Name: Joe Rogan Experience #1896 - Bjorn Lomborg
Uploaded: 2022-11-09T00:00:00.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1896 - Bjorn Lomborg' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2022-11-09. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1896 - Bjorn Lomborg' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2022-11-09. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #1896 - Bjorn Lomborg

Joe Rogan podcast, check it out.
The Joe Rogan experience.
Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day.
Would you like coffee?
So, see, I brought my Mountain Dew diet.
Oh, you're a Mountain Dew guy?
Oh, boy.
I like a man who prepares for his podcasts.
All right, we're rolling?
We're up?
Did you get that part?
This dude drinks Mountain Dew diet.
That is like the anti-environmentalist beverage of choice.
Is it?
No, I'm kidding.
Aluminum is actually good, right?
Because aluminum does get recycled.
Recycle it, yeah.
It does get recycled.
Oh, yeah, it's no problem.
We were so heartbroken reading this article recently about plastics.
About how it was like 5%, right?
5%.
Single-use plastics get recycled.
Yeah, yeah.
Every time you throw your bottle in the right bin, you feel like you're a good
person.
Yeah.
I'm like, I'm a good person.
I put it in the blue bin.
I'm a good person.
The right way to probably handle that, that's a whole different conversation,
is just simply to burn it and reuse the energy.
Right.
How would you do that, though, and not pollute the air?
We do that all over the world, especially in Europe.
You just put a scrub on the smokestack.
That's all you do?
Yeah.
It's that simple?
Yeah.
It doesn't have any.
Well, come on.
It must have some emissions.
Sure.
I mean, nothing is zero.
Right.
But it's very, very low.
But it's very, very low.
Or is it like a million cars?
No, no.
I think it's probably less than a car.
So it's not something I've looked.
A million cars sounds gross, but that's our city.
You know, like every day in Austin, you get a million cars.
But the emissions from waste burning, very, very low.
So I remember people worried a lot about dioxins and that kind of stuff.
It turns out we can get rid of virtually all of it.
So is that the tradeoff?
Is the tradeoff, you have some emissions from the burning of the plastics, but
you're getting
rid of the plastics, which is a real, is it a net gain for the environment?
Because the plastics are a real, real problem, particularly in the ocean and in
landfills
and just, it's a real issue.
So the real issue here is once you decide to say you have to switch it into all
these different
bins, you have everyone sit.
I was just at a conference in Stanford and you could just see everyone and I
did the same
thing.
You're sort of like, oh my God, what am I going to do?
And you feel like you did the wrong thing no matter what you do.
And you probably did.
And most of it, as you just said, won't get recycled.
Why?
Because back in, you know, five, 10 years ago, we just took all of this and
sent it to
China and had them recycle it.
And this is why there's so much plastic in the oceans.
It's not because anybody, you know, just throw it out.
It's because we shipped it away to feel good about ourselves, but we didn't
want to pay.
And then, of course, when you get this barge with all this crap plastic, you
either say,
should we, you know, recycle it and spend a lot of money or maybe just come,
you know, happen
to lose it on the ocean.
That's where most of this plastic actually comes from.
So the idea is-
Really?
They just dump it out?
Yeah.
So if you burn it instead, it's no problem.
You just throw everything in one bucket.
You recycle the energy and it's very, very cheap for everyone.
Nobody has to sit and stand there and worry.
And you'll actually do what you just pointed out.
95% gets done anyway.
So if we just do that, it will have a net gain on the environment.
We'll remove plastics, like particularly from the ocean.
Who's that young gentleman that we've had on the podcast that developed that
machine to extract
the plastic from the ocean?
Yes, tip of your tongue, son.
Very, very.
I mean, he was, I believe he was 19 years old when he came up with the idea and
implemented
it.
You know, had like a few different models.
Boy on slot.
Boy on slot.
Thank you.
Sorry, boy.
My memory's shit in the morning.
But he figured out how to extract some of it.
And then they took that plastic and then converted it into things you could buy,
like sunglasses
and things along those lines.
And all of this is nice.
And look, we should definitely try to clean up the ocean.
But again, I tend to think that we try to make it too hard.
You know, if you actually want this to work for a population of 8 billion, you
need to have
simple municipal waste recycling.
And that's very often just that you recycle glass, you recycle paper, you burn
most of the
other stuff.
And then you recycle some of the really valuable stuff.
But doesn't that cost a lot of money to do in places that are like strapped for
resources?
Like one of the things that you always see when you see video footage of
countries overseas
that are impoverished is you see a lot of trash.
Oh, yeah.
Because they don't have the money to process it.
No, no.
Right?
And that's why the first thing you want is just simply good trash collection.
So you get rid of it.
So we did a big project in Dhaka or for Bangladesh.
And one of the things we focused on was also just simply getting trash off the
streets.
Because it's unsightly, it actually leads to more crime.
It leads to more destitution.
It probably also transmits disease.
And it's fairly cheap to get rid of.
This is not rocket science.
So there's a lot of ways that you can do that.
But instead, we come in and say, no, no, you need to recycle.
You need to have three different baskets and all that kind of stuff.
No, you just need to get rid of it.
That's how you also get rid of the plastics in the ocean.
Again, and I think we'll have that conversation a lot of times.
A lot of these, oh, we should do the absolute best, feels like it's a really
good solution.
But very often it ends up meaning that you do stuff that will then only be
implemented 5% and the other stuff is crap.
Hmm.
There should be a real public understanding of the dangers of these plastics
and microplastics getting into your body, too.
It's just so weird that we've developed this entire society based on this petrochemical
product that ultimately gets into your body and has negative effects.
So the microplastics are possibly an issue.
It's not quite clear yet whether they are.
But that's a concern, and that's certainly something we should look at.
But also remember pretty much everything else that you have with plastics is
incredibly useful, right?
It packages which actually reduces loss of pretty much anything you can think
of dramatically.
And, of course, through COVID, we realized it's a really good thing to have one-use
plastic stuff.
So, again, most things in the real world are both a problem and a benefit, and
we need to find out how do we make it more of a benefit and less of a problem.
But we need to stop having this kind of say, oh, you can't have anything of
this bad thing.
That's not how we organize our societies.
That's not how we think, and that's certainly not how we make good choices.
That makes sense.
But if we know that there are alternatives to plastic, and we know that there
are so many different problems with plastic, it being non-biodegradable, unless
it's like there's some – isn't there some plastic that they can make with,
like, plant fiber that's biodegradable?
Then there's the phthalates thing.
You know, I'm sure you're probably aware of this.
Dr. Shanna Swan, do you know this whole thing about what's happening to when
women are pregnant and their bodies have levels of phthalates above a certain
level?
It has an effect on the reproductive cycle of the child, and they can do
studies in mammals, and they show that when the female is pregnant and she
encounters these chemicals from plastics, it fucks with the gender of the child,
like, where their taints shrink, which is weird, but in mammals.
Apparently, that's a representation of, like, whether or not it's a male or –
it's, like, one of the best distinctions, ways of distinguishing, whether it's
a male or a female is the size of the taint when it's a baby, because the male
taint is 50 to 100% larger than the female taint.
She's hilarious.
She's, like, she's got a, like, really funny thing on her Instagram about –
because it also causes a decline in sperm production.
And so her way of approaching it that's funny is she has the jizz quiz, and she
does this – she's, like, this adorable, like, petite lady who is a brilliant
doctor.
But she's kind of being funny, and at the same time, like, sounding the warning
shot, like, hey, this is fucking with human beings' reproductive cycles.
And since the invention of petrochemical plastics that we use in basically
everything, from that point to today, there's a very clear drop in fertility
rates, a very clear drop in male sperm count, a very clear drop in penis and
testicle size.
And with females, there's higher rates of miscarriages.
And she believes, through her research, that this is connected and that these
chemicals that we're getting from these plastics are literally affecting the
development cycle of human babies.
Yeah.
And, look, I've done some work on this.
So – and the thing you have to worry about.
So we should definitely be concerned about these things.
That sounds like a giant issue.
And we should certainly be looking at it.
The best data, as I understand this, is the fact that sperm counts have gone
down dramatically over the last 30 to 40 years.
You haven't looked at the taints?
Well, no, I haven't.
Big-time taint study.
Sorry.
And what it turns out, of course, is that you tell people that they have to
abstain for a week or four days or a week.
I can't remember.
And that's potentially possible that people would do in the 50s.
It's very unlikely.
It happens today and we know that they don't –
So you think more people jerk off now and that's why – that's an interesting
perspective.
I bet you're right.
Hold on a second.
Now I'm on Team Bjorn.
That makes sense.
The point is not that we shouldn't be concerned about issues and that we should
be investigating things.
But you also got to remember our civilization is actually really, really good
at making sure that we are concerned about all the different things.
And how do we know?
Because we live much longer.
This is one of the things I think, you know, almost everyone forgets.
In 1900, the average life expectancy on planet Earth was 32 years.
Last year, it was 74 years.
Right.
But you know why it was 32 years, right?
It was to a large extent.
It was infant mortality about three quarters.
But what's happening is still that it goes up.
So this is a fantastic statistic.
You're going to be surprised about this.
So even in rich countries, it goes up for every year you live, it goes up three
more months.
So for every four years, you actually become – you get one more year in life
expectancy.
You should be young Jamie forever.
Kind of, you're going to run out of runway eventually.
But the point here is that we're actually really good at doing these things.
And yes, we should still be concerned.
And one of the reasons why we're good at it is because we're good at being
concerned.
But we should not be so scared that we end up thinking, oh, my God, you know,
all these things are going on.
I don't think people are necessarily scared, but they should – I think they
should be concerned.
And I think we should recognize when things are detrimental to human health,
you know, like the plastics thing.
Like to just dismiss that and go, well, everything's better than it was before
and you live longer.
Right.
But it might like literally be affecting the way human beings develop in a
negative way.
And who knows what – I mean, right now they're looking at sexual side effects.
What kind of cognitive impairment side effects does it have?
Yeah.
What kind of – I mean, who the fuck knows?
Yeah.
And we had a very good example of that with lead that we added to gasoline.
And that was a terrible idea.
Please explain the story behind that because it's really bananas.
So the fundamental thing is it makes your gasoline run a little better.
So you 