Sailesh Rao On Why Ahimsa (Nonviolence) Is An Essential Response to Climate Change

Today I am pleased to offer a conversation with environmentalist, engineer and technologist Sailesh Rao, the founder and Executive Director of environmental non-profit Climate Healers. With a focus on ahimsa — the Sanskrit word for non-violence — as an essential and perhaps the most powerful response to climate change, Climate Healers promotes technological and engineering advances aimed at clean air and reforestation. Partnering with NGOs, tribal villages, and school clubs, current projects include efforts to devise an affordable and high-functioning solar powered stove to replace the traditional — and quite environmentally detrimental — wood burning stoves that proliferate across low income areas of India. An electrical engineer by training with a Ph. D. from Stanford University, Sailesh’s background in technology includes stints at both AT&T Bell Labs and Intel, where he was instrumental in developing early iterations of the internet itself. Sailesh is also the author of Carbon Dharma: The Occupation of the Butterflies*– a call to undo the planetary damage done by the human species in its present “caterpillar stage” of existence. As for palmares, Sailesh was selected as a Karmaveer Puraskaar Noble Laureate, an award presented by iCONGO (Indian Confederation of NGOs) whose primary mission is to encourage citizen action for social justice. This is a conversation about environmental preservation, the inherent and incredible power of ahimsa, the imperative of service and a reminder that each and every one of can make a positive difference in the world. Sailesh is a highly intelligent, contemplative and compassionate man devoted to making the world a better, cleaner place for us and future generations. I greatly enjoyed this conversation and applaud his advocacy and devotion to service. I sincerely hope you enjoy the exchange. Note: Apologies for publishing this episode a day late and for the brevity of this post. I am currently traveling internationally with little free time or internet access. I'm doing my best under the circumstances and appreciate the consideration. When I find the bandwidth, I may supplement this entry with additional thoughts and resources. Thanks for understanding! Peace + Plants, Rich Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Rich Roll?

  Eating well rarely falls apart because of one big failure. It's the daily question that wears you down. Like, what am I actually going to make tonight? What's in the fridge? And it's exactly why we built the Plant Power Meal Planner. It's a personalized, plant-based meal planning program that matches you with recipes based on your taste, your allergies, your cooking skills, and how much time you actually have. You build, through this program, a balanced, nutrient-dense plan for your entire household in a few minutes. Then it generates a grocery list for you with one click that plugs right into our delivery partners. All the recipes in the program are built by dietitians with culinary training. Plus, you get your own food coach to help you problem-solve along the way.

• 0:44Rich Roll?

  It's kind of an amazing thing. For listeners of the show, all you special people, we're offering an exclusive $20 off an annual subscription right now. To get it, go to meals.richroll.com, take your quick personalization quiz, and enter promo code RICHROLL20 at checkout.

• 1:17Rich Roll?

  Hey, everybody. How you guys doing? What's going on? What is happening? I'm Rich Roll. I am your host. This is the Podcast, episode 185. Can you believe that? 185 episodes. The podcast where I sit down with the outliers, the big forward thinkers across all categories of positive, paradigm-breaking culture change. Why do I do this? To help all of us, myself included, unlock and unleash our best, most authentic selves. So, thank you so much for subscribing. Subscribing, yeah, I can talk to the show. For giving us a review, and for always making sure to use the Amazon banner ad at richroll.com for all your Amazon purchases. The banner ad's right there on the main Podcast page. It doesn't cost you anything extra. You just click on it, and then whatever you get on Amazon, we get credited. They don't charge you.

• 2:02Rich Roll?

  It comes out of Amazon's pocket. It's just a great, really easy, free way to support the mission. And thank you so much to everybody who has made a habit out of doing this. It really does make a big difference. So, thank you. We appreciate it. Today, I've got Silas Rao on the show today. He is an environmentalist, an engineer, a technologist. He's doing some really interesting things out in the world. And I'm going to get a little bit more into him and his background in a minute. But before that, two things I want to cover, two things. First thing, apologies for the podcast being late this week. I am so sorry. But right now, it's the middle of the night, somewhere outside of Frankfurt, Germany. I'm in Europe. It's been a very busy last few days. Arrived here a couple of days ago.

• 2:47Rich Roll?

  I'm here for the Frankfurt Book Fair, which is the largest international book market in the world. And I'm here to do press around the launch of The Plant Power Way, which comes out in a German language edition, which is really exciting. But it's been kind of a demanding last couple of days of acclimating to the time change and doing a bunch of press, et cetera. By the way, check out the book. It's now available at amazon.de for those of you who want to get a German language edition. It came out really beautiful, really proud of it. Nariana Verlag, our German publisher, they are amazing. Julie and I are going to talk a little bit more about our experience working with these guys on the next AMA podcast, but just trust me that it's been really cool working with these people. But there's been a lot going on.

• 3:30Rich Roll?

  We've been running around quite a bit and, you know, not to mention trying to adjust to an eight-hour time change. So I am apologizing for the podcast being late. It's the first time that that's happened in an extremely long time, so I'm sorry. And the second thing I want to say is, before we get into Silas, is let's take care of some business really quick.

• 3:58Rich Roll?

  All right, you guys, so this week's show, I'm going to keep this intro really brief because it's like the middle of the night. I'm in the middle of nowhere in Germany, extremely jet lagged and tired. But this is a really exciting show. I don't want to put a damper on just how amazing today's guest is. Silas Rao is the Executive Director of a nonprofit called Climate Healers, climatehealers.org. He's the author of a book called Carbon Dharma. The Occupation of Butterflies, really interesting book. And by training, he is an electrical engineer, a technologist. He's got a PhD from Stanford University. And very interestingly, his technology career involved working very intensely on the very

• 4:41Rich Roll?

  early iterations of the Internet, which is fascinating. He did that both at AT&T Bell Labs and at Intel. And at some point in his career, he was moved to Action to address the global climate challenge. And in 2007, he was moved to found Climate Healers. And the goal of Climate Healers, among many things, but its primary goal really is aimed at reforestation. It's got a lot of projects going on. They partner with NGOs, with tribal villages, and school clubs to help low-income areas, particularly in India, use solar rather than wood-burning stoves, which is a big focus of today's conversation. It's an interesting little niche thing, you would think, but actually, it's a huge problem.

• 5:25Rich Roll?

  The sort of carbon footprint incident to wood-burning stoves and the millions of people that are using them, and the work that Sailesh is doing to find more sustainable, sort of environmental-friendly ways of people preparing food in their homes. So Sailesh is a really interesting, thoughtful guy. He's doing amazing, important, interesting work. So let's pay him a visit, step into his world, and see what he has to say. Enjoy.

• 5:54Rich Roll?

  I'm looking forward to getting into so many of the interesting things that you're doing. And welcome to Los Angeles. You live in Phoenix, yeah?

• 6:02Speaker 01

  Yes, I do.

• 6:03Rich Roll?

  What brought you out here, other than the podcast? Do you have other business here?

• 6:06Speaker 01

  I'm on my way back to Phoenix.

• 6:08Rich Roll?

  Oh, you are?

• 6:09Speaker 01

  For my long trip.

• 6:10Rich Roll?

  Well, I know you were in Paris. Have you been, where else have you been?

• 6:13Speaker 01

  Before that, I was in India. From Phoenix to India, and then India to Paris, Paris to San Francisco, and now San Francisco to LA.

• 6:22Rich Roll?

  That is quite a road trip. Are you a little road weary?

• 6:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:27Rich Roll?

  Yeah, very good.

• 6:28Speaker 01

  Looking forward to going home tomorrow.

• 6:29Rich Roll?

  All right. Well, if you need some caffeine, let me know.

• 6:31Speaker 01

  No, no, I don't take any caffeine.

• 6:33Rich Roll?

  All right. I didn't think so. Well, you have such an interesting story, and I want to get into all of the advocacy work and talk about Climate Healers and all the work you're doing in India. But maybe the best place is to start at the beginning. You grew up in India, of course.

• 6:50Speaker 01

  Right, yes.

• 6:51Rich Roll?

  And...

• 6:54Rich Roll?

  And was sort of raised as a lacto vegetarian from the get go, is that correct?

• 6:59Speaker 01

  Right, absolutely, yeah.

• 7:00Rich Roll?

  Uh huh. And that was just something your parents did, or how did that kind of come about?

• 7:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, we were Brahmins, you know, Brahmins, almost all of us are lacto vegetarians. So it is the Ahimsa tradition.

• 7:12Rich Roll?

  Right, the Ahimsa, do no harm.

• 7:14Speaker 01

  Do no harm tradition, yes.

• 7:16Rich Roll?

  And it sounds like, you know, from poking around the internet and what I've read, that you know, you had a pretty, you had a, you know, sort of a normal childhood, right?

• 7:26Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 7:26Rich Roll?

  This is true?

• 7:27Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 7:27Rich Roll?

  And you came to the United States eventually for your graduate work. You got a PhD at Stanford.

• 7:32Speaker 01

  That's correct.

• 7:33Rich Roll?

  Uh huh, in electrical engineering.

• 7:35Speaker 01

  That's correct.

• 7:36Rich Roll?

  And then, and then found yourself in the world of Silicon Valley.

• 7:41Speaker 01

  Well, I was actually in New Jersey.

• 7:43Rich Roll?

  Oh, you were?

• 7:43Speaker 01

  Doing silicon design, yeah.

• 7:44Rich Roll?

  I see. So you worked for Bell Labs originally, uh huh, and then Intel?

• 7:50Speaker 01

  Bell Labs, and then I started my own company called Silicon Design Experts, which got acquired by Level One Communications, which got acquired by Intel.

• 8:00Rich Roll?

  Wow, that's nice. Very good. That's good. So, so essentially, you know, sort of in terms of being an entrepreneur and being an engineer, you're sort of retired, yes, from that?

• 8:14Speaker 01

  Right, yeah.

• 8:15Rich Roll?

  And I'm interested in exploring the evolution away from, you know, being a tech entrepreneur and into the world of environmentalism. Like, what sparked that for you?

• 8:26Speaker 01

  Well, it's sort of like the dog that catches the car and then discovers that what to do, right? So you, you have ambitions as an engineer. You say, I want to do something significant.

• 8:40Speaker 01

  And I did this standard called Gigabit Ethernet, which was the basis for the internet backbone. And the internet took off. And so I said, okay, I achieved what I wanted to do in engineering, but it isn't what I thought it was.

• 8:56Rich Roll?

  What did you think that it would be?

• 8:58Speaker 01

  I don't know. I mean, I thought it was, you know, that I would feel much better about it. But then I noticed that my, you know, my...

• 9:10Speaker 01

  I'd spent so much time working on that that my family life had suffered.

• 9:14Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm.

• 9:14Speaker 01

  Right, so I was beginning to question, what am I doing with this?

• 9:18Rich Roll?

  Right, and what you were doing specifically in layman's terms was really working on, oh, I didn't turn my phone off, sorry about that. Was working on chip design, is that accurate?

• 9:32Speaker 01

  I was working on the backbone of the internet. So this is what connects switches to each other and switches to computers. So this was the hardware infrastructure for the internet.

• 9:42Rich Roll?

  Right, so in many ways, you are one of the inventors of the internet.

• 9:47Speaker 01

  Not really, no, I'm not even going to touch that.

• 9:51Rich Roll?

  Okay, let Al Gore.

• 9:53Speaker 01

  Let Al Gore have it, yeah.

• 9:56Rich Roll?

  But you were involved in the early days of pioneering the technology that kind of powers the internet.

• 10:01Speaker 01

  That's correct, we were a pretty collegial group at that time. We were, we didn't really realize that the internet was going to be such, so big.

• 10:10Rich Roll?

  What did people think at that time?

• 10:12Speaker 01

  You know, imagine in 1996 Cisco was like a billion dollar company. That was the biggest company around.

• 10:19Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm.

• 10:19Speaker 01

  And what was, among the companies that were working on the internet. So we thought maybe it'll be a little bit bigger than it was.

• 10:31Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 10:31Speaker 01

  And we never really thought it was going to take off like it did in 2001.

• 10:34Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 10:35Speaker 01

  So.

• 10:36Rich Roll?

  If you had known that, would you have done things differently?

• 10:39Speaker 01

  Who knows?

• 10:39Rich Roll?

  A lot of people would.

• 10:41Speaker 01

  A lot of people would.

• 10:42Rich Roll?

  Yeah, exactly right.

• 10:43Speaker 01

  Right.

• 10:44Rich Roll?

  All right, so the dog catches the car and you're kind of doing an inventory on your, on your life and trying to figure out what's important.

• 10:51Speaker 01

  Right.

• 10:52Rich Roll?

  And so where does kind of the environmental awareness start to, you know, crop up for you?

• 10:57Speaker 01

  So it started with coming home from work one day and I had a company doing 10 gigabit ethernet at that time. And switching on the TV and there was Al Gore talking about climate change.

• 11:11Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm.

• 11:12Speaker 01

  He was basically doing a slideshow in front of a live audience in San Francisco. And someone had taped it.

• 11:20Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm.

• 11:21Speaker 01

  And they were showing the tape on TV, on Link TV.

• 11:24Rich Roll?

  It was, it was kind of his keynote that ultimately led to the movie.

• 11:28Speaker 01

  Right.

• 11:28Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 11:29Speaker 01

  It was before the movie.

• 11:29Rich Roll?

  Before the movie, yeah.

• 11:30Speaker 01

  It was before the movie and it was, it was actually a small group of maybe fifty people in San Francisco.

• 11:36Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm.

• 11:37Speaker 01

  And Link TV had taped it and they were showing it on, on satellite. So I, I turned it on and I, I couldn't get off the couch. I was so mesmerized by what he was saying. And after he finished, I told my wife, if even half of what he said is true, I'm wasting my time.

• 11:58Rich Roll?

  Hmm.

• 11:59Speaker 01

  You know, working on ten gigabit ethernet.

• 12:01Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm.

• 12:02Speaker 01

  So I decided to study the problem. I'm like a systems guy and I'm basically do systems work. And to me, that was the biggest systems problem around. And I realized that the kind of legacy I leave our children, we leave our children. It's got nothing to do with money if this is going on.

• 12:20Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm.

• 12:20Speaker 01

  You know? So within three months, I realized that it's far worse than what Mr. Gore is saying. Because he only touches on the energy issue.

• 12:30Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm.

• 12:30Speaker 01

  So it's a whole another, so it's like, you know, someone talking about just the fever when there is a cancer going on in the body.

• 12:37Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm.

• 12:38Speaker 01

  So I told my wife that we have to close our company and she agreed.

• 12:42Rich Roll?

  Hmm, wow.

• 12:43Speaker 01

  So, so we closed it within three months and I wrote to Mr. Gore and I said, how can I help you? And I didn't hear back from him for like six months.

• 12:53Rich Roll?

  Right. How did you even know where to send the, send him an email or a letter or like how did you even?

• 12:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, I sent a letter actually.

• 12:59Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 13:00Speaker 01

  Because I didn't have an email address.

• 13:01Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 13:02Speaker 01

  But I could find an office.

• 13:03Rich Roll?

  The guy who's working on the internet doesn't, doesn't have his own email address? What year is this?

• 13:08Speaker 01

  It was two thousand six.

• 13:10Rich Roll?

  Oh my God, come on.

• 13:12Speaker 01

  So then I found a physical address for him and I wrote to him, wrote to the office of Mr. Gore.

• 13:18Rich Roll?

  Right, right.

• 13:19Speaker 01

  And I got a reply back like six months later.

• 13:24Speaker 01

  Basically asking if I would come and get trained by him and to give this presentation.

• 13:29Rich Roll?

  Right, so he was kind of dispatching lieutenants out in the world to kind of give the talk that he was giving. So it could kind of spread a little bit more virally.

• 13:38Speaker 01

  Right, yeah, right.

• 13:39Rich Roll?

  So you became one of those people.

• 13:41Speaker 01

  Right, I was in the second batch that he trained.

• 13:43Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 13:44Speaker 01

  And then, you know, as part of that, you agreed to give that presentation 10 times over the next year. And I did that. And then I started Climate Healers.

• 13:54Rich Roll?

  Right, but while you're doing this, you know, you're sort of, you're giving his talk, right? So you're kind of talking about the fever as you're, you know, going home and deepening your research and realizing that there's a cancer underneath this that is going under addressed.

• 14:09Speaker 01

  Right, but even when I was giving his talk, I did add slides. I mean, he said it's okay to personalize your slides because you're talking to a person, you know, you're talking to your friends and your community, right? So you have to personalize it to that situation. So I did add slides about the cancer right from the beginning.

• 14:30Rich Roll?

  And the cancer is?

• 14:32Speaker 01

  The cancer is really human overconsumption in many ways, you know, mainly the consumption of animal foods because that's the biggest impact on the planet. And then other consumption also, if we sort of propagate that kind of consumption throughout the whole world, the planet cannot tolerate that.

• 14:51Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 14:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:52Rich Roll?

  So let's just lay a little bit of foundation here because we're kind of getting into the world of industrialized animal agriculture and the impact of that on the planet. And, you know, for listeners out there, they know, you know, I had Kip and Keegan in from Cowspiracy. We talked at length about this, but if somebody's new and they're unfamiliar or they haven't seen that film, you know, let's, let's like sort of paint the picture, if you will.

• 15:17Speaker 01

  Right.

• 15:19Speaker 01

  I mean, if you look at the overall situation right now, it is fundamentally unsustainable. Because...

• 15:28Speaker 01

  Sustainability means that the earth can maintain something for the foreseeable future, right? And for the past, I think it's like 2 million years or so, the biomass of megafauna has been stable at around 200 million metric tons. Megafauna are all animals greater than 25 kg in weight. Okay? So it has been, it has been pretty stable at 200 million metric tons. And then we come along and our weight, the weight of human beings alone is 360 million metric tons right now. Wild megafauna has dwindled to 40 million metric tons.

• 16:08Speaker 01

  So we have basically destroyed 80% of them in terms of total biomass. And livestock is around 1.1 billion metric tons. So clearly, you know, if you were to say, how do you become sustainable? You, you have to get rid of livestock. I mean, it's, there's no ifs, ands, or buts about it. The UN agrees with that. The UN had this, uh, even environmental program had an international council on sustainable resource management. And they said that a global transition to a vegan diet is vital to save the world from hunger, fuel poverty, and the worst, worst effects of climate change.

• 16:53Speaker 01

  That's the reason for that. Because it's like you're a, it's like a man holding a, holding a weight that's three times his weight and then discovers that he's in quicksand and he's sinking. The first thing you do is throw away the weight you're carrying, right?

• 17:07Rich Roll?

  Right. But we're trying to figure out a way to still hold on to the weight and not sink.

• 17:11Speaker 01

  Right.

• 17:12Rich Roll?

  Right? And convincing ourselves that there's, there's a solution to this fundamental problem that defies the laws of physics.

• 17:19Speaker 01

  Laws of biology, basically.

• 17:21Rich Roll?

  Laws of biology, yeah, right.

• 17:22Speaker 01

  Ecosystems, yeah.

• 17:23Rich Roll?

  Right, so in terms of statistics, I mean, what is the impact of this, you know, this biomass of livestock? I mean, I know, you know, there's certain statistics that, that, you know, you learn about in conspiracy, like forty-five percent of the earth's, you know, non-island masses covered with live, is covered with, is, is for livestock, including grazing grounds, I think, right? And statistics like it takes six hundred and sixty gallons of water to produce a quarter pound of hamburger and a thousand gallons of water to produce one gallon of milk. And I think it's one to two, uh, football fields worth of acreage is lost every second in the rainforest due to clearing it for livestock.

• 18:04Speaker 01

  Right. I mean, the statistic, if you look at the UN IPCC, um, AR5, which is the, the fifth report, uh, fifth assessment report. Uh, in working group three, chapter eleven, you know, they go through all of this in detail. So, um, the amount of grasslands used for livestock covers thirty-five percent of the land area of the planet.

• 18:33Speaker 01

  And then half the crop land is being used for livestock. So that's another ten percent.

• 18:38Rich Roll?

  To feed these animals.

• 18:39Speaker 01

  Right. So that's where the forty-five percent comes from, you know? And, uh, if you look at the total amount of biomass that's going to feed livestock, it, it's, it gets reduced by a factor of twenty-six before it becomes food for human systems.

• 18:57Rich Roll?

  What does that explain what that means?

• 18:59Speaker 01

  It means that there's twenty-six calories going into livestock to get one calorie out.

• 19:04Rich Roll?

  Right. So it's, it's the definition of inefficiency.

• 19:08Speaker 01

  Exactly. It's only four percent efficient in that sense. So when people really talk about protein conversion, they're talking about just the protein. They don't talk about the overall calories that are going in. And that includes, that average is, that's an average, including eggs, milk, meat, all put together. If we just look at beef, it's like sixty-five to one. Okay. I mean, it is very efficient in the US because it's like fifty-something to one, fifty-five to one or something like that in the US. And it's like a hundred and ten to one in, uh, in developing world.

• 19:42Rich Roll?

  And it's, it's, the number is different in the US because we have our system down so locked in in terms of how we Create economies of scale around our agriculture, right? Like the animal is only alive the shortest amount of time possible before it's slaughtered, etc.

• 19:59Speaker 01

  Right, and they're not allowed to move too much, so they're sitting around. I mean, so that they don't waste energy in movement. So there's all kinds of optimization done, but it's really tremendously cruel to the animals to do that. In the developing world, they let the animals run around and graze, and so they're wasting energy walking around, you know. Whereas in the US, all the, most of the food that's eaten, they want it to become muscle as much as possible, right? So that's why the energy conversion ratio is, is less in the US.

• 20:29Rich Roll?

  Okay, so, water use, inefficiencies in terms of calories, rainforest destruction, what else is going on?

• 20:39Speaker 01

  So it's, there is deforestation going on, which is what the UN usually points out, and I mean, it's like twenty, twenty-five million acres per year. But there is also desertification going on, which not many people talk about.

• 20:53Rich Roll?

  Explain the difference between deforestation and desertification.

• 20:58Speaker 01

  So deforestation is when you take a forest and you clearcut it, and then you convert that into grassland, or you convert that into soy, cropland, or something like that. But over time, that, the carbon in the soil disappears, so the soil basically becomes less and less fertile, because it used to hold a forest, right? And as the soil becomes less and less fertile, you discover that you can't grow so much soy. So you start pouring more and more chemicals to get the soy to grow. And, and then the soil basically becomes infertile, and it turns into desert.

• 21:41Speaker 01

  So that process, so at the end, there is desertification going on, you know, from the grasslands and from the cropland. And the amount of desertification is, is greater, if not, I mean, equal at least, not greater than the amount of land that's becoming deforested.

• 22:00Rich Roll?

  Oh, that's interesting, I didn't know that.

• 22:01Speaker 01

  Right. So there is even, so there is an entire UN...

• 22:07Speaker 01

  Sister organization to the UNFCC, which only looks at desertification. So it's, I think it's called the UNCCD. Convention to Combat Desertification. So these are their numbers. They're saying, you know, thirty million acres is becoming desertified.

• 22:24Rich Roll?

  And where is that, is that localized somewhere? Or is that sort of?

• 22:28Speaker 01

  It's spread out.

• 22:29Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 22:30Speaker 01

  It's spread out, you know. Basically, the Sahara is trying to grow. I mean, in the place that I work in, in India, we see that happening in the ground.

• 22:40Speaker 01

  Like in, so I work at the edge of the Thar Desert. Which is, Thar Desert is a desert in Rajasthan, India. And that's really the tip of the Sahara Desert. The Sahara Desert begins in the western part of Africa, goes all the way into India.

• 22:57Rich Roll?

  Oh, I didn't, wow, I didn't realize that.

• 23:00Speaker 01

  And it goes all the way into China is the Gobi Desert. So it's one big continuous desert. And if you, if you notice, that's the, that's the area where the civilizations of the world, where the ancient civilizations, you know, the Egyptian, Sumerian, Babylonian, Persian, Indus Valley, Chinese civilizations. I mean, these are their homes that became the desert.

• 23:24Speaker 01

  Because they essentially deforested and converted it to crop land or livestock grazing land, and then desertified.

• 23:33Speaker 01

  So that's growing, right?

• 23:34Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 23:35Speaker 01

  And you watch it at the edge, because we are working at the edge of the Thar Desert. And at the edge of the Thar Desert is this Aravali Hills. And the hills have forests on them still. But the forests are dying. And you can see why they're dying. So and you can see the desertification process happening, because they have, the people have a lot of livestock, because that's their source of energy, source of income. See, there is no other income for them. They eat what they grow, but they, they need anything from the outside world. They need to have some cash. So how do you get cash? Well, raise some goats, sell the goats, you make money. And the goats get bought by traders who will convert that into mutton.

• 24:19Speaker 01

  And then they sell the mutton and export it to the Middle East. So it's like the biomass of the forest is being transported to the Middle East. Okay? And there, they eat the goats and the sewage gets flushed into the ocean. So we have all these open-loop systems where the biomass is being removed from land and being flushed into the ocean. Of course, you're gonna get deserts.

• 24:42Rich Roll?

  Right. Right. And so by contrast, a closed-loop system would mean that the animals that are living there perish there and then their remains go back into the soil.

• 24:53Speaker 01

  Right. Yeah, right. And even the, you know, the plant biomass as well goes back into the soil.

• 24:59Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 25:00Speaker 01

  So you have to compost and put things back into the ground. That would be closing the loop.

• 25:05Rich Roll?

  Right, right, right. But you're seeing the desert essentially expanding around the perimeter. And part of the work that you're doing is trying to stop that momentum and reverse it and start moving it in the other direction.

• 25:17Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 25:18Rich Roll?

  Right. All right. And I want to get into that specifically with the work that you're doing. But while we're kind of on the subject of, you know, the global impact of animal agriculture, you know, there's other, there's, there's other, there's other things going on too. We have carbon emissions, we have ocean pollution, we have the algal blooms and, you know, all these other things that are happening as well, right? I mean, you know, explain a little bit of that perhaps.

• 25:46Speaker 01

  Well, it's, it's basically a symptom of these open-loop systems that we have created. Algal blooms are because of overnutrition. So you, you, if you get a lot of fertilizer in the ocean, you get a lot of plant growth. So, and this comes from maybe chemical fertilizers on land. You pour a bunch of chemical. Run off. Yeah, and the runoff from that goes into the ocean and it fertilizes the ocean bottom. And so you get a lot of plant growth. When a lot of plant growth, algal growth happens, it sucks all the oxygen out. And when it sucks all the oxygen out, then there's nothing for the fish to breathe. So they die. So you get dead zones.

• 26:31Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 26:31Speaker 01

  Direct consequence of this. And so it's all industrialized agriculture, which is mainly being done in the West to feed livestock.

• 26:45Speaker 01

  Essentially, it results in these things.

• 26:47Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 26:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:48Rich Roll?

  And these are all things that the UN, you know, has written about and has been very clearly, you know, kind of articulating to the world our issues that we should be concerned about. But to kind of bring it back to the work that you were initially doing with with Al Gore. I mean, this is sort of a more inconvenient truth, perhaps too inconvenient, right? And so I know that that, you know, he wanted to sort of curtail his message, you know, specific to fossil fuel use, et cetera, and really didn't want to get into this area. Right? So it's sort of like the elephant in the room that is not being addressed. I mean, if you look back on that experience of, you know, kind of being one of his lieutenants,

• 27:31Rich Roll?

  I mean, how do you explain why he didn't want to go there?

• 27:37Speaker 01

  Al Gore is basically off the current system. He's within the current system and he's not going to do anything that would upset the current system. The current system is based on economic growth. It's all about growth. Okay? And if you suddenly, you know, decide to shrink it.

• 27:59Rich Roll?

  That's a, that's not a politically viable message.

• 28:02Speaker 01

  Exactly. It's not a politically viable message. So when we talk about switching from animal foods to plant-based foods, you're talking about shrinking the footprint of human beings. Significant amount. And thereby, you know, releasing land back to nature to regenerate forests.

• 28:21Speaker 01

  And bring back life.

• 28:23Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm.

• 28:23Speaker 01

  But the economic footprint also shrinks.

• 28:26Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm. You see. Yeah, the message to consumers is you have to change your your habits, not only, you know, in the kitchen and at the grocery store, but your consumer habits overall, which means spending less money or spending your money on different things.

• 28:41Speaker 01

  It's a it's more than, I mean, you know, in terms of consumption, the number one thing we need to do is to reduce the consumption of our of animal foods. I mean, to me, that's that's the biggest bang for the buck. Okay. And of course, if everybody in the world wants to build 3,000 square foot homes, that isn't enough on a to support something like that, you know, or everybody wants a car per person, one car per person. Yeah, it's you really don't need one car per person. What you need is to be able to transport yourself when you need to.

• 29:18Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 29:20Speaker 01

  Right. You don't have to have a car in a separate car for each person to do that.

• 29:25Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 29:26Speaker 01

  But the industry would rather that you do this, right? The industry would rather that you buy one car per person, or you change your phone as if you're changing diapers. Okay, so this way, you get a lot of circulation, right, of material. And so they get to do a lot of work and they sell you a lot of goods. But you create a lot of pollution. You get a lot of pollution and you create a lot of ill health. And then they can create a lot of drugs to treat all that ill health. So it's like it's like a never ending vicious cycle, right?

• 29:57Rich Roll?

  Right, right, right.

• 29:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:59Rich Roll?

  So, I mean, did you ever, I mean, when you were kind of giving this, you know, Al Gore keynote, I mean, were those were you slipping in some slides about animal agriculture? I mean, how did did you did you ruffle some feathers in that organization by starting to, you know, think and advocate in this regard?

• 30:18Speaker 01

  Uh, yeah, we tried to do it internally. We we actually sent him a letter and he basically brushed it off. And then we did demonstrations during one of his training session.

• 30:36Rich Roll?

  Hmm.

• 30:37Speaker 01

  And I think the message-

• 30:38Rich Roll?

  So you actually jumped the fence.

• 30:40Speaker 01

  I did.

• 30:40Rich Roll?

  Sort of, ah, interesting.

• 30:43Speaker 01

  Because I think it's very important, you know, to me, it's about healing the climate. You see, the story that's been told so far is that climate change is inevitable. It's going to get worse. And the best thing we can do is to

• 30:59Speaker 01

  hold it steady at a high level of disruption.

• 31:02Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm, right.

• 31:04Speaker 01

  Right.

• 31:04Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I mean, and I think what, you know, on the consumer end of it, the messages that we're receiving are, you know, take fewer showers, drive a little bit less, you know, sort of tiny little things that really aren't going to make an impact and are not addressing the real problem.

• 31:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's, to get a social movement, really, we have to change our lifestyles, okay? So you have to have a social movement to change lifestyles. Because people consider some things to be normal now, and you are going to go to a new normal, right? When you change lifestyles. To create a social movement like that,

• 31:43Speaker 01

  you need to get large numbers of people doing the same thing, okay, in unison, with discipline and persistence, okay? I consider the vegan movement to be the vanguard of a social movement that's going to do this lifestyle change.

• 31:58Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 31:59Speaker 01

  Okay?

• 32:01Speaker 01

  So that, that one thing that you do together, that creates that movement, has to be a substantial thing. Changing light bulbs is not a substantial thing. I mean, you can, you have to do it, but it's a, it's a really minor blip. Whereas changing your food habits, I mean, you do that three times a day. Okay, and three times a day, you're making a, an impact on on the, on the, on the earth, essentially, right? So whether you're eating animal foods or plant foods, it makes a huge difference if millions of people start doing it together.

• 32:44Speaker 01

  Billions of people start doing it together, then you create- Social change.

• 32:49Rich Roll?

  Right. The example, and I love this, the example that you used is the one of Gandhi with garments, right? Can you recount that?

• 32:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, so Gandhi, Gandhi was an activist first in South Africa. I mean, he spent a lot of his life in South Africa. And he came to India exactly a hundred years ago as an adult. I mean, he was, he grew up in India, but then he left to do his studies and then he came to South Africa. And exactly a hundred years ago, in 1915, he came to India. And there's a picture of him getting off the boat and he's wearing a suit and a tie. He's like a lawyer.

• 33:33Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah, it's hard to, it's hard to picture.

• 33:35Speaker 01

  Right. And then there's a picture of him three years later, or four years later, and he's wearing these kadi clothes.

• 33:43Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 33:43Speaker 01

  So he started the kadi movement in 1918. And his idea was actually genius. He was going to ask people of India to do one thing together. We all do that one thing, then we will tackle the mighty British Empire of that era. And that was to change clothes, change from British made clothes to cotton clothes that were spun and woven in India. Called kathar clothes. They were actually quite, quite popular outside the country as well, kathar clothes. So with that, it was a simple act that anybody could do and join.

• 34:24Speaker 01

  It was a substantial act because the textile industry in England was the largest industry they had at that time. So we're going to impact the largest industry in England. And it was also a spiritual act because it united the people of India.

• 34:41Speaker 01

  You know, we could overcome all these divisions that we had in terms of religion, caste, you name it, because you see the other guys wearing Kadi clothes, just like you.

• 34:49Rich Roll?

  That one thing.

• 34:50Speaker 01

  That one thing, yeah.

• 34:51Rich Roll?

  And, and the impact of that was what?

• 34:54Speaker 01

  So, within a dozen years, the textile mills of Manchester had been bankrupt, and the British came begging to negotiate with Gandhi.

• 35:02Rich Roll?

  Hmm, that's so interesting.

• 35:04Speaker 01

  Right.

• 35:05Rich Roll?

  Yeah, and there are so many, you know, analogies to switching your diet.

• 35:11Speaker 01

  Right.

• 35:11Rich Roll?

  To that thing. It's simple. It is substantial. You are asking somebody to, you know, make a pretty radical lifestyle change for most people. Simple, substantial, and definitely spiritual.

• 35:25Speaker 01

  Right.

• 35:26Rich Roll?

  Right. I think it's, I think it's probably, perhaps, well, I don't know, because I didn't live there at the time, but to ask somebody to change their attire might be easier than trying to get people to change their, their eating habits. People are very, you know, it's a very emotional thing for a lot of people.

• 35:45Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, in India, there was a lot of debate about Kadi as well. If you read the magazines from that era, you, you realize Gandhi had a lot of opposition in the beginning. People said, well, how could this be? How could this affect the British at all? Okay. So he had to go through a lot of explanations, and then they came up with all kinds of arguments. So, well, Kadi is, is, is costlier than British clothes, because those are all made in industrial, you know, industrial factories, right? So they were cheaper than handmade clothes. And so that's why Gandhi started wearing just the line cloth, right?

• 36:25Speaker 01

  I mean, just, so he said, well, you can use very little cloth and still cover yourself. So he started changing himself to show that it can be made cheaper.

• 36:38Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 36:38Speaker 01

  So just like vegans, we face the same kind of...

• 36:42Rich Roll?

  It'll be more expensive, yeah, it's gonna be inconvenient, and what are you gonna do when you go out to dinner or you travel? All these, all these arguments crop up around it that are really, you know, just mental constructs that prevent people from kind of mentally grappling with the reality of what it, what it is, because it is very simple, actually. It's a very black and white thing. You're either ingesting animal products or consuming them in some way, or you're not.

• 37:10Speaker 01

  Right, yeah. But in there is, see, we all have these blinders, okay? Some area or the other. And we put these blinders on and we, we come up with rationalization to keep those blinders on. Because we are comfortable doing what we are doing. And so it's, it is kind of human nature to be like that.

• 37:32Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 37:33Speaker 01

  Um, the, the thing we have to focus on more, I think, is the suffering that's happening. You know, the suffering that's happening, um, not just for the animals, but also the people who are investing in the animals. They are suffering a lot too, you know? Um, because you look at all the pollution that we have put into the environment. I mean, every product we buy has caused a lot of pollution to go into the environment. And all that pollution, we think we have just pumped it up into the atmosphere and it disappears. No, it doesn't disappear, it comes down in the rain. It gets sucked up by plants. And the plants get eaten by animals. And they concentrate it in their bodies. They actually, you know, and then they give you a concentrated dose of those pollutants back to us.

• 38:18Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 38:18Speaker 01

  So we are at the top of the food chain, so we are getting it in, in big, big chunks.

• 38:22Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 38:23Speaker 01

  So it is, it is going to become, um, sort of, I mean, it's going to become toxic to eat these things. I don't know how long we can continue this because the circulation of these to- these toxins never goes away. You are just adding more and more each year.

• 38:44Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm. So as a, as, you know, as a scientist, as an engineer and somebody who has studied uh, climate change for quite some time, uh, if you had to, if you had to make an estimate that if we don't change our systemic way of feeding the planet, I mean, what are we looking at? And, and how far off? Are some of these repercussions?

• 39:10Speaker 01

  It's very hard to predict nonlinear systems. There are tipping points and then they just go off into another realm altogether. But I, rather than saying, okay, this is, this is where you're going to hit the brake. I mean, you're gonna, you're gonna fall off the cliff.

• 39:30Speaker 01

  I think that there is a tipping point in people going vegan. Okay, people joining the movement.

• 39:38Speaker 01

  I was at a conference in San Francisco of the IIT engineers. All the alumni got together, like 50,000 of us.

• 39:48Speaker 01

  And so they had Elizabeth Holmes for the keynote. And Elizabeth Holmes, she's the CEO of Theranos, which is revolutionizing the medical diagnostic industry. So she's like the youngest billionaire ever. And so she stands up on stage and the, and the audience is packed. Okay, it's only standing room.

• 40:14Speaker 01

  She finishes her presentation and then they ask her a question and she says, well, I'm a vegan. And you know, and people look, wait a minute. This lady that we look up to is a vegan. Then they had Vinod Khosla in the next session. And Vinod Khosla is an investor and he's one of the biggest investors in Hampton Creek's. And he talks on and on about plant-based foods. And people are getting this message now. See, some of these people sitting up on stage are investing in these things and are being vegan.

• 40:48Speaker 01

  There was another philanthropist who was, who also came on stage and he said, I'm vegan.

• 40:53Speaker 01

  So three things had happened within like two hour span. And you have all these engineers thinking about this now, right?

• 41:03Speaker 01

  So I think we need to make this an aspirational goal for people. So it's no longer the old, oh, which planet are you from? When you say you're vegan, right? People know that.

• 41:16Rich Roll?

  No, not anymore.

• 41:17Speaker 01

  Not anymore.

• 41:17Rich Roll?

  It's definitely has a level of mainstream awareness and acceptance and momentum that is unprecedented.

• 41:24Speaker 01

  Right.

• 41:25Rich Roll?

  You know, and I see that only growing and that's exciting and interesting. But I think at its core, it still very much remains a grassroots thing, you know? And I think To the extent that, you know, we want, you know, we would be inclined to sit around and wait for, you know, our elected representatives to pay attention to this UN report and start doing something about it is to ask them to defy the very kind of rules that have been set up around government.

• 41:54Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 41:55Rich Roll?

  Because unless there's radical campaign finance reform, you know, the big agricultural companies and the milk and dairy lobbies, et cetera, just hold too much sway and power over our legislative process. They've had, they have it in, in gridlock. So, you know, I don't think that, you know, that's going to be the way that things are going to change. And similarly with, they have a stranglehold on media as well because their media ad buys are so large that it becomes difficult to get objective reporting on these issues in, you know, our typical kind of mainstream outlets.

• 42:30Speaker 01

  No, it's, it's more than, it's actually systemic. You see, I mean, I, when you are in a system, you don't want to do anything that would break that system, right? So there is the fear of the loss of the known. So you, even though this is awful, at least it's still going, right? And you say, I don't want, I don't want to derail this thing because it's still going. So you will never get leaders of the system to break the system. I mean, it's very hard to, to have, it's very rare to get a Gorbachev, so to speak, right? Who could say, well, this thing is messed up, so I'm going to just change the whole thing. So you are going to get, have to get pressure from below.

• 43:15Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 43:16Speaker 01

  So this is the grassroots. Yeah, this is like the Cadi movement.

• 43:20Rich Roll?

  Yeah. And, and, and ultimately, if you get enough critical mass around that grass movement that influences consumer spending habits, and, you know, we live in a capitalist society and the markets will adapt to serve the consumer desire, right? So if desire shifts away from... You know, Hellmann's mayonnaise to Hampton Creek to a plant-based alternative because it's healthier and it's less expensive and it's more sustainable, then the market will, you know, applaud that. But we have to work within that system unless we overthrow the system by virtue of, you know, a grassroots movement, I think.

• 43:59Speaker 01

  Right. So the analogy with the Kadi movement is very apt because there also it was a grassroots movement and Gandhi couldn't go and ask the British to move.

• 44:11Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm.

• 44:12Speaker 01

  And he did, but they'd said, go away, right? So they only listened when.

• 44:18Rich Roll?

  It impacted their bottom line.

• 44:20Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 44:20Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 44:21Speaker 01

  So the same thing is going to have to happen here. When it impacts their bottom line, they'll have to come and talk to us. And I mean, they'll probably, you'll see major changes happening at that point, you know?

• 44:33Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 44:34Speaker 01

  So, and I see that also as an exponential process, right? Because it's exponential process, meaning it's, you see more and more vegans and then until you reach about 10%, then you're going to see it shoot up and then it'll become the normal thing.

• 44:51Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm.

• 44:51Speaker 01

  Right?

• 44:52Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it reaches a critical mass and then it explodes, right? So then it's seemingly overnight, it becomes much bigger than it was the previous day.

• 45:00Speaker 01

  Right.

• 45:00Rich Roll?

  Right?

• 45:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:02Rich Roll?

  So, all right, so you're out in the world, you're giving the Al Gore keynote. At some point, you realize this isn't cutting it, you jump the fence, you start protesting.

• 45:13Rich Roll?

  Did he become aware? Like, did you ever have a conversation with him about that?

• 45:17Speaker 01

  Not with him directly, but with his people. They took me to a room and they like gave me the third degree, right?

• 45:23Rich Roll?

  Really?

• 45:23Speaker 01

  And then I walked out, yeah.

• 45:25Rich Roll?

  Uh huh. And was Climate Healers kind of formed on the, on the shoulders of that?

• 45:30Speaker 01

  No, no, no. Climate Healers has been going on from before that.

• 45:33Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 45:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:34Rich Roll?

  So you formed that in 2007?

• 45:36Speaker 01

  2007.

• 45:37Rich Roll?

  Uh huh. And so it's climatehealers.org and it's a nonprofit. So explain the mission of this organization.

• 45:44Speaker 01

  The mission is to heal the climate, not just, not just stabilize it at a high level of disruption, to heal it. It's like a patient who goes to a doctor and he says, now I've had this persistent fever for the past, you know, few weeks. And the doctor examines the patient and he says, sorry, it's not just fever, you have a cancer, you have cancer and your fever is going to get worse.

• 46:09Speaker 01

  And the best I can do is to stabilize your fever at a hundred and two.

• 46:14Speaker 01

  While the cancer ages on. And then you discover that he didn't tell you to stop smoking. If you had stopped smoking, if you had stopped eating all these carcinogens, your cancer could have been reversed. And your fever would go away. Right? So the UN IPCC is not telling us that we can do some lifestyle changes that would reverse the cancer. They're just telling us, if you can, you're going to continue doing this. Because if you look at all their projections, the economy is growing by a factor of three or four by the year 2100. We're going to continue deforesting from now until 2100. You know, you say, how stupid are we? Right?

• 46:57Rich Roll?

  Yeah, by 2100, we're going to have 11 billion people on the planet, most likely.

• 47:02Speaker 01

  That's their, I mean, they're, they're looking at projections like that, right? So nine billion to 11 billion, and they're looking at, okay, we have to continue deforesting because we have to continue eating at the current rate.

• 47:12Rich Roll?

  We're going to have to serve this, yeah.

• 47:13Speaker 01

  Right.

• 47:13Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 47:14Speaker 01

  They're assuming that livestock, livestock biomass is going to double by the year 2050. So, I mean, how can the earth support that, right, without going overboard?

• 47:23Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's just not possible.

• 47:24Speaker 01

  Right.

• 47:25Rich Roll?

  It's impossible to continue to feed the planet the way that we've been feeding them as population continues to swell. And I think we're already at that tipping point and, and point of no return.

• 47:36Speaker 01

  Right.

• 47:36Rich Roll?

  And yet, the, the solution is staring us in the face the entire time. Uh, but that message really isn't getting out there and nor is it, you know, being heeded on a mass level.

• 47:49Speaker 01

  Right, because, you know, I mean, most of the scientists are not vegan. In fact, I haven't found a single climate scientist who's, who's profess to be vegan, right? So.

• 47:59Rich Roll?

  Right, I mean, I feel like all of the people that are doing, not all of them, but, you know, a good percentage of the people that are doing work in this area, all very smart, well-intentioned people, are trying to find ways to make our current system work to serve this growing, you know, swelling population as opposed to taking a step back and saying, well, we need a new system. It's the system that's the problem.

• 48:22Speaker 01

  Right? Right.

• 48:23Rich Roll?

  So, you know, you're an outlier in that regard.

• 48:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, we see ourselves as presenting alternatives that would reverse the damage that's been done to heal the climate, heal the planet.

• 48:38Rich Roll?

  And the way of going about that is what?

• 48:41Speaker 01

  So the way of going about that is you look at what are the systemic changes and behavioral changes? What changes should be done? And what would the effect of that be? If you make one change, what does it do to the climate? So we analyze that and we present that.

• 49:00Rich Roll?

  So breaking down individual behaviors and sort of tracking the impact of that behavior protracted out over time?

• 49:16Speaker 01

  So for instance, if you ask the question, if the whole world goes vegan, how much carbon can be sequestered by regenerating forests? It's a very simple question, because right now we are deforesting. When we release land back to nature, it'll reforest. We know that. So then the simple question is, how much carbon will be sequestered by those regenerating forests? So I asked a professor at University of Illinois, Professor Atul Jain, he's a land carbon expert, and he took out his model and his grad student, Shijie Xu, worked on this. And they looked at the grasslands alone. Thirty-five percent of the land area of the planet is being used to raise grass, to feed

• 50:00Speaker 01

  cattle, to feed livestock. So of that, they looked at all the grasslands that are adjacent to forests that can be reforested. And that happened to be just forty percent of that. So about forty-one percent of that. And on that land alone, forty-one percent of the thirty-five percent, okay? On that, they were able to sequester 265 gigatons of carbon, which is more carbon than we have put into the atmosphere since the industrial era began. So.

• 50:32Rich Roll?

  Right, so in the last 200 years.

• 50:34Speaker 01

  The last 200 years, so that's a word, that's of course at maturity, so there's a transition that's gonna have to happen, but the potential is enormous, and we haven't even begun to look at what can we do when we are forest, not just reforest, we actively go and build soil and bring back forests that used to be there, because over 10,000 years, we've been deforesting as human beings, you know, and the estimate is that we have, I mean, the Sahara, most of the Sahara, you know, that used to be all carbon-based forests.

• 51:05Rich Roll?

  How long ago was that, when it was forest?

• 51:07Speaker 01

  Well, 10,000 years ago is when the transition happened from the interglacial, from the Ice Age to the current interglacial period, and agriculture kind of began around that time, okay, um, remember the, the fertile crescent?

• 51:24Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm, yes.

• 51:26Speaker 01

  No, it doesn't.

• 51:27Rich Roll?

  Not so fertile anymore.

• 51:28Speaker 01

  Exactly, yeah.

• 51:29Rich Roll?

  Right, right, right. Well, I feel like there's an interesting thing happening culturally right now, and I'm interested in your, in your opinion on this, um, as we, you know, as Western culture becomes more intrigued by wellness and these, you know, the idea of living more sustainably is kind of having a zeitgeist moment, at least in, in terminology, if not in actual behavior change, uh, and so I feel like industry has kind of cropped into this world because they realize there's money to be made around branding these ideas of sustainability, and so what you're seeing, and in my own personal experience, you know, I have friends who

• 52:11Rich Roll?

  are not, you know, they're not plant-based, they're not vegan, but they'll say, "Well, I make sure that all of the meat that I eat is sustainably harvested, it's grass-fed, uh, you know, and it's humanely, these animals are humanely treated, they have good lives, and, and therefore, they feel alleviated of whatever kind of guilt paying that they have, like, they feel like they're, they're making a responsible choice," when in reality, that's quite an illusion, because it's, it's certainly not what they've conjured up in their mind of some happy cow, or, or chicken, or what have you, uh... And by its very definition, you know, an animal raised for food is not sustainable under any circumstances, right?

• 52:54Rich Roll?

  So, so there's sort of this, um, you know, for lack of a better phrase, like Madison Avenue, kind of marketing, uh, and, and specific language that is created and crafted around these products to perpetuate the very behavior pattern that is, uh, you know, causing the harm i- in the first place.

• 53:15Speaker 01

  Right. I mean, but you would expect them to do that, right? Because they are all about increasing their business. They, and they see an opportunity to make money and they're going to do that. We have allowed a system that's built around this, right? Um, because fundamentally sustainability is very simple. You know, compassion for all life is sustainable. Violence towards any part of creation, when it's sustained, is unsustainable.

• 53:45Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 53:46Speaker 01

  So.

• 53:47Rich Roll?

  It can't be that easy. Come on, Silas, you're talking crazy now.

• 53:52Speaker 01

  It is that easy, it's simple. Non-violence, you know, go to town with it, it's infinitely sustainable. But when you commit violence on something without any limit, you're going to kill it, or we're going to kill ourselves in the process of trying to kill it.

• 54:10Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 54:11Speaker 01

  So violence is the root of all unsustainability.

• 54:15Rich Roll?

  That's interesting. So violence cannot be part of the solution either, in a, in a Gandhese sort of way.

• 54:25Speaker 01

  Right. Cannot be part of the solution. This is why I think this is a very spiritual transition that's happening. We are undergoing a transformation as a species. Okay? And.

• 54:38Rich Roll?

  This gets into your whole butterfly thing, right?

• 54:41Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 54:42Rich Roll?

  Yeah, let's talk about the butterfly thing.

• 54:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, you know, what we are undergoing is similar to the transformation that a caterpillar does when it becomes a butterfly. A caterpillar, when it's born, the first thing the caterpillar does is to eat the shell of the egg he came out of. Then he eats the leaf that the egg was on. Then he eats every leaf that he sees. It's like a voracious consumer. And then after two, three weeks, he stops. He builds a cocoon around himself and he meditates for a week. And he wakes up as a butterfly.

• 55:27Speaker 01

  And as a butterfly, she's a very discriminating consumer. She only sips nectar from flowers. And as she sips nectar from flowers, she pollinates the flowers and regenerates life. She undoes all the damage she did as a caterpillar. But you know, in nature, both the caterpillar and the butterfly have their own purpose. They serve their own purpose. They are useful. Whatever they're doing is useful for the forest, useful for the ecosystem in both cases. So we are, I think, going through the metamorphosis from our caterpillar stage to the butterfly stage.

• 56:05Rich Roll?

  Well, that's a very optimistic perspective.

• 56:07Speaker 01

  I think we have to tell optimistic stories now. I mean, if we tell pessimistic stories, then we are going to basically doom ourselves, right? Because we live out our stories. In fact, I have a granddaughter, and my granddaughter took me to a movie. Basically, she said, we're going to see Cinderella. So we went to see Cinderella. And at first, I thought, here is a children's movie, and I'm going to sit with her and enjoy her company. And then I heard Cinderella say something that poked my attention, and I said, I better pay attention to this movie.

• 56:44Rich Roll?

  What'd she say?

• 56:46Speaker 01

  She said...

• 56:51Speaker 01

  Have courage, be kind, and all will be well.

• 56:59Speaker 01

  Very simple, right? Have courage, be kind, and all will be well. And I think it is true for all of us as humans, as human beings. Be kind is be kind to all life. Not just your neighbors, not just your family, but to all life. If you're kind to all life, which is compassion for all creation, then all will be well. That is the sustainability mantra, right? And then the second thing she said was, "Just because it is what is done, doesn't mean it is what should be done."

• 57:31Rich Roll?

  Cinderella is quickly overtaking Gandhi as your prophet of the day.

• 57:36Speaker 01

  Right, I mean, this is what we face, right? As we've been eating this way all along, and you've been doing this all along, doesn't mean it's what should be done today, because our situation is very different from what it was 2,000 years ago, when they came up with that custom. You see? So, all these cultural things that we have brought along, we have to question now, because we are in a completely different environment than when it was initiated. And it probably made sense 2,000 years ago. I mean, I've seen, I mean, I have tremendous respect for what our ancestors have done. You know, every one of our ancestors, not just Indian. And the third thing she said was, "Imagine the world as it should be, not the world as it is."

• 58:21Speaker 01

  So then you'll work towards the world as it should be. See, if we all imagine a world in which we are sustainable, we are fundamentally equal, so we don't have wars, and we have peace, we will work towards that. Right? But if we say the current system is going to continue, so the violence is going to continue. I mean, have you ever had a single day without somebody dropping bombs somewhere? You know? President Obama has a kill list that he signs off on every day. So, so if we imagine the world as it should be, not the world as it is, then we will all work towards that.

• 59:03Rich Roll?

  So, how does that translate into the actions of the everyday person who's listening to this?

• 59:15Speaker 01

  Have courage, be kind, and all will be well.

• 59:19Rich Roll?

  This is a closed loop.

• 59:21Speaker 01

  Right, right. No, no, I think, you know, everything we do, we have to ask, okay, what is behind it? I mean, where did this come from? Let's say we buy a product, right? We don't really understand, most of the time, what happened to get that product to our table? It could be something as simple as even, you know, strawberries. And you discover that the people who are picking strawberries are being abused, enslaved, they're, you know, and they're being paid a pittance. And you say, well, maybe I should be going local, so I understand the farmer, I'm, you know, so I, um, so I know where my food comes from.

• 1:00:06Speaker 01

  Right? So, so that's one way of saying, okay, I'm not going to participate in the cruelty of the industrial food system. I'm going to go local, okay? Or you say, well, if this apple is cheaper than this apple, so which one should I get? Or this fruit is, and you say, well, this one was made with chemicals. So they poured a lot of chemicals to kill all the pesticides, the pests, the so-called pests. And this was done organically. That's, you're not being kind to the insects that you call pests, right? So you slowly switch to a local, organic, vegan eating lifestyle. That becomes, that's love.

• 1:00:51Rich Roll?

  I think Gene Bauer would say that that is aligning your actions with your values.

• 1:00:56Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:00:57Rich Roll?

  Right? It's about being clear about what your values are, and then trying to make sure that what you're doing is, is, uh, consistent with that, right? But the problem is, we walk, we, we walk around with blinders on. And, and a lot of those blinders are either conscious or on some level of, you know, unconscious willingness to not know. Like, it's just easier to not know. Because then you don't feel, then you don't feel that dissonance, right? Like, if you don't ask the question, where is my food coming? And you just purchase the food, then the question never arises.

• 1:01:30Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:01:31Rich Roll?

  To ask.

• 1:01:33Speaker 01

  See, there are a lot of us, I mean, there are a lot of us who are in a position to ask questions and answer them and make choices that align with our values. We can afford to do that. We can make those choices, some of us, I mean. There are a lot of us, actually, right, who can do that. There are a lot of us who are in a rat race, or in a mill, you know, who are sort of stuck in this daily grind, who are not going to think about things like this because they have more important things to think of in their immediate family life. They are the ones who will come along, once enough of us at the top do this.

• 1:02:14Speaker 01

  They'll come along because things will change around them automatically, right? And then there will be the ones who are stragglers, who will not change. Most likely, they'll have to just die off and, you know, that's the way they will die off, right? So, in a sense that, you know, there are some people who are not going to change. That's okay. That's the way things are. But new generations come along. The new generation right now, the younger generation, I mean, they have no qualms about, you know, gay marriage. They have no qualms about skin color and things like that. So, they don't see those differences as much as our generation saw them.

• 1:02:57Rich Roll?

  I think they ask more questions too, you know, and they demand a level of transparency that really was not something that was part of our generation.

• 1:03:06Speaker 01

  Right, yeah.

• 1:03:07Rich Roll?

  And that's exciting.

• 1:03:09Speaker 01

  It is. I mean, it is an exciting time to be alive because we're in the transition period, the transformation period. You know, and you're witnessing the butterfly being born. And it's beautiful.

• 1:03:22Rich Roll?

  I like your wings.

• 1:03:26Rich Roll?

  So, so tell me about some of the, the work that you're doing with, with Climate Healers. I know you're very involved in this issue of cooking in India, the impact of, of wood burning stoves on the environment and trying to find sustainable solutions for that. So explain that to me a little bit.

• 1:03:46Speaker 01

  So, I mean, this again started with that, with observing that forest in Rajasthan and, and understanding why it is dying off. And you, as I said, livestock is one of the major reasons for it. But the other major reason is wood being extracted for, for cooking. Now, normally, we consider wood being extracted for cooking as a sustainable activity because wood grows on trees and you take some and you burn it, you know, so it would have fallen off and anyway decayed and become CO2. So, all the woman did, all the person did was to accelerate the process. That's how we justify it. But not at the level at which we're doing it.

• 1:04:28Speaker 01

  You know, there are 600 million households that are burning wood for cooking. And together, they're burning about 2 billion tons of wood.

• 1:04:37Rich Roll?

  So. And is it wood itself, or is it wood that that is turned into charcoal? Like, how does it work?

• 1:04:45Speaker 01

  No, it's wood itself. So, it's basically dead wood from trees, wood that's fallen off on the ground. They bring it and they dry it, if it's not dry already, and they chop it up and they burn it. So, it's a daily, I mean, it's a daily activity in the village. Women go at least three to four times a week to collect wood. They bring back like 60 to 70 pounds of wood on their head every time they go. And, and it's a really tough task, you know, to go collect wood. It takes about an hour for them to walk to where they're collecting wood. It takes them an hour to collect the wood, takes them an hour and a half to walk back

• 1:05:28Speaker 01

  because they're carrying a heavy load. And it lasts them two to three days, 70 pounds. And they're burning this wood for making their, for cooking their food, for making their chai in the morning, and then during winters also for heating. Okay?

• 1:05:48Rich Roll?

  And how many people are doing this? How many million?

• 1:05:52Speaker 01

  Worldwide, there are 3 billion people who use biomass for cooking. So it's about 600 million households.

• 1:05:59Rich Roll?

  And biomass is, that's a broader term, right?

• 1:06:02Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:06:02Rich Roll?

  It includes wood and...

• 1:06:03Speaker 01

  There's always a mixture, okay? There's wood, there is cow dung, dried cow dung. They use corn stalk, I mean, other things, other biomass as well. So, but mostly it's wood. But it's all carbon. As far as I'm concerned, it's carbon that was sequestered by photosynthesis. It's precious because it was sequestered. And we should be keeping it underground because we can't afford to keep sending it back up. And it's being turned back up and sent it to the atmosphere as CO2 or carbon. It's black carbon. So...

• 1:06:39Rich Roll?

  And that black carbon, what happens to that? Like, walk me through the kind of, you know, the sort of step by step.

• 1:06:46Speaker 01

  So, like, when you have incomplete burning of wood, it, you get soot, a black carbon. So it's smoke, soot, right? And that black carbon goes into the atmosphere and is taken by wind currents and deposited on the ice in the Himalayas or deposited in the ice in the Arctic or in Greenland. So we've seen all this ice now becoming darker and darker and darker. And when they become dark, basically, they absorb sunlight.

• 1:07:16Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm, rather than reflect it.

• 1:07:18Speaker 01

  Rather than reflect it. And when they absorb sunlight, they heat up the ice faster. So the ice melts faster. So, and the fact that it also absorbs sunlight makes it a greenhouse gas, right? Because basically, it's increasing the heat that's being trapped. So, black carbon is a very significant greenhouse gas in that sense. And India has 160 million households that use biomass for cooking. So, we've been working in this, this region of Rajasthan, trying to address this issue. How do we reduce their wood use? So the first idea, you know, I'm an engineer, right? So I have this brilliant idea that I can build new things.

• 1:08:02Speaker 01

  So, I said, okay, here's the engineering challenge. Let's build a solar cooker that can cook their food. And their food happens to be really thick rotis. These are flatbreads made with corn or millet.

• 1:08:19Speaker 01

  And it takes a lot of energy to cook those. And it takes a lot of concentrated energy to cook those. It's like you have to make the equivalent of a gas stove with solar energy. That's not hard. But what is hard is to make a stove, the equivalent of a gas stove, while the cook can stand near it.

• 1:08:42Rich Roll?

  Otherwise, what, it would like heat the whole house?

• 1:08:45Speaker 01

  It would heat the cook, right? I mean, because most solar stoves that have that kind of energy concentration, they're intended for making big, big pots of rice or something like that. So the assumption is that you put the pot, focus the solar stove, and then you walk away. Whereas to make rotis, you have to stand there and flip it around. So it's an interactive process. So you don't want a stove that will cook the cook. So it took us a while and we came up with a stove that met our requirements, engineering requirements. And then we went and deployed it in the village. We gave them five stoves. And within six months, not a single one was being used.

• 1:09:26Rich Roll?

  Because?

• 1:09:27Speaker 01

  Because it was culturally the exact opposite of what they're doing now. You know, because they cook inside, now we are asking them to cook outside. They cook sitting down, we're asking them to cook standing up.

• 1:09:41Rich Roll?

  Right, so you can't disrupt the environment to do it. It has to work within their sort of social construct and the environment that they're used to.

• 1:09:48Speaker 01

  Right, they cook during the, I mean, they cook early in the morning or late in the evening when the sun is not out. And with the solar stove, they have to cook when the sun is out. So anyway, that was a completely disruptive thing and they said they just didn't want to do it. And I realized at that point that I can't ask them to change so drastically, you know? And again, if solar stove is such a great idea, how come the rich people are not using it, right? So we had to be humble. And we say, okay, now I have to sit down and figure out how to do an intervention that works within their cultural context. So this year, we tried these efficient stoves. These efficient stoves are still biomass stoves. They use wood.

• 1:10:32Speaker 01

  But they're supposed to reduce the wood consumption by forty percent, fifty percent, whatever. So we took three different efficient stoves that are like the top of the line. And we took three samples of each. We went to nine different households and we rotated them around. And we did surveys. We asked them to cook with these stoves and asked them whether they like it or not like it. And we measured how much wood they were using. So we did this engineering assessment, right? And we could clearly see why they don't like them. Just by watching them and talking to them. Because these stoves, either they're, I mean, they are made of metal. So they get hot on the outside.

• 1:11:16Speaker 01

  So it's a hazard for children. So, and so the women said, our stove, it's got mud on the outside. It's insulated.

• 1:11:27Speaker 01

  The opening for the stove is too narrow. So they had to chop the wood lengthwise. And it's

• 1:11:33Rich Roll?

  That's more work for them.

• 1:11:34Speaker 01

  It's a pain in the neck to chop wood lengthwise. You can chop it this way, now but this way, it's painful. So they wouldn't do it. As soon as they encountered a log that wouldn't go into the hull, they would just go to their original stove and they'd abandon the stove. The flame was too narrow. So it was good for a metal pan, but they don't use metal pan. They use a mud pan for cooking their rotis.

• 1:11:58Rich Roll?

  It disperses the heat over a wider area.

• 1:12:01Speaker 01

  Right, so you have to disperse the heat over a wider area. So their stove is built like that. So, and they love cooking rotis on mud and then eating that because it brings the taste of the soil into the roti. You can even donate to them an iron pan, they won't use it.

• 1:12:19Speaker 01

  Right, so.

• 1:12:21Speaker 01

  See, it was clear that the efficient stoves are not gonna work. But we asked them, so how much would you pay for these? And they were roughly, each one had cost us about fifty dollars retail. The best we could get was like five dollars, ten dollars, you know?

• 1:12:35Rich Roll?

  To get something that they're not gonna use?

• 1:12:38Speaker 01

  Right. So then, we asked them to cook with their stove and we observed what they were doing with their stove. And we noticed that the inefficiency was coming from all the embers that were falling off the edge of the wood. As it was burning, the embers would fall off and they would pile up. And those embers were the source of all the soot. And they were the source of inefficiency as well, because that's not complete combustion, right? So we said, so how could we just reduce those embers? How could we get the wood to burn more completely? And then, you know, every fireplace, if you notice, has a grate. We put the wood on top of a grate. They don't have a grate there.

• 1:13:22Speaker 01

  I mean, they're putting the wood on the floor, right? So we made a grate, a simple grate that would allow airflow from below. And the holes were too small for the embers to fall through, but they're big enough for the ash to fall through.

• 1:13:40Rich Roll?

  Right, almost like a little cage for the fire, so it could burn more completely.

• 1:13:46Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:13:47Rich Roll?

  And therefore use less wood and create less carbon emissions.

• 1:13:53Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:13:54Rich Roll?

  Right?

• 1:13:54Speaker 01

  So we made one in the local market and had the women use them. And we were shocked at how much it reduced the wood in their stove.

• 1:14:05Rich Roll?

  So how much?

• 1:14:06Speaker 01

  So that woman, the woman was using 2.9 kg's for cooking her meal without the grate. And with the grate, it went down to 1.1 kg.

• 1:14:16Rich Roll?

  Hmm, so more than, that's like sixty, seventy percent, yeah, yeah.

• 1:14:20Speaker 01

  Sixty percent reduction. And it was better than even the efficient stoves. With the efficient stove, she had used 1.8 kg. So we were shocked, and then we said, well, this couldn't be true.

• 1:14:30Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:14:31Speaker 01

  You know, I mean, how can such a simple solution actually work, right? So we had it tested at a cook stove testing center in Udaipur. And the official numbers are that it reduces wood use by sixty-three percent and it reduces soot by eighty-nine percent.

• 1:14:46Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 1:14:48Speaker 01

  So I went and soon-

• 1:14:49Rich Roll?

  But the important question is, do they like using it?

• 1:14:52Speaker 01

  Right. So when I got those test results, I immediately booked a flight to India. So we could go and deploy a thousand of them in four villages. And we first did a survey where we took a sample of the grate and went to ten different households, asked the women, "Do you like them or not like them?" It was unanimous. Why wouldn't I not use it? You know, it changes nothing for me.

• 1:15:22Rich Roll?

  Right. It's half the trips of carrying wood around, if we're nothing else.

• 1:15:27Speaker 01

  More than that, it was less smoke, you know, I mean, she's suffering with the smoke burning her eyes. She's cooking indoors. And so why, she said, "I can hardly feel any smoke with this." So, so anyway, it became quite apparent that it was, at least they were going to use it. So we're deploying a thousand of them and we're going to go back six months later in December and survey again and see how well it's taken on.

• 1:15:57Rich Roll?

  Right. And they don't cost anything, right? It costs them a dollar to get one of these things? Is that what I, I read something about that?

• 1:16:03Speaker 01

  Right. I mean, in volume, it's going to cost a dollar. But we, since we only did like a thousand of them, it's costing us like four dollars each.

• 1:16:10Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:16:10Speaker 01

  But it's, you know, as far as the cost is concerned, the amount of carbon it saves is so huge. Even with the current price of carbon credits in Europe, you can fund this thing very easily. Because the carbon reduction is going to be over multiple years. Because that grate is not going to go away for three to four years.

• 1:16:35Rich Roll?

  Right. And weren't you doing something with incentives by giving them a cellphone? What's that about?

• 1:16:44Speaker 01

  Well, we, initially when we started Climate Healers, this was 2007, no one in the village had cellphones. And cellphones, they wanted them. They wanted communications, right? So it was a good incentive if you could offer them cellphones.

• 1:16:59Rich Roll?

  Right. Be part of my pilot study and I'll give you a phone. I got you.

• 1:17:02Speaker 01

  I can give you a phone like that. But by the time I brought the solar cookers- Uh, three years later, uh, forty percent of the village already had cell phones.

• 1:17:12Rich Roll?

  It's not gonna work anymore.

• 1:17:13Speaker 01

  It doesn't work anymore. And then you say, where did you get these cell phones? I mean, it's like proliferating.

• 1:17:18Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:17:19Speaker 01

  And they said the local, the contractor in the city was giving away cell phones for free.

• 1:17:25Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:17:25Speaker 01

  To able bodied men.

• 1:17:27Rich Roll?

  Hmm.

• 1:17:28Speaker 01

  So that he could call them to come and work in the city for construction.

• 1:17:33Rich Roll?

  Right. That's a smart man.

• 1:17:36Speaker 01

  Because he can pay these village people half the price as the worker in the city was asking. So it's really a method. So capitalism is providing these free cell phones.

• 1:17:48Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:17:49Speaker 01

  Because they can get labor at a lower cost.

• 1:17:52Rich Roll?

  Right. So that's amazing. So, you know, assuming that you can get these, you know, these, uh, these devices into all of these homes. I mean, that's a huge, that'll have a huge impact. But as an engineer, you still have to come up, you realize that you still have to come up with this solar stove.

• 1:18:11Speaker 01

  Yes, yes, yeah.

• 1:18:12Rich Roll?

  Invent that so that it works.

• 1:18:14Speaker 01

  There is, there is a team working on it.

• 1:18:16Rich Roll?

  Oh, there is good.

• 1:18:18Speaker 01

  Yeah. Cause we're trying to store the energy and then release it at night and next morning and so on. Yeah.

• 1:18:23Rich Roll?

  And so is Climate Healers doing this all on its own? Or are you in partnership with other NGOs? I mean, how does that function?

• 1:18:30Speaker 01

  We work mainly through partnerships. Uh, but we have partnerships with academic institutions. We partner with the University of Iowa. We partner with the University of Illinois. UC Berkeley has done work with us. Georgia Tech has done work with us. And several universities in India, IIT Madras has worked with us. And we work with NGOs in India. And we have NGOs now in Ghana who are working with us. So, um, really it cannot be done with just one organization. All of us have to get together to work on this. And I tell people, you know, when they ask me, how many people are in Climate Healers? I say seven point four billion.

• 1:19:08Rich Roll?

  Hmm.

• 1:19:09Speaker 01

  We all have to do this together.

• 1:19:10Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:19:18Rich Roll?

  So when's the next kind of phase of this? Are you mass producing these things right now? Or, I mean, you just came back from India. So what were you doing there on this trip?

• 1:19:27Speaker 01

  On this trip, we had about a thousand of them manufactured and distributed to the four villages in Rajasthan. And we then took samples and we gave it to a number of NGOs. So we gave some samples to an NGO called SEWA, which is Self-employed Women's Association. And they have 1.1 million members and they've been looking for a bookstore solution for a long time. We shipped a bunch to an NGO in Hyderabad. So it's just seeding.

• 1:20:00Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:20:01Speaker 01

  And then have them try it out. Try it out and see what you think. And then we can manufacture more of them if they need it.

• 1:20:10Rich Roll?

  Right. That's cool. I want to turn the conversation a little bit back towards deforestation and desertification. One of the things that always comes up, and I've gotten a lot of emails about this, is the work of Alan Savery, right? Who is out there and kind of has a lot of energy around him and a lot of people paying attention to his work, you know, that I think really kind of entered mainstream consciousness as a result of his TED Talk. But essentially, his philosophy is sort of at odds with what you're saying, which is the solution to desertification is to increase grazing, right? That if we had more animals kind of freely grazing the planet, that this would cure

• 1:20:54Rich Roll?

  this problem that we're having. So I'm interested in your perspective on that.

• 1:20:58Speaker 01

  You know, what Alan Savery is talking about is what our ancestors used to do. You know, I mean, they used to keep livestock and maintain the fertility of their soil, right? But as population increased, and as the livestock population increased, I mean, with the current levels where we are 7.5 times the biomass and megafauna that used to exist sustainably in the past, I mean, are we as human beings so hubristic to think that we can beat nature at her own game? And that too by a factor of 7.5?

• 1:21:44Speaker 01

  And can make it sustainable? No way, right? We know that native ecosystems have the maximum carbon sequestration in any given area. If you disrupt a native ecosystem, your carbon sequestration on land is going to go down. This is well-known, right? So if we take a forest and convert it to grassland and then we add all these things, we're going to get less carbon sequestration there. And the amount of biomass that you can raise on that is going to be less than what nature did. So there is no way to do this and beat nature.

• 1:22:27Speaker 01

  So this is why when I hear that you can now triple or double the volume of livestock, I say we are smoking something. I mean, this is not possible.

• 1:22:37Rich Roll?

  Who's saying that?

• 1:22:38Speaker 01

  That's what, when you look at Alan Savory's message, it is you have to increase the density of livestock, is what he says. Increase the density of livestock. Well, we already have.

• 1:22:48Rich Roll?

  What about the, just the methane, you know, production alone there or the water use required for that? And that doesn't even get into land use. Like, to me, and maybe I'm missing something, and I'm certainly not an expert in this field by any stretch of the imagination, but we don't have enough land. Like, even if, even if we implement it, let's say we implemented his philosophy completely, is there enough, would there even be enough land to support? I mean, there would just be livestock everywhere, roaming through the streets and, I mean, is that?

• 1:23:21Speaker 01

  It's already happening in India, right? I mean, there's livestock roaming through the streets and the density of cattle in India is nine times the density of cattle in the US. And mainly because Indians.

• 1:23:36Rich Roll?

  Well, that's, you know, that's rooted in Hinduism though, is it not?

• 1:23:41Speaker 01

  It's rooted in the lacto-vegetarianism. This is why I was a lacto-vegetarian and then I became vegan when I saw what was happening to the forest. Because in India, we drink a lot of milk and we don't eat so much beef. So we don't kill the cows. Cows are sacred. So the cow lives for 25 years, eating the forest every day. So you say, well, if you drink milk, you started exploiting the cow, right? Then maybe we should finish it, finish the exploitation, meaning you have to eat some beef to compensate for the milk you're drinking. So it's almost like...

• 1:24:22Rich Roll?

  Right. Yeah. So it's not, it's not a black and white thing, right? So by virtue of all of these cows eating up, you know, basically encroaching on the forest land, then there's less habitat for the other animals, right? Like it's encroaching on, on the tiger's, you know, sort of domain.

• 1:24:39Speaker 01

  Exactly. That's why the tiger population is down so much. The tiger population used to be 100,000, just 100 years ago, and now it's down to like 1,300, 1,400. So...

• 1:24:49Rich Roll?

  But I think one of the things that people miss in this is, I mean, it's different in India because of your cultural perception of this animal, the, the cow. But I think people think, well, if everyone went vegan, there would just be cow, we have so many cows who would, who, you know, what are we going to do with all these cows? But they don't understand that we're, we're specifically raising these cows. Like if we stopped raising, first of all, no one's, the whole world is not going to go vegan overnight. So this is not going to happen, you know, that way. It's going to be a gradual process. And as we move in that direction, we're going to be raising fewer animals for food. Like it would, that would, that would course correct itself.

• 1:25:26Speaker 01

  Right. I mean, cow impregnation is a profession.

• 1:25:30Rich Roll?

  Right. These, yeah, these animals need to be inseminated, right, in order to reproduce.

• 1:25:36Speaker 01

  Right. And so all those professions will, will start dying out, you know, because we are abusing these animals when we impregnate them by hand. They're not having sex. You know, I mean, this is not, they're not having families and therefore raising their own children. So this is all being done forcibly through industrial methods. So, yeah, as the, the demand for livestock products decreases, there'll be less and less being produced by industry.

• 1:26:08Rich Roll?

  And what is the, the difference in impact between a person who says,

• 1:26:15Rich Roll?

  I'm a good environmentalist. You know, I'm driving a Chevy Volt or a Prius or, you know, an electric car and I or I ride my bike to work and I don't take very many showers. But yeah, I like my meat versus somebody who's driving a normal car to work every day, but they're eating a plant-based diet. Like, how does that balance out?

• 1:26:35Speaker 01

  Balance is out in favor of the person who's eating a plant-based diet. Okay, it's he's less environmentally destructive in general. You can come up with outlandish scenarios where you

• 1:26:46Rich Roll?

  The guy who's flying a private jet every single day.

• 1:26:48Speaker 01

  Right, yeah, things like that, you know, so. But overall, it's it's just raising awareness and raising our consciousness. And raising our consciousness about the violence that is around us. See, that's the main blinder we have, is that there is violence all around that's happening on our behalf that we don't want to know about.

• 1:27:09Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:27:10Speaker 01

  Right? And we really see how every product is made, whether it's chocolate. I mean, chocolate, you know, there's so much child slavery going on for for getting all those cocoa beans and turning them into chocolate. That's violence. Some poor child didn't want to do that and is being forced to do that at the point of a gun. And when we pay money to buy that, we're actually supporting it. We're saying that's okay. So it's raising our consciousness about what is really going on, the amount of violence that's going on, and realizing that it's non-violence that's sustainable, not violence.

• 1:27:52Rich Roll?

  Right. I mean, I think that changing your plate is a very powerful thing to do, and it certainly helped me relieve myself of some of that dissonance that existed between values and actions. But it doesn't stop there, you know? The road gets narrower and as you kind of take the blue pill in the matrix and you start to open your eyes as to how the world functions, then you it applies to basically every consumer purchase that you make.

• 1:28:20Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:28:21Rich Roll?

  Everything from, you know, the precious iPhone that I have right here, sitting next to me, that I, you know, can't imagine living a day without, but, you know, and I know on some level That there's a factory in China where there's some issues and I don't really want to think about that.

• 1:28:35Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:28:36Rich Roll?

  I don't, you know, I don't, I don't necessarily want to think about how the clothes are made that I'm wearing, but I'm becoming more hip to that and I've made more conscious decisions around those things. And it doesn't end there. It continues and continues and continues. So it really is on a macro level, a conversation about consumerism in general and raising awareness around that. And, and having the courage and the willingness to ask those questions and, and to,

• 1:29:04Rich Roll?

  you know, be inquisitive. We don't want to do that. And our system is set up to specifically prevent that, to keep us in that foggy haze.

• 1:29:12Speaker 01

  Right. I mean, the, the numbers, you know, and basically,

• 1:29:17Speaker 01

  if you're concerned about your paycheck or how are you going to pay the next bill, you're not going to think about things like this. You're more concerned about those.

• 1:29:25Rich Roll?

  These are rich white guy problems. You know?

• 1:29:29Speaker 01

  Exactly. Yeah.

• 1:29:32Rich Roll?

  So how do you begin to, you know, shift that in terms of like advocacy and how you communicate with people? I think it's really important to, to be conscious of your approach to that, like, and so if you look at like, veganism, for example, there are all different kinds of people that, that, that employ a wide variety of different communication tactics, right? You have people at PETA that are, that are, you know, throwing blood on, on women that are wearing, you know, furs, all the way down to, you know, the more kind of Gandhi-esque approach, which is just to kind of be the lighthouse and stand in the light and just pay attention to your own behaviors and not preach, right?

• 1:30:13Rich Roll?

  And so there's a spectrum of approaches. So where do you like fall on that spectrum?

• 1:30:19Speaker 01

  Well, see Gandhi has also been mischaracterized, in my opinion, because he, he never really said, be the change you want to see. And he wasn't a passive activist. I mean, he was an activist. He, he was quite militant about making people wear kadi. In the Naljivan magazine in 1925, he said, "I consider it my duty to use every available means at my disposal to persuade people to wear kadi." So this was not a passive man who would wear kadi and say, "Look at me." He went out and told people, "Please wear kadi," right? So activism is absolutely essential for social movements.

• 1:31:00Speaker 01

  But we have to be nonviolent in our activism as well. So the ends never justify the means. So when you, when you attack people or throw people or abuse people, when they are not doing what you think they should be doing, you're not going to win them over. Right? And so those are the things I say, you know, yes, we have to be activists. We have to, I participated in protests with direct action everywhere. I've gone and, you know, stood with them in Whole Foods and talked about what is really going on behind those products that they're selling.

• 1:31:40Speaker 01

  And that kind of activism is essential to, to basically snowball the movement. Okay?

• 1:31:52Speaker 01

  As far as consumerism is concerned, you know, I've, I've realized that it's everywhere. I mean, it's, the violence is everywhere in everything we do. Everything we do is, there's pollution being poured out into the streams and some fishes dying. So it's like, so you say, where do we start? Right? So the way I did that was to say, if I really need, if I think I need some product, that's not an essential product, I just write it down in a piece of paper. I don't go buy it.

• 1:32:25Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:32:26Speaker 01

  I do a buy everything day.

• 1:32:28Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm. Yeah, I heard you all that you go shopping once a year.

• 1:32:31Speaker 01

  Once a year.

• 1:32:31Rich Roll?

  I mean, that doesn't include like food in the sentence, right? But like for things that you would like, right? You indulge yourself one time a year.

• 1:32:38Speaker 01

  One time a year.

• 1:32:39Rich Roll?

  So what did you buy on your last big shopping spree?

• 1:32:42Speaker 01

  I bought only toothpaste and shaving items and stuff like that. So I really didn't need anything beyond that because my clothes are still lasting me, you know? I'm doing fine with what I have. And as far as buying my, even my essential stuff, even my travel, I'm very conscious of it and I say, I'll only travel if I know I'm advancing my cause. Which is healing the climate. So if I have to fly to India, I will fly to India. I'm not going to spend, you know, three months going in a ship because it does lower carbon footprint. I'm going to fly because I need to do a lot of things, you know, but I'll only fly for those reasons. Or I'll only drive for those reasons. So.

• 1:33:24Rich Roll?

  Right. So you do like an engineering calculus on the, the sort of, you do like a profit and loss statement on the impact of your behavior when you make these decisions that, that might, might release some, uh, some carbon emissions into the environment.

• 1:33:38Speaker 01

  Right. I look at these as tools. Okay. So a plane is a tool, car is a tool. I mean, but what are the tools being used for?

• 1:33:46Speaker 01

  Are we using the tool to just, I mean, are we using this to go for pleasure? If I, I don't get any pleasure anymore going inside seeing things. And I mean, I, I have so much fun doing my work. So much more fun doing my work. So I'd rather just use all these things just for that purpose. You see, I really think that these tools are available for us to do this healing work. And we shouldn't just allow all these tools to be used only by the people who are destroying the planet, you know? Those of us who want to heal the planet should get into it and start using them as well.

• 1:34:22Rich Roll?

  Have you, uh, followed this woman, B. Johnson, who is the zero waste home person? Do you know about her?

• 1:34:29Speaker 01

  No, I have.

• 1:34:29Rich Roll?

  Uh, I gotta send you her website.

• 1:34:30Speaker 01

  Oh, please do.

• 1:34:31Rich Roll?

  She's amazing. I heard her speak at a wellness conference a couple of months ago. And she lives in Marin County with her family. She has two kids. And she just decided to see if they could live with, uh, creating the least amount of waste possible. And over a number of years, she refined her techniques and experimented with all different kinds of things, but she's got it down to this science now where she held up like a mason jar and she said, this is the. The mass amount of garbage that our family produced last year and it all fit into one jar.

• 1:35:05Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:35:06Rich Roll?

  And she shows pictures of her home. She, you know, it's like upper middle class, but it's a, it's very minimal, but everything, you know, they just have the least amount of each thing that they need and, you know, they don't have any plastic or, and everything is like, you know, all, they don't use any single use items. They don't accept anything into their house. Like, it's amazing. Like, it was incredibly inspiring. It's intimidating too, but also, you know, she's a very beautiful woman and they're, her, you know, kids look healthy and they look happy and, and, and when you see that, who's somebody who's living in the modern world, you know, with normal jobs and all of that kind of thing, uh, that they're able to, to do that really makes you think about, you know, how we behave, you know, with the, the level of single use items that we go

• 1:35:51Rich Roll?

  through on a daily basis is insane, you know, and the plastics and all of that. It's really crazy.

• 1:35:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, the statistic is that 99% of what we buy, we don't use within six months.

• 1:36:01Rich Roll?

  Hmm.

• 1:36:02Speaker 01

  So we are just, basically 99% of our purchases are useless after six months.

• 1:36:07Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:36:08Speaker 01

  You know, clearly there is a lot of, uh, excess that we can cut out from that. But we're not trying to export that kind of lifestyle to developing countries.

• 1:36:20Rich Roll?

  Right. So when you're talking about the caterpillar, the caterpillar turning into the butterfly and this kind of mass awakening that we're having, and I feel like that is happening in, in, in the United States. You know, meanwhile, look at China and I, and, and India, you know, and you see the rise of the middle class there and they're, they're like, yes, now we can finally do what all these people in America have been doing and they want to live the good life and they want to consume these products that we've been consuming and we're happy to export that, those items and that lifestyle over to them. And that becomes, that compounds the problem, obviously.

• 1:36:53Speaker 01

  Right, but they are actually learning much, much faster than we did in America. Because, you know, it's not just buying these things. You also, you get the baggage with it, right? So you get, two thirds of Americans are either obese or overweight. Forty-nine percent of Americans are either on antidepressants or anti-anxiety medication or on illegal drugs on a daily basis. So I mean, these are statistics that they are also beginning to see very quickly. And they're saying, wait a minute, just 20 years ago, I didn't have this. This 30 years ago, I didn't have this, so how come I'm getting it? So they're beginning to answer those questions faster as well. So there's a tremendous acceleration of the process that's happening in those countries.

• 1:37:38Speaker 01

  This is like, they're leapfrogging, okay? So just like they leapfrogged the landlines telephones and went straight to cell phones.

• 1:37:46Rich Roll?

  Right, exactly.

• 1:37:47Speaker 01

  They're gonna leapfrog a lot of these intermediate stages that western countries went through and get to the final state much, much faster than.

• 1:37:54Rich Roll?

  There you go with this optimism again.

• 1:37:58Speaker 01

  No, I see it happening, you know? I mean, your example of Bea Johnson, isn't it? It's so apt because she's, she's an embodiment, based on her description, of the first mantra of the Upanishads, which says, use-

• 1:38:15Rich Roll?

  Upanishads, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:38:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, the first mantra of three Isha Upanishad says, and the rough translation is, "Take just what you need and no more. For the earth and all her bounty does not belong to you, but to the Lord."

• 1:38:32Rich Roll?

  That's a beautiful place to end it. But I can't let you go without asking you one last question, which is, for people that are listening and they're ready to make, you know, a different choice, what is the, what is the one thing that they could do first? That's simple, that's accessible to everybody and doable, that you would suggest to try to reduce their carbon footprint and, you know, live more sustainably?

• 1:39:02Speaker 01

  Transition to a plant-based diet. I mean, that's the number one thing I would say. And within that, I would say-

• 1:39:11Speaker 01

  Try to eat local and try to eat seasonal fruits and vegetables. So that you're not ordering apples from Chile, but apples from Washington. So the way I do it is I go to the store and I buy the three cheapest fruits and the three cheapest vegetables that are organic. And they all tend to be local, organic and seasonal. So I think there is, this is the one thing that we are all going to do together to make the transition. This is the start of the transformation, the vegan movement. And it is shaping up beautifully.

• 1:39:55Speaker 01

  I mean, if you look at Germany and how fast they're turning vegan, you look at Israel and see how fast they're turning vegan. And you look at California, you know, the proliferation of vegan restaurants. My God, when I turned vegan in 2008, it was difficult.

• 1:40:11Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:40:12Speaker 01

  And now I-

• 1:40:12Rich Roll?

  That wasn't that long ago.

• 1:40:14Speaker 01

  It wasn't that long ago. And you look now, you know, it's so easy. It's everywhere, in the mainstream supermarkets, you know, you get vegan products everywhere. And I mean, Germany has its own vegan supermarkets, right? So-

• 1:40:28Rich Roll?

  I heard about that. I'm going there this fall. I'm looking forward to it. I'm going to Frankfurt.

• 1:40:32Speaker 01

  Wonderful.

• 1:40:33Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I'm excited. Well, that's great. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me today.

• 1:40:40Speaker 01

  My pleasure. Thank you for having me.

• 1:40:42Rich Roll?

  If, if you want to learn more about Sailesh and his work, the best place to go is climatehealers.org. Yes. Are there other places or resources that you could point people towards where they could begin their own process of learning more about you and the things that you are talking about?

• 1:41:01Speaker 01

  That's the place.

• 1:41:02Rich Roll?

  That's the place. All right, cool. And, you know, whatever books or other kind of things that we talked about during this podcast, I'll put in the show notes to the episode. So, all right. Where are you headed now? What's next?

• 1:41:17Speaker 01

  Oh, I have to go and talk to a nonprofit that's going to look at our great. Yeah. Oh, I forgot. There is a book they can read as well.

• 1:41:26Rich Roll?

  Oh, that's right.

• 1:41:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:41:27Rich Roll?

  Yeah. I forgot about that. Carbon Dharma.

• 1:41:29Speaker 01

  Carbon Dharma, which is available on Amazon. So that sort of details my story until 2011. I'm writing a follow-up book called Carbon Yoga.

• 1:41:39Rich Roll?

  I like that.

• 1:41:40Speaker 01

  So that, so Dharma is what is the right thing to do? Yoga is how do you do it? So, and this one hopefully will come out by the end of the year.

• 1:41:49Rich Roll?

  I like that. Awesome. That's exciting. Well, maybe you can come back and talk to me again when the book is released and we can talk more about that.

• 1:41:57Speaker 01

  I would love to.

• 1:41:58Rich Roll?

  All right. Very good. Thank you so much.

• 1:42:00Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 1:42:01Rich Roll?

  You're an inspiration. Keep doing what you're doing. We need more guys like you. And I love your message, man. So anything I can do to help you, support you and, and help get the word out about the work that you're doing, I'm happy to do so.

• 1:42:12Speaker 01

  That's wonderful. We need more people like you as well.

• 1:42:15Rich Roll?

  We're all, but like you said, we're all, we're all in it together.

• 1:42:18Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 1:42:19Rich Roll?

  All right. Thanks so much. Peace.

• 1:42:26Rich Roll?

  All right, everybody. I hope you guys enjoyed that. Two big Stanford brains in the same week. First Craig Heller with the whole cooling glove thing, and then Silas with the solar-powered stove. Both Stanford guys, pretty cool, right? I enjoyed it. I hope you guys got something out of that and it helped raise your awareness about climate issues and made you think a little bit more deeply about certain things that concern all of us. Again, make sure to visit the show notes on the episode page at richworld.com to read up, learn more, and take your knowledge base and podcast experience to the next level. If you speak German, our book, The Plant Power Way is now available in German language edition. Go to amazon.de. Finding Ultra is also in the German

• 1:43:07Rich Roll?

  language edition as well. Same German publisher. That, that edition came out really great as well. If you're in the LA area or your visits bring you nearby my neck of the woods, check out a few of our businesses that we're partnered with. Joy Cafe, it's our organic, plant-based and gluten-free eatery in the Westlake Village area. When I'm in town, when I'm not in Frankfurt, Germany, usually I'm eating lunch there. So partnered with the Karma Baker, which is a vegan and gluten-free bakery also in the Westlake Village area of Los Angeles. So again, I've said it before, but the podcast is a great way to kind of serve a global audience with this message. But it also feels really good to kind of invest in my local community and kind of give back by helping

• 1:43:52Rich Roll?

  provide food that's consistent with my values. It feels really great. So if you're in the area, again, it would be great to see you come by Joy or see you come by the Karma Baker, both my friends and great products for you guys. For all your plant power needs, visit ritual.com. Check out The Plant Power Way in English language version at amazon.com. We have signed copies of that and Finding Ultra at ritual.com. We've got nutrition products. We've got 100% organic cotton garments. We've got Plant Power Techies, all kinds of cool, awesome stuff, all there to help you take your life and your health to the next level. That's it, you guys. I'll see you in a couple of days. Hopefully I'll be a little bit more coherent. Again, I'm pretty jet lagged today. Hey, man, I did my

• 1:44:35Rich Roll?

  best. Give me a break. It's hard to put these things together from the road, but I'm trying. Apologies again for being a day late, but I hope the listen was worth your while and I'll see you guys back here in a couple of days with another great episode of the RRP. So make it great, everybody. Peace, plants, and namaste.