we can't really get out of it, but the police would.

We have to start is just even understanding, just not understanding, not just the role of the fossil fuels play in society and the and the issues that we have, the vulnerability we have to vet dependence. Right, right. Both from the standpoint of being dependent upon something that is depleting and being dependent on something that is literally destroying our chances of, of living on this planet.

But, but energy as a whole, you know, more broadly because, because it's been so abundant because it's been so cheap because it's been so easy because it's been so powerful. We take it for granted. You know, none of us want to be taken for granted, and we should not be taking this incredible gift that we've been given as a species for granted. So the first place to start is recognizing how we use energy.

That's each of us individually and us as a society in it, and asking questions about the fucking things that we're wasting it on. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. It's about becoming literate. Get out there, understand why energy's important and what the level of power that's, that's embedded in it. You know, try toasting a piece of bread with a bicycle sometime or push your car down to your mechanics. Yeah. Let us know how that goes. By the way I spend our inheritance wisely. Invest properly.

I just blow it. Otherwise, we're going to be a laughing stock of future species. I think, uh, I think there should be a rule like it. Let's say you had a barrel of oil and you spilled it, then you would have to do 11 years of hard labor because that's what you just spilled. While we should, maybe we could do that. You don't have to literally go and buy a barrel of oil. I don't think you can actually go as an individual and buy a barrel of oil. Had An interesting test.

But figuratively speaking were we're spilling. We're not spilling 50 barrels of oil on average each of us here in the United States, but quite a, quite a big chunk of that is wasted. Right. So you think about that. Maybe we should think about what we could do to, to make up for that. The incredible waste. Well, I'm going to get on outside and start dumping over some barrels. I don't know about you guys. I'll be pushing. It's really hard.

Yeah. I'm going to go be chasing gazelles and see if I have any luck. All right. All right. See you next town. Crazy town.

Catch you next time on the mean streets of crazy town.

It was, it was like a plastic dog shit. You know, the fake stuff that you can put on the, uh, on the rug. And then people come in and be like, oh my God, awesome. As it 100% plastic every time. Yeah. Well, you know, it was really cool. So I opened my plastic shitbox and I pull out the plastic dog shit. And it's wrapped in plastic. Ah. So not only did I get the shitbox plastic, I got the plastic dog shit and I got the plastic wrapper.

Did you get a micro dopamine hit on that three, three fucking plastic shitbox dopamine hits and the dopamine was wrapped in plastic to, oh gosh, I think they call that a pill. Well, only if it's wrapped in plastic. What's the website again? Plastic Shit. box.com I'm looking at how much does it cost? Uh, you know, I, you don't know cause you pay with plastic, right? There you go. All right, so everybody visit plastic shitbox.com and you can get your little dopamine hit today.