so we live in complex systems i'm going to talk about four of them tonight and through this series of pulling each one out for different weeks but it's it's complicated but i take my cue from al who said you don't overcomplicate it's complicated enough so so my goal is to try and make it as simple to understand these four interacting systems as possible and here's a beginning point imagine what it would be like if this was the way those systems were nested right imagine that so so that that society was conscious of living in a finite environment on a planet that's not able to support all of us already and that society actually controlled government enough so that what government did reflected that environmental context and that all of those things were trying to design an economy that worked for the people and for the planet imagine that i'm going to help you imagine it in a different way in a minute but instead i sort of sense it's more like this the economy is the biggest thing going right it's the god term it's it's everything we're of afraid of it in a way and then government is sort of serving the economy but not altogether serving society because the economy is more important than society you might wonder and then of course the environment is being kind of chewed up by all of these spheres so this is kind of my ideal way of feeling and imagining the world we live in and this is more how i think it is most days so let's look at how those four systems interact to help you follow the discussion i've kind of color coded the pieces that are interacting and this is as i said keep it simple so i could talk about a lot more pieces but that would be too complicated so i'm going to just give you some ideas so let's start with the economy that seems to be where every conversation starts and many of them stop and if you think about the economy the current era we've next week is all about capitalism and how to make it better but for now i'm going to use this term neo liberal which means sort of the preference for privatizing things so our secretary of education to be has an ideological preference to get rid of public schools and to privatized education and she's actually owns investments in private charter school companies so we don't know if that's a conflict of interest because apparently those don't apply in this case but but the idea is that private trumps if you'll pardon the pun publicness and has for some time and in the late ninety's and into the two thousands we've developed a kind of casino capitalism where a lot of the growth in the economy has been paper growth not growth that produces jobs good jobs produces education without people having to pay so much for it you can imagine different kinds of investments producing different kinds of social rewards other than wealth for a few so around this and this is kind of where society kicks in and interacts with the economy we have consumerism we live in our consumer bubbles i am a professional shopper as my family who's here will tell you so consumerism is an important piece of the economy for those of us who are fortunate enough to be consumers but in many ways much of the growth of our economy over the last couple of decades has been driven by debt public debt but interesting lee enough private debt is bigger i'm going to get to that in a minute so so we are we are growing basically because we are in debt deeply in debt the other thing that's been growing is inequality so there are a lot of ways to engineer an economy so that more people benefit or not and this economy it's not accidental that a lot of the growth that it has enjoyed has gone upward so inequality has grown which is a social phenomenon it's not it's a social phenomenon the sense that it makes people feel bad when they're on the bottom and they see people on the top and it also creates political differences that aren't good for democracy and then another social feature is the replacement of good jobs with technology going to talk about that in a minute to but outside of this strange economic engine that interacts with society in these ways we are also looking at phenomenal rates of resource depletion and waste and we've created a an increasingly toxic environment which is more toxic for some people on the planet and some people in this country than for others and all of this is brought to us by the complete conviction that most people have that we have to keep growing we have to keep growing now it doesn't matter whether you read paul krugman will tell you we have to keep growing he's got a little different way of producing growth or if you listen to the goldman sachs team that donald trump is going to bring in to engineer growth but growth is the bipartisan kind of the bipartisan meeting point in washington these days and it's a big problem for reasons that i'm going to share with you in a minute but the s story here is that growth produces all of these crises it's chewing up resources producing more ways than we can process on the planet creating energy crises there's an irony of growth gasoline is cheap right now i filled my car at half the price that i was filling up before the financial crisis but if we start growing oil is going to become more expensive which will slow down the growth so that's the dilemma that we're in and then there's a de crisis i'm going to talk a little bit more about because it's really huge as both bernie and the donald would say huge probably the only thing they have in common so we have these rising costs of growth it costs more and more to grow all the time and that's slows growth down so we have gotten into this dilemma where we really can't grow and next lecture all talk about why that is but the short story is this period of amazing growth from one hundred fifty to roughly two thousand is unprecedented before in history and i am going to argue with you it won't happen again no matter how much debt we generate to try to grow so that's kind of a picture of where we are and there are all these people who are pointing out what's happening but there are those who are benefiting too much in the moment from what is happening to pay attention so here's one of my favorite quotes from an economist actually one of the few economists that i will be quoting at much length in these lectures kenneth boulding who was turns out john kennedy's environmental advisor and this was his operating  guide so from time to time you've already gotten an email i hope about readings you can do if you want to read more about this kind of thinking here's another book that isn't on that reading list but it's available easily enough c enough so here we are with the new president pledging four percent which if it happens if this happens there will be a tremendous boom in the stock market that four percent will go upward and i doubt very much if much of any of it will distribute outward and so the question of even if this is possible at the price of leverage debt who's going to benefit from it so here's here's the debt picture and in a nutshell this is the g d p last year this is personal loan by the way student loans have recently passed credit card debt and i experience that every day on the job here because my students are leaving here with thirty thousand or so on average in debt which is not a great way to start your your life the corporate debt is even bigger so we've got a big corporate debt  problem and as we discovered what happens when corporate debt becomes that disproportionate we end up with too big to fail and bailouts so look for those in the future and then the public debt that everybody is so worried about is actually relatively small so here's here's the this was an earlier set of figures this is now a little over sixty so the accumulation of public and private debt is over  sixty trillion and the g d p is approaching about twenty so one of the things i'm going to be talking to you about is why are we so obsessed with g d p why what does it measure what is it doing but it's what people used to see if the economy is going well so so the interesting thing about this strange notion of the growth of private debt supporting everything because we all know we want government to be frugal and we want to downsize the budget and so on so forth that is that that we've translated a kind of a strange privatized  into supporting the economy so that's what's happened is we've shifted from public spending which was the kenyan model you can spend and then the economy grows and then you can grow so big you pay off the debt the problem with this is that if the economy isn't growing in proportion to the amount of debt that is being used to fuel it you can't ever pay it off and so there are likely to be greater periods of instability and in crashes so another pledge somehow in this four percent growth spurt that we are promised we will enjoy in the coming years there is going to be i heard mr trump say today he's going to be the greatest job creator ever ever so let's think about what that might mean well he says we're going to pull back these trade agreements nafta and  several others the p p p and so on well what would that do so if you look at manufacturing these are good jobs right these are jobs that carrier air conditioning these are jobs building fords in ohio well in the last fifteen sixteen years we've lost five million of those jobs and estimates are that this is how many of them were due to trade agreements and this is how many of them are due to robots so now hold that thought robots what is the position of trump and some of his appointees on robots where you think little steel mills in california and scattered around the country most of which are being run by robots ok so so actually manufacturing isn't doing so badly in the u s it's being done by robots however which raises the question of should the economy serve the workers in the citizens or should it serve the investors who own the plants so here's what trump says about technology this was to silicon valley executives in a december meeting we want you to keep going with this incredible innovation anything we did to do to help this go along we're going to be there for you so he wants more of this and silicon valley is is is launching driverless vehicles one of the biggest occupations in the country is driving taxi cabs uber is investing in driverless ca trucks buses all of that stuff is going to be automated so so we want you to do more about and where do the jobs come from if we do more of that here's the one that i think is really telling andrew poster is going to be our labor secretary said this about robots always polite they always up sell he's a fast food c e o they never take a vacation they never show up late there's never a slip and fall or an age sex or race discrimination case they're the perfect workers so we are looking at and don't blink we are looking at an economy without workers h i find this dizzying i don't know what to make of it well i do but i for some time i thought this is crazy this is almost an insane set of system disfunctions so instead of getting dizzy when you pick up the paper in the morning try this lecture series feature instead of having this reaction ok don't don't think that and please don't say it ok let's think about w a t d what to do so today the what to do is we're just go connect the dots here we're going to have some more activities that we can all think about doing together in future lectures look at examples of people who are doing really amazing things in the public space that we occup to talk about the economy next week political solutions and real world projects so all of those are coming attractions today sit back and relax and connect the dots so here's the the what to do so in the future new economic ideas coming next lecture strategies for political change some of you might be interested in thinking about those and then how can we communicate differently about the environments in the economy so that we think about them both together in all ways together and then what are people doing here in seattle in king county and around the world to actually realize these kinds of ideas ok so here's another what to do allow yourself to go back to this idea and try and imagine this world trying to magine you and the seven billion people on the planet your neighbors seattle the united states in this world not this one so think about how would it be and how do i imagine all of these systems being nested like this and imagine an economy that wasn't trying to create more robots instead of workers but an economy that was trying to serve the needs of society including giving people decent jobs and finally imagine what the government would look like if this were to happen so just allow yourself a zen moment close your eyes and imagine that wow the environment's is really the big thing not the economy the environment is the big thing and society is aware of that and society controls government to protect it so we can have future generations and the economy is going to serve all of these so let's let's let's go in let's just let's dive into this and that seems to me the easiest place to sort of think about how complex systems interact in this case the  economy and society is with us as consumers as i said i'm a professional shopper so ask me anything about consumerism and i'm happy to share in fact i think post retirement job might be to become a shopping assistant for for rich people so i don't have to buy all this stuff so shopping is kind of insane if you if you step back and look at at the  overabundance of stuff that we don't really need at least in that many varieties this really exists i don't know i wouldn't feel totally comfortable and that's vacation setting but some people do obviously and here's one where a luxury cruise ship they're now building the luxury cruise ships with a super luxury deck so that the super rich people who want to own yachts but don't quite have one yet don't have to mix with all of these wealthy people  down below ok and at that they're actually making money so what is consumerism well i would invite you to think of it like this it is the most widely shared set of practices and values we have on earth the most widely shared wow it's what brings us together a lot of things divide us but we all most of us like to shop we can all afford the same things but we all most of us like to shop so and because this is so basic so fundamental to who we are it it it kind of shapes to some degree to some degree you know the poor kid who wants mom to buy the two hundred dollar pair sneaks you know i mean it's important it's emotional it's it's critical so who we are and what we want to be and of course we all want to be cool and consumer brands promise that there we go that's cool and that's what i see in all my classes i've watched the transformation in these classrooms from a motley assortment of p c s to cool glowing apples in the dark so but there's this dark side which i'm going to talk about a minute which is that it also produces stress i gotta pay the bills i've got to pay off my credit card i have to work more to be able to take that luxury cruise vacation or buy that cool computer  and consumerism is pushing stuff out us pushing stuff at us producing all kinds of disorders and depression which we'll talk about again in a second and at the global level so that's kind of the domestic chaos but at the global level you know the have nots who don't have a consumer option are producing the commodities all the raw stuff that goes into the consumer products and it's become a kind of a neo colonialism of the global order simply forces these countries to do that so we and many people in the north can enjoy or be depressed about this consumer and in the bargain we are eating up more stuff than the planet can provide and we're producing more toxic waste than the planet can process all right wow every time i think about these things like oh how did this happen how is it possible that these systems produce these undesirable outcomes i will answer that question later on but we are the best we are the best consumers in the world five percent we are five percent and look at what we look at the paper and i don't even use paper anymore but apparently a lot of people do that solid waste all that throwaway stuff produces of waste problem that somebody has to process so if we all lived in india not that that's an attractive option for many of us but but the planet would be ok right if if every country had the footprint of india the planet would be fine today france is kind of well it's it's they're living in a scale of two and a half planets we need two and a half planets to to be french we actually need four planets to be us and if we were trying to air condition the desert we would need five planet and so right now collectively this adds up to a planet and a half more or less and pretty soon it'll be two planets and these are some of the sources that these come from the the global footprint network is trying to estimate these kinds of consumption and planetary use measures so this is this is actually a reality t v show from new zealand that is invite can you believe new zealand has an environmental reality t v show and they go in they go in like the police and they start hauling all the bad stuff out and putting it on the front lawn and then they ask people how they feel about having all this crap in their house and the people feel really bad and they promise to do better and this is just the stuff produced by oil so so so if you think about the transition to clean energy you have to think about what happens to all this stuff because this stuff will only go away if we really think differently about the consumer society and the consumer acquisition tendencies that many of us have so what keeps it going at the individual level i'm going to talk about what keeps it going at other levels but at the individual level ok i walk in this a patagonia ad by the way so think about what that means but i see that i have to have it i like that parka i'm now convinced that i need it even though as my family would say i probably have three parkas in the closet they're all just fine and actually stylish enough and then i get it and then i use it and then i kind of forget about it and and then i see the next new thing in patagonia is interesting for several reasons one it's a privately held company so they can tell you not to buy too much stuff they can also tell you if you buy our stuff it's going to cost you twice as much as it's going to cost you somewhere else but that's ok because you really only need one parka don't you so shop patagonia pay more but by less patagonia's actually made a very successful business now i'm not sure patagonia could sustain this strange business model of anti consumerism lite if in fact they were publicly held company which is why they have resisted going public because they think consumerism is a problem and here's ed norton from fight club all my students have seen fight play anybody here seen fight club ok all right good god so in an undergraduate class all the hands go up but when when ed norton realizes thanks to brad pitt that he's got a consumption problem he goes oh god we're buying things we don't need with money we don't have to impress people we don't like that's not original to fight club actually i think that's original to will rogers but they put it in fight club so there's two questions i want to raise with you about consumerism here at this point one is a moral question is who should be left out because the way it works is everybody can't be consumers some of them have to produce the stuff that goes into the products that are consumed by others and some people can only afford not so nice stuff not so stylish not so nutritious stuff so there is a moral question that we don't notice very much when we consume because we are encouraged by the propaganda environment that we are in immersed in marinated from as soon as a child can watch t v the child is marinated in and consumption and buy things so so so so what happens to the moral question it's not in that environment consuming is good you deserve a break today all of you so all of you go out and get something  you look like you could use it really and one of the reasons why that moral question doesn't get asked by more individuals who are happily out there shopping until they drop is that in the this comes from tim jackson and i put that book on the reading list which i invite you to enjoy some of the supplemental readings but what the idea is what does consumerism do for human character development we have we have a human nature debate are people nasty or people al truest dick are people loving are they kind are they greedy and selfish well if we can imagine people in those ways that means we are capable of being all of those things so what if the culture in which we live pushes some aspects of our possible nature and suppresses others so if the dominant environment in which we live culturally is consumerism what's about see that thing buy that thing forget that things see that thing well ok it's a focus on ourselves which sometimes converge on the narcissistic and it's a focus on novelty the new thing the upgrade the bigger screen the newer model trade in your perfectly good i phone six and get i phone seven for free how can you turn that down hard to hard so in this in this quadrant what we've got is this piece of human nature being over developed so our characters often spend more time living in this part of our human potential then in the part that would have us focus on other people and their needs or on the past in the future we live in the now now some of us of course belong to subcultures in society that focus entirely here or entirely here or more there than here but most people i think live in this diminished quadrant of our human potential i would like to see is do the three sixty and develop all of those aspects of our character but we can't do it given this economy so my question for you and as i said i understand it because i see it and i see it my students i invite them to take a little test but first i show them this and then i invite them to take a little test that all of i chewed as well so here's what it means to be brand so we start with buying things which requires us to work right and kind of the more we work the more stuff we can buy so that's good on the other hand the more we work and the more debt we incur we can't work enough to buy all the stuff we want we end up getting stressed marketing surveys have told us in the last few years that stress in the us population is off the  charts when people are asked you know what do you do what's your life look like what's your daily home routine look like and what do you value people say well i like to go shopping and i are and my job isn't so much fun but it pays for my shopping and my vacations and the nice house and the car and all those things but oh my god am i stressed and so's so is my husband and some of my kids for some reason so you've got this trust problem which is alleviated and the advertisers help us alleviate the stress problem by buying something you'll feel better in it's true isn't it i mean if we go out and we buy something and in that moment i mean it we might forget that thing but in the moment of bagging that thing it's kind of satisfying it's recreational and so we are in this cycle but we are in this cycle in a way that reinforces emotional relations to things and our sense of who we are and who other people are is often through things if you look at the ads the ads show us how to be with other people in product environments and outside of that is politics which nobody likes so it's better to go shopping because politics is depressing government is even worse it's the source of all problems i'm trying my best to volunteer because that makes me feel good and  you know it's a it's important to do something besides shop and then there's a future the world which is hopeless so so so this kind of emotional walked in to this quarter of our human potential is creating a society in which we live emotionally through stuff and vacations and ski trips and con you know all that and it's all fun it's absolutely fun so meanwhile here's the stampede on black friday at urban outfitters and here's the maldivians cabinet meeting in school but here because they're trying to get the attention of these people and i'm not sure that they're succeeding very well so here's another w t v here's a book that's quite good i think beyond consumer capitalism the talks about the system and then how you could imagine  different economy that would be more relaxed it would involve places for more people it would involve valuing other things in our lives but i invite my students and now i invite you to to do these little exercise pay attention to what you consume and how you consume it in how important it is and look at the public spaces there are very few unbranded spaces i mean  how are you branded me that it turns out that i caught the brand virus with apple and then i started noticing how invasive apple was becoming and i realized oh my god it's like a bad relationship breakup and now i i'm having an apple life but i'm not as happy in my apple life as i was at the beginning when i was emotionally branded by it all so here's the challenge here's the challenge is how long can you go without buying things beyond  so every spring i teach a class that's about the size and i offer that challenge and ask the students in please email me and if you choose to take this challenge it's hard i'm not don't take this lightly but if you choose to take this challenge think about how long you can go and yeah you're your double skinny latte that that's ok you can say you can still do that that's fine but that new piece of tech year with that new parker those new shoes see how long you can go without getting them and last spring i said let me know let me know and at the end of the week i got an email from a student who said oh my god that was hard i can't believe how difficult that was i have never done anything that difficult step i made i made a week and she was the one one student made a we one and i talked to her and we sort of did a little therapy and short hair it was going to be ok and that she could go back to shopping anytime so let's look at since consumerism is kind of the thread of society let's look at society now as as it's affected by these other systems so unfortunately some of the picture of  american society isn't very pretty we had the world in these and other things and those things are disproportionately burdens in the black community it's panix native peoples right so so that's the society that all of this is producing so how did that happen how do we end up with this society we have income  quality that ranks with these countries i'll show you where we are in just a second and consumerism both unites and divides us mean we're everybody is kind of trying to be a consumer although some people can't afford it but we are in a special how how many levels are there in your airline mileage club and how bad you feel if you know the elites are going on and then this senators are going on and then the super people are going on and then there you are you know the last one on i feel i feel bad i don't know about you but it hurt it hurts me and then you know we're divided in political terms we're divided by race gender class in ways that we should also reflect a little bit on during this time we have together and environmental politics have become a low priority for reasons i'm going to talk about in just minute trumped by growth dissin from ation and the politicization of science i used to think science was a very cool way to know things and challenge that knowledge and update and improve it as just another way of knowing and it's a harder way of knowing so why why why do science a lot of people have direct knowledge received from other sources true in fact i feel like an embattled minority being and being a scientist so so how is all this going mental health wise well the company that the u s is keeping is this company countries we think of as not so advanced inequality look at the countries that are above the u s and around the u s and israel is only in this group because of the palestinians right so so israel would be if the palestinians weren't in the israeli question they'd be done here and then we go in then ok then finally we we get to these countries and these are really big differences and what does it mean to have that much inequality it means that you have lower life expectancy you do less well in math because you can't afford schools for poor people infant mortality homicides all of these things that we spend so much time debating and trying to solve and make policies to prevent we could improve all of these things with no political squabbles policy battles by simply reducing our level of inequalities so we become more like these countries who are doing better on all these measures not because they have necessarily struggled with policies for all of them it's just because they have figured out how to make and child poverty romania we are competing with romania these days ok government i'm running over are we are you are you nodding off do you do you have a do you have a  game i probably would be less entertaining if this was a forced march so so i'm going to try and move more quickly at this point but but let's think about now government this is a special topic that will get a whole lecture the third lecture is all about this so it's just a quick taste today so i'm calling what we have die no democracy in the name only ok share it with your friends on facebook so we have legalized corruption there i'm going to walk all through so you know what that means rather than me just saying and you go yeah that's it or are you kidding we have systematic voting rights violations which would have rendered this last election not even close not even close and we have policy choices that are constricted by the s having been a leader but now a member in the global economy of nations that limits what we can do at the risk of pulling ourselves out of this global economy and suffering a really big disruption now could be that that disruption would be worth it and on the other side of it we would be looking at a very different kind of economy and society but the the costs of pulling out as i think donald trump is going to show us actually are going to be severe and then we have political parties that operate rather like business cartels trying to dominate the voter market of course we have this kind of archaic elect college system which means that unlike almost every other democracy it's very pretty but of for new parties to form or to be effective in fact what new parties tend to do is become spoiler as happened in this last election so here's another w t d what to do exercise and this is one that's very personal and close to me because i teach about democracy to to lecture classes and i noticed that when i'm getting passionate about democracy students are writing it down as fast as they can and see if they could pass the test as a way where everybody put on your your writing utensils and let's think about democracy and what i've discovered more and more over the forty two years that i've been doing this is students today have a very dim sense of it even means and i'm going to show you something even scarier than dim demist scary but there's scarier territory beyond him what does it mean how is it taught in school not effectively because it's politicized so it's it's something you have to be careful about so allow yourself since we have the freedom to do this what would a better functioning democracy in government look like you know i think each of you should engage with this lecture series to address these kinds of questions i can't answer these questions for you i have my own answers but each of you should think about is this is good as it gets or can it be improved for home in what ways so think about those questions here's an interesting book called post democracy which is where i got the idea of democracy in name only he calls a post democracy i call it di no but the same idea at the political parties have been hollowed out they are basically clients of various business sectors so and american see this this is not just some liberal professor making a pronouncement about this this is  perceived level of percentage of the public the thinks the u s government is corrupt and that's three quarters of us so three quarters of americans think this is a corrupt government and where do we fit in the world of nations here we are so what's what publics think of their governments is more corrupt than ours mauritius cyprus taiwan poland that's it so here's here's the thing i said you know beyond students having a dim sense of democracy there is actually something even worse and i don't mean to depress you but coming soon the question is how essential is it to live in a country that's governed democratically and this is by age groups so those who are born in the thirty's that last great generation really digs democracy relocked super important to them but every cohort born after that is in in the u s even worse look at that the millennial says how is it essential to live in a democracy thirty percent what's with that and here's something that i see in my classes and i want very much to create experience a learning about democracy for our students to go out in the world and come back with a sense of what it might be for them but if you think about this can you imagine the twenty five percent this was two thousand and eleven twenty five percent of sixteen to twenty four  thought that democracy is a very bad system think about why that might be what if you were born and then when you began paying attention to politics all you saw was negative stuff and government dysfunction and name calling and fight inability to make basic decisions about pretty much everything you might conclude wow if that's what democracy is give me something else what is an interesting question but it could be that they have learned about democracy from watching ours and don't really have the capacity to distinguish between our dysfunctional government and democracy in general so help me think about ways we can help our students experience democracy differently that to me is a huge challenge as a teacher so here's a formula for minority party ru e trump won wisconsin by twenty two thousand votes three hundred thousand citizens in wisconsin didn't have the proper id to vote and those were republican laws so if you're a minority party and you're not so popular how can you win well you cheat or you prove you deny three hundred thousand people to vote to prevent the three citizens who voted twice from doing that so if you think about gerrymandering that the republicans have gained seats in two ways one is all those rust belt states that were figured so big and trumps victory a lot of the younger population has moved out of them to the sunbelt where there are no unions where there are jobs of some sort arizona the whole southern tier of the us and so there are some natural population shifts but in all of those states where there's populations moving away and populations gain their opportunities to rig the voting districts gerrymandering and if you think about what happened to indiana the democrats should have and this is the two thousand and twelve house of representatives election indiana should have twenty percent more democratic house members michigan should have twenty percent more democratic house members if the district ng were done equitably missouri twelve percent north carolina so you see the battleground states and you see the effects so we would have a democratic congress if district ng had been done equitably and my sense is that the current attorney general to be isn't going to take up too many of these cases ok so just a quick one why does why does drawing voting districts matter well we would be republican forever if only the men in america voted ok we would be democratic forever if only the women in america voted we would be solidly democratic forever if only people of color voted pretty republican and then if only the white men voted anybody think about disenfranchising white males just just an idea ok so why all this political dysfunction on lecture three we're going to go into money and politics it's an interesting topic and the u s is like no other democracy in the levels that infuses politics of voter discrimination of the sort i just pointed out and gerrymandering of the sort that i just pointed out so coming attractions so what we've got and this is coming to the end what we've got is we have somehow allowed or created depending on how you think about it a political system that can't deal with problems because people are dealing with power and favors power and favors that's the political system that's what it does really well power and favors and groups we forgot about the environment groups we forgot about child poverty in america votes we forgot about inequality we didn't forget about those things but we have a government that can't address them so let's look at the environment which i regard as all of these are worthy problems for your number one problem children in poverty certainly qualifies in that but i think that all of us are going to be at risk if we don't address the environment soon so look at the environment and how all of these systems run through it so we know we've got climate change all of what those of us who believe in science say that this isn't actually we're not us really huge money we're not a huge majority thing or you might think we are but we're not and we've generated toxic life support conditions which are really severe ask the folks in flint michigan and that we've got a species extinction going on while we're shopping and i want to talk a little bit about that because i think that's something that hasn't been talked about enough but it's happening if you believe in science again i'm all of this is qualified if you believe in science fracking and the clean up costs of all of these things are huge drags on the economy ok and the economy has to grow at extraordinary and now impossible rates in order to make these kinds of resource extract ssion operations pay off right now fracking companies are going bust because the price of oil is so low and so this this vicious cycle continues climate disruptions and pollutions are drag on the government the government ends up cleaning up this this kind of a mess and as i said poor people and minorities suffer all of this the most yet we seem to be paralyzed by propaganda i mean you know if you think about the power of ideas it's it's easy to dismiss ideas until you think about our political campaign ideas and how many times have we heard we would love to deal with global warming and deal with carbon emissions in the impose some kind of a carbon tax system of the sort that voters in this state voted down while voting overwhelmingly for hillary clinton this last time so but it would cost us jobs while jobs that are actually being taken by robots but that's another story so we have this kind of a contradiction of gee it's too bad about the environment but we have to give people jobs which is also really not happening so we've got a polarization between the economy and environment i think is completely completely a false dichotomy there is no reason we can't have a totally productive economy and have jobs and have better distribution all of that is possible except for a government that is not interested in those outcomes because they don't benefit those who are buying the government sorry but it's going to get better in here and with any luck you will become emissaries and help make it better out there ok so what do i mean by this here's a poll from a year ago the economy is the top priority for in this case obama in congress but i promise you when this poll is done again and released probably next week it'll be the same and where is the environment it's forty seven percent and if you break this out by republicans and democrats environment is still rather low on the democrats priority list but it's higher than forty seven percent and it's not even on the republicans list not on their list so as i said all of this is producing something extraordinary something really amazing is happening on the planet today called species extinction there have been five of them in the past most of them are the stuff of disaster movies asteroid hits the planet big dust cloud for two years everything dies except little rodents and fish but this one which is well underway you all heard about the bees are kind of the poster critter for this extinction  but there's a lot of other things besides the bees that are disappearing so we are in the midst of the sixth great extinction in the billions of years this planet has supported life but this one is caused by us it's caused by us as consumers caused by us extracting too many resources having the wrong kind of an energy system and so on so i invite us to try and not be the species that extinguished itself that's stupid i mean so this is the first one produced by a species so what to do ok here's this is that folks this is the this is the end i mean just t