***Special archive - #239 Vince Beiser, Author of The World in a Grain: The Story of Sand and How It Transformed Civilization

Speaker A: Nexus PMG welcomes you to the Bigger Than Us podcast, which we as energy geeks lovingly refer to as the btu. Bigger Than Us is a podcast that focuses on ideas that will shape the future of our planet and ultimately our existence. We will occasionally lean into energy topics because, after all, it's the key to our collective survival. But we'll also explore other ideas and topics and that we believe will have an impact that is bigger than us. And now onto today's show. Hello and welcome to the Bigger Than Us podcast. I'm your host, Raj Daniels, and today I'd like to welcome Vince Beiser to the show. Vince Beiser is an award winning journalist and author of the World in a the Story of Sand and How It Transformed Civilization. The book has been translated into five languages, was a finalist for a Pen America Award and a California Book Award, and spawned a TedX talk. Vince is currently at work on a new book, Power Metal, about how the materials we need for digital technology and renewable energy are, uh, causing environmental havoc, political upheaval, mayhem, and murder, and how we can do better. Vince, how are you doing today?

Speaker B: Doing great, Raj. How about yourself, Vince?

Speaker A: I am doing fantastic and feel a little like a kid in the candy store. Huge fan of your work, and I'll, uh, just give you a quick story about how impactful your work has been in my house. We had a little dinner party at my house last week, and we played this game called the Celebrity Game. And the objective is you walk out of the room, you come back in the room, and people at the room start asking you questions like you had a press conference. So, for example, if it was Clark Kent, how quick do you change clothes, et cetera, et cetera. I left the room, I came back in, and my middle daughter suggested that my celebrity is the author of the book the World in a Grain.

Speaker B: Wow, that's about as high a praise as anybody could ask for.

Speaker A: You know, since I read your book last year, I've shared it with so many people. Um, changed my life, changed the way I look at the world around me, the built environment, et cetera. But before we get to the book, what led you to journalism?

Speaker B: To journalism? Oh, uh, that's a good question. Um, you know, to be honest, I really kind of fell into it by accident. Um, long story short, I, uh, back when I was in college, way back when, uh, I was very caught up, um, in the Israeli Palestinian issue, um, and, uh, really wanted to just go and, well, fix it, you know, just,

Speaker A: just for context, we are recording on January 11, 2024. Don't think it quite got fixed.

Speaker B: No, not quite, not quite. Um, still working on it. Um, you know, whatever. What can I tell you with, with, with, with all the hubris of, you know, of uh, a 22 year old do Gooder. I figured, like I'm the guy who can, who can help in some way. Anyway, I, I took myself, I got a degree in Middle Eastern studies and I just took myself over to Jerusalem and just started looking around for some way to get involved. And uh, the first thing that came my way, uh, was a job with a, with a, with a local news agency. This was back during the first Intifada. So there was lots of news going on all the time. It wasn't nearly as violent as it is now, but basically the same problem, same issue. You know, people getting shot here, people under curfew there, demonstrations there, clashes there. Anyway, um, so I just kind of fell in. I, uh, you know, turned out to be one of the few things that I was actually qualified for, which, uh. Cause the main thing I'd learned at college was how to go out and just gather up a lot of information and then boil it down. Uh, and it uh, turns out that's a lot of what journalists do. So, uh, I took the job and that got me into journalism and haven't been able to get out since.

Speaker A: Well, I have a quote here that you said during your TED Talk, always hustling for a good story. What does hustling for a good story mean?

Speaker B: M. Well, so most of my career I've been a freelancer. I have done staff, uh, stints here and there over the years, but most of the time I've just been a, you know, kind of on my own hook. Which means that, uh, I mean all journalists have to do this. But it's even, it's even more true when you're a freelancer and your income depends on, on every story, you got to be finding stories all the time. That's, that's the coin of the realm. So it means just always, you know, keeping your eyes open, keeping your ears open, looking around for stuff, you know, for, for issues, developments, characters, uh, events that are, that are important and uh, that the people should know about. Um, and that's, you know, that's a, that's how you make your living. And more to the point, you know, for me, that's, that's really why I got into the business in the first place, is I really, you know, I wanted to, to make a difference in the world if I Could I wanted to shine some light on, you know, uh, things that are bad and help uplift things that are good. So, uh, that's how you do it, just by always looking, always seeking, always, um, trying to find, um, another story, another story to tell.

Speaker A: So let's get tactical for a minute here. Nowadays, I can't imagine the number of news sources that are available, both official, unofficial. What moves you? Where's that hunch come from? Let's get tactical. You have a sniff test that say, okay, this sounds interesting. I want to double click here.

Speaker B: M. Yeah, that's a really good question. And it's hard because there is so much out there. But, um, uh, part of it is I really follow my interests and if there's something that really makes my eyes pop open and go, wow, really? I'd never heard about that, then there's a good chance that, uh, you know, that there's a story there, right? That other folks are also going to be going to find it something new and interesting that they haven't heard before. So, you know, I do a lot of, um, I do a lot of sifting. I read a whole lot every single day. I, you know, I sift through Twitter and I sift through Reddit and I'm on a whole lot of mailing, uh, lists for different, all kinds of different, you know, subject areas, uh, you know, industries, topics, whatever that I'm interested in. So I have a lot coming into me all the time. Um, and part of it is, like I said, just, just sort of also always just keeping your, your eyes and ears open. You know, I mean, I get a lot of stories just, you know, from conversations that I strike up, people that I might, you know, meet at a party or that I'm sitting next to on a plane. You know, when you hear something that, that um, that sounds A, interesting and B, important in some way, that's when, uh, then I go to work. And then the, the third thing, uh, you know, for better or for worse, that I always have to factor in, of course, is can I sell that story? Right? Because like I said, this is, this is how I make my living. And there are some really worthy and important topics and issues that I'd like to write more about. But frankly, it's really hard to sell them to find anyone that'll uh, publish them and pay me for it. So there's that factor as well.

Speaker A: Well, you said interesting and important. Let's get to the topic that pushed me to reach out to you. I read your book last year, the World In a. The Story of sand and how it transformed civilization. What led you to writing this book?

Speaker B: Right, so that's a, ah, you know, that's a great illustration of everything that I was just talking about. So, um, one, you know, like I said, always looking for a good story. Um, so I also read a lot of, uh, international news, you know, foreign press. And I came across, ah, an article in an Indian newspaper about this is, geez, must be six, seven years ago by now already, um, about a guy, a farmer in India, who had been murdered over sand. And that, you know, that's the first thing that sort of made my antenna pop up. I was just like, what sand? Why in the world would anybody kill somebody else over sand? Who cares about sand? I mean it seems like, you know, the most trivial, the least important thing on and on the planet. Why in the world would anybody get killed over sand? So that's when I clicked through and read this story and, and started reading more and come to find out, well, this guy who was murdered wasn't, wasn't the only one. In fact, hundreds of people have been murdered over sand, not only in India, but in many other countries around the world. And the reason is basically what the book is about, which is that even though almost barely anybody ever thinks about sand, it's actually the m. Most important solid substance on Earth today because it's the thing that we build our cities out of. Concrete. The skeleton of all of our modern cities is basically just sand that's been glued together. Uh, all the roads that connect all those buildings also made out of sand, asphalt and concrete. All the glass in those buildings, also made of sand. Glass is just sand that's been melted down. Even the silicon chips in our computers, our cell phones, all our digital gadgets, all that is also made from sand. The bottom line is we use more sand than any other natural resource in the world, except for water. And in some places there's so much demand that, that a, uh, black market has developed. Organized crime has gotten into the game. Uh, and that's. And those guys do what gangsters do all over the world. If you try to stop them, if you really get in their way, they'll kill you. And that's exactly what happened to this farmer. So all of that was complete news to me. I'd never, I had no idea. And it, you know, it just kind of blew my mind. Uh, so I, you know, so I went, I did a story for Wired magazine. They sent me over to India to kind of, uh, you know, do an investigation into this particular murder and tell the story of this guy and through him, sort of talk about this bigger issue of the sand crisis. Who even knew there was such a thing? And out of that research, you know, I just came to realize, like, wow, this is a huge, huge issue that very few people know about. And, uh, there's. There's a whole book's worth of stuff to say about it. So. So the book kind of grew out of that.

Speaker A: So I don't want to give away any secrets. Like I said, I've read the book, watched the TED talk, listened to interviews, watched interviews. But I want to start asking you questions specifically about sand. And. And, um, I love this conversation already. Sand, it's everywhere. Why can't we just go to the desert and get what we need?

Speaker B: Yeah, great question. So the reason is basically that desert sand doesn't work for our purposes. So the number one thing, we use about 50 billion tons of sand every year. And most of that goes to concrete. Concrete is the number one thing that we use sand for. And if you just look around you, you know, wherever you are, your listeners are, you can see it. That's obvious, right? Every, pretty much every building at least has a concrete foundation. If it's not made out of concrete, like I said, roads, sidewalks, airports, dams, you name it. Concrete's absolutely everywhere.

Speaker A: And for a visual 50 billion, what would that look like?

Speaker B: Well, it's enough to cover, uh, the entire state of California, for instance. Uh, so we use that much every single year, and it's enough. Another way to put it is we use enough concrete every year to build a wall about 30ft high and 30ft across.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: The way around the equator. Every single year. Right. It's a lot.

Speaker A: It's unimaginable.

Speaker B: Yeah, it really is. It's just staggering. Um, so anyway, so we need this incredible amount of sand to make this incredible amount of concrete. And the problem with desert sand is the grains are too round. So desert sand, the actual grains, have been eroded by wind over thousands and millions of years, tumbling and tumbling and tumbling in the wind. And that's given them kind of a round shape. They're kind of like little balls. As opposed to the sand that you find on the sand that's been eroded by water. That's the sand that you find on beaches or on the bottom of rivers or lake beds or even the bottom of the ocean. That sand tends to be m. Uh, more angular. It's got more like, sharp edges. So if that sand, that water sand, that marine sand, locks together to form A solid structure, which is what you need for concrete, whereas desert sand just doesn't do that. It's like the difference between trying to build something out of a stack of millions of little marbles. That's your desert sand as opposed to a stack of millions of little bricks. That's your marine sand. So all that desert sand basically, uh, for most intents and purposes, is basically useless. The sand that we need, unfortunately, is the stuff that's, that's often in these quite environmentally sensitive areas. It's in riverbeds, it's on beaches, it's in, you know, it's on the land. So that's, uh, that's part of why it's such a problem, because we need so much of it that we're doing tremendous environmental damage to get at this sand. Right. We're ripping up riverbeds, we're stripping beaches bare. In some places, we're tearing up forests and farmlands all to get at that sand that we need.

Speaker A: But Vince, let's talk about beaches for a moment. Fort Lauderdale last year, Miami last year. I went to the beach with my kids. It looked great. Um, Hawaii, Waikiki beach looks great. Those beaches don't look like they're going anywhere.

Speaker B: You threw me both those beaches as south, uh, poles.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: Waikiki and Fort Lauderdale. I know you know this, Raj, if you read the book, because those are both, both of those beaches are completely artificial.

Speaker A: Like, let's m. Talk about renourishing.

Speaker B: Yeah. So many of our most famous beaches all over the world. Those two. Miami, Miami Beach. A lot of the beaches in southern France, all over the world, they're basically man made constructs. Um, because, uh, that are, that are only there because we do what's called beach nourishment, which is sort of a weird euphemism that basically just means that we dig up millions of tons of sand from the bottom of the ocean or from pits, from enormous pits, uh, on the land and truck them out to these beaches and dump the sand there in order to build up the beaches. So that happens in some places. Like Miami beach just did not exist until, uh, until developers just dumped, Dug up millions of tons of sand from, from, uh, from the bottom of the Pacific and dumped it there to create a beach where there hadn't been any before.

Speaker A: The Keys too, I believe. Right.

Speaker B: Uh, could be, I don't actually know offhand.

Speaker A: Okay.

Speaker B: But very possible anyway.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: And those. And they wouldn't continue to exist. Those beaches are eroding all the time. All beaches are constantly being eroded Naturally by wind and waves and so on. And they would just disappear if we didn't keep on artificially replenishing them. And of course, those beaches are super important economically. Right. That's what brings millions of tourists to Florida and all kinds of other places, Hawaii and everywhere else. But again, there are big costs to it. It's a huge financial cost to renourish those beaches, which is mostly paid by taxpayers. Uh, and often there are environmental costs. Like Miami. Uh, the Miami Dade county has literally run out of seafloor sand. They have sucked up all the sand they can suck up from the bottom of the ocean to refill those beaches. And now they have to bring it in by truck from, uh, about 100 miles inland.

Speaker A: I remember that story. One of the many wow or aha, uh, moments I had while reading the book. The gentleman that owns the trucking company in the sand mine from the middle

Speaker B: of Florida somewhere, Lake Okeechobee.

Speaker A: Okay. And he's driving trucks of sand down to the beach. And just the economic impact of doing that and the environmental impact.

Speaker B: Yeah, no, it's, I mean, if you think about, I mean, just the truck traffic alone, I mean, it's, you know, it's thousands and thousands of truck trips back and forth along the roads. All the carbon emissions that come off of those, that come off those trucks, there's the wear and tear on the roads. There's the fact of this enormous pit that they've dug somewhere out in the middle of the, of the Everglades. And then on top of that, um, you have the issues of the sand itself. Now, this doesn't happen everywhere, but in some places, like in San Diego, for instance, researchers, um, have found that basically when you take, you know, there's the naturally occurring sand on these beaches in San Diego, and they renourish those beaches with sand from somewhere completely different, brought in from some, uh, inland pit. When you do that, uh, it can kill all or all or a lot of the organisms that were living, um, in that naturally occurring sand. And we're talking about things that can be as small as a critter living on a grain of sand. Microbes in some cases. And you might think, well, who cares? Something that small, what difference does it? But those things can be really important in the whole food chain. Microbes get eaten by bigger creatures, get eaten by insects, those insects get eaten by fish and by birds. So if you, like, if you break that chain, if you destroy that food chain at its base, that's going to start having impacts further on up, and it can lead to losses in fish population, losses in the bird population, which ultimately can have an effect, of course, on human beings as well.

Speaker A: Well, you mentioned in Florida sucking the sand off the sea floor. Sounds like a tongue twister. Um, can you paint a picture for us of how that actually occurs? Dredging, I believe.

Speaker B: Sure. I mean, it's pretty straightforward really. In places the, the easiest and the cheapest way to get sand up onto your beach is just to suck it up from, from the nearby ocean floor. And it's literally just imagine a giant straw. It's a great big floating pipe. And they just drop one end of the pipe, uh, in some sandy area under the water. Um, you know, might be 50ft offshore, might be 100ft offshore, might be further than that. Um, in some cases it can be miles offshore. Um, and the other end goes up on the beach and you just turn on a big motor and that, that pipe just acts like a big straw and just, just sucks that sand right up off the seafloor, blasts it through the pipe and shoots, shoots it up, um, onto the coastline where you can then use bulldozers to, to spread it out. I saw them doing that in, uh, not in Fort Lauderdale, but what's the next beach north of that? Uh, anyways, the same process they do. They do in most places. So the problem with that of course, is again, you know, you're, you can really do damage to the, to the ecology, to the ecosystem of, of whatever's living in that area where you're sucking all the sand out of. So that kind of sand, extracting sand in that way has done a lot of damage to coral reefs and mangrove beds, seagrass, uh, beds, fish populations, um, all over the world. And this is why they're no longer allowed to do it in Miami Dade at all. Because they've already done a bunch of damage to the coral reefs there, um, from this kind of sand mining. And uh, basically they've been banned from doing any more because it's. So they've already done so much damage, they just literally can't afford to have any more. Fort Lauderdale is headed down the same path. When I was there, I think they said they had about maybe 10 more years, and that's five years ago already. And then they would have to stop, um, they would also have to stop mining from the ocean floor.

Speaker A: And what other effects does dredging have in the ocean?

Speaker B: Um, well, it all depends on how it's done.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: I don't want to say that it's always bad, um, because, you know, of Course, you can do it more and less responsibly. Um, and sometimes we need to dredge. You know, if you have shipping, uh, lanes, ports and that sort of thing, silt and sand can build up, um, and ships aren't able to get through, and you need to dredge them out. Um, so, you know, if it's done in places where it's actually needed, if it's done carefully and responsibly, um, it's not necessarily so, so damaging. But that's not always the case, of course. And if you dredge, you know, if you just go hauling up sand from anywhere, I mean, uh, if we're talking about sand mining, one of the most common ways to get sand for concrete use, which again, is the biggest thing that we use sand for much. We use much more for that than even for something like beach nourishment. So the easiest way to get your sand for concret is to get it from a riverbed. Same idea. You just put a big old barge out in the middle of a river. You know, any river with a sand, uh, nice sandy bottom that's, you know, the Yangtze in China or the Ganges in India or the Mississippi in the US all kinds of places. And same idea. You just drop a pipe down at the bottom of the river. Basically just a big old straw that just sucks the sand right up off the river bottom onto your barge. And then you can take it wherever you want to. It's cheap, it's easy, but it can do tremendous damage. So first of all, let me just picture it, right? You're literally stripping the bottom of a river off completely. So anything that was living down there, whatever kinds of, you know, fish or other, uh, aquatic creatures or plant life that was down there, their habitat is gone completely. Also, you, when you do that, you stir up all the. Whatever other mud and silt and muck is down there at the bottom. And that can cloud up the water, the actual river itself, for a long. For. For over a large area and over a long time. And all that junk that's floating around in the. In the water can literally suffocate things that are swimming in the water. Other kinds of fish, um, in some places, like in. In the Yangtze river, uh, there's a rare freshwater porpoise that's been really hard hit by sand mining in the river there. And then finally, uh, when you've got all that junk floating around in the water, it blocks sunlight from getting down to whatever plant life is growing underneath the water, right? So it can Kill off a lot of that plant life, which then has knock on effects on again, fish that are living there and also, uh, uh, you know, other birds and other, you know, animals that live along the river that, that eat those plants or that eat the fish that eat those plants. So that kind of river sand mining done wrong can have huge, huge impact. And in fact it's been banned. Most of Europe no longer allows river sand mining at all. For that reason here in the U.S. uh, in most, most states though, it's, it is still allowed and it is still happening.

Speaker A: Let's switch gears here. I was listening to an NYU professor recently and he's um, teaching a finance class and he said if you want to look smart, answer almost any question with don't forget China. So let's not forget China. Um, can you share some of the stats regarding China's growth over the last decade or so?

Speaker B: Sure. Well, here, compared to the U.S. here's my favorite one, um, which I'm sure you saw in the book. But it's um. China is growing so fast. They're building so much stuff, so many cities, all this stuff. Keep in mind, all this stuff, um, all this sort of infrastructure of modernity that's built out of concrete. We're talking about cities, airports, highways, uh, road beds for our beds, for the railways they use. They've been using so much concrete to build all this stuff to develop their economy that in just three years of the 2010s, China used more concrete than the United States used in the entire 20th century. If you just step back and think about that, that never fails to blow my mind. I mean, think about everything that was built in the United States between 1900 and the year 2000. Every sidewalk, every dam, every airport, every, all the US highway systems, the interstate highway system, all of that. China used more concrete than that in just three years. That's how fast they're building, that's how much they're consuming over there.

Speaker A: And not to minimize, but that's just China. Behind China we have India, we have all the emerging countries in Africa. I can't imagine what the next decade or so is going to look like from a demand perspective. What other technologies have you seen that could perhaps help, uh, augment or eventually even replace some of the sand that's being used?

Speaker B: Yeah, that's a really great question because, uh, I mean, you're absolutely right. I mean, the amount that we're consuming, uh, is only set to grow because all over the world, the whole developing world is developing and China is first and foremost. But you're absolutely right. It's also India, Indonesia, practically everywhere. There's concrete everywhere in the world by now. So the thing is, um, we don't really want to, to. I don't think it's a, it's a good idea to think about to ask the question how can we replace concrete altogether? Because it's not like fossil fuels where, where uh, you know, there is an alternative, there is another way of, of getting energy or, or even that concrete is always so damaging. The reason we use so much concrete is it's a great building material. You know, it's really easy to work with, it's very cheap, uh, it's very strong, it's very sturdy, it's long lasting. That's why it's become, you know, the world's by far the world's most used construction material. Um, and frankly, you know, we've got 8 billion people in the world today. We're on track to having 10 billion. And every one of those people deserves to have, you know, sturdy, well built housing. They deserve to have decent roads, um, you know, to get around on. Um, and concrete is I think the only way that we can build enough, fast enough to provide all that. So we're going to have to use a certain amount of concrete. Um, but the trick I think is how can we minimize it, how can we keep it, uh, how can we use as little as possible and use it as intelligently as possible. So there's a number of ways we can do that. So one is, um, first, uh, of all there are, there are other things that you can use in place of sand in, to make concrete. Um, there's a lot of research going on around using things like like shredded plastic or even shredded rubber or bamboo, um, to replace sand and concrete. Um, there's a stretch of roadway in the Netherlands in fact, um, that was made entirely, that uses, it's made out of concrete. But there's no sand in that concrete. It's all shredded, uh, shredded rubber tires. So if we can get those kind of technologies to work at a big scale, that would be fantastic. Right? That's a real win win because then we, you know, we, we could get rid of some of the plastic and rubber trash that's absolutely everywhere and we could take some of the pressure off sand resource. So that's promising stuff. None of those technologies have really hit on a, on a big scale, uh, for various reasons yet, but hopefully they'll, they'll make a dent. Um, there's longer lasting concrete, um, which I Think can also make a big difference. Because the problem with concrete, of course, is it doesn't last forever. Right. I mean, if you look at any concrete structure, you'll, you'll see cracks. Concrete always cracks.

Speaker A: Uh, the rebar inside it too. Rusting.

Speaker B: There's rebar inside of it too, which can be rusting. Um, you know, and you hear every now and then about a whole building collapsing or a bridge collapsing. Um, and that, that's just inevitable that, you know, sooner or later these things are going to fail. They're either going to collapse or we're going to condemn them, tear them down and build a new one. That's what happens. But anyway, that's inevitable. But, uh, we can slow that process down if we have better concrete, essentially. And there's really, again, there's a lot of interesting research and, and some products that are coming on the market of concrete that just lasts longer, like dynamic does, like what they call self healing concrete. It's concrete that's uh, injected with different, um, chemicals and actually bacterial agents, different kinds of substances that can literally, when a crack forms, these things will just seal that crack back in automatically on their own. It's cool stuff. So there's that, there's recycling. We do recycle some concrete, you know, when you demolish a building. But we could be doing much more. Um, uh, so all those things can help, right? Like alternative substances. Yes, good. Uh, self healing concrete, more advanced concretes, Longer lasting concretes. Yes, good. Can help. More recycling. Yes, good. Can help. All those things, I think can help, uh, reduce, um, the amount of sand that we need, the amount of fresh concrete that we need. But really the way that we can have the most impact, um, especially as individuals is it really comes back to the same story with almost any resource that you're talking about, which is we've just got to use less.

Speaker A: Oh, no. Controversy, behavior change.

Speaker B: Yeah, well, yeah, I mean it is, but that's really, if you ask me, that's the only way that we can really get to a truly sustainable, the way that we live here in the West. You know, I'm in Canada, Raj, you're in the U.S. uh, you know, the way that, the way that we Westerners live, uh, and it's not just Westerners, but the way that like people who have a western style of living wherever they are in the world, uh, it's just not sustainable. This idea that like everybody's going to have a car and everybody's going to have a detached house and we're all going to Drive to shopping malls and drive to, you know, offices and, you know, and fly all over the world. There's just no way that can work in a world of 8 billion people that's headed for 10 billion people. It's just impossible. There just isn't. There literally aren't enough resources on the planet for everybody to live that way. Um, so, but like I said, if you, you know, I believe everybody has the right to, to a decent standard of living, and we should be working towards a world where everybody has enough to eat and has decent shelter and so on. And I think we can get there. But it does mean we're going to have to. We who are at the top of the heap here in the Western world, we're going to have to dial it back a little bit just so there's more for everybody else to go around. And I don't even think that's going to entail a lot of. I think that's going to entail much less, uh, sacrifice than most people think. I'm happy to talk about that if you want, but I feel like I've been rambling for a while here.

Speaker A: No, absolutely. Let's talk a little bit about sacrifice.

Speaker B: So the number one thing that I think we should be giving up, uh, is cars, right? We should be doing whatever we can to try to live our lives and build our cities in a way so that we don't need as many cars as we're using now. And I know that that sounds like absolute heresy to a lot of folks in the US And Canada, especially in places like, you know, in Texas or Los Angeles, where I used to live, where a car is absolutely necessary. I'm not saying get rid of cars. I'm not saying cars are evil. We need cars, right? Obviously in the way, the way that we've built our cities, uh, in a lot of places in America, you have no choice. And cars are super useful, right? Like, they know they're a really good way, uh, to get around. Um, but the problem again is it's, it's a matter of scale. It's that we have, we're just using way too many of them. And we've built our cities really around cars rather than around people. And I think we can actually, by reducing the need to own a car, um, you not only are doing the planet a favor, but in the long run, you make, you make for a better life for yourself. So I lived, I lived in Los Angeles for 17 years, um, where, of course, you need a car to get around. And we had Ah, you know, I'm married, I've got two kids, and of course we had two cars there. You need two cars to get around in la. We just moved to Vancouver, Canada, which is my original hometown, about three years ago. And here we only have one car. Still got the two kids, still got two jobs, you know, still got a dog, still got basically the same, you know, setup that we did before. But the key difference is that the city, Vancouver has really put a lot of effort over the last 20, 30 years into making itself into. Into, uh, sort of retrofitting the city itself so that you don't need a car to get around. So there's a. They've put a lot of money into public transit, they've put a lot of money and effort into bicycles, into making it really accessible and above all, safe to ride a bike on city streets. They've closed off lots of streets. They've made, uh, bicycle paths, protected bicycle paths, um, that run. There's a network of them all over the city. Um, to the point where, you know, people like my wife, who was frankly scared with good reason to ride her bike in Los Angeles, where you're just out there among all the cars, she now rides her bike to work because there's a nice protected bike path that, that takes her there. So, so that's, you know, Vancouver is just one example. But if you. All over the world, this kind of thinking is taking hold. Lots of cities in Europe are doing a lot to, uh, discourage car use and encourage, uh, the ability of people to get around by other means. And the beautiful thing about it is when it's done right, when it finally, like, all gets into gear, it's actually, you have a city that's actually much cleaner, safer, quieter, more pleasant. It's a much more humane place to live when you can get around on foot and on bicycle than when you're forced to be in a car all the time.

Speaker A: So, Vince, I hear you. As we both know, behavior, incentivize behavior. The government will give tax credits on EV. EVs, will they give tax credits for bicycles?

Speaker B: Well, um, they do. In, they do in, in Paris, as a matter of fact, the city government subsidizes, um, purchases of bicycles. Um, I think that electric bikes should get the same or similar subsidies that electric cars do. Electric bikes are so. They're incredibly underappreciated in, in, in North America. I mean, they're exploding all over the developing world. There are millions and millions and millions of electric bikes being sold. Um, and the reason is they're just, they're great transport, right? Because if you think about it, you know, not everybody wants to ride a bike. Not everybody is, you know, fit enough or like even, you know, just wants to go to the effort of pedaling a bike all over the place. Both an electric bike, you can get most places that you can go. I bet you most places you're even going in a place like Dallas, you could probably get to pretty easily on an electric bike. You know, trips of 3, 5, 10 miles, you can do those easily on an electric bike with almost no effort, you know, no more effort than it takes to drive a car. So that's something that I really think, um, we should be promoting like crazy. Um, so incentives are a piece of it. Absolutely. I think that we should be. You know, there are, uh, tax, uh, breaks that you can get, tax rebates and refunds that you can get for electric cars right now in the United States. I think that's great. I think the pain part of it is we also need a bit of the stick. We really need to drive that behavior change. We need to somehow make car driving more expensive, meaning more taxes on gasoline, maybe more taxes on car registration, maybe. Um, in New York, they've just introduced, uh, congestion pricing, which basically means if you want to drive into the center of Manhattan, uh, during, you know, sort of peak hours of the day, you have to pay for it. You know, something like 10, 20 bucks to drive your car in. Now, that kind of sucks, right? Nobody wants to pay more taxes. Nobody wants to pay extra tolls. But the fact is, cars really do saddle all of us. Whether you drive or not, cars impose a lot of costs on the rest of us. Pollution is the most obvious one. Greenhouse, uh, gases that they emit, and also just the regular old, uh, smog that comes out of their tailpipe that kills hundreds of thousands of Americans every year. There's also the huge numbers of people who are killed by cars in car crashes, pedestrians hit by cars. The number of pedestrians in America being hit by cars, by the way, has been going up and up and up every year for about the last 15 years. Thousands and thousands of people are killed every day by cars. And those are, you know, those are costs that are not paid by car owners. Now they're paid by all the rest of us. And I say, you know, think about it, uh, more. Let's think about it more like cigarettes. You want to smoke cigarettes, fine, your business. But understand that you smoking cigarettes does impose costs on the rest of it. You're putting, you know, pollution out into the rest of the world. You're creating more, the more people who smoke, the more sick people who are. That puts stress on the healthcare system. So if you want to smoke cigarettes, you got to, you got to chip in. You've got to pay extra taxes essentially to help offset those costs to costs to the rest of us. I think the same should be true of cars. By the way, it is true of cars in a lot of countries, like here in Canada where I live, gasoline is about twice as expensive as it is in the U.S. and that's because, uh, for exactly those reasons. Because the idea is, well, let's make car owners help pay for some of the health care costs that come with car ownership. A lot of that gasoline tax goes into the health care system here.

Speaker A: I think you mentioned a stat in one of your talks or presentations regarding if car ownership was cut by X percent.

Speaker B: Yeah, uh, it's kind of a hypothetical, but just imagine if we could just reduce car ownership in the United states by just 10%, let's say, right? Not a radical overhaul of American life, but 10% fewer people buying cars. What would that mean? Well, think about it. It means all of a sudden 10% fewer homes need garages, right? That's every single garage that you build is about 100 tons of concrete. So to take it back to sand, just by not having a garage in your house, you've just saved a hundred tons, close to 100 tons of sand in the form of concrete. That's one garage. Multiply that by millions, tens of millions of new houses that are built every year. That's a huge savings there. It also means that parking lots don't have to be, you know, all your parking lots can be 10% smaller. Just think about all the parking lots in every shopping mall, in airports, office blocks. Imagine shrinking all those parking lots by 10%. You would save millions of tons of concrete every year, um, just by doing that. By the way, concrete is also one of the top, uh, carbon emitters on the planet. It's the number three biggest, uh, uh, uh, emitter of uh, carbon. So it's a huge contributor to global warming. So if we could cut down those carbon emissions, uh, so in other words, anything we can do to make a dent in concrete consumption also really helps with climate change. So cutting 10% of car ownership has this huge knock on effect on all these other things that don't have to get, that no longer have to get built if there aren't cars there anymore.

Speaker A: I think you also touched briefly on the heat island Effect in the book.

Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. So concrete has all these other costs, all these other negative impacts that we don't think about. And one of them is the heat island effect. Right. The world is getting hotter as we know, thanks to climate change. Uh, and cities in particular, which is where most people live in the United States and also everywhere in the world. Majority of people now live in urban areas. Urban areas tend to have, you know, uh, have huge amounts of concrete. And when it's hot, that concrete soaks up heat from the sun and holds it like a sponge. So it makes, it makes things even hotter than they would be during the day. And then at night when things cool down, things tend to still be really hot in cities because that concrete is still, is releasing all that heat back out. So this is a big problem in places like Phoenix. When they had, you know, last year or so they had this insane heat wave where they had, I think it was something like a hundred days in a row of 100 degree plus temperatures. The temperature never dipped below 100 degrees. And part of that was because, uh, concrete, like things couldn't cool down at night because the concrete had stored so much heat that even at night it stayed hot in Phoenix, which is a big problem, you know, and literally kills people.

Speaker A: Amazing. Let's bring it back to sand. I can't let you go without you sharing stories about sand theft and also the black market for sand.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. This is the craziest part of it, right? This is, this is the, the angle that got me into it in the first place. So as I said, there's, you know, sand is an enormous industry. It's about a, some roughly probably a hundred billion dollar industry worldwide. And whenever you got that much money involved, you're going to get criminals, you're going to get uh, grifters and thieves and black marketeers. And sand is absolutely no exception. So there's illegal sand mining going on in dozens and dozens of countries all over the world, including the United States. Not much in the United States, but, but definitely some. Which basically means, you know, people going and digging up sand where they're not allowed to, uh, usually because it'll, you know, the environmental damage that it'll do. Um, so that, you know, just the digging up of sand that can have, you know, that can cause tremendous harm. And then what happens is. So this brings it all the way back to the story that got me interested in the first place. This is a great example of how the sand black market works at its worst, at its most violent. So like I Said what got me interested in the first place was the story about this farmer who'd been murdered over sand. How did that happen? Well, how it happened is, uh, one day in a little farming village about an hour south of New Delhi, you know, the capital of India, uh, a bunch of sand miners, illegal sand miners, came, uh, to this village and just seized about 200 acres of the villagers land, ripped up their crops, the vegetables and stuff they'd been growing, tore all that stuff up, ripped up the topsoil and started digging up the sand that was underneath that they, in order to sell it to developers in Delhi. Right. People are building, people are building buildings up in Delhi, need lots of sand. They don't care where it comes from. These guys are like, great, we can just steal the sand from these villagers. Well, the villagers of course, were not very happy about this. And um, so they tried to fight back. And one of them in particular, a guy named Pali Ram Chohan, kind of led the charge and really did everything he could to try to stop these guys. He went to the police, he went to the courts, he went to the local media, he organized protest marches. Um, but he just couldn't get any traction. Basically because there's so much corruption in the system in India. It's really easy for these miners to just pay off the local cops, local government officials, whoever slip them a few bucks to just look the other way. So he could not get these guys to stop. Even what they were though what they were doing was obviously illegal. But he did start to annoy them. And at a certain point, um, one of the sand miners takes this guy, Palliram Chohan aside and says, listen, you're really starting to annoy us. You're bad for business. Just cut it out. Just shut up or we're going to kill you. But he did not. Palliram Chohan did not stop. In fact, he reported that threat to the police, which is how I know about it. And three days later, a couple of guys kicked in the door of his house and shot him dead in his own bed. So I was amazed to hear that. I'd never imagined that anybody could be killed over sand. But it turns out that's exactly what happened to Pali Ram Chohan. And he is far from the only one. Hundreds and hundreds of people have been killed similarly by these sand gangs. In India. They actually call them sand mafias, which, you know, sounds a little funny to us. But really these guys are no joke. They've killed people like Palayram Chohan, just local, you know, local People trying to protect their own property. They've killed journalists looking into this stuff. They've killed cops trying to shut them down. They've killed government officials trying to shut them down. Sometimes they kill each other. There's been shootouts between different San gangs, just like you have shootouts between different drug gangs fighting over turf. Um, and not only in India, by the way. This is all. Same thing has happened in Mexico, Indonesia, Ghana.

Speaker A: Well, I was going to say, for some listening, it might sound like it's happening over there. I've read a similar story in the book regarding San Diego and Mexico, I believe Baja area.

Speaker B: Yeah. So what happened in San Diego is, uh, San Diego, of course, a big city. They need lots of sand. They basically. They've long since tapped out. They've used up all the local sand that they can. Um, so they started about 10, 15 years ago, they started importing sand from Mexico. Right. And this is a great example of how we often displace our own environmental problems into poorer countries. Right. I want to dig up sand in our own country. We don't want to dig up sand in lovely Southern California, but we can get it from Mexico and we don't have to worry about how they get it. Well, where it was coming from, a lot of it is they were digging up riverbeds near to these small farming communities in Baja California in Mexico. So a bunch of. Again, the locals were of course, not happy about this. It, uh, was really damaging their livelihood. It was damaging the area around them. So they launched a bunch of, uh. There was big protests around it, um, strikes, a lot of, um. A lot of, uh, uh, protest around it because of all the damage that it was doing there in Mexico. And they finally shut down that particular, um, business, like that city of San Diego, sourcing from that particular area. But I have heard, uh, since then that the trade continues and that a lot of it is just getting smuggled now that there's actually sand being smuggled from Mexico into California. And some of it is done by, you know, by the same, uh, cartels or the same gangs that. That smuggle drugs and uh. And uh. And illegal immigrants just using the same routes. Truckload of sand, truckload of drugs, truckload of human beings. You know, it's all the same kind of stuff. And also we do know about two years ago down at the other end of Mexico in Yucatan, uh, there was an environmental activist. Very similar story to the one that I just told about Palayram, uh, Chohan in India, this guy, an environmental activist who was trying to stop illegal sand mining down in Yucatan, and was murdered. Was, you know, shot dead. Um, very soon after, he started raising a ruckus about these guys. So it's, you know, it's very close at hand.

Speaker A: Any concerns for your own safety?

Speaker B: Um, you know, there was, ah, in the book I write about, I had a little bit of a close call with, uh, with the guys who killed Palayram Chohan. I can now say they got killed because actually, uh, they were finally convicted just a few months ago of. Of the murder. Um, took 10 years for that trial to go through. But anyway, those guys were finally convicted. Um, yeah, long story short, what happened was we went out, I got together with Pali, Ram Chohan's son, um, and he took me out to the mine, this area in the village where they were mining the sand. And while we were out there, uh, the boss, one of the guys who had. Who had killed his father spotted him and they sort of came running up on us with a bunch of goons toting shovels. Um, and, um, weren't, you know, we're not at all happy that we were there and taking pictures and asking questions. They actually. We tried to jump back in our car and get out of there. We'd hired a. Rented a car and hired a driver that day. And these guys, like, grabbed our poor driver by his. By his shirt cuffs and hauled him out of the car. So then, of course, we had to jump out and kind of get into it with them. And it was a little bit of a standoff for a minute. Um, things didn't quite get there. We sort of got stuck. When they realized that. That I was there, a foreigner, and they were kind of confused by what was I doing there. Who was I? Was I with the police? Was that the government? What the hell was going on? Anyway, it just kind of confused everybody for a minute. And me and my translator and Palliram Chohan's son and the driver, we just took that chance to jump back in the car and take off. So.

Speaker A: Well, like I said, the book was fascinating. You mentioned murders, um, the stories of entire beaches being stolen, the black market of sand. I encourage everyone to read it. If you were to perhaps suggest or hope that a person that read the book would walk away with one or two takeaways, what would those be?

Speaker B: Um, I guess the one thing is to really understand that everything we use, every single thing that we use, comes from somewhere. You know, we're getting used to the idea of thinking about that with food, right? Oh, our food is grown somewhere Else, our clothes are made somewhere else. Um, but it's really. It's everything. It is literally, you know, the ground under your feet, the floor of your house, the window that you're looking through. Everything is made from natural resources, probably in another country. And all of that has costs. There are always human costs, environmental costs to the making of, um, whatever, uh, product or object you're talking about. So that's. That's one thing is just to really understand everything we use. Our cars, the gas in our cars, the concrete that we drive them on, all that. I'm starting to repeat myself, but you get my point. All that comes from somewhere. There are costs to that. Somebody had to dig that stuff out of the ground or grow it. Somebody had to make comes from somewhere. There's always costs. That's number one. Number two is we can really reduce those costs. We really can, uh, and must, if you ask me, just reduce our consumption across the board. We have to just consume less of everything. Of energy, of.

Speaker A: Of.

Speaker B: Of clothing, of meat, and even of sand. You know, this. I mean, to me, it's kind of like a parable, right? Sand is actually the most abundant thing on the earth's crust. There's huge amounts of that. Who would ever imagine that we can start to run out of sand? We are running out of sand. The fact that we're running out of even something as ubiquitous as sand, that should really tell us something, that should really give us all pause and make us all look again at everything else that we're consuming.

Speaker A: Well, a quote from the book, sand is both miniscule and infinite. A means of measurement and a substance beyond measuring.

Speaker B: Indeed.

Speaker A: Vince, this has been a pleasure. Again, thank you so much for your time, and I look forward to your next book and catching up with you again soon.

Speaker B: Yeah, likewise. Likewise. Raj, this has really been fun. I really appreciate the very thoughtful questions. And, uh, yeah, I, uh, hope we'll get another chance.

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