Good morning John.

If you had asked me when I started writing my "Eco Geek" blog back in 2005 when I thought CO2 emissions in the U.S. would start falling, I would have said "I don't know, probably freaking never"

But in fact, the year I started writing that blog, is the year CO2 emissions started to go down. 

"Eco Geek" was about environmental technologies, and on that front, the progress has been kind of remarkable. Like the graphs of the cost of solar panels and wind turbines and batteries are mind-blowing to me. And there's every signal that those costs will keep going lower.

The amount of like work and thought and engineering and just genius brains that have been necessary to make that happen is mind-blowing, and it's very good news!

But, by every measure, shouldn't it have been easier to achieve a similar reduction in greenhouse emissions by just not using cows for meat anymore? Like, that doesn't require any genius thought, no engineering. You don't need expensive equipment or new power lines or mining or material science. 

We have the technology to do it in 2005, we have the technology today.

It just requires people making one different choice, and if we all did it, we would decrease future warming by 10% with absolutely no new technology at all.

Why can't we stop eating beef? It is an obvious choice, and it's obviously easier than making a solar panel for 400 times less money, right? Right?! No! Wrong! Obviously wrong! Like that is not a true sentence! If it were true, we would have done it! 

If it were easier to stop eating beef than making cheap solar panels, it would have happened. It's harder! And why is it harder? I think because we don't have the technology.

This is one thing that I think we most get wrong about ourselves. Making different choices is really hard, especially when they require some amount of sacrifice.

But we do do that, sometimes. But when we do, we are using technologies. 

And I don't mean technologies the way that we usually talk about them. I mean social technologies. For a long time, we had a technology called Church! That helped people make specific decisions. And some people still have that technology! And it's a very powerful technology for them. For other people, it has become a less powerful technology.

We are so unused to thinking about social technologies that we forget that they are the thing that holds society together.

Marriage is a technology that benefits people and society. Fashion is a technology that signals gender and age and social status and cultural affiliations. Christmas is a technology! It's a technology that helps you give presents to other people, and take a little break! Soccer is a technology. The idea of a border is a technology. The word vegan is a technology. 

These are human-created things, that result in changes in human behavior. The reason these things don't feel like technologies to us is because we don't feel like we create them. And oftentimes like we don't but somebody did.

Like I inherited the technology of hockey. And it seems kind of frozen to me. Though actually as a hockey fan I have watched as changes in that technology have changed the game and how people respond to it. And every one of those changes people were mad about them!

Changing our behavior, changing our social technologies, it's so hard. We think that we are individuals but we are possessed by our societies. 

When I think about why I still eat meat, the like honest answer isn't even that I like it? I mean I do, but like a bigger reason is that I am too aligned to cultural norms. I find it too unpleasant and difficult to deviate from what my culture tells me is normal.

That's not a thing that I've ever heard anybody else say. But I think if more people looked harder that would be their answer. 

And I think that plenty of vegans and vegetarians will tell you that the harder part of their diet isn't the diet it's dealing with other people's responses to it. 

And I think it's really important to say that there are lots of reasons why we align ourselves to the norms of our culture. Like if we blew it all up and started from scratch, I think that would be really unpleasant, and a lot of people would fall through the cracks and it would be overall net negative.

But also on the other hand, I think that many people don't even recognize that culture is a malleable thing and instead believe that the one way of doing it that they have known their whole life is somehow the only right way to do things, and should never change.

But obviously like culture does change. Like we've witnessed it change in our lifetime.

It's just that unsurprisingly if unfortunately those changes usually are pretty passive and our decisions mostly flow through the paths of least resistance, rather than the paths of like trying to achieve a positive outcome.

Stopping eating cows is hard for a bunch of reasons. One reason is because it is so impactful. The land we devote to raising livestock is like 40% of the habitable land on Earth. And most of that is cows. That's a real number. 

And part of me says like the benefits of freeing that up for other uses like for example increasing biodiversity are so huge that we have to do it. 

But another part of me is aware that each one of those acres is owned by a person who has a way of life that they believe in, that they love, that they are appreciated for, and that they are using to make a living for their families and their futures. 

But also most of the times we change cultures is when we give people a better choice rather than when we ask them to give up something they enjoy. It's much easier to get people into an electric car than it is to get them onto a bus. A cultural technology exists to make a thing that is a harder choice easier. It's there to make something that is uphill feel like it is downhill. 

Which is why the whole idea of four beef days a year is appealing to me. Not because it takes away something I like but because it also gives me something new. It brings along other things that I kind of desperately want and feel as if I am missing. I want a time to put on a nice shirt and sit down with my family. I crave a little bit of ritual. 

I want to say to my son, "Son today is an important one. This is an important day. It's a day when we think about how well we have been provided for by the many people who provide for us."

Sacred days are an important cultural technology that we have not found ways to build back up in secular traditions. As I say that I can hear how like over-sincere that might sound to people. Like one thing about a cultural technology is that it's probably not going to work that well if it seems like super cringe. And it feels a little like absolutely freaking everything sounds cringe now. 

And so cringe must be overcome and it can be. Loving Taylor Swift is at the moment a little bit cringe but gosh dang it, people still do it.

And we have to do it because what we are left with in a world with no cultural technologies is a world where we only ever fall down the paths of least resistance into whatever crack or crevice we happen to end up inside of. 

We're not building up to something we are just letting whatever app is best at retaining our attention control our hours and our days and our minds. 

Let it be known that the fourth hour of scrolling is a lot more cringe than any of the other stuff I do. 

When I started working on this video I thought it was going to be about how depressing it was that it's like easier to make a solar power cheaper than wood than it would be to make people make one simple decision. 

But having thought about it, that's like most human thing ever. Like it's easier to make a vaccine than to get everybody to take a vaccine. Of course it is! 

What are we? Eight billion monkeys? With roads and hats?

And we're a particular mess because of how a revolution and how  we communicate and create the world together that's got to like flip the whole table. 

I haven't been talking about this because it's not like fun content and maybe watching this video you're going to think I've gone too far in the other direction but I'm kind of coming out of a few weeks of brain fog and fatigue and discomfort that might be like post-chemo. It might be just like normal depression. It's hard to tell.

Part of dealing with survivorship is that you don't know what you're body is trying to tell you. Do you have a low-grade viral infection? Is this chemo-induced fatigue? Are you just sad? 

But now that I feel like more capable of anything beef days are exactly what I want to do. I want to eat a thing that I can't always eat. I want to put on an outfit that I might not otherwise wear. I want to think some nice thoughts about the billions of people who have come before me and built a world that is imperfect but better than the one they had. And I want to think about how every one of those people good and bad made mistakes and laughed at jokes and cried when they lost someone and I want to think about how the only times things got better is when people believed they could get better. Never perfect, but better. 

Thank you to all of you who've been thinking through some beef day thoughts. Including people who have done some calculations of the potential impacts of beef days on the subreddit. People who have suggested days for beef days and people and things to honor on beef days. I'm making a spreadsheet myself. Keeping things in order. Maybe then I'll make a proposal next week. Maybe in We're Here the newsletter which is in the description. Maybe in the- I don't know. I don't know. Maybe in a video. There's a lot going on!

My point is thank you to everybody who is engaging with this I think thoughtful idea in a thoughtful way.

John, I will see you on Tuesday.

Also! Tomorrow, Saturday June 15, John you're going to be streaming a two hour livestream on this YouTube channel doing two things:

First taking a dive into how Partners In Health does their work and talking to some people there. And second honoring and matching the bequest of a long time nerdfighter. This Saturday, Noon Eastern time.