GrowthBusters and Super Connectors

Introduction

“If you speak the truth, have a foot in the stirrup.” — Opening quotation

KMOHello, and welcome to another installment of the C-Realm Podcast. I’m your host, KMO, and this is episode number 597,¹ “GrowthBusters and Super Connectors,” prepared for release onto the World Wide Web on Friday, April 29th, 2022.

In this episode of the podcast, I’m going to share a conversation that I recorded at EarthX. That is a big environmental conference. It takes place in Texas most years. It didn’t the past couple of years, for reasons that I probably don’t need to expand on, but it was back up and running this year, and I was there with the Institute for Sound Public Policy, better known as the comic book GEBB, or the Greater Earth Betterment Bureau. We had a booth there at EarthX, and GEBB was the only thing featured. We had a nice big backdrop with imagery from Antarctica, and we had little cut-out paper miniatures of the characters. We had three issues of the comic book for sale. And we got to talk to a lot of people about aliens, but more importantly, about the things that GEBB sort of slyly talks about while also pretending to talk about ridiculous topics, like aliens who don’t like their jobs, so they distract themselves with food, drugs, and popular media.

And right across the aisle from our booth at EarthX was a booth for the GrowthBusters podcast with Dave Gardner. I got to talk to Dave quite a bit over the course of the four days of EarthX, and at one point he and I sat down and we recorded not one, but two podcast conversations. So thanks to Dave for being there with his podcasting rig all set up. Everything that you’re going to hear in this conversation between Dave and me was recorded on his equipment.

And then later in the podcast, I’m going to talk to a couple of people who are not podcasters, but they have a new business which will be of assistance to podcasters, and, from my selfish perspective, most importantly, will be of assistance to me. So that’s in the latter half of the program. But first, here is my conversation with Dave Gardner of the GrowthBusters podcast.

Program identification: “You’re listening to the C-Realm Podcast. C stands for consciousness.”

Meeting at EarthX

KMOYou are listening to the C-Realm Podcast. I’m your host, KMO, and I’m here with Dave Gardner, the host of the GrowthBusters podcast. Dave, it’s good to meet you.

Dave GardnerI am really excited to meet you guys. I was unaware of what you were doing, so thanks for sitting down with me.

KMOIt is my pleasure, and hopefully it’ll be the pleasure of the people listening. Great. So we are in Dallas, Texas, at EarthX. I know what brings you here, but for the sake of the audience, what brings you here?

DaveWell, I came here because somebody actually talked me into it. They were really impressed with EarthX over the last several years, with the pandemic years excluded, and they felt like everybody who’s anybody in the sustainability field comes to EarthX these days. The GrowthBusters podcast is, I think, a world-class podcast, but it’s still a pretty well-kept secret. So I thought, well, I’m just going to come exhibit and promote the podcast and see if I can’t build listenership. And at the same time, record interviews with people who are in attendance, just to kind of get a feel for how literate people are about the state of the planet these days.

Overshoot and the Georgia Guidestones

KMOSo I heard you do one interview. I wasn’t able to listen very closely, but I got a sense of the sorts of questions that you were asking. Suppose you’re going to ask me some questions. What sort of questions would you ask to test my literacy?

DaveTo test your literacy? Well, probably the number one question I would ask would be: do you know what overshoot is?

KMOI do know what overshoot is.

DaveI’m not surprised. Tell me, what is it?

KMOOvershoot is when a population increases beyond the carrying capacity of its environment and degrades the ability of the environment to support even the number that was possible in the past.

DaveYep, that’s a great answer. And if I was answering it, I would add that it’s kind of a combination of the population— In the human race’s example, it’s not just the number of people, but it’s the way the people are living, too. Because with a population of humans living pretty simply, the planet would support a lot more humans than if everybody on the planet were living in high style like we do here in North America.

KMOAre you familiar with the Georgia Guidestones?

DaveYou know, I just heard about those recently for the first time.

KMOSo for those who are not familiar with them: they’re in Georgia, and they are like a granite monument, very large; not a megastructure, a megalith. And it kind of looks like Stonehenge, but it was created a few decades ago by a group of very wealthy yet anonymous people who are concerned about sustainability issues. And it’s a list of commandments for people in the future, and it’s in multiple languages. And one of the commandments is that the Earth’s human population shall not exceed 500 million.²

Dave500 million?

KMO500 million. That would require quite a cull to get us down to that level.

DaveWell, I know one very smart gentleman who thinks 50 million is the magic number.

KMOOoh, that’s even harder.

DaveYeah. A lot of scientists have arrived at a number like about 2 billion. The way I see it, unfortunately [wording unclear], we have a long time before we have to worry about what the magic number is. We do know that the magic number is far fewer than the nearly 8 billion of us that there are on the planet today. So we know which direction we need to head, but we also don’t need to cull.

Birth rates, women’s choices, and the economy

DaveWhat I try to explain to people is that we’ve demonstrated the solution to the population part of the sustainability challenge. We have dropped the birth rate around the world in half over the last 60 years without having to do anything, you know, without government coercion, without terminating people, anything like that. More and more people are making informed decisions about family size, and more and more women are being educated and are finding out that there are other ways to have meaningful lives besides just cranking out baby after baby after baby. So women largely have been choosing to have fewer children.

And so what I think we need to do to get from 8 billion down to 2 billion, or maybe even that 500 million, is we just need to really make sure everyone around the world knows we’re in overshoot, and that they know that overpopulation and overconsumption are the two biggest drivers of us being in overshoot. We ought to live more simply, and there’s a lot of joy that comes from simplifying your life. And there’s a lot of joy from choosing to have a smaller family, a lot of advantages to that. And we need to celebrate the decisions that women and couples are already making about having smaller families. Instead, right now we’re getting a lot of alarmism. Some economists and big companies and policymakers are alarmed, because the easiest way to grow the economy is to have more workers and consumers, and so the fact that the birth rate is shrinking worries them. And we need to not fall into that trap. It is the best thing that could possibly happen. We need to celebrate that and thank the young couples today who are making informed decisions to have smaller families.

Speaker uncertainYes, that makes it a little harder.

DaveWell, it makes it harder to grow the economy, but growing the economy is not what we need to be doing on the planet when we’re in overshoot, because it’s the size of the economy and the size of the population. And if your population is contracting, your economy can contract, because it just needs to be of a size that will meet the needs of the population. So: smaller population, smaller economy.

KMOSo I am not an ideologue, but I do know the response, or the rejoinder, to those arguments. For one, the birth rate has not fallen because people have been thinking about carrying capacity. People make economic decisions. When you’re living a rural lifestyle, children are free labor on the farm. And if you don’t have any sort of government-provided retirement or employer-provided retirement, your retirement is your children. And if you live in an environment where they’re likely to die young, it just makes sense to have more of them. But when you’re living in an urban environment, real estate is very expensive. Kids are not free labor. They basically become very expensive exotic pets that live for a very long time.

DaveThey come back.

KMOYes. So people are having fewer children because of urbanization, because it makes more financial sense for them to have fewer kids.

DaveI think that’s a big part of it. I think you’re right. A very small part of it is people being alerted and aware and concerned about being in overshoot. But I also think a part of it is that women are discovering that they can have meaningful lives way beyond motherhood.

Smartphones and the global nervous system

KMOYou know, in doing the C-Realm Podcast for 17 years now, I’ve encountered a lot of people who identify strongly with an environmentalist identity, and they tend to be rather dour about technology. But I’ve heard it argued, and it makes sense to me, that a lot of what is empowering women to make more informed choices is what I’m holding in my hand right here, which is a smartphone, which gives them access to the internet and information that would not be available to them if they were living, say, in a rural village in India. Now, all the women in that rural village in India, they have smartphones. And I was reading— I can’t remember where I read the interview, but I was reading an interview with somebody who’s talking about this, and they mentioned that all the women in the room were gathered around, and they were answering questions and they were engaging, but they always were looking down at their phones. They were in constant contact with, you know, the global nervous system, which provides information to everybody everywhere.

DaveWow. I have mixed emotions about that.

KMOOh, go ahead.

DaveWell, you know, we’re in our phones way too much as it is. I mean—

KMOOh, I agree.

DaveYeah. The access to information is great, but just exiting the conversation that you’re in— You know, you sit down in a restaurant and people aren’t having conversations. Everybody’s staring at their phone, and that’s kind of sad.

KMOI have a girlfriend in the Philippines that I’ve never met, but I talk to her every day with these devices. And she’s a bit younger than me, and every time I go out to eat somewhere, she wants me to take a picture of the food.

DaveWow. Oh, I thought you might just set the phone up there and FaceTime her the whole time, and it’s almost like she was there on a date with you.

KMOWell, I’m in the other ideological camp in terms of operating systems, so no FaceTime.

DaveOh.

KMOWe use WhatsApp.

DaveYou poor guy.

From Conversation Earth to GrowthBusters

KMOWhile we’re on the topic of podcasts, how long have you been doing GrowthBusters?

DaveI think about five years, six years. I started it, and then I kind of stopped for a year, and then some interns talked me into starting it back up. Actually, when I first started it, I called it Paving Paradise, but then I changed the name to GrowthBusters.

KMOAnd how did you get started? Did you sign up with a podcasting service, or did you just build it yourself, and you have control of the RSS feed?

DaveNo. When I first launched, I used SoundCloud to host it. But what kind of got me into it was: I’m a longtime media guy. Most of my adult life I’ve spent as a filmmaker, but I worked in the radio business early on, and kind of returned to the radio in my community about five or six years ago. I decided to produce a syndicated radio series called Conversation Earth, and discovered while I was in the middle of that that there was this thing called podcasting. I didn’t even know about it. And so Conversation Earth, while it was picked up by about 25 radio stations across the country, it was a natural just to make it available as a podcast too. And I did 43 episodes, and these were interviews with some of the leading thinkers, really famous people that are some of the smartest people on the planet, about living in harmony with the planet and its carrying capacity. And I stopped producing episodes four or five years ago, because, doing a radio series, every week you’ve got to crank out a new episode, and it was killing me.

KMOI’ve done live radio, and it’s enjoyable, but it also requires a lot more preparation. With a podcast, you can fix it in post.

DaveSo there’s 43 great episodes of Conversation Earth out there, and they’re pretty evergreen, so you might want to check those out. But with GrowthBusters, I can be doing more topical stuff, and a lot more freewheeling, and not worry about how long it is, because it doesn’t have to fit the radio schedule.

Polarization, conservatives, and conservation

KMOSo in this country, particularly since the election of Donald Trump, but I think it was underway before that, we’ve had a really intense social polarization.

DaveReally, yeah.

KMOAnd one thing that concerns me is that on Team Blue there’s a lot of virtue signaling and a lot of self-aggrandizement, you know, trumpeting one’s moral superiority over the knuckle-dragging Red Tribe. And that turns people off. And if you approach environmentalism in that mode of hortatory scolding, it can turn people— people who were otherwise neutral to your message will strongly reject it. I wonder if that’s a concern that you have.

DaveOh, that’s kind of a multi-part question.

KMOTake as long as you want.

DaveWell, first I want to comment on the polarization. And I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that the conservative element in the United States chose to elect a con man, you know, and support a con man, and many of them continue to excuse and apologize for a con man breaking the law. It’s really hard for those of us who are a little more left-leaning to understand why you would throw all of your principles out the window just to get some policies that you want.

KMOBut do you think that they elected him because he’s a con man, or do you think that they elected him because he was not speaking in the mold of a sort of politics which they have come to see as being useless?

DaveYeah, you know, they didn’t elect him because he was a con man. They chose to overlook the fact that he was a con man because of the other things that he did that addressed their perceived needs. But so that’s one part of the answer. You know, I was a registered Republican when I was younger, mostly because I was a fiscal conservative, but I eventually had to renounce that affiliation, because environmentalism seemed to be just ejected by the party in the quest for profits and low taxes. It seemed like conservatives didn’t want to conserve anymore. They just wanted to—

KMOIt depends on the type of conservative. Like, you can see there’s some conservatives over there, you know, promoting preserving habitat for deer, or for, you know, the fowl that they like to shoot, the quail. So I think it’s the economic conservatives, more so than the cultural conservatives, who are antagonistic to environmental regulations or any slowdown in economic growth. Which brings us back to growth. Let me invite you to give the, say, two-minute pitch on why growth, which is touted as this unmitigated economic benefit, why we should be skeptical of growth.

The case against growth

DaveWell, it’s pretty hard to miss. In fact, hardly a week goes by that we don’t get a new report from scientists somewhere around the planet that is reporting to us on the negative impact of just the scale of the human enterprise on the planet. We’re pushing species off the planet at record rates. We’re turning our climate into a very inhospitable climate over the coming decade, and we’re seeing it now. We are toxifying our air, land, and water; freshwater crises we’re seeing today. We’re pumping aquifers and major rivers dry. There’s just an endless array of evidence that what we’re doing today isn’t going to leave a good planet for our children or our grandchildren. It’s going to be a dead planet if we just keep on doing what we’re doing, and there’s lots of scientific evidence of that.

It’s evidence that we’re in overshoot. And the Global Footprint Network, I think, does the best analysis of all the data around the world every year to determine what the carrying capacity of the planet is and what our ecological footprint is, whether it’s exceeding the carrying capacity or within. And according to their analysis, since the early 1970s we have been asking more of the planet, demanding more of the planet, than she can sustainably provide, year after year. Now, you would think, well, the fact that here we are 50 years later, we’re still here, so maybe it isn’t so unsustainable to be in that overshoot condition. Well, the fact is we’re just kind of stretching the rubber band, and we’re killing the planet, and we’re probably going to really experience the negative implications over the coming decade or two. And I think in many cases we’re experiencing them today. Some scientists are surprised that we were able to stay in the overshoot mode that long.

But anyway, our impact on the planet, simplified, is really the product of how many of us there are and how we’re behaving. And the size of our economy is really the best measure of how we’re behaving. So the size of the global economy, which is about 100 trillion, near that today, and the size of the global population, very close to 8 billion today: that combination is not a good long-term strategy for having good lives on the planet. So if we’re in overshoot, if that’s where we are today, then growing the population or growing the economy doesn’t make a lot of sense.

Replacement fertility and an aging population

KMOSo in talking about population and demographics, a very important concept is the replacement fertility rate. On average, each woman needs to have 2.1 children to keep the population stable. And most economically advanced, industrially developed countries have fallen below that, and in some cases fallen well below that. And their demographics over time are being sort of twisted and perverted to be very, very top-heavy, to have lots of senior citizens and fewer younger working people than the economy requires. And really, to maintain a certain character in your society, you need young people. Old people tend to be risk-averse. They tend to be conservative. They don’t spend as much. You know, a lot of them are on fixed incomes, so they’re not really contributing to a consumer economy. And, you know, you’re welcome to push back against the notion that a consumer economy is of benefit. But how quickly— Like, what would you want the birth rate to be in a place like the United States?

DaveWell, eventually, it would be good for the birth rate to be at replacement level, 2.1, to have a stable population. But if you’re overpopulated, having a stable population isn’t really a great strategy. You really want to have population contraction until you’re back down to—

KMOBut population contraction hurts.

DaveIt does, but it doesn’t hurt nearly as bad as trying to live on a dead planet. I mean, that is the worst of all crises. And yes, you’re right, you pointed out that it’s a mode that’s temporary, while birth rates are lower than 2.1, which is really good news, because we really need to shrink back down as fast as we can before we kill the planet. That’s a temporary condition, and yeah, there’s going to be a temporary bubble of older people, fewer younger people, and that does create some challenges to the economy, but they’re pretty minor compared to the challenge of trying to have an economy on a dead planet.

And one of the big things is the dependency ratio. A lot of the economists like to complain about that: you have all these old people, they’re a real drag on the economy, we don’t have enough people to take care of them, we don’t have enough money to take care of them. Well, at the same time, we have fewer children, and they’re dependents too, and they are a drag on the economy; they require a lot of input. We have to have schools, teachers, colleges, universities, daycare, all of that. While we’re in this temporary condition where there’s more older people and fewer younger people, the resources that we have been devoting to the younger people while we were in growth mode, we can shift those and devote those to the older people. So that isn’t as big of a hurdle as the economists who are big pro-growth would have you believe.

But the main thing is it’s temporary. You know, it’s just something that we’ve got to get through if we want to have good lives for our children, until we get to a place where we really want to stabilize. So the closer we could get to a fertility rate of one— If we could get to a fertility rate of one for 100 years, boom. Then we could switch back to a fertility rate of two. We’d get back down to about two billion people on the planet, and that might be a sustainable number, depending on how we want to live. But we would need to be dedicated to not— You know, everybody couldn’t have a yacht. Everybody couldn’t have three houses. Everybody couldn’t fly across the country to see a hockey game or go to a wedding or something like that. They’d have to live a little bit more simply. So we’ve got some sorting out to do, to figure out what the perfect balance is between size of economy, how grandiose our lifestyle is, and how many people we should embrace living on the planet at one time.

From corporate filmmaker to GrowthBusters

KMOI’m reading your name tag. It says “GrowthBusters, Dave Gardner, filmmaker.” And you’re not young enough for podcasting to have defined your career.

DaveTrue.

KMOSo tell me more about your efforts outside of podcasting. And in particular, I’m interested in the filmmaker part.

DaveWell, what got me into GrowthBusters was— You know, I was a professional filmmaker all my adult life, and most of it I spent working for the evil empire. I was making propaganda films for oil companies, chemical companies, multi-level marketing schemes.

KMOSo you’re doing your penance now.

DaveYeah. I learned the art of spin, and I didn’t ask any questions, because I wanted to be a good provider. I was chasing the American dream. I wanted a trophy house; that was my idea of success. So I spent 30-plus years doing that. But eventually, somehow, I got back in connection with my conservation ethic, and started looking at what we were doing and what the impact was, and decided, you know what, we’re creating a hellstorm here. I’m going to use my filmmaking skills to alert the world and start helping to shift our culture away from chasing more, year after year. So I started a nonprofit and researched and produced a documentary called GrowthBusters: Hooked on Growth, which premiered in 2011. And after doing that, I just couldn’t go back to working for Fortune 500 companies. So I kind of took a vow of poverty, and I’ve been doing public speaking, media interviews, talking to college classes, creating short films, doing everything I could to try to make the subject interesting and get the attention of as many people as possible that, hey, growth isn’t everything it’s cracked up to be. And so I’ve been doing that for well over a decade with very little to show for it. I don’t think that the world has changed very much, sadly.

KMODo you feel any regret about having spent the time and the effort without any noticeable impact?

DaveNo, because it’s a meaningful life. I wake up every day— I kind of joke about that with my wife, but I wake up every day with a planet to save. I mean, it’s easy to get out of bed. I’m really motivated to do it. Who am I to— You know, I’m just making a tiny difference. I would love it if tomorrow— You know, Paul Ehrlich, after he wrote The Population Bomb, was invited on to The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, and he ended up doing 20-some episodes with Johnny Carson, and he got attention. And for a while, people were concerned about overpopulation. I would love to have that kind of opportunity, but I don’t think I’m as interesting a character as Paul Ehrlich, so I don’t think I’m going to be invited to be on Stephen Colbert or anything like that. But I keep waiting for, you know, a New York Times feature or something to catapult the subject into the national conversation.

Julian Simon, Paul Ehrlich, and the bet

KMODo you know who Julian Simon is?

DaveOh, yeah.

KMOOkay, so you know about the bet.

DaveYep.

KMOWould you recount the bet?

DaveWell, let’s see. So sometime, I don’t know, in the few years after The Population Bomb was published— Julian Simon, who was a business professor (I’ve forgotten what college or university he was at, but some people call him an economist; I don’t think he was technically an economist), he was really kind of a well-known growth pusher, I would call him. He really believed that economic growth and population growth were goods, and there was no downside to having those.

KMOI’ve heard him described as a Panglossian.

DaveYeah. So, you know, he criticized Paul Ehrlich, and eventually, in some conversation, they— I can’t remember now who challenged who to that bet. I’ve forgotten.

KMOI don’t know. I just know that the bet exists.

DaveYeah. But they made a bet that they were going to pick a certain basket of commodities, of raw resources, natural resources, look at the price today, and— What was it, was it a two-year bet or a one-year bet?

KMOOh, I thought it was a longer time horizon than that.

DaveIt might have been five. But yeah, they bet. You know, of course, Paul Ehrlich saying we’re eating up the planet with our numbers, those prices are bound to rise.

KMORight.

DaveAnd Julian Simon says, no, no: economies of scale, increasing efficiency, those prices are going to fall.

KMOAnd when the time came?

DaveThe prices had fallen on enough of them.³ Yeah, Julian Simon really believed that innovation— that it really wasn’t about the resources; that if a resource became scarce, we were smart enough that we would figure out a substitute for the resource. And so we weren’t going to be in this resource-scarcity hell that Paul Ehrlich had envisioned. Now, it turns out that, you know, if they had picked a slightly different time period, Paul Ehrlich would have won the bet.

KMOYou know, there’s a saying in Silicon Valley: too early is the same as wrong.

DaveThere you go. But anyway, it’s an interesting story. And, of course, the people who like to criticize Paul Ehrlich for being wrong in some of the predictions they say he made in The Population Bomb— He was predicting mass starvation in the 1980s, that millions of people would be starving to death. He might argue and say he wasn’t predicting it, but it was easy for it to look like he was predicting that. He really was trying to portray that as one possible scenario. And I think he probably was as surprised as anyone that it didn’t come to pass.

And I have two things to say about that. One is: well, maybe it’s great that he warned us and we did something about it. Of course, what we didn’t do about it was stop growing the human population. We did not adopt that solution. But we had the Green Revolution, which is really what made it so that people didn’t starve. We no longer had millions of people starving as a result of the Green Revolution. The unfortunate thing is that that solution— You know, have you ever heard of Sevareid’s Law [spelling unverified]?

When solutions become problems

KMOOkay.

DaveThe leading cause— Oh, go ahead.

KMOYeah: the chief source of problems is solutions.

DaveYeah. Well, what looks like a good solution today is going to be a problem in the future.

KMOThat will be the problem that your next innovation will be targeted at.

DaveYeah. And, you know, eventually you just may not be able to innovate your way out of that. And so the way we’ve been feeding the world, that’s a really big driver of the climate crisis today. It’s a big driver of ocean dead zones, and it’s a primary reason why it’s estimated that we only have maybe 28 harvests left before most of the soil on the planet is not going to be worth a damn for growing crops. So probably not a good long-term solution after all.

KMOI met a young man last night who is a roboticist, and his company is building robots to work vertical farms. So you’re smiling and nodding. I would encourage you to say something about that.

DaveWell, it’s just techno-optimism. You know, it always reminds me of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice segment from that movie Fantasia, where Mickey— I think it was Mickey Mouse—

KMOIt was Mickey Mouse.

DaveYeah. You know, he unleashed some kind of a disaster. He animated a broom to do his work for him.

KMOYeah, that’s right, yeah.

DaveAnd I need to go back and watch that again.

KMOBut then it wouldn’t stop.

DaveYeah.

KMOSo he took a hatchet to it and shattered it into many parts, each of which became a full broom unto itself and started doing way more work, and, I think, fetching water from the well and dumping more and more water into the sorcerer’s lair. So it was flooding.

DaveYeah. And so every time Mickey came up with some kind of a solution, it just turned into a bigger problem. I mean, the list of great wonders of technology that have turned out to be, well, not quite so great after all, is long. I mean, you know, look at Teflon. Wow, Teflon skillet, nonstick skillet. Well, the chemicals that they used for that, the same chemicals that they used to waterproof outdoor gear: it turns out that that’s now called the forever chemical, and it’s causing serious issues with birth defects, and it never goes away. You cannot find a place on the planet where that chemical doesn’t exist today, and it just doesn’t break down. So, so much for Teflon and Gore-Tex fabric. But thalidomide, Roundup, you know, BPA, the material that they used to make water bottles out of: turns out that that was poisoning us. It just goes on and on and on. But there are success stories of things that we were doing that were harmful that we’ve stopped doing.

KMOCFCs. Yeah, well, we’ve been talking for a good long time here. Why don’t we switch roles, and you can do the interviewing?

DaveOkay.

KMOAll right. So, Dave Gardner of the GrowthBusters podcast, it was great talking to you.

DaveThanks very much, KMO. KMO, is that how you say it [wording unclear]?

KMOThat’s it. Not “Camo.” Just Jim Kunstler calls me “Camo” [wording unclear].

DaveOf course. Well, yeah, thanks for your interest, and thanks for challenging me. It’s been a lot of fun.

Introducing Padverb

KMOYou’re listening to the C-Realm Podcast with your host, KMO. That was Dave Gardner of the GrowthBusters podcast, and you can find that at growthbusters.com.

Next up, I’m going to share a conversation that I had today with Anna Haskell and Slava Borisov. And I would like to give my apologies and thanks to both of them: they did not know, when we got on a Zoom call together, that we’d be recording a podcast segment. In fact, I’m gearing up to do some work with them. They’re starting a new business that already exists; the service exists. It is called Padverb. You can find it at en.padverb.com. It is a podcasting service of sorts. But rather than tell you anything about it, here is a bit of the conversation that I had today with Anna and Slava.

Podcasts labeled by people

KMOAll right, next up on the podcast, I have got a couple of folks here to talk about a project that I’m going to be working on in the very near future. Anna Haskell and Slava Borisov, welcome to the C-Realm Podcast.

Speaker uncertainThank you.

KMOAll right. So, Anna, I think you are in the driver’s seat in terms of the elevator pitch. What is this project that we’re going to be working on together?

Anna HaskellSo the problems we’re solving at Padverb started with my co-founder Slava being a very heavy user of podcasts. And what he discovered is that it’s very difficult to search for podcasts, to discover new podcasts. And the reason is that you really have to know the name of the podcast. So if you know the name, you can type it into Google or you can type it into Apple, and you can find the right podcast. But the question is, what’s next? Where do we go from there? So the idea we started with was to essentially label each episode of podcast guest content to the person rather than the podcast. So each of Padverb’s episodes is labeled to at least two people, in a very simple format: host and guest. Sometimes we have one guest, sometimes we have two or three guests, and sometimes we even have co-hosts. But the format is very simple: we have people who are creating this piece of podcast content.

When I came to the project about a year ago, my frustration with the podcast space was that the interviews that I have given in the audio format were lost. I couldn’t really know where to find them. I couldn’t understand how to look. I wanted to see my content all in one place, in one platform, in this easy format: host and guest. So it was really a perfect combination, a perfect merger, where we have a problem of search and discovery brought together by a listener with a problem brought together by a guest, a guest of a show, a guest of a podcast interview, which was me. So we started with these two problems.

And where we’re going now is: we realized that we’re creating an amazing social graph. What we realized is that the podcast interview is a very heavy degree of connection between people. Once a host and a guest have sat together for a one-hour-plus interview that is going to be published, essentially they’re very tightly connected to each other, in terms of maybe their business interactions; maybe they see each other offline, socially; they refer each other for business opportunities. And that means that we can really figure out who is connected to whom in the podcast interview space, and also create the future for people who want to brand themselves in the podcast interview space, who want to start maybe with a small portfolio of podcast interviews, but then get to maybe some of the star hosts and get interviewed by them. So we think we have something unique here, where we’re creating a social graph of people going from just a few interviews to a very large portfolio.

And really, our overarching purpose in life— Every organization, every person has a purpose. Our purpose is to facilitate the delivery of ideas to the world, and we do it in the podcast interview space. So that’s kind of short and sweet, I hope, and I would let my co-founder Slava maybe add something.

Slava BorisovWell, it was very well put, but I would only add that I personally, as a listener, am a big fan of KMO’s C-Realm. So I wanted to listen to all of his guests at other podcasts, and I couldn’t find a way to do it. So I decided to actually create this sort of rudimentary tool that would allow me to take a person’s name and populate my feed with all their other interviews. So that’s part of the story. The second part is, yes, it’s a graph, it’s a social network, but we also kind of split it into two different functions. A person could be just a listener, and that’s who I was, and hopefully I’ll remain so. The person can also use that graph to identify the perfect host or guest for his or her podcast, or the opposite way: if they have a book or something, they could suggest themselves— So, like, an author could find all the hosts who are talking to guests on their topic. So that’s the kind of thing that we’re thinking: that there will be both a matchmaking tool and sort of a recommendation tool for listeners.

Matchmaking hosts and guests

KMOWell, let me paraphrase my understanding of it, and you can tell me if I’m getting it right or wrong. At one level, it seems to be a utility for connecting podcast hosts with potential guests.

Speaker uncertainYes.

KMOThat seems pretty obvious. It sounded, though, like there might also be an element of it of helping streamline the production process for the podcaster. Is that correct?

SlavaThat is also correct. I think we’re on slightly less firm ground here. We’re learning as we go, yes. But the production process itself could also be sort of— I don’t want to say disrupted, but, you know, streamlined, as you say.

KMOSo I have learned, and I’m sure many other podcasters have learned this same thing as well, that it’s a lot easier to be a guest than it is to be a host. And for somebody who is a host, you know, 99 times out of 100, it is very refreshing to get guest spots [wording unclear] on somebody else’s show. So it seems to me that somebody who’s already a successful podcaster with an audience, if they wanted to register with Padverb, that might be an avenue to them being guests elsewhere, which is, you know, more fun and less work.

AnnaYes. Well, absolutely. One of the avenues— And actually, this product is currently in development. As we said at the beginning, we’re working on a lot of things, but one of the avenues that we are doing this through is the recommendation for people who have primarily been guests, or who have primarily been hosts, the other way. You know, if you have been a host, then you should be a guest, maybe, on this particular show. And we are scaling these recommendations, because we are a technology firm. We want to create technologically enabled recommendations for people to be guests or to be hosts if they have primarily taken the other route.

KMOAnd for people who think they have something to say but don’t really want to start their own podcast, this would probably be a good tool for getting themselves started as a podcast guest.

SlavaRight. And actually, on that topic, we sort of do a— not a sandbox, but kind of like a playground for people who are just starting. You don’t have to actually have RSS feeds right away. You can just upload a file, label your guests, and you’re set to go. You can actually export that as your first podcast. So you don’t have to immediately start with the whole RSS thing and hosting and choosing a commercial provider. You can just do it for free on Padverb.

The founders’ backgrounds

KMOAnd you two come from a rather technical background. I’d be interested to hear more. So let’s start with Anna, because I’ve spoken to you at length, Slava. So nothing personal, but let’s go with Anna.

AnnaWell, I’m very flattered that you think that I come from a technical background. I’m really grateful that you say so. Myself, I actually come from a business background, and I am learning as I go. This is a technology company. My background is: I’m a trader in commodities on Wall Street, really. And I’ve started companies in the past. I’ve been in the online media space almost from the beginning. Back in 1999, I was part of a founding team of what became a very successful online media, independent news media, company in Russia that got shut down very recently, but it existed for 21 years. So that was my first experience with online media and the internet. And since then, I built my career really in finance and hedge funds and, you know, family offices. And when our other co-founder brought me this project, it was very exciting to me, because, you know, I did start my career in online media, and I saw the scaling potential of this platform. I think the podcast space is a complete mess, is in complete disarray, and there is room for a new entrant that will make it streamlined and create really the future for podcasters. So that’s us. So I saw a very interesting idea, very interesting potential, and I jumped in, and I’m learning a lot from Slava, who does have a technical background. So maybe he could say a few words.

SlavaWell, I strive to be a Renaissance man myself. So I did go to school for computer science and math, but I’m not sure what question I’m answering: like, whether this background that I have had in any way kind of impinged on this project.

KMOFor example, the phrase “social graph”: I may never have spoken it before just now, and yet it’s off of both of your tongues. That sounds like tech speak to me.

Six degrees and the social graph

SlavaWell, actually, you know, it’s funny, because I recently learned that the sort of cliché that exists, called six degrees of separation, actually is a fairly recent thing. Supposedly it came from a play by one Hungarian playwright whose name I can’t remember right now,⁴ but it’s been documented and mentioned in many books. But more famously, this social scientist, Milgram, did this experiment where he was sending small postcards to different recipients, asking them to please forward this postcard if they can think of somebody who can deliver it to the final recipient. And this way he sort of mapped out the United States of the 1960s, and concluded that probably the level of connections that existed in American society at that time was around five or six.

I think nowadays the whole thing doesn’t really apply, because, you know, through LinkedIn, through Facebook (Meta, sorry), we’re connected to many more people than we really are familiar with. So I guess the length of a typical path got compressed to maybe three. I’m pretty sure, if I can say that, I know KMO probably already has a number of connections that— Even if you’re not on Facebook, KMO— I think you’re quitting Facebook at some point— but even so, your number of connections is so big that I can be pretty much guaranteed that I can be within striking distance of a lot of famous people. So nowadays that’s not as interesting.

What’s interesting to me is how these graph properties— And they’re actually quite interesting in themselves; you can visualize it in a very beautiful way. But how do these properties actually relate to the kind of topics and ideas that are circulating? If one could even just kind of color ideas with certain colors, you can maybe create something that’s very, very beautiful in a sort of 3D space, or maybe not necessarily 3D, that kind of thing. So I do understand “social graph” has sort of been overused in the last 20 years, especially, you know, with all the social media. But there’s different kinds of social graphs, and there were early experiments. I remember there were some social scientists who were documenting [wording unclear] what I believe was kind of like the notes of some sort of society that had regular meetings in the early 20th century, Alabama or something like that. And they were putting together all these kinds of connections between people that showed up at the same meeting and spoke on the same issues and stuff. And it also created a certain representation of historical time and place and a certain, you know, segment of society. So you can apply it to almost anything, really. There’s many, many people who’ve done— The study of co-authorship, for example: two people are considered connected if they had written articles with each other. That kind of stuff also results in very interesting data. So you can apply it to almost any sort of social activity where two people or more do something, and by doing that something they presumably generate or pass ideas around. So that’s pretty much the foundation of all the social—

Super connectors and The Square and the Tower

AnnaRight. To give you just a preview: what Slava is talking about is very interesting, because where we’re heading is really in data analytics. Because there’s a big question today that, you know, business people are asking, really everybody’s asking: who is really connected to each other? You know, if you have 20,000 followers on LinkedIn or 100,000 on Instagram, you’re not really connected to all these people. Who are the real super connectors? And one way to judge that is to figure out if people have given interviews and to whom they have given interviews. And if you see that a person has thousands of connections on LinkedIn and very few podcast interviews, then that tells you something about that person: maybe they just create the content for a like or for a follow, but maybe they’re not a super connector. So the podcast interview has become a mainstream medium for people to brand themselves, brand their ideas. And really, everybody should be giving podcast interviews today. And if you’re not in the space as a super connector, you absolutely should be. So that’s where we’re going, really. We are creating libraries of these super connectors’ podcast interviews, and trying to evaluate who is the real deal and who just has thousands of followers but no real super-connecting capability.

SlavaYeah. If I can add to that: I think a good book to read, if somebody’s curiosity is piqued by this— Niall Ferguson, historian at Harvard, I think, wrote on the ebbs and flows of this kind of conflict between hierarchy and network that’s been going on for many centuries, actually. And in his estimation, the 20th century, especially the mid-20th century, was the peak hierarchy period, whereas in other periods we’re really more operating in the paradigm of a network. And, you know, if I may, kind of build a hypothesis that maybe we’re more in that—

KMOBefore you detail the hypothesis, which of Niall Ferguson’s many books are you referencing?

SlavaOh, what is the title?

Explanatory insert(KMO, in an editing insert) The book title that Slava is looking for right now is The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power, from the Freemasons to Facebook, by Niall Ferguson. Niall is spelled N-I-A-L-L, just in case you’re looking for it on wherever you look for books; no need to mention my former employer. All right, now back to the conversation.

SlavaNo, I pretty much just wanted to recommend this book, because I think it’s really relevant to what we’re discussing.

KMOSo I just finished listening to the audiobook of his most recent book. It’s called Doom—

SlavaAh, okay.

KMO—The Politics of Catastrophe. You can probably guess why I was interested in that.

SlavaYes, yes. I actually came away— Okay, I know flattery is getting you nowhere, but I think, you know, this podcast has been, for me personally, a platform where I discovered a lot of the thinkers that, you know, I still think are important, regardless of whether or not they’re right or wrong. And because there’s different kinds of audiences that listen to you, I actually think that you’re going to fight a super connector [wording unclear], as Anna said. You’re joining several different segments that are maybe not necessarily even like each other, but they listen to you. So here we go.

KMOAll right. Well, I think we should wrap it up there, but I’m very much looking forward to working with the both of you, and I look forward to talking to you again very soon.

Speaker uncertainThank you very much.

Speaker uncertainThank you very much.

Program identification: “On the C-Realm Podcast: a mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions.”

KMO: the Padverb podcast and the producer’s role

KMOThat was Anna Haskell and Slava Borisov, and we are going to be working on a project together. What’s that project? Well, in addition to connecting podcasters and podcast guests through Padverb, there’s going to be a Padverb-branded podcast, and yours truly is set to be the host.

So I’m sure you’ve noticed my podcasting output has fallen off dramatically. You know, for many, many years, I put out one a week, every week, on the same day each week: Wednesday. And then that productivity started to slide, and for a time I was saying that the C-Realm Podcast was a monthly podcast. But this is only the second one I’ve put out this year, and we’re at the end of April. What’s the reason for that? Well, you could say that the C-Realm Vault is part of the reason. That’s the podcast that pays the bills, and that’s the one that has to take precedence. But I can’t lay it all at the feet of the Vault. I have found it increasingly burdensome to play the producer’s role in the podcast. Lots of people have helped me with the C-Realm Podcast, particularly with the website, but for the most part, it is a one-man band. I set up the interviews, I conduct the interviews, I edit the interviews, I assemble the shows, post them, do the cover art, write out the descriptions. And what very little publicity the podcast gets, I’m responsible for that as well.

I would really rather just be the host. I would just rather talk to people and then have somebody else do the producer’s role, which is to say: reach out to people, schedule conversations, and, you know, make it all happen. At that point, I would like to just be presented with a little study packet or a little dossier: “Hey, here’s your next guest. Read up on this. Be ready to talk to them at such and such a time.” That’s my dream from podcasting. And then I just pass it off to somebody else to edit and assemble the podcast and all the other stuff: the maintenance of the website, all of that. That is my podcasting dream. And it seems, knock wood, like it’s about to come true. So the podcast will just be the Padverb podcast with your host, KMO, and once it is available, I’ll announce it to folks via Twitter and Patreon and YouTube.

Social media, Twitter, and Elon Musk

KMOAnd, well, that’s pretty much it for my social media these days. Of course, there’s the C-Realm Podcast discussion group on MeWe [spelling unverified; heard “miwi.com”], and I apologize, I have not participated in that in a very long time. And maybe whoever’s in control of the Friends of the C-Realm group on Facebook can also get the word out. I remain, by choice largely, persona non grata on Facebook. I do not participate in that social media platform.

I do participate on Twitter, and I have to say I don’t like the side of me that Twitter brings out. And it’s not Twitter’s fault exactly, or at least not entirely, but I noticed that I’m a very different person on Instagram than I am on Twitter. And that’s largely because I’m speaking with images on Instagram: images that I take with my smartphone, images that I draw. And so the social media platform and the way that it is implemented does affect the interaction. You know, it does color the interaction and the side of our personalities that that interaction draws out. And the part of me that comes to the surface on Twitter is aggressive, abrasive. And so I’m making a point, actually, to just retweet a lot of artwork on Twitter that I like. So to go and find the nasty little bons mots that I might drop from time to time from my own curmudgeonly psyche, you’ll have to surf through lots of absolutely gorgeous images by really accomplished artists, and I hope that’s not too much of a burden for you.

I have to say I’m as excited, as captivated, by Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter as anybody is, although I haven’t had a lot to say about it, because it’s a really partisan conversation. And I simply do not credit for an instant that Elon Musk is going to be any less amenable to free expression, any less responsible in the exercise of power, than the previous administrators were. But at the same time, I realize, you know, he has financial interests, he has egoic interests, and he has not been a consistent champion of free speech, particularly among his employees. So I’m not investing, I don’t believe anyway, I’m not investing undue hope in his ability to turn that platform around. It’s a mess, it encourages bad behavior, and I don’t see myself walking away from it anytime soon.

KMO’s closing remarks

KMOOn the off chance that you’re listening to this and you don’t know that I was on Twitter (I know that it comes as a surprise to some people), my Twitter handle is K-A-Y-E-M-M-O, and it’s a capital K, so that spells out “KMO” phonetically. K-A-Y-E-M-M-O. Hit me up.

And if you want to go over to Padverb and create a profile there: if you have ever been a guest on the C-Realm Podcast or the C-Realm Vault Podcast— I’m particularly talking to people who have been on the Vault. The Vault is behind a paywall, and there it shall remain. But if you have been a guest on that podcast and you create a profile at Padverb, if you would like to upload the recording of just you and me talking (not the whole podcast, but just the segment of you and me talking), I will be happy to provide you with that recording. And who knows, you might end up as a regular guest on a variety of podcasts. So if you want to do that, then just send me a link to your Padverb profile and, if you remember it (hopefully you remember it), what episode of the C-Realm Vault Podcast you were on.

All right. Well, I have more recordings and tales from EarthX, which again took place last weekend at the Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center in Dallas, Texas. I had a bunch of fun. Can’t wait for next year. And I can’t wait to share some more stories and conversations from that event. So that will be on the next episode of the C-Realm Vault Podcast.

And as always, thank you, thank you, thank you to the subscribers to the C-Realm Vault Podcast. It is your interest and your dollars— I mean, not to put too fine a point on it, and not to be crass, but your dollars, which keep me podcasting. So thank you.

All right, that brings us to the end of this installment of the C-Realm Podcast. Thanks for listening. For those of you who only listen to the free podcasts, well, hopefully Padverb will have my voice in your ears more often. But for the subscribers to the C-Realm Vault Podcast, thank you for your patience, and I will be talking to you quite soon. All right, I’m out. Stay well.

Editorial notes

1. Heard as “597” in both transcription passes; KMO evidently misspoke. This recording is C-Realm Podcast episode 579, “GrowthBusters and Super Connectors” (archive metadata for main-579, released April 29, 2022). ↩

2. The inscription’s English wording is “Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature.” The Georgia Guidestones stood in Elbert County, Georgia, from 1980 to 2022; they were commissioned under the pseudonym “R. C. Christian.” On July 6, 2022, after this recording, they were heavily damaged in a bombing, and the remains were removed the same day. Source: Wikipedia, “Georgia Guidestones” (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia_Guidestones). ↩

3. The Simon–Ehrlich wager was formalized on September 29, 1980, twelve years after The Population Bomb (1968), with a ten-year term ending September 29, 1990. Ehrlich and his colleagues picked five metals (chromium, copper, nickel, tin, and tungsten); all five declined in price over the decade, and Ehrlich lost the bet. Source: Wikipedia, “Simon–Ehrlich wager” (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon–Ehrlich_wager). ↩

4. The idea is usually traced to the Hungarian author Frigyes Karinthy’s 1929 short story “Chains” (also translated “Chain-Links”), not a play; the phrase was popularized by John Guare’s 1990 play Six Degrees of Separation. Source: Wikipedia, “Six degrees of separation” (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_degrees_of_separation). ↩