Join us for a rare, reflective conversation about the learnings and insights gained from hosting a podcast, highlighting the inspiring work of diverse and talented individuals, including entrepreneurs and nonprofit leaders.
My wife and I discuss the emotional and intellectual journey from ignorance to awareness about global challenges such as resource shortages and climate change, and how these issues are being addressed.
The main question is: Are we more or less optimistic after talking to all these people??
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➡️ Watch this Episode on YouTube: @therosspalmer
(upbeat music) - All right, so what are we gonna talk about in today's episode? - Well, I wanna know what you've learned from your guests. I know that you have podcast guests. I do watch them even though you think I never watched. - Okay, you're the only one, so that's good. It was you and my mom, but she dropped out 100 episodes ago, so it's just you now. So that's nice, it's nice that your wife is watching. - It's my duty as a wife. - Yeah. (laughs) - Listening to you talk sometimes. - Okay. - So what have you learned? - I think, what have we learned? That's a hard question to answer, but-- - They're so diverse. - 200, yeah, very different people, many entrepreneurs, many non-profit people. I think the biggest thing that we have learned is how many talented and incredible people there are. I think there are genuinely people who are doing amazing things for the planet and have built successful businesses doing that. - Future optimist. - When you start it as a wife, I know that you can get a little cynical about the world. - Well, that's a little cynical. - That's a little bad. (laughs) - And it's easy to get cynical and at times we live in, as parents, you also look at the world in a different way. And if you look at the state of the world, it's really easy to get hopeless. But I think it's been really good for you to talk to these people who are like, yeah, things suck and we're gonna make a difference. And this is the concrete way that I'm gonna contribute. - Yeah, I think so too. And I think we've often talked about three levels to things and there being three levels. And I think the first is just broad ignorance. Everything is gonna be fine, but not out of any place of intellectual knowledge. Just I believe everything's gonna be fine because my astrologist is gonna be fine, right? And there are a lot of people, and that's why I say ignorance is bliss, right? That's the first tier. Everything's gonna be fine, but have no basis for that, no scientific understanding of the state of the world, of our resources, of climate change, whatever, right? - Yeah, that's basically just anxiety. Just trying to convince yourself is what I think it is. - Or something else. But yeah, you know, something is causing a lot of you. - This is the yin and yang. (laughing) - I believe everybody is smart. All the people in the world are smart and good-hearted. - But the second level is you start to read books and you start to understand some stuff and you realize we're in a very tricky spot. As humans, we're running out of resources and it's not even just global warming or climate change. It's many different factors. There is gonna be 10 billion of us and the amount of stuff that we're all consuming is rising rapidly, especially as new countries come into being the equation of being a human being is changing and it's scary and difficult. - It is. - And there are shortages of certain resources that we're rapidly running out of and we're not slowing down. So the more you learn about that, the more you're scared and then you look at politics and the people who are in charge and they're saying stupid things and you believe that there's, oh, nobody in particular, that you believe that things are just, that it looks hopeless, that it looks bad. A lot of people right now are afraid of having kids because they genuinely believe that the world of the future will be worse than today and that's not just cynicism. There's a very good reason to believe that. But I think the third level and that's what we try to get to on the show and we have gotten to is what is even beyond that? Can you look at these problems and not just throw up your hands and give up? Can you not just quit in the face of overwhelming odds but can you find something else that motivates you to go forward and something else that propels you to actually try to solve something even knowing or not knowing whether the problems are solved. And seeing a lot of people who are smart and intelligent and have their hearts in the right place is doing that is deeply comforting. And that's what makes it almost like a spiritual practice talking to these types of people. - Yeah. - Oh, that's beautiful. - No, but I think I always believe that humans adapt, it's just evolution. And it's really good to see in which ways people are actually doing that. So yeah, I've loved many of your guests. Yeah, tell me about some of the companies that kind of jumped out at you or that you still think about a lot. - Well, I think anybody who's come up with something from nothing, those are the most interesting ones. When somebody just sticks a battery on something that's just I never knew was possible or never even had heard of, that's what makes your brain really expand. Whether it's new tech, like, of course, neurotech, the capacity to read our brains, like Norable is doing and Ramsay's Arcade is doing, or biotech people who are making the woman who's making that device that allows you to perform chemistry on a droplet scale gene editing and CRISPR and literally modifying genes to be able to eradicate certain genetic diseases like sickle cell anemia. That's all really cool. People who have found angles to problems that are, that's completely unique. Like the guy who came up with the idea that heat is a byproduct of so many industrial processes and came up with a block that allows you to store immense amounts of heat at high temperatures for a long period of time, thereby not wasting all of this energy because so many industrial processes, heat just, they just waste all kinds of stuff and they don't have any way to capture and reuse it. So anybody who does something that allows you to make something more circular or close the loop or get rid of trash, those I find very fascinating too, or I still think about that guy from Cambium Carbon who realized that do we need all of our products to come from wood, from trees that we chop down? What about all of the urban trees that get cut down for one reason or another, or that just fall down? Should that go to a landfill or just be wasted? And then we chop down some new tree in a forest to make a table, couldn't that make a table too? And there's just so much waste in our society and anybody who is actively stopping that waste, I find very fascinating too. - That's cool, I love the smart thinking. Morgan who is here, I loved her idea 'cause it's such a, as a woman in the music industry, that would be a real solution for many women. - It's true and she's referencing Morgan Mercer, the person who used VR to teach empathy, even not knowing what that's about, you know that's a brilliant idea as soon as you hear it. And there's a reason that big companies like Hyundai and IKEA are going with that because what better way to teach empathy than to show? - I love that idea. - And I think the stories that you learn about people just finding different ways of achieving their dreams, that's interesting and people who've bet everything, I just talked to somebody this morning, people who've gambled everything, like we live in such a risk-free way and some of these people have gambled not just their money but other people's money and come out the other side or their entire life-saving, maxing out every credit card and you wouldn't say that's advice that you would give to somebody, but there's a different way of thinking that all these people have that lets them do that. - I love that idea. - Pretty crazy. My walk, I walk most evenings. I was thinking of how powerful it is when you just hold the expectation for something, you just hold the expectation that it's gonna work out and how that change is just micro-behavior and I would love to live my life more like that so that's inspiring to hear. - That's awesome. - People talk about that. - Yeah, it's like a chicken and egg thing too because you wonder and I still don't know whether people feel that because they're on to something or they're on to something because they feel that. For example, did somebody push through because deep down they knew they had a good idea and they did have a good idea or did they just hold space in a vacuum and then the idea came? And I don't even think they fully would know the answer to that because for whatever reason, some people are propelled to do certain things and it's almost oftentimes even just random. Why did this person decide at that moment? Why did you go from being a scuba dive instructor to building a vacuum-sealed, stainless steel water bottle together with plastic? It's almost like it doesn't even make sense but something in their brain said you've got to do this and you've got to do it now and you've got to put all of your money and other people's money into doing this. - I love people who just follow that. - This is crazy, right? - That's my area in their harmony and listening to what Steven Spielberg calls the whispers, those whispers of intuition and some people, most people ignore those whispers but some people just go all in and just completely trust that. That's really beautiful. - It seems clear that most of the successful people that I've talked to follow those whispers. - Yeah, that's cool. - And there's always that element of randomness or weirdness or chaos or something that they have in there. Yeah, it's quite bizarre. And of course, another thing that I should say is, and again, like when you're in an interviewing relationship, you don't know whether they're telling you the truth or a PR because they're also giving a pitch. It's like a pitch that they've given a thousand times before because they've been on a thousand podcasts before. And so you don't, I don't like it when people just go into their pitch or when I feel like I'm in Shark Tank and somebody's just selling me on their idea. So I try to break that pattern. I don't always succeed. Sometimes it is just a sales pitch and then I feel used. I don't enjoy those types of conversations, right? But so you don't know whether people are telling you the truth or not or whether they're saying what they think the public might want to hear or whether they want to publicly share. But all of them, not one of them has expressed that they're pessimistic about the future. In fact, they all go to great pains to say that they're optimistic about the future. And I don't know again, is that because optimism is a necessary trait for being an entrepreneur or for building anything. Can somebody be a pessimist and still build something? - I think I read a study once that most entrepreneurs are optimists. Yeah, I have no data to back it up. - Are they excited about the future? - Yeah, I think you have to because if you're not, you stop trying because no idea succeeds in the first round. So you have to have the optimism and the belief that it will work out. You just have to find the way, the strategy or the form. Speaking of which, I'm curious what is something you would like to invent? - I think I would like to invent something different. And there have been two types of guests. There are guests that come up with something that's just wildly out of left field that never existed before. And then there were people who did something that was almost stupidly simple. Like making a better water bottle. - Right. - That almost doesn't even sound like an idea. Some people have had wild success, made millions of dollars with something that doesn't even seem like a good idea or an idea that you would share with your friends and they would say that, how on earth, right? - Yeah. - And other people have ideas that are so crazy absurd, like taking NASA technology and finding a better way to wash clothes and that somehow prevents microplastics from going. And the ocean that you just think, how on earth did you come up with this, right? - Wow. - I think in a world where everybody's trying to do the same thing, doing something unique would be my ultimate aspiration. And right now I'm not doing anything unique. I'm succeeding with a marketing agency. Like my company is a marketing agency, which is the most boring, arguably oversaturated type of business. It's working. And even when it comes to content like doing this, everybody has a podcast, everybody's putting out content. Everybody feels that this is the only way to succeed right now. And obviously that's not true. - Yeah. - Obviously there are completely different ways to succeed and add meaning and to make money. Something that's not a waste of time, cosmically would be something. - But I'm curious, what is the problem you would like to solve? - Well, if you could make a dent in any of the very real problems facing humanity, I think there are-- - Like what? - Internal, okay, there's internal problems. Like the fact that everybody's depressed and that we're all increasingly lonely and all of that. - Yeah. - So there are these mental problems. I think it's more your domain. I think in general I'm more interested in the actual problems that are affecting all of us, whether we realize it or not, such as how are we going to farm enough food to feed 10 billion people? Where is the ammonia gonna come from? What resources? What does the future economy look like? What does a world look like where AI is smarter than us? What is our role in the future? Those are the types of problems that fascinate me and I think more so than money for money's sake, which to me has always seemed empty and shallow and stupid. It's more about if you can make a dent in an actual problem that humanity is facing, of which there are so many. - So many, yeah, so lots of things to invent. - Yeah, and again, will we survive, won't we survive? I don't know, but I think if you could help with that, that would be better, yeah. - Okay, that's our goal. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music)
