How Sustainable Are Tech Companies, Really?

28:54And so, but luckily, America is like pretty much off coal for the most part. And, you know, like it's really expensive to run a coal generation facility. So we're sort of on the outs with coal. all i mean remember this is like a global problem and and 80 of the world's energy is still fossil fuels and a lot of that is coal in across the world so like it's still a huge problem but clean energy is something that uses uh as low carbon as possible so that's going to be wind solar hydro that's going to be geothermal and nuclear and i'm probably missing 40 of them but these are sources. Did I? Got that.

29:34I certainly, come on. I definitely said wind, right? I think you said wind. Run it back. Run it back right now and do a slow-mo of me going, wind. Wind. Are any of these methods carbon zero emitting? No. I mean, like, look, we're sitting here talking and we're carbon positive. Like, we're all excreting carbon dioxide. Yeah. Which is like a thing that these are like, oh, you want climate change to end and yet you drink from a water bottle? Curious, you know? Bro, you breathe? Yeah. You hate society, but yet you exist in it. Right, like pick a flag, brother. Yeah, I definitely want to, like we're all emitting currently, so nothing that you're gonna do, even like the walk to a water well is carbon excretive.

30:26Because you're breathing out. Yeah, but also like, And that sounds like I'm minimizing the amount of carbon required for a wind turbine, and I don't want to do that because it's a f***ing lot of carbon required for all of this setup. Solar panels, they do also take carbon to produce and to set up and a little bit to run. But once you're through the setup phase, amortizing that over a handful of years, and then you're good on the carbon side. Is there one of those that you think is the most effective slash you would like to see more of throughout the world? I mean, so one nice thing about like solar and wind is that they are officially the cheapest form of energy now.

31:10Like the cost curve for those two has just fallen off of a cliff. And now like in the past ten years, like solar power has dropped 90 % in the price. Wow. That's crazy. Yeah, it's like we've just marched it all the way down the cost curve. So I think like I would like to personally, I want to see more battery installation. I think that's the that is the like fix for intermittency. There's also I know I know all of the things that it's online say. And so I'm going to say they're going down the rabbit holes in your head before we even get there. Deeply. Yeah. And it's like, well, yeah, but like at night you can't get solar power and the wind doesn't always blow.

31:47what do you do then, huh, sheeple? You know, like, then you need your coal to burn. And the answer is like, well, yeah, but that's how the grid was set up when all we had was coal. You know, like, why are we judging these new technologies by, like, the benchmarks of the 1800s? The way to cut the intermittency of renewable energy like solar and wind is battery storage. So you, like, extra juice these batteries when you have too much solar and then you're able to like cut that cut that uh the drop off yeah i did a whole i did a video on my setup which is it obviously takes a lot and we could there's another rabbit hole to like create the batteries and to ship them to your house and all that but once you have it all set up you have batteries i have batteries in my garage and i have solar panels on the roof and the whole thing just kind of works as a cycle hardly ever touches the grid charges the card the house runs off of electricity from solar all day nice and so that's like a nice ideal setup but it's still not carbon zero because you have to get it all to the house there's there's that whole rabbit hole um but i think what we want to talk about is some of these big tech companies where it's like okay now if you're google how how on earth do you attack that problem of like all of your buildings and all of your manufacturing and electricity and the lights and everything being uh clean energy we have a quote here from google google has claimed that they have matched a hundred percent of its global annual electricity consumption with the purchase of renewable energy.

33:15Okay. Okay, so this kind of feels like another accounting practice. What does this mean? I mean, it's tough because this is great. We like that Google is investing their money in clean energy, right? I want to say, Google, Jonathan P. Google, if you're listening, thank you. You're doing, I love what you're doing with the place. the accounting strategy is real, right? Like you're generating power from all sorts of places. Those electrons get mixed up in a big electron soup and then they're powering Google. So like various parts of Google. So it's not as though like every electron that turns on the light in Johnny Google's office is from a renewable energy source.

34:00But they are, I believe they are accounting for all that energy through things like power purchase agreements and uh rec purchases which are renewable energy certificates so when you man god i'm i i know what i'm gonna say and i'm already bored by what i'm saying i'm so sorry um when you produce clean energy you you dump it into the grid and you also get a rec or a renewable energy certificate that you can sell and that's a way to incentivize more renewable energy generation. So Google can effectively offset the electricity that they use by making sure that they have accounted for all their electricity through purchasing direct from renewable energy companies or purchasing renewable energy certificates for the megawatt hours that they've been using.

34:49Okay. So it kind of divides again into to like those two camps of like, you can either get your supply as clean as possible, or you can accept that your supply won't always be clean, but sort of accept that total and purchase offsets in some way that can account for that. Right, which is what we wanna encourage, right? We wanna incentivize that, but also like, it also encourages Google to make claims like, every single thing we've ever done is renewable energy. We've never once even thought about using natural gas as an energy source. And like, of course, you could very easily point to a time when some station was run on natural gas.

35:29But because they bought so many offsets, they can say that everything they've ever done has been offset. Right. In fact, like legacy emissions. This is a new thing. I think Microsoft is kind of hot on this, where it's like, we're going to calculate all the electricity we've ever used and offset that. But also like Google is doing some cool where they will install geothermal generation on their, I think their Bayview campus is all geothermal heat pumps. Wow. And so that's like powered pretty renewably. And also it cuts down on their water usage. So like they're doing cool. I wanted to talk more about the language because Google lays down this sort of complicated, like matched 100%, you know, it's not exactly like the clearest sentence in the world, But in the sort of Apple companion sister press release that they always do, they full on say Apple's global facilities are powered with 100 percent clean energy across 43 countries, which just feels like an impossible wrong thing.

36:32So are you allowed to say powered with 100 percent clean energy, even if you're just offsetting it? Yeah, so I think Apple's claim that they're powered 100 % renewable in 43 countries when they only have power generation in 20-something countries is like, so you're not powered by that. You're doing the offsetting. And to my knowledge, I think they are also doing some kind of power purchasing or rec purchasing or something and just calling it powered because you can do the mental judo to make it feel like that's what's powering you. Sorry to interrupt. Is that kind of like when they say like made with 100 % real juice or something and it's like half from concentrate, but it's made with 100 % real juice?

37:22There was a war at the beginning. There was an attempt. Yeah. You know what I mean? Like that. I think it's actually even worse than that because the FDA pretty tightly regulates things like that. And there are such loose regulations in what you're allowed to say. Europe. I think the European Parliament is is starting to crack down on that. And so, like, you can't make greenwashing claims like 100 percent clean powered if it's not. the U.S., bless our little hearts, has fewer scruples about what a company is allowed to say marketing-wise. So, yeah, I think Apple can say that and they can back it up by proving, oh, every single time we, you know, like flushed a toilet, that's the one thing that doesn't take electricity.

38:12My God. Every time we turn the light on and turn the fan on in the bathroom, wow, I'm blowing this. We can account for that in renewable energy. And yeah, I mean, like, they can. You know, like, they kind of can. And also, no one's going to walk into Tim Cook's office. Who runs Apple now? Tim Cook. Tim Cook. Okay, great. I almost said Steve Jobs. I really didn't. No one's going to dig up Steve Jobs and arrest him. So this is a really interesting thing, because Apple kind of, I've learned a lot about what Apple's been doing, and they kind of do both sides of this, where, yeah, they clearly can't be completely renewable, and so their statements kind of feel fuzzy in that way.

38:48but on the other hand they have a lot of solar on on their hq i doubt the entire thing runs from solar but they have a lot of solar there they have all these solar farms that they've contributed to building and then the one thing that really stuck with me was uh having a meeting with them them talking about manufacturing and also that's a very cool sentence to say having a meeting with apple oh no yeah we've and look they they love to talk our ear off about all the great things that they're doing nice um but one of the things that stuck with me was they may say that they're doing some things and you can split into these two buckets but one thing about apple is they they've told me like strongly they're trying to make the best effort to to use sustainable suppliers and so they'll go to a supplier and say we will only do business with you if you are reaching this benchmark or if you are this much more sustainable and so instead of just buying the credits, they're actually making that effort.

39:48And then on top of that, because they're such a big company, the suppliers, number one, they want that business. So they're going to try to do that. And then every other company who uses that same supplier for something just have their process, their supply chain get that much more sustainable as well. So the biggest companies going through the effort to adjust their supply chain to be more sustainable does have, feels like a really good impact on the entire system if that makes sense i think that's a great point and i think i think uh what we want is every company to be like trying for that yeah i will note the sentence that apple told you was we're trying to make the best effort to work with people who are like clean in the supply chain which is just like couching all their life you know like at the end of the day they're trying to make another trillion dollars or whatever and they're really good at it and they have so much money right like they if they wanted to yeah they could just say we're only working with suppliers to do this yeah so like they are doing a lot and i really respect the accomplishments that they have made and i think our job as like people in the same world this Apple is to like say good job, but also don't stop where you're at because that's not far enough.

41:13Yeah. Or you can say whatever version of good job and you can make it mean if you want even. Good start. Good start. Yeah. It's a good start. Speaking of clean energy and kind of near the end of this topic, there's a thing that Apple did either at the beginning of this year or last year. Bitmojis. Yeah. Huge. Yeah. That we made a short on where basically by default on every iPhone running a certain iOS version or whatever, it now automatically will only pull power when your grid is coming from a clean energy source unless you turn it off, it is opt out. And I wanted your opinion on both. What is exactly does, how does that work?

41:55Like how does your grid sometimes come from clean energy and sometimes not? Can you just give like a brief like top-down recap of what that looks like? And also if you think that that is actually super impactful or not. Yeah, yeah. Okay, so I think probably what Apple's language is, is like, we're going to charge when the grid is most renewable, right? Yes. Because like some grids, never renewable. All natural gas, you know, like sometimes there's just, or not all natural gas, but like the majority of the electricity is generated by natural gas. However, in California, for instance, there's this thing called the duck curve.

42:31Has anyone heard of this thing? No. It's like, don't worry about it. Don't look it up. Don't look it up. It's basically, don't, don't, stop Googling. Don't know. Basically, like, we put so much rooftop solar. It really does look like a duck. I totally think the opposite. I've never seen the duck. People have been like, look, it's a duck. And I'm like, fuck you, it's a duck. It's a stretch. It's not, okay. Yeah, that's true. It's a stretch. What it is, is there's enough solar electricity being generated in California that they can't use at all. So it creates this kind of like... Oh, wow. Yeah. So if you're in California, your iPhone is most likely to charge on this renewable energy charging at the peak hours, in the like noon, kind of when there's the most sun and the most solar on the grid, because that grid is like maximum solar.

43:23This is my understanding of how this Apple works. If you are out there, Tim, I know you're watching this. Nice pajamas last night. um what a weird what a horrible thing for me to say um uh yeah so i think this is how that works but if you are in a place where there is not a lot of renewable energy being dispatched into your grid it's just gonna have to pick the time when it's like oh there's like a little bit more wind maybe it got like windier it's always a mix yeah yeah or like there's more nuclear online or is that like public information that your iphone can collect yeah absolutely yeah you can the Energy Information Administration, EIA.

44:03Matt, fact check. Yeah, yeah. You can, I mean, you can't get like your specific part of transmission, but like you can get a breakdown of your chunk of the grid. So like you could look at New York State and see basically what's happening. Right. And it's different for different times of the year. So like the shoulder months where there's less electricity load for AC and more solar, so say like September, October, that's where you have the biggest, where they're dumping a lot of solar in California. Matt is an engineer turned comedian. And so that's, there's not a lot of those out there. So if you find one, hold on to them.

44:39That's me too. Oh, really? I'm not funny. You're very funny. I thought you were a computer scientist. That's the same thing as an engineer. Matt's like a real engineer. A computer scientist is just an engineer who - Matt drives trains, okay? Wow. I was making a bad joke that if was funny would make my point true. If you're a comedian. Here's what happened. I felt like I needed to defend myself, but objectively it was funny. It was the right moment. It was the right timing. You said it right. I just was like, someone's going to get mad at me. And I didn't want that. I'm not a comedian, but I can be funny.

45:16You're a funny guy. When there's 1.46 billion active iPhones throughout the world, do you see that as actually being an impactful change? Like that only charging in peak hours kind of thing? So I think, I mean, that's not going to be the thing that saves us. But I think the thing that saves us is like 100 ,000 things that won't save us. You know, like our salvation is going to come at the hands of like an everything thrown at the wall kind of approach. Right. And Apple doing an opt out. Yeah. Version of this is awesome. It felt like a big deal to us because normally companies don't do opt out things.

45:58Right. They're trying to screw you over. But this seems like a like, wait, this is like good for everyone. Yeah. It felt like a thing they didn't have to do. They flip the switch. Everyone's phones are doing it by default. And you can then people were happy to opt out in the comments. But it was just the fact that that many phones all at once opted in. It felt like it made a dent. So really your video about how to opt out probably was carbon negative. Probably a bad thing. Oh, man. I think it's I think it's really cool. I think it is free for Apple to do because they're not paying for the electricity.

46:31Sure. So like it's a very cool move. Way to go, Tim. It goes back to the beginning thing. every company has got a good public facing and private facing reason. The private facing reason is that was pretty good PR. That was pretty good. But yeah, it actually does make a difference. So that was good to see. That's cool. That most of what they're doing with emissions when they're looking at carbon emissions is scope three. So they're actually looking at what's happening with their products when they're out in the world. Not like what's happening at their offices or what's happening in their trucks.

47:00Like they're looking at like these products are living out in the world. And so over the course of your life, your iPhone, like you're charging it on the grid. And so it is also affecting their carbon emissions because like the vast majority, like 90 plus percent is scope three, which includes charging your iPhone. So it all ties back into the same thing of like carbon neutrality, where if they can get an iPhone onto a cleaner charging system, that's reducing their carbon emissions because they're actually counting that with their carbon emissions. Can they track that? They can estimate it. They can estimate that.

47:29That's really interesting. Interesting. I had no idea that it was 90 percent. When you're looking at carbon emissions for these companies, tech companies, it's like 95%. Yeah. I mean, maybe it's Google. Microsoft was 96, I think. Yeah, it's like very, very high scope three, which is outside the company. Wow. That's interesting because when I look at a massive company like Microsoft, Google, Apple, whatever, I just automatically picture huge buildings and tons of lights and manufacturing equipment and all this stuff that naturally feels like it has to be making a big impact. but probably more than all of that put together, or as we're learning is more than all of that, is probably the transportation of getting it to you and then the energy that it burns while it's in your hands.

48:11So this is something, when Apple came out, I think it was earlier this year, and they said that the Apple Watch this year, Series 9, is Apple's first ever carbon neutral product, fully carbon neutral. They said that that includes the entire lifetime of you using and charging it, which obviously they don't know how much you're going to use it or charge it or how or when you're going to use it and charge it. But they've made that estimate. They've reduced as much possible in the manufacturing and getting it to you and bought enough offsets that they feel that they can claim that the Apple Watch for the lifetime of owning it makes no impact to the environment.

48:46Or at least that's what they want you to think. Yeah. I think that sounds like a really good start. Yeah. Interesting. Okay. Well, I think that's a pretty good place to leave off for clean energy. We've got one more section on recycling coming up, so that's a pretty good place for a natural break. We'll be right back.

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50:37All right, welcome back. We've got one more section, one more topic to cover with these tech companies and their green stuff. And that's recycling. And we're not talking about juice. Yeah, we got to talk recycling. You almost went hard on them. And they're green stuff. Yeah. You know, the quote again came up in my head about like made with 100 % juice. And I just keep replaying that in my head. Because every time I see one of these recycling quotes, it kind of feels like I don't know how to read this quote in a way that would actually answer what I'm supposed to know about this. But I'll give you some examples.

51:11Hey, man. And you can tell me what you think about them. Apple promises that by 2025, magnets in Apple devices will use entirely recycled rare earth elements. All Apple-designed printed circuit boards will use 100 % recycled tin soldering and 100 % recycled gold plating. Oh, cool. And by 2025, the target is to use 100 % recycled cobalt in all Apple-designed batteries. batteries. Apple Design batteries. Apple Design. Which ones are Apple Design, which ones are not? So some of these feel like made with 100%. I don't know exactly if that's what that means. But all of them seem like good things. I mean, you obviously want to use as many recycled materials as possible.

51:58What was that quote that you had about like if all the phones anyone's ever bought? So there's a company in France, I think that maybe somewhere in Europe that makes I'll fact check as you go. Yeah, it's a company called Fairphone. Oh, yeah. Amsterdam. Amsterdam, yeah. They make these... Amsterdam, France. Yeah. Got it. They make these phones that are supposed to be, like, upgradeable and last a long time, but their biggest thing is that they are just trying to, like, be better about getting people to be more climate conscious. And we interviewed the CEO, and he said something about Cobalt where he said, if you took every phone that was sitting in a drawer somewhere in someone's house and you recycled all the cobalt in it we'd never have to mine cobalt again dang yeah so pretty crazy and everyone's got that drawer like when you said that i thought i was like i know the exact drawer that's got four of my old iphones right yeah yeah right i think that's like so so cobalt is like a extremely renewable resource right uh i mean yeah so every every molecule of every element is a commodity right like it is identical to any other molecule so in that way yes they are renewable um or they're not so much renewable as in reusable recyclable renewable means like regenerative they're all finite but they're all potentially reusable right and the problem is uh it's kind of hard to organize every single person in the world to like go to their drawer get it out give it to the the right factory and then that factory has to like go into the phone take the cobalt out re-homogenize it in whatever way cobalt is i don't know i'm over my skis here i don't know how cobalt is like actually recycled into a new cobalt phone but like that is totally true in the same way that like if we were able to like get all of the food that's wasted at a restaurant in america to every other country like no one would ever go hungry again like technically accurate probably or close to it i mean not known whatever just close but it's like logistically insane got it for sure yeah right yeah but in general i think i think this is one of the easiest ones to get everyone on the same page which is uh virgin materials bad recycling good.

54:20It feels like the, it feels like the simple, uh, at least from the messaging that I see from these tech companies, it feels like the thing that they're all stressing. Like we want to use as many recycled materials as possible because that is sustainable. Yeah. I, I mean, yes, I think that the messaging is going to say a lot of that. And then to a, to an extent that's very true. Um, however, they're, you know, like they're, they're in, they're trying to hit a quota, right? They have to make a certain amount of phones and if they can't get the recycled cobalt from a drawer in your mom's attic or something not to why did i drag your mom into this doesn't matter if they can't get that that phone they're gonna mine the cobalt out of whatever cobalt mine they need to because like they're gonna do that but i mean like that's not to say they shouldn't use recycled cobalt and i'm really happy that they are yeah but like it's it's a it's a piece of the puzzle, right?

55:15It sort of feels like with all the things that we've talked about so far today, it's like, it feels like we're reaching a point in capitalism where it's more cost effective for the company to do things that are climate positive in a lot of ways. Would you say that's the case? I think we're slowly getting to that point. I think still to this day, it is probably more cost effective for a company to mine new material than it is for them to recycle it just because like when when you're mining it you're getting it a giant vein of it in one shot and you don't have to do a lot of processing to get it to pry it out of old phones right i think like if there was some kind of law that was like it's we're gonna put a giant tariff on like mining new cobalt yes that would be super cost effective they would all go after all the old phones There'd be like a huge phone buyback program that would absolutely be a fantastic move.

56:14But I think like it tends to be a little easier to mine it. And companies are very incentivized to do the easy, fast thing. So like that's why there's so much mining right now, which is crazy because cobalt is not like an easy metal to mine. Like it's not found in places that are necessarily the most accessible. it's it's you know it it's crazy that it's it's easier to go to the congo into the middle of the jungle and pull the stuff out of the ground than it is to like you know not to bring her back into it but go to david's mom's house and the attic of david yes you know what i mean it also it kind of strikes me that a recycling would be the easiest for uh regular people to get on board with like we talked about that feature before where it's opt out where it's going to flip a switch on everyone's phones and it's going to if you plug it in maybe not charge for a couple hours until you're on clean energy and people were like oh that's so inconvenient i'm gonna disable that on my phone i wish it would just charge but like nobody can tell the difference between a recycled aluminum frame on their phone and a brand new aluminum frame on their phone i feel like the more of these metals and and rare earth magnets and all these things that happen to be recycled in your phone generally the better because i feel like i can't tell the difference no i think that's true i think like it would be amazing to like have that be the the uh status quo where we're just with like recycling old phones, and my God, there are so many phones out there.

57:37Like if we could just take those phones and disassemble them and put those elements right back in a new phone, that would be awesome. I think like it tends to not be that easy. Recycling facilities are like, you have to kind of mulch up a phone and like use different density sorting techniques to get different elements out of it. And it's not a perfect science yet. It's like hard to do. But emphasizing that to companies, we want more recycled in our phones that's I think a really good move I love your take on this thing that happened recently there's this company called OnePlus right hate them hate them no what are they sorry OnePlus catching a stray right there what is OnePlus what do they do they're a phone company okay alright strike one strike one they made this folding phone recently okay right expensive $1700 they have this rebate that lasts until the end of time until they stop selling the phone where if you send them in any phone in any condition from any one plus phone no any phone anybody's phone well any phone sure i guess like marquez can i borrow your phone i gotta send a text for any phone that has ever been made if you send them a phone okay uh it could be burned to a crisp it could be whatever they will give you a 200 off their new folding phone oh and And somebody in my briefing was like, so it could be like, you know, a 12 year old phone or like something that doesn't work anymore.

59:03And they're like, yeah. And there's been a lot of questions like, why would they do that? And my intuition was they're trying to get the Cobalt from it either as a credit of sorts that they can use later or that they can like reuse in their devices. But I don't know if that's way too expensive to do. that probably cost more than$200 per device? Like, what's your take on that? Yeah, there's definitely not$200 worth of Cobalt in every phone. I think, I mean, it sounds cool. I think that's a cool move for one phone, OnePlus? OnePlus. OnePlus to do? Yeah. Sorry, OnePlus. It sounds pretty cool. And yeah, I'm not really sure.

59:46I suppose there's like a, I bet it's a$1 ,500 phone that they're like, We better tack on an extra$200. My guess was they just want it to seem more premium, but it cost them less. I think in general, a lot of these folding phones have bigger margins. They are more expensive, but they have to make them expensive to look like the highest-end thing. So they have bigger margins to play with, and maybe they're just taking the$200 hit in the margins to maybe it's a combo of marketing and recycling and the cobalt they get from it and whatever they'll be able to say in the next keynote about how many phones they recycle.

1:00:17We recycled 50 ,000 of these phones for you. All that put together. Yeah. Which. And that's just from one guy's mom's house. Yeah. So it feels like a net positive. My mom hasn't had any phones. But as with any. My mom's a drug dealer. What? Well. As with any of these. My drug is cobalt. As with any of these quotes, there's obviously language that's very specific to them. And there's an asterisk at the end of apples. That is the. That's the whole thing about quotes. Language that's very specific to them. Very specific. Yeah. Very specific with this one. So apples that I read at the end with the Apple design batteries has an asterisk.

1:00:50So the quote again is, by 2025, they are targeting using 100 % recycled cobalt in all Apple design batteries. Asterisk. The asterisk says, when you scroll down to the bottom, all cobalt content references are on a mass balance system basis. Okay. I read this, and I don't know what that means. So when I knew you were coming, I decided not to Google it. I'll just ask you. Okay, so as far as I understand, mass balance system is about inputs versus outputs. So when you say mass balance, if you have almost all recycled cobalt or all recycled cobalt going into the system, anything that's coming out of the system gets to be counted as 100 % recycled cobalt.

1:01:37So even if you've got somewhere in the line, and please, if you're out there and you're like, that's not what it means, leave a comment and I'll respond to it and I'll see. thanks jackson um yeah so mass balance is a way to because when and it's also probably not 100 recycled cobalt in the whole thing you know in the same way it's like oh it's 100 recycled plastic in the in the phone but it's actually like oh actually just the back case is recycled and 58 of the plastic total is recycled um it's it's a way to allow inputs to be counted in the system itself because when you are recycling something you're mixing all the molecules together just like the electricity or just like the offsets where you you need to be able to account for the extra inputs in the system so maybe maybe you're flushing the system with recycled cobalt and eventually all of the the phones and all of the batteries are using recycled cobalt but it's a way to kind of couch it a little bit yeah and the thing you mentioned also with the different parts of the phone is very, very, very common for these quotes, where they'll say that we're using recycled aluminum, but they'll say it's just the enclosure of the Pixel 5, where there's a lot of aluminum also in the frame on the inside of the phone that they don't talk about.

1:02:58So it'll just be the outside, which you're holding, and you're holding recycled aluminum. That's great. But stuff like that comes up a lot. The enclosure of the phone, the frame of the phone, this part of the phone is recycled aluminum, which is nice. and which also brings up another thing also, which is Google's quote for recycled aluminum. It was back housing only. And recycled aluminum is approximately 58 % of the Pixel 5 enclosure based on weight. Okay. So specific. Yeah. And like, I just want to make sure I'm clear here. Like, this is a good thing to be recycling this material. Absolutely.

1:03:35And the engineers, the mechanical engineers or whoever's designing or what, I don't know how phones work. These guys are like, we're trying to do our best. You know, like we're doing our best to put as much in there. And then the marketing arm is like, got it. Now, how do we like spin this in one line and make it really pop? Yeah. And that's where this sort of like judo comes in. So I wanna say like, great job on the 58 % of recycled material. Let's see how high we can get that. But then when you see a quote, that's like 100 % recycled, and you're like, well, back away from the table like a blackjack dealer and move on to the next thing.

1:04:13You can't let them stop at 100 % when 100 % is 50%. Right, right. But it's good, but it's not there yet. Yeah. It says the aluminum in the enclosure of the Pixel 5 is 100 % recycled content, in which I would say so is ours. Nice. Recycled content. See, you are a comedian. Don't sell yourself short. but 100 % of 58 % is 58 % no one can do that math that's too hard that to me that is the exact fruit juice thing that right there yeah the aluminum in the enclosure of the Pixel 5 is 100 % recycled content but that recycled content is 58 % recycled content yeah okay got it 50 % of the time it works every time got it that asterisk is doing a lot of heavy lifting but like that's not the engineer like the engineers are doing their best I know I don't know there's no I I think it's easy, especially on YouTube or on the internet in general.

1:05:10People want to be like, this is only terrible or this is only amazing. But it's sort of one of those middle ground things where it's like, it is a net positive, even though it is also beneficial for the company to be doing it. One of those kind of things. And, you know, I mean, it doesn't feel good to be like, thanks, Apple. You're really saving the planet. Because you know that their net emissions without all the offsets and stuff are still like, but it's still good you don't want to like be mad at companies for doing the best that they can uh well are they doing the best that they can well and that's like they're doing the best that they want to do something yeah yeah like i think i think that's that's where we exist we can like we force them to do better or ask them to do better yeah and also be happy that they're doing right doing something you know yeah yeah i think that's a good place to like summarize it all because at the end of the day, we vote with our wallets.

1:06:03If we actually want to make decisions based on what these companies are saying about not just how well the product works, but how sustainably well it's made, we can make that difference to them because that's the thing they care the most about is where we spend our money. So when we are evaluating what these companies are saying, we can push them a little bit on, okay, you could do better here, or you could do more here, or you could be more sustainable here and actually buy products and make it obvious that that's why you're buying the product. Yeah. Although we vote with our wallets, but we like encourage with our mouths and social media.

1:06:38So like that's the other thing. If you're out there and you like want to push these guys, like push them. Like they, for some reason, they listen to you on Twitter, you know, like they listen, they like, they take all that into account and like be that force if you're out there. Yeah. Don't let them off the hook. Yeah. The Fairphone company that we were talking about is one of the most interesting ones in the space because they have made a conscious effort to, and I made a video about this, to make their entire smartphone from the beginning of the process, from the offices that they work in, to the manufacturing, to the mining, to the packaging, to the shipping, the whole thing to be as sustainable and renewable as possible.

1:07:18And the trade-off with a phone that makes all of those decisions is it's not as thin and pretty and it's not made of metal it's got a plastic back there all these are all these things that are a little bit right here it's got it's got a little bit of the uh do you want to go all the way or not yeah and i think people will vote with their nuance somewhere in the middle as we all follow that example yeah what fair fun there's a there's a new sort of um soc like computer process that people are doing where they do everything on one die now instead of having like the ram is separate from the gpu is separate from the motherboard now it's all one and integrating everything like that makes these things exponentially faster so like apple uh announced the m1 architecture a couple of years ago and that's what all these computers are running on they're not very repairable so there's sort of this awkward tension between like if we want to keep advancing technology becoming more integrated is like kind of what you have to do but then there's the flip side of like you can't fix it yeah so and repairability is like one of the biggest ways to be sustainable yeah that's true yeah yeah i mean so we're the the right to repair are we're gonna do an episode on right to repair on our cool our youtube channel climate town i'm so excited yeah at youtube.blogspot um is that the plug oh that's cool oh okay i also have a podcast called the climate deniers playbook there we go all right it's on it's on spotify oh hosted on the worldwide web oh damn it's hosted in my mom's attic but yeah right repair is that's a good callback see you got the chops man you could go all the way with that one but yeah right repair is one of those things that we we always i made a video about this as well it's like okay we want tech to be better tech gets more integrated gets more tightly knit gets faster now it's less repairable now it's less sustainable yeah so that's a challenge we all have to sort of contend with yeah that's true but there's also like apple being in like purposely difficult exactly and that's that yeah that's that yeah there are things on the fringes that are notably anti-repair which make it really tough to justify all the rest of the stuff that they do yeah are you kind of wrapping it up yeah i was gonna say the ev rabbit hole is way too deep to dive into now oh god big one i'll come back later i'll come back in an indian evie oh what about the you want to do the leather one we have like quick oh yeah yeah quick hits okay okay yeah all right i think i'll i'll we'll wrap it up with a couple quick hits no pressure to think too hard about these but also all the comment section is is waiting to comment about these we got a bunch of quick hit heads in the in the comments couple quick hits they skip straight to this part of the podcast there's time stamps for for them to get mad here.

1:10:14All right. You have 10 seconds for each answer. First one, is net water positive a real or interesting thing we should care about? It's a bit of an accounting technique. Google uses net water positive to imply that they're gray or non-potable water. Potable, obviously, being Latin root for potare, right? Not potable. They use that to say we're catching more rainwater, so we're cycling out how much potable water we're using and we're collecting more than we're using. yeah so but and then they also use as much pot potable water as they as they want um apple getting rid of all leather in all of their stores and all their products feels like a good thing but doesn't vegan leather use a ton of energy to create yeah but like it also doesn't produce all of the methane that we're seeing like cattle farms produce so like certainly there are bad parts of everything, but I'd rather have like a vegan product that produces so little methane rather than like a leather product that is part of this giant meat industrial complex that's like slowly drowning the entire planet.

1:11:21Totally fair. Is it true that shipping more products via ocean than air is actually a good thing? Absolutely, yes. It's a little bit slower, but when you think about buoyancy, right, you can make a ship naturally buoyant and a plane requires like a ton. were you thinking about buoyancy too hard there there's a running joke here on the pod that none of us understand how boats work don't know how they work that's a good bit just just perplexes i get planes but i just don't really you know boats are just yeah joke right well air is a fluid air is a fluid so just imagine how and boats don't have wings so what the do they have little tiny wing they have one wing on the bottom of the boat little wings it's called the keel or the dagger board if you're in a sailboat this is see like my eyes they're just i can't they turned they turned all black for a second and like hovered off his chair you could cover a donut with all that glaze damn okay so yeah the quick hit heads are going crazy in the comments yeah well last quick hit true or false the ev battery rabbit hole is too deep to dive down right now uh true but only because i want to come back and talk to you guys about that later we are going to have a We'll do a separate episode just on the Eevee rabbit hole because we'd be happy to dive down that rabbit hole.

1:12:36Yeah. I have a quick hit. Sure. Raleigh. Yes. How fast can you type the alphabet? Wait. 5.9 seconds. Would you like to prove that? No, but yeah, I'll do it. I'll try it. All right. So the way this works is pretty simple, Raleigh. What you're looking at in front of you is a box. It's empty. All you've got to do is type all the letters of the alphabet in order from A to Z and then don't hit enter at the end. when you hit Z, you'll have a time. Don't hit enter. Don't hit enter. In any order? You gotta type in order. Alphabetical order? A, B, C to E, F, G, all the way to Z. When you hit Z, that's your time.

1:13:09We're gonna give you three attempts, and if you hit 5.9 on the dot, I will give you a small trophy. Oh, wow. And if you miss a letter, it will not accept any of the following letters until you hit it. You have to go back and hit it. If you go A, B, D, E, F, it'll be waiting on C. But it doesn't penalize me for hitting the wrong letter? Correct. So I can just mash in the area. Yes. True. I mean, that's not going to be faster. It's a bad strategy, but you're technically right. But what if it isn't? You know what? You have to hit them in order still. But you can hit like... I mean, you could just...

1:13:43I'm just going to try something really quick. I mean, theoretically, if you wipe 26 times in two seconds, you'll get it two seconds. I can't quite cover all the keys. I was just trying. It's very hard. Are you wiping though? Yeah, are you wiping though? Answer the question. Alright, here we go. We got our leaderboard pulled out. That doesn't work for me at all. Okay, ready? Yeah.

1:14:155.8. Wow. That's a pretty good first score. I was trying to get 5.9. Very, very close. You'll have two more attempts if you want to try to get faster than 5.8. Can I try to get slower than 5.8? You can. Wait, what is the decimals on that? Just a camera. 5.844. Okay, so you can either try to get exactly 5.9 or you can try to go for our leaderboard. I'm gonna I'm gonna try to go as fast as I can and I bet I'm gonna get a 5.9. Okay, even better. That would be a huge win. Ready? Yeah. And it just it just resets or do I have to reset it? When you hit enter it does reset. Got it.

1:14:566.2 damn it all right one more time here we go 5.9 wow 5.973 that's pretty close that's pretty good oh you i had to get 5.900 technically this rounds up but i'm impressed you were three hundredths of a second i am very impressed than dr mike so yeah just in case you're curious your 5.8 puts you 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 at ninth on our all-time leaderboard Wow. Right above Doug DeMuro, right behind our local dad, Andrew Manganielli. Yeah. Well played. Thank you very much. 5.8. But I feel like if I get a trophy for 5.9, that's got to go. That's got to be my score. What's the significance of 5.9? I was just guessing.

1:15:53I just thought I could maybe do it. He just nailed it. But I went a little over. It's pretty close. I went a little over and a little under. We don't keep track of this, but 5.8 might have been the best first round score we've ever. Tom Scott might have beaten that on his first round. I can't quite remember. Yeah. But that's a pretty great first. I got to tell you, I'm a terrible typer. I only use these fingers. What do you think our slowest all time time is? If your 5.8 is terrible, what do you think is the worst? Did anyone get disqualified for having a bad attitude or something? we did have a certain someone start off by saying i am a bad typist really bad like hunt and peck and he was not last place wow yeah um i guess i'm gonna say 12 seconds is the max david blaine was said subject he got 8.8 wait david blaine is the slow oh and he was said i'm a bad typist yeah yeah what was the slowest uh our local our local brandon he got a 9.4 okay so no one's even no No one's been over 10.

1:16:56Yeah, yeah. Okay, that's good. You only have tech heads on the show. Yeah, we've got capable keyboardists here. Nice. Who's got the fastest score? Tom Scott. At what? 3.5. Get the out, Tom Scott. It was insane. It was insane. He was like, yeah, I think I can do it. Done. That's some classic Tom Scott. I'm standing here over a keyboard. There are 26 keys that I need to hit in the precise order. And he - That's for sure how it started. He was like insistent about doing it on his Dell laptop. Wow. Yeah, because he had the keyboard down. God, what a guy. What a god. Yeah. Okay, so to round this out, we usually ask guests, is there anything that people don't generally know about the topic that we're talking about that you just really want them to know?

1:17:39Do you want these commenters to be like, huh, that's a fun fact about the climate that they just had no idea about? So I think I want to stress that they probably don't know how ignorant I am on the topic, how ignorant like everybody is on the topic. Like these are, these are subjects that like we were, we're talking about this on the ride over and we were like trying to wonder exactly how solar is curtailed and where the electricity goes when like it's produced or it's not produced. And there's just so much to every single part of this that I am like so surface level aware of, even after like a couple of months of study.

1:18:19so like these are complex difficult topics that if somebody is like oh i'm an expert in how solar works like they're not they aren't they're super not and so i think that should number one let me tell you how you should feel about this empowered to go out and learn but um more than anything just like you you get to pick what you learn today and you get to pick like how far along a subject you get into, and it's probably worth your time to understand the climate crisis as deeply as you can. You'll never waste your time researching this stuff. So by all means, please go research, because there's like a bajillion things that I have no clue about, and I'm gonna spend the rest of my life trying to figure them out.

1:19:03Yeah. If you can make it that far. Then. I just get shot. It's been a sting operation from Waveform. Oh my god. God. I think, David, you meant climate change mega death, not like big oil assassinates Raleigh. What is this podcast? But I think in general it is, you're right, it's a good idea to learn about the world we live in, about this planet. We only have one of them, so it's pretty important. Yeah. Worth looking into. Yeah. This has been really fun. Like I said, we'll have you back. We'll talk about EVs. We'll do this again. Deal. But until the next one, where can they find you on the internet?

1:19:41Okay, yeah. Yeah, YouTube. I have a YouTube channel called Climate Town. Check that out. We have 24 videos out or something, so it won't even take you that long to go through them all. They're bangers, though. They're like 20, 30-minute big-time pieces. That's sometimes not how people describe bangers. I think they're like... I think on YouTube 2023, when I see a 25-minute video in my sub box, I'm like, oh, I'm popping the popcorn. This is a good one. Then they are indeed bangers. They're bangers. Bangers to the last. Bangers only. Yes. Bangers Only that's a good like that's my website BangersOnly.net BangersOnly.net he had to plug that in here it was inevitable it's probably link plugging time yeah sorry no it's totally fine I'm gonna go there after this thanks and so that's that's the YouTube channel the Climate Deniers Playbook check that out that's me and my comedy partner slash friend Nicole Conlon she got a plug she writes for The Daily Show so she's really smart and really funny those are the two big ones follow us on instagram we're like just at climatetown and at uh deniers playbook everywhere we have a patreon page if you're feeling like you got an extra five bucks that you want to throw my way that'd be cool the plug sound is going to make me really self-conscious about what's what's uh what i'm plugging in that we have a whole lighting cue with it too oh really that was a plug for the lighting cue this is cool and then also if you if If you want to just get a little goofy with it, I have a billiards channel.

1:21:12If you just type my name. Wait, wait, wait. We can make this one serious. Okay. Since the dawn of time, mankind has wondered, how do you hit a ball with a stick into another ball into a hole? And all these questions and more are answered at the YouTube channel, Raleigh Williams. Yeah. But don't do the Climatetown ones first. Don't do that one first. only if there's if you've you are like i need more vitamin him in my life like then go check that out but not before you check out climate 10 there it is there it is yeah thank you guys so much for watching for listening for subscribing of course and for liking and we'll read your comments catch you guys in the next one peace go for it we're almost produced by adam alina and ellis rovin we are part of the vox media podcast network and our intro outro music is by vain sill so close first take

1:22:38you guys ready for the next section yes yeah all right all right let's get it

1:22:47i'm about to recycle a bunch of jokes nice okay perfect david whatever you're doing keep doing it yeah i don't know what it is but you got it brother yeah you're gonna make it in this town kid. Yeah. Think enterprise software is too costly, too complex, and takes too long to get up and running? Think again. Workday Go makes simplifying your small or mid-sized business simple. HR and finance together on one powerful AI platform right at your fingertips. Workday Go gets you live fast and fits the needs of your business. Find out what Workday Go can do for you. Go with Workday Go.

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