In this episode, Rich and Paul discuss global warming and the chaos that it would cause. As the world grapples with the impacts of climate change, building resilience becomes essential to cope with the challenges ahead. We created a board that aims to bring order to this chaos, fostering collaboration and solutions for a sustainable future. This podcast is sponsored by Aboard.

Hi Paul,

Richard, how are you?

I'm doing well.

I want to play a little game.

Do you like games?

This is the beginning of a horror movie.

Yes, I like games.

I'm gonna name a country and you tell me the

first thing that comes to mind

Oh, great.

This can never be problematic and can only work out in my interest.

Go ahead.

Try to be topical like think what you heard about this country

recently even in the last few years Iran

Uh, sanctions, civil unrest, youth protest.

Algeria.

Not a lot, frankly.

Um, I just probably, uh, I think of it more like in terms of France and

Parisian unrest and stuff like that.

Afghanistan.

Rights of women being severely abrogated, U.

S.

pullout, long term rise of Taliban, and collapsed state.

Okay.

So, those all make sense.

I'll stop there for a second.

Let me tell you what's happening in these countries right now.

Okay, I'm

In Iran, Iran, because of sanctions, so you're

kind of in the, in the ballpark, decided to be self sufficient.

And so they routed all their water to farming.

And now they're suffering through.

a massive heat wave, like multi month and a massive water drought such that

people in rural towns and cities and, and, and less populated areas are

fleeing because there's no water.

They're migrating, they're migrating away from these, from drought.

Exactly.

Okay.

In Algeria.

you're saying, by the way, that that is a mix of both social

policy failure and climate change.

Yeah, but it also absolutely record breaking to like the asphalt at

the airport in Tehran airport was melting.

Algeria is suffering through massive wildfires.

Massive like where Greece has been in the news a lot lately because of its

wildfires But you have to understand the infrastructure and the capabilities of

an Algeria to even deal with wildfires And they're suffering through massive

wildfires because of drought and dry weather and no rain and just extreme

weather conditions Afghanistan is itself again people can talk about

You know Rights of women and just the regime and how repressive it is, which

is all true, frankly but you have to also keep in mind that they're utterly

incapable of Dealing with what is coming at them from a climate perspective.

So they're suffering through massive droughts Essentially livestock is dying

left and right which is you don't go to the supermarket in Afghanistan.

You just raise the goats, right?

an enormous amount of your wealth, right?

Like you can't, you can't lose your sheep.

exactly and Two things come to mind when I, by

the way, how do I know all this?

Am I going and searching on like Algeria news on Google news?

No, there are better sources of information in the world.

I just got exhausted with like polarizing shout at me.

News sources right or or lecture at me You're either getting yelled at

or you're getting lectured to in the news and I just saw it other places

You know, I don't read The Economist because it's enormous amounts of pressure

to read The Economist on a weekly

Oh, it piles up.

It makes the New Yorker pile.

Like there's the New Yorker pile, but the New Yorker pile, you're

like, well, at least there'll be, there'll be cartoons in there.

I can take, that's a, the worst thing in the world is the economist in the

bathroom, New Yorker in the bathroom.

You're like, okay.

But

Well,

economists in the bathroom are like, Oh, I

wonder what Bagahad has to say,

Exactly.

Well, you know, the New Yorker is almost designs for you to cherry

pick articles that you think you want, you're in the mood for,

the New

the economist, it's like, sit down and don't say a word.

deep down the New Yorker knows it is an entertainment product,

whereas The Economist is literally like...

A guide for colonialism.

It's like colonialism's updated brochure on a regular basis.

Like, Hey guys, you know, I know we used to have that country.

You might want to know what's going on in there because you probably

have some business interests.

Like there are absolutely people who read the economist who are essentially running

chunks of the Dutch East India company, but it doesn't have that name anymore.

Right.

Um, so it's for them.

It's for them.

so the Economist is is frankly it's just there's an Asia

section and then there is a Middle East section and then there's a Central

America like they just go down the list and they have to report on it, right?

Yeah, it's literally like a list of old girlfriends.

I wonder how they're doing.

That's the economy.

Yeah, I mean, and you know, I watch Al Jazeera.

I often like rope you into watching Al Jazeera like during

So look, I

work together in the same location

we stopped when we are solo in the office and that will often be our

lunchtime viewing it'll watch like some dumb video on YouTube and then you'll

just sort of slide on over and it'll be like, it's always a very British

accent, even though it's coming out of Qatar and it'll be like news from the

Algerian oil fields or the, you know, a lot of a lot of oil in Al Jazeera.

So let's break it down because not everybody knows this.

So Al Jazeera is very much like BBC World News.

It's like a very buttoned up news, 24 hour news network.

It is produced by the state of Qatar, which is like a

real kind of old school Arab,

That's the asterisk, right?

I mean, you're not going to get any Qatar news except, hey, Qatar donated

millions of dollars to some cause.

There's no Qatar news on Al Jazeera.

Our system is the best.

Um, and you know, they were very pro the world cup, the way that

all the world cup stuff unfolded.

Not a lot of coverage about like just the enormous amounts of money.

Going to FIFA that made that happen, that kind of thing.

So, so you, you definitely are getting a certain bias, but yes, I agree with you.

I, as an experienced consumer of media properties.

It is actually, and it doesn't get a lot of due, America was very down on it

starting around the Gulf War era, like Rumsfeld came out against Al Jazeera and

so on, like it, it actually was seen as an enemy of the state for a minute, so

there's a little of that hovering around it, but mostly what you have is news about

socioeconomic situations with a bias to coverage that is not focused on the U.

S.

The U.

S.

isn't, but, and actually, and then I think the last thing to say

is like, it's an Arab property.

So it, it favors Palestinian narratives over the official Israeli narrative, like

Exactly.

I mean, but also it's extremely buttoned up in that we are gonna report

global news And it's gonna be kind of boring We're just gonna tell you

what the heck just happened, right?

And so I've been watching it for a while and what I'm noticing lately is that

they are reporting on Just Pockets of instability and frankly the beginning.

I feel like I'm looking into the future in a way

Oh, you're, well, this is, this is to my point about Lebanon being a guide

to understanding climate change, right?

Because you see what happens when instability hits a country

and you see how people react.

It's not this like instant, oh my God, the world's ending.

It's a what, what, what frameworks and structures make you more resilient.

So you're looking at Al Jazeera and you're seeing chaos

I have two sort of threads here that I want you to react to.

otter.

ai Shatter a lot of the dynamics power dynamics in the

world because water is water.

Um,

and heat is heat.

Yep.

heat is heat.

And if people are dying in the streets of Tehran, no matter how

much we think they're an evil empire, a reckoning is coming, right?

It's going to become something that is going to, by force, frankly, like

we're not going to have a choice in it.

Um, from a hopeful perspective, potentially align us as

humans around what is coming.

It's like an alien landed, you know, if an alien landed, Like the giant

ship landed in the middle of the Atlantic and green people came out.

We would call Putin and say, Hey man, let's get on the same page with this one.

This is a problem.

gotta, we gotta really focus on this.

We have nuclear weapons.

You have nuclear weapons.

This green guy just told us that the earth is his, so we're going to have to deal.

So there is a common enemy here, right?

Um, that is The ship has sailed in terms of responsibility.

Well, China's responsible, the U.

S.

That doesn't matter at this point because there's no water.

you have just alienated a huge number of people who are

sitting there going like, why do we need to, uh, why are those countries

responsible when the main emitters, um, are not seeing the same consequences?

So there's people advocating for a huge distribution of wealth and

responsibility around all this stuff.

Here's what, but let me react to your thing, which is, um, The world tends

not to care when the crisis hits, like, like later there will be historical

monographs and there will be, there might be trials at the Hague for,

for Exxon CEOs, like that we might be headed towards all that, who knows.

But in the moment, everybody just needs to cool down, literally, like

it's, it's, the thing that, the thing that's happening, this is very hard

for humans because we, we came up in stability and essentially your

ideology was the most important thing.

What did I believe?

Did I believe the right things?

Am I in alignment?

And actually social media became about that.

Like we got millions and billions of people saying like, I think I'm

aligned with the right team over here.

And sometimes that's good.

And sometimes that's bad.

Physics is not ideological.

Like it doesn't matter.

Doesn't matter what you believe.

It's hot.

It doesn't matter.

Like, so, and that, that can be, even if you believe in this is, this has

been a little something I've been with.

And then I'll throw it back over to you.

I bet it's like, I believed in all the right things about climate change.

I gave money and did a lot of research.

I built a database product with some other people at our former agency to let

people go, you know, ProbableFutures.

org, go look at it.

Some of that code is mine that shows you the maps and helps you understand

the science of climate change.

So I'm very proud of that and it means absolutely nothing at

the moment that I did that work.

I don't get any credit because the sun is hot.

The sun doesn't care what I think or that I believed.

It doesn't matter.

Well, here we

feel like the work you did kind of just isn't resonating

or fell on deaf ears or was kind of, is it disheartening?

Um, it was for a minute.

I'll tell you, I'll just be real frank.

It was all sort of tied in.

I sort of backed off, got into learning about music and was kind

of grieving my dad because I just couldn't process for a minute.

The things that are happening in the summer are pretty bad.

They're actually a little bit outside of what was predicted.

They're not completely outside of.

the prediction zone.

It's just like instead of being in the middle of the range of possibilities,

we're on the, you know, we're kind of down the bell curve a little bit.

It's happening fast.

Um, there is almost no evidence historically, uh, or emotionally that

humans will rise to the occasion.

So, uh, that is really bugging me, right?

Because it's just like here, we need everybody to do a lot better.

they're going to, you know what, you know what the tech industry does for me, I look

at the, I look at everybody's obsessed about AI, and they're like AI is either

going to fix the world, or it's going to kill everybody, and they're excited about

fusion coming in and so on and so forth, and it's like all of this is literally

just turning away from the thing that's in front of them, right, the thing that's

in front of them is like, um, Actually, all those, the, the, the fantasy around

the abstractions, that the abstractions of technology are going to change everything

about how humans interact and so on.

That's been disproved over and over in the last 25 years, as technology

scaled to every human being, roughly, who has a little bit of economic power.

Like, literally, you know, what, 4 or 5 billion people are connected.

And, and so, like, It's tough to see everybody doubling down on narratives

where it's like actually guys know it's it is it is physics It's physics physics

is right here telling us that we actually need to change the roadmap on the product

Yeah.

Uh, the track record isn't great for humans.

not great And I think we are you know Like we've talked

about it before and we're building software that I think is good for small

resilient groups like Resilience has to be your focus because you can't

count on the world to get it together.

You can hope But, and you can help, but you can't count on it.

Yeah, I, I, I, I, I think that's right.

Um, I think.

I think that I, I come at it from a slightly different angle, which is

I, I'm looking at the news and seeing this sort of instability seep in.

And I think, I think You know, if people can't survive, um,

everything gets unstable.

Like, governments get unstable, um, the world order gets unstable.

So we can not care about Algeria and Afghanistan and Iran, but the

point is, um, when you lose control, Everybody gets affected, right?

That's why we have bases around the world.

That's why we have friends We call them friends because they offset, you know,

what we see as a threat So we're buddies with japan because we don't want you

know We're buddies with south korea because north korea keeps yelling at us.

Like there's all of that.

There is a balance There's a balance of power I don't think

Well, that's, that's a critical word, right?

Like, that word implies a sort of stable foundational order.

You can't have balance without if every variable on either

side of the balance is changing.

Not only changing, but changing in such drastic ways that it's

not a matter of like, Oh, wait, there was a coup or Oh, our ally lost an election.

It's literally like an entire village is rushing the parliament, right?

Uh, and that That, I think, is going to lead to more chaos, honestly.

There's chaos from wildfires and heat and, you know, and whatnot, and floods,

but there's also chaos because humans, if, if the, if they can't get the

basics and the basics are under threat, they're not under threat in Europe.

Like everybody talks about the fires in Greece because people, because

frankly, Americans vacation in

No, and there was great and compelling footage.

And there was great, and there's, I'm sure there's

great footage in Algeria, except nobody flew the camera over.

No, there are no drones.

There are no, and there's nobody like on a, there's nobody on an island vacation

who's trying to get their kids who are named Jeff and Jeff onto a boat.

Well, I mean, look, I mean, Al Jazeera is there.

That's how I know about it.

That's why we're talking about it.

And I think, I think this is, you know, we, we like to end these with advice.

God, I have nothing

Well, let me, let me ask you something, because look, my job in

the relationship that we project out into the world and sometimes inside

the organizations that we build, I'm like the emotional interpreter, right?

And so my emotional interpretation of a lot of this stuff, it's something

I talk about and I'm, I'm good at it.

And so like, you know, I, I'm like, here's, what's been challenging

for me, what's been challenging for me is as an American who grew up.

In personally unstable circumstances, but frankly had a, a, a carpet

of opportunity put in front of me once I got my act together.

Okay, so like I've been able to live a hell of a life as someone

who had to kind of put it together.

But once I put it together, whoo, off to the races.

I've had to learn what instability is.

I've learned a lot from you.

I've learned a lot from.

watching Al Jazeera and a lot from listening to Democracy Now!

and reading magazines and working at Harper's Magazine.

Like there is a big world out there and it is a freaking mess.

Like, okay.

Let me throw it back to you.

You grew up in instability.

You left an unstable country that was at war and you were poor.

And your family was not westernized.

And, um, you ended up getting a lot of the carpet got put out for you to you had to

get an education, which are our government did a very good job, I think, of providing

They paid for it.

I didn't go to an Ivy League school I I was able to get loans for law school

and and and with no credit by the way because the loans were guaranteed by the

government So yeah, I'm I'm very fortunate

So, but You absolutely, and I learned this wiring, this is a

lot of the wiring that makes you very successful in business, and some of it

is just you, and some of it is your, your background, just like everybody.

Um, you expect a level of instability in the world, you

expect a certain amount of chaos.

But you're like me, you got kids, you live in a house, and you like your

life, and you're seeing this happen.

You saw it happen in Lebanon, a place you're deeply connected to, you're

seeing this happen in the world.

Mm hmm.

Yeah,

are you going with this?

Because I get worried, I stay up at night and I worry, and then I go, I

don't have control over a lot of it, I should talk about it, I should use my

platform, we're doing that right now.

Where's your head at?

um, I I I'm a little more optimistic and I'm optimistic for two

reasons Well, you know the Lebanese there's you know, I'm Lebanese and

when we leave We seek higher ground.

That's what we do.

The diaspora is essentially like, okay, this is bananas.

I just need to go to a place where I can get to a hospital if I need

one and I can get a job and I can raise a family right like so We

is why, and there are, the people don't know this, like, cause, it's

actually not, it's not, it's not a famous diaspora, like, let's say the Irish, or

the, or, or Jews around the world, right?

Like, but the Lebanese are everywhere.

And it's funny, until you know the Lebanese, you don't realize

it, because then they'll be like, Shakira is half Lebanese.

Like, it's, it does, but

there's more Lebanese in Brazil than there are in Lebanon.

Just to give you an idea.

Yeah and and and for us, we don't believe in the future too much.

And so we're always in motion.

We're always, always angling.

Always.

Constantly.

And when I

this, is that, can we call that diaspora thinking?

Is that like a kind of thinking that like that approach?

yeah, I'm the new kid in school.

Yeah.

I don't have a choice, right?

I gotta survive.

Everybody's looking at me funny.

I'm new.

Um, and, and, uh, I gotta settle in.

I might assimilate, but I probably won't entirely assimilate.

Like, I have, you know, my uncle's name is Faraj, but he

calls, everyone calls him Frank.

And I have another uncle named Ghassan, and everybody calls him Gus.

So there's a little bit of assimilation, but believe me, if

you talk to Frank for five minutes, you'll realize he's Lebanese.

He's very Lebanese, right?

So, we, we do just enough.

As I look at the world, can the world, like, can we find higher ground?

I think the question that, that, that, that is raised is can we, I was like,

you know, and for me is like, yes, I think a lot of, let me be a little

more optimistic about climate change.

I think a lot of the assumptions that we made about where we can be and what we

can do are going to change, meaning the Mediterranean is going to boil like soup.

Right.

Deli, like a, yeah, but you get the, the pulpo, it's delightful.

You put a little spice

delicious, but the, you know, the Mediterranean tourist economy,

Italy, Greece, the South of France, Spain is about to see massive change, right?

Like it's, it's billions upon billions of dollars in, in, in

business and revenue and GDP.

That's going to just lop right off because people, I was in Greece this year.

You know, here's a real world story.

I was in one of those islands, this is before the fires, I didn't see any of the

you went over to Lebanon and then you did a quick hop to Greece.

quick, quick hop to Greece.

I was on one of those charming islands, like a lesser known one, not one of the

big popular ones, where they have like, you know, stepping stone villages, where

there's shops and restaurants and whatnot.

I was there for five days.

During the day, it was completely empty.

So hot.

empty.

It was so hot.

The restaurants were empty at eight o'clock at night.

It was bustling, right?

But let me tell you whoever went to that vacation went on that vacation.

He's like, uh, I don't think i'm gonna do that again I'm not gonna

go sit in my hotel room for 12 hours and then go out for dinner.

Like that's not

It, it, it is bad for the brand, right?

You want to go to the beach.

You want to have a delightful, you want to have a delightful

salad under a blue umbrella.

That's coming now, what do people do they seek other paths, right?

Like does that mean Denmark like Copenhagen's gonna be do great?

Possibly.

I don't know.

I don't know enough about climate change.

I do know that the Mediterranean is in trouble Does that mean people?

Vacation elsewhere.

Does that mean New York, you know, does that mean Florida's done for

but New York City and Montreal will thrive because they're not

in the target I don't know enough.

I don't know enough.

What I do know is this though Paul

there are, there are predictive models to tell you about

what might happen, but we're, we're kind of on, like, we're at the, we're

getting on the tail end of the curve.

It's a little weird right now.

There are very, very few, you can't count on it.

You cannot point to one piece of land and say, I'm going to be okay.

Yeah, and and I think the the now I'm talking about, you

know, first world societies that can Pack up and move and go to Montreal

I have, you're going to have 2 billion people or however

many, I pulled that number out, who actually, they need bread and they

got to get somewhere with their kids.

haven't seen, I mean, it has been an explosive, um, frankly,

it's probably one of the most prosperous stretches in human history

over, like, over the last 150 years,

After, well, after World War II in particular,

just an unbelievable expansion.

I mean, what does a, you know, what does your enemy do when

there's massive famine in your country?

What will, will the United States do if there's massive famine and unrest in Iran?

What will they do?

What will China do when their neighbor in India, it'll be uninhabitable.

What will they do?

Will they be sympathetic?

I'll tell you what I think

what will, what will Pakistan do?

What will Pakistan do?

So that, I think, look, I'm sad about vacationing, not vacationing in the

Mediterranean, but frankly what I think about are those parts of the world where

they simply don't have that adaptability.

be clear.

That is the correct focus.

So much climate stuff comes down to, like, will my house be okay?

And I get that.

Like, that is a normal thing.

Go research that.

Find it out.

You'll learn a lot.

Okay?

Like, mine's at more risk of flooding.

Go figure that out.

Um, there's a website called Habitable.

Go look at it.

It helps you figure out where your, you know, what your risk is.

But then go to probablefutures.

org, a thing that we, we helped with, um, and you can actually see the global map.

Let's, let's, let's be, let's have a more modest goal for

this podcast, which, and which is.

Let's at least know about it.

Everybody's like, Oh my God, brush fires in Greece, like the world.

If you, and you have to seek these other sources of information out.

And it's not as exciting.

It's not as relatable because you were in Greece four years ago for your honeymoon.

God bless.

But this is really like the, there isn't a knowledge today.

And I think one of the most striking things that came out of the work

with probable futures was he wasn't saying it's going to, you know, the

temperature is going to go up 30 degrees.

He's like, you just need four degrees and you just have absolute chaos.

Well, I mean, one, 1.

5 degree global average is absolute chaos.

And then like a hot summer.

is a result where instead of having 10 days over 100 degrees in Houston,

you have two or three months and now people don't want to live there anymore.

Like there's an article in the Wall Street Journal noted leftist rag

about how people just want to leave, um, want to, want to leave Houston.

I have an idea.

I'm going to throw, I'm going to throw a curveball into this

because this podcast, even though it is about relatively difficult

subjects, it does have a sponsor.

Tell

can't, can't believe I'm doing this.

You and I build a product called a board and we've talked about

it before as, and we're talking about it maybe as like software

to help small groups be resilient.

I've been thinking a lot about resilience, this very subject, because that's the way

that I deal with all this information.

I'm like, what?

So what do we need to do?

And I think that resilience comes down to two things for me, critically,

knowledge and skills and health.

If you can keep your, if you can make your body more resilient,

and you can get some knowledge and skills, especially to help others,

You can adapt.

You're building and you're building communities, you

know, my people are going to show up in the in the raft when it floods.

Well, you need to get a raft to maybe like it's, it's stuff like that.

Well, you got to be able to paddle the raft.

So you better work your upper body like it's it's actually

really simple, fundamental stuff.

So, What I would like us to do, since we have a knowledge management and

process definition tool designed for sharing information, is to start to

track some of these resources and ideas.

in a board and then talk about what we're learning as we do it.

This should like, we're kind of refocusing the podcast very

gently in real time, right?

Like, cause we want to react to and be relevant in the world.

And this will be our tool for talking about like what's happening in the world.

So we'll make that board.

We'll share it.

and and I think I think you know, what's striking

to me I'm not a white paper guy.

Like we're not gonna put a pile of white papers in the in the board We're gonna

actually point you to places that are telling you what's happening today.

Al Jazeera streams live 24 7 on YouTube It's free and it's as good as any other

news source unless you really want to know what's going on and cut that

which that I can't help you there but You know, let's list those out, right?

Rather than like really dry academic papers with, you know,

float with charts and graphs.

Um,

I will say this too.

Like you, you, You don't actually need to know an enormous amount.

There's this climate scientist, Michael Mann, who is, uh, right down the middle.

He's been, he's been in it from the beginning.

Like, he's decades and decades.

And he is a well known figure.

He'll show up on national TV.

And it's just like, he's like, yeah, it's bad.

It's not total tipping point catastrophe bad, like some people are saying.

But you know what?

If we, um, stop putting carbon in the atmosphere, we could

stop this from getting worse.

And I watched him give a talk, it was like on the Today Show.

And he said variations on that probably nine

He's just saying the same thing over and

Because there's, there is nothing else to say.

And he says it with a smile and he is a, he's a tough actor.

Like he's, he goes to war with people on Twitter.

But when he's on that TV show, he is just like, okay, well, let me tell

to get to the best possible act, outcome, right?

That's like during COVID when the scientists are like, you know, if you

wear a mask, it'll just be less likely.

And then they get screamed at and they just keep smiling through it.

You just, you just, you beat the drum.

So I think like what feels really tough with this stuff is you're

like, I have to learn so much.

Not really.

It's hot.

And we have to put, we have to stop putting carbon in the atmosphere.

You can learn all about different greenhouse gases.

I tried, you can get a chemistry degree in your spare time, or you

can say it's really hot and we have to stop doing those things.

And that's going to be really uncomfortable and difficult.

And we're not going to be able to get it all done right away.

So there's gonna be really bad human factors and you got to vote and make your

life sort of aligned with what you believe about what should happen to people.

So let's, yeah, let's use our own tool to create some resources and guides.

We'll put some Al Jazeera stuff in, um, some.

Some Bloomberg stuff.

There's a, Bloomberg Green is a good publication.

And I think like that's the sponsorship I'm looking for, right?

Like that's, that's how we want to be doing this.

Um, so check out Aboard.

com.

We'll put a link on, we'll put a link on the Aboard Twitter.

We'll connect it to the, we'll mention it on the next podcast.

We'll figure out how to do this right.

Um, Rich, what else should the people know?

Um, they are listening to thank you people for listening

to the Zioti and Ford podcast.

Uh, we're at Ziotiford.

com and at Ziotiford on Twitter slash X.

Um, and, uh, check us out, give us, if people still do the stars thing, give us

five stars and check out Aboard at aboard.

com.

Yes, it's our startup, but it's, it's a, it's a tool to kind of help you make order

out of chaos, uh, for just about anything.

Um, I know that sounds crazy, but check it out.

Uh, that's, that's all I got, Paul.

This is a heady one, my friend.

I, I think what it's, we, big picture is important and it's good

that we're talking about it, but the reality is, and what I think we'll, we'll

probably end up just naturally spending more time talking about, is how do you

stay healthy, resilient, and reactive while you learn about this new world?

And, uh, that's good.

I need, I'm going to go ride my bike a little bit, even though it's hot.

Nice.

Everyone have a lovely week.

Take care of yourselves.