Eugene Kirpichov is a former staff software engineer at Google. In this interview with Marie Fadeyeva, he explains why he and his colleague Cassandra Xia left their positions at Google to create Work on Climate, a rapidly growing nonprofit aimed at mobilizing the talent that can build a regenerative green economy.
Kirpichov calls for redesigning the economy so that all activities will contribute to the health of the entire system. For those seeking ways to join the effort, Kirpichov explains that opportunities don’t only come from companies that are already focused on climate. Since every industry has to change, there are a wide range of jobs where someone may make greater impact through bringing new ideas to roles that once may not have been ‘climate-focused.’ Kirpichov challenges the notion that the climate crisis is about saving nature, instead describing global destabilization as an existential threat to human civilization.
Marie Fadeyeva is a recent Columbia University graduate in computer science.
Listen to our Bridging the Carbon Gap podcast episode on Apple or Spotify:
Eugene Kirpichov 00:03
I think a lot of people, especially engineers like myself, tend to think that because they’re being quantitative, that means that they are getting at the truth. But when it comes to something as complex as the food system or the energy system, things get way more complex. They get to the level that our quantitative methods simply stop working. And the reason they stop working is not that, you know, we lack data or so mething like that, but more because these systems behave like chaotic systems. And in chaos theory, you start needing to think about, you start needing different tools to reason about what’s happening and what you want to do about that, or, you know, the political system, and all of the systems we’re talking about there are inherently, they are political.
Helena Rambler 00:58
Welcome back to another episode of Bridging the Carbon Gap. Because climate change is not formally taught in New York City high schools. City Atlas started this podcast to connect students directly with experts to find out how they would design a high school curriculum for climate.
Eugene Kirpichov 01:17
Let me begin with a bit of my story. So nowadays I run a climate movement-building nonprofit, but that’s not where I started. Where I started was the first 15 years of my career. I was a software engineer. I was working in big tech. I was working most recently at Google. I was building their big data systems, their AI systems, and was having tremendous fun. And you know, was really good at it, which is part of why it was so fun, and indeed, here I am running a climate movement-building nonprofit. So you may wonder, how the hell did they get here?
Around 2020, I’ve been learning more and more about climate, and eventually it got to the point where it became morally intolerable to work on anything else, because it’s an existential problem. It doesn’t make sense to work on anything else when we’re all going to be wiped out. So I quit, typed up a little goodbye note, and the next thing I know is that hundreds of people are emailing me and saying, Eugene. I want to work on climate too. Eugene. How do I do that? Tell me Eugene, please. So I quit together with my colleague Cassandra from Google AI, and after seeing all of this, we decided to start a little community. The purpose of the community was to help all of these people who want to work on climate, work on climate. So we decided to call it Work on Climate, as you might expect. And looks like it worked out, because very quickly it blew up and became the largest community in the world of this sort by a very wide margin. We helped 1000s of people, who credit us with a with a role in a climate job that they found, 1000s of people on the founder path credit us with some kind of progress on their path.
But more recently, where we get to what we’re doing today, we started asking ourselves, is this really good enough getting people into jobs? Does it really confront the root causes of this crisis? And honestly, no, it doesn’t confront the root causes of this crisis. It accelerates progress along the current trajectory of our climate progress. You know, whatever we’re doing about climate today, yeah, it makes it go faster, but it doesn’t change the trajectory. So we have to change the trajectory. And we started asking ourselves, How do we mobilize this tremendous amount of passion of professionals to change the trajectory of climate progress? And the answer is, by helping people rather than, or at least not just finding existing opportunities, but step into leadership and start changing how things are done at your company. What does your company actually do? How does your company use its business power and how what does your industry do? How does your industry, you know, show up in the economy? Is it showing up as a force for climate destruction, or is it showing up as a force for regeneration? I generation? So I think I probably should start wrapping up the answer to this question, but that’s what we do. So our mission today is to mobilize humanity’s talent to build a regenerative economy. And this may be a new word for many of you, but we’ll get to that later today.
Marie Fadeyeva 04:17
I’d like to zero in on what you said about leaving Google and quitting your job. I know you mentioned, when you just talked about your experience of leaving that work, you said it was just morally wrong for you to work on something else, right? And that’s why you wanted to specifically leave your job in tech. And you wanted to start specifically, directly working on climate, making direct impact. I wanted to reference your LinkedIn goodbye post about leaving Google, where you wrote the reason I’m leaving is because the scale, urgency and tragedy of climate change are so immense that I can no longer justify to myself working on anything else, no matter how interesting or lucrative, until it’s fixed, which echoes what you just said. Do you remember how you felt in the moment, maybe when you were putting in your resignation letter, maybe when it was your last day. Did you feel like it was a lot of your worries about climate change accumulating over time? Was it you woke up one day and you decided today is the day and you mentioned your colleague, Cassandra? Was it just Cassandra, or were there other people in your life that you were also talking to about this, and how did they react?
Eugene Kirpichov 05:26
Yeah. So first, I didn’t say morally wrong, I said morally intolerable. I don’t think it’s morally wrong to work at Google. It’s, you know, it’s, you have to make a living, right? And even though we’re all really complicit in this economic system that is creating tremendous harms, like we can’t all be morally wrong because we’re part of something that we’re forced to be part of in order to survive. I just want to make clear that I’m not judging people who have not made the same choice now when it comes to the feelings I was feeling.
So let me take a step back. This was during Covid. And at the beginning of Covid, like everyone else, I was also freaking out how we’re all gonna die. And I was, you know, unable to work, well, almost unable, at least, like, to put serious effort into my work. I was very anxious. Was very sad and depressed about it. And then I connected with a with a project where I could build, where I could contribute to building an open source, affordable ventilator. And all of a sudden, instead of worrying about how we’re all gonna die, I was worried about bugs in the software that I wrote for the ventilator. And there was a completely different vibe. Yeah, it was a completely different vibe. So I wasn’t anxious anymore. And that was also a moment when I asked my when I realized that I really want to feel this way, but about climate. So actually, in a bit more detail, what happened at some point when I was already, you know, really seriously considering, like, should I maybe leave Google? That was when I connected with Cassandra. She, like, we knew each other for a while, but I didn’t realize she cared about climate too. So we started talking about that, and really hit it off. And basically we one-upped each other into handing in our resignations a week later.
So the feelings I was experiencing at the time, I was hyped. I was really excited. Like, finally, I’m not the only crazy one. There is, like, this really brilliant person who also wants to do that. No, we’re all gonna, you know, heck yeah, let’s do this together. And then after I actually posted my goodbye note, in addition to the influx of other people who want to work on climate, I also got an influx of people who do and they were writing and say, like, hey, I want to help you. I want to help people like you. So honestly, it was intoxicating. It was an incredible feeling of being part of something big, a feeling of, you know, hope and excitement and, yeah, just that whole bouquet of feelings. So I wasn’t feeling climate anxiety at that time anymore. This was not the last time in my life that I felt serious climate anxiety, but at that time, I was not feeling it.
Marie Fadeyeva 08:08
Wow. I’m really happy to hear you say that you were feeling hyped. And because that’s such a positive emotion, being so excited about something, and it was also awesome that you had someone to share it with. I’m curious if you have any thoughts about maybe why they were there weren’t more people at the same time as you that were kind of contemplating the same decision, maybe leaving as well, or contemplating leaving, or maybe, as you mentioned, did you track any of the people that were your former colleagues? Did they also leave their work after you did? Was it that initial push maybe that caused them also to leave, if they did?
Eugene Kirpichov 08:47
So I think quite a few Googlers, and quite a few people from tech and obviously from other industries also, a lot of people were having asking themselves questions about the meaning of their life and their work during Covid. So a lot of people did quit. Not a lot of people from my particular former colleagues, from my teams, did, but I know a lot of people who did. And when it comes to your question, why didn’t even more people do that? Well, that’s a very complex and personal question. I think so, some people simply don’t know, haven’t done the same amount of reading, or, you know, other learning to realize just just how bad it is.
I think a lot of people think it’s about polar bears, while really it’s about the complete collapse of human civilization. And I wish I was joking. Second, even people who do you know, people’s brains work differently. And for some people, that’s motivating. You know, for me, it’s motivating. For some people, it’s paralyzing, and I don’t judge people for whom it’s paralyzing. So the people for whom it’s paralyzing, they stay paralyzed, and they don’t think about it, and they keep doing things that they are are able to do. Some people, you know, some people, rightly or wrongly, think that even though they’re working at this job that’s paying absolutely ridiculous amounts of money that nobody should be making, they still feel that they’re financially insecure, and that, you know, if they if they stop making half a million dollars per year, they will not be able to feed their family. Like, honestly, that’s bullshit, but they don’t feel that it’s bullshit. And like I, many of them are my friends. So I know, you know where these feelings are coming from. I don’t agree with them, but you know, if you’re asking, What are the reasons? This is one of the reasons. So yeah, I’ve got this bouquet of reasons. But I think probably the biggest one is that this kind of leap, it’s a big decision. And generally, we humans are, we’re not wired to make big decisions like this alone, and I was lucky enough that I wasn’t alone, while other people, for the most part, they are alone, so they are the only crazy one, and you know, the only force that’s pulling them in that direction is this, you know, little nagging thought in their head, but at the same time, all of the relationships they have are pulling them in the other direction, and that’s why they stay.
Marie Fadeyeva 11:00
Yeah, I definitely agree with you. I really respect your approach of not judging people, and I 100% agree that the feeling of feeling like helpless in the face of, you know, disaster, catastrophe, collapse, potentially even that can be very scary. And again, it’s amazing that you had someone who was there with you to do this leap with. And I can add a little bit more to this, because, as you know, I went to Columbia, and I would say the majority of my classmates, they were hoping to get the high paying jobs that you just described, maybe making half a million dollars a year, maybe even more than that, and I definitely saw that, while people wanted to make a difference when they were starting their college journey, I think when they were leaving, they were definitely gravitating more towards security, right? Like you described those high paying jobs, feeling like you need to make $500,000 a year to feed your family. I definitely saw that. So I agree with you 100% you talked, let’s pivot a little bit, and you talked a little bit about the regenerative economy. And since we’re on the topic of compensation and jobs and what a future of work would look like, let’s talk a little bit about your ideas for a regenerative economy from your perspective, what is the regenerative economy that you envision? How do you see people thinking about their work? What would work even look like? Feel free to share whatever ideas that you’d like.
Eugene Kirpichov 12:39
So first I want to actually clarify something. So there isn’t necessarily a trade off between compensation and, you know, working on climate or working on something else. In fact, the people who could do the most about climate are some of the highest compensated people in the world, and if they decided to actually use their power to that end, then they would be at the same time making a lot of money and at the same time making a lot of impact for climate. It’s, it’s a much, much more complex question. So for me, you know, I was leaving to start an organization, and honestly, as a founder of any organization, you don’t make a lot of money. And if you, if you start a nonprofit, which is, I don’t recommend that you do that, you’re never going to be making a lot of money. Like, I’m okay with that, but yeah, just overall, I want to make clear that there isn’t necessarily a trade off. And, like, it’s very difficult to even explain when there is or isn’t a trade off. So maybe later in today’s conversation, we will get into the trade off between finding, like, a pure climate job, or starting a company or creating impact as part of your current role. These are, these are all very different parts now, yeah, let’s talk about regenerative economy. So where do I begin? So let me begin with an analogy.
So I’m Eugene. I weigh 170 pounds, and I am made of single cells and the cells that I’m made of. So there’s trillions and trillions of cells that I’m made of, and they are collaborating really, really well with each other. They’re collaborating so well that, you know, a whole Eugene exists, you know, an intelligent being, I’m able to accomplish meaningful things. I’ve been around for 38 years. So thanks to the existence of Eugene, my cells have been around for 38 years, and hopefully will be around for a while longer. And all of this is is happening only because my cells are like the purpose of all the processes in my body is to keep me alive and to keep me healthy and effective. Now compare this with our economy, the person, the purpose of processes in our economy is primarily to, you know, for the individual actors to get as much as they can. And you know, it is what it is, just that’s how our economy is structured currently. But as you can see, the purpose of processes in our economy has nothing to do with keeping the economy healthy. It has nothing to do with keeping, you know, the fundamentals of the economy healthy like, you know, keeping a supply of people who are healthy enough, keeping a supply of natural systems that are in which it is possible to grow food, keeping a livable environment and so on. So again, imagine if, for example, you know, my kidney decided that it needs to be the biggest kidney in the world. And maybe it would, maybe it would succeed in that. Maybe it would become a really large kidney, but very soon, I would die of kidney cancer, and my kidney would die with me. And that’s what’s going to happen with our economy.
So a regenerative economy is an economy that acknowledges that if the whole dies, every part of it dies, and the whole can only survive if the if all activity contributes to the health of the whole. So that the main principle of a regenerative economy is that it’s an economy where all economic activity meets the needs of the person doing the activity or the organization doing the activity, but at the same time, contributes to the health of the whole and contributes to the health of the systems that the economy depends on. And this isn’t some, you know, esoteric tree hugger, hippie concept. 1000s of human societies have had regenerative economies, or have had, you know, components of their economy that were regenerative. For example, many indigenous societies the way that they related to the systems that they depend on, you know, soil and water and, you know, biodiversity, animals and so on. They weren’t simply sustainable in their relationship with them. They were building those systems. They were actively making them stronger. They were making these systems thrive. And because their systems thrived. Their society thrived on those systems. And like, honestly, it’s not even that hard what they did, you know, they didn’t have AI, they didn’t have blockchain, they didn’t have, you know, genetic engineering. So if you just imagine what kind of powerful regenerative economy we could build with today’s technologies. You know, my imagination goes to wild places when I think about that. But it has to be an economy that’s that’s run differently. It doesn’t have to be run, you know, radically differently. We don’t. And certainly, a path to it does not lie through a massive worldwide, worldwide revolution that destroys everything. And then we build the regenerative economy. I think we’re going to build the same economy if we, if we pursue this path. The path to it is far more complex, but it’s possible. So there’s two ways to think about it. One is so we talked about how my cells are collaborating really well with each other. But you know, this wasn’t always the case.
A few billion years ago, when life appeared on Earth, we just had this primordial soup of single cells, and they know they weren’t collaborating with each other, they were competing with each other, and some of them died. Some of them lived. But then what started happening is that some of these cells started collaborating and started joining into multicellular organisms, and those organisms pretty quickly turned out to be massively more successful. So they started forming into more and more sophisticated, higher level structures. So what needs to happen in our economy is formation of, you know, higher level, higher level collaborations. It’s not like we lack them completely. You know, any company is a particular form of collaboration, any labor union, any community, any capital stack, any market, any government. So they’re all certain forms of this collaboration, but they’re just not good enough yet. They haven’t developed the level of the level of sophistication that living systems have. However, another angle to look at this, so many people may be familiar with the concept of tragedy of the commons.
So tragedy of the commons, for people who are not familiar, imagine, for example, that you have a lake, and many fishermen are fishing from that lake, and one day they start over fishing. So now everybody is in danger, because if you if fish runs out, then everybody’s gonna die. Do the fishermen you know, turn around and decide that now they’re going to fish sustainably. Well, of course not. They start fishing even harder, because now, now a fish is going to run out. So if you don’t fish, if you know, you’re going to just die faster than the other people. However, so many people think that this is just what it is, and we can’t do anything about it. Or like you need a politician to come and wag their finger to say that you must fish sustainably. But actually, many human societies have succeeded in situations like this. In fact, the idea that most human societies manage their resources and sustainably is simply false. Most human societies throughout history solved these problems just fine. And in fact, there was Nobel Prize-winning work by economist Eleanor Ostrom, called governing the commons, where she simply documents how people have done this. So another way to say, what is a regenerative economy? It’s really an economy that successfully solves tragedies of the commons, and there have been many devices developed to solve them. It’s primarily actually through self regulation at the level of the community of people who use a certain resource, like, they have a certain form of governance. They have a certain form of coming up with the rules and deciding who comes up with the rules. They have certain way of enforcing the rules. And this is different for every community and every type of resource they use. But, like, it’s quite possible. So it’s all different types of, you know, ways for people to collaborate with each other, and what the path to a regenerative economy. Another way to say what that path looks like is it lies through increased deployment of collaboration vehicles like this. So more and more you know, networks of people and organizations that govern the resources healthily and are able to maintain that ability as they grow, because they do need to grow, and they need to not just grow, but they need to be able to win in a fight to death with incumbent actors, because incumbent actors will try to kill them.
Marie Fadeyeva 20:52
That’s a great answer. I have two follow ups to that. So first, I’d be interested in your opinion on if you were to give the same spiel that you just did to me, to your former colleagues at Google, what proportion of them do you think would be on board with this or ready to join this economy? And then a second question that I have is, what kind of skills do you think people need to start joining this type of economy?
Eugene Kirpichov 21:23
To your first question, people don’t make these kinds of decisions based on a spiel. So my answer would be zero. Not even one person would change their career because I gave them a spiel. The way that people change is primarily through relationships. So you know if one of if I maintained closer relationships with my Google colleagues, and if you know, every week or two, we would convene and would talk about this, and I would, you know, hear them out. They would hear me out. We would brainstorm together, and so on. Then over time, I think quite a lot of them would like, certainly not all, and I don’t have the capacity to maintain this level of relationship with all of them, but I think quite a few would. And I think if, for example, if I helped more of them develop relationships with other people that are more, you know, of my mindset, or of other mindsets like this, then even more of them would. So I think like it’s honestly not that, not that difficult, but what we need to do is help people not be alone in this, and kind of put them in an environment where they’re constantly exposed to these ideas and are able to be part of them and shape them, and not just, you know, yeah, and like, not just listen to people saying, you know, you must join the regenerative economy. If you just hear this, that doesn’t move you. That’s not the relationship. A relationship is when the transformation is mutual and when you get to shape the other person too. So if more people become parts of these kinds of communities and networks, then a lot more people are going to begin being engaged in this work.
Oh, you had another question about, what kinds of skills do people need to be part of the transition to an economy like this, the answer is leadership skills. So I think, like, certainly on some level, you do need literacy about what this kind of economy is and how it works. You need literacy about the climate crisis in order to understand why you’re even doing this, like, you need to be on the same page that there is a reason to lead. And you need to have some knowledge of what are some destinations worth leading towards, but that’s really the easy part.
The much, much, much harder part is the full complex of leadership skills, so that these are skills like, you know, how do you build relationships with people? Because without relationships, you are never going to be able to move them once you’ve built a relationship. How do you, you know, listen to them. Otherwise you’re not going to be able to convince them of anything. And the thing that you are, you know, trying to push them towards is not going to be something that can work because you haven’t listened to what can work for them. You have to develop skills of, you know, conviction. You have to develop skills of, you know, motivating people, skills of you know, accounting for people’s strengths and talking to them about how they can use those strengths throughout all of this, you also really need, you really need the skill of self regulation, and many, many different skills of self regulation.
Because, you know, this is going to sound like a cliche, but it is hard, like I would not wish upon my worst enemy to start a nonprofit. So I’m not doing it because it’s fun, like I’m doing it because I just can’t imagine doing anything else. But you are going to need self regulation and like, by far the biggest upgrades in my leadership ability, they know, did not come from listening to a leadership pep talk. They came from many, many years of investment in, like, working with a therapist, practicing, we pass on the meditation, you know, reading, you know, dozens, if not hundreds, of different books about, you know, how our emotions work. How do you, you know, take care of yourself through difficult times. How do you resolve conflicts? How do you help other people take care of themselves? So. Maybe, like, for the more technological inclined listeners, this may be, you know, less satisfying, like, maybe you want to hear or you need to study electrochemistry, or, you know you need to study environmental science, and you know, if your heart lies with studying that you’re going to study that, whether I’m telling you or not, but I really, I beg you to take this seriously. You’re not going to be able to lead if you not develop leadership skills. They are difficult to develop. But it’s, it’s these are learnable skills.
Marie Fadeyeva 25:28
So we talked a little about emotions, and you talked about skills. I also want to talk about something that we have in common, which is that we are both from Russia, and I think one of the things that has definitely shaped how I view climate is my own experiences with nature. I remember that when I was growing up in Russia, my family had, and they still have, a house in a remote rural village. It’s basically a wooden construction. There’s no indoor plumbing. We have a vegetable garden. There is a forest in the background. And I’m 24 now, and I remember that when I was a kid, when I was seven, eight, nine years old, that’s where I would spend my summers. I would work in the garden. I would dig into the dirt, and I would help collect the plants, the vegetables, and I would water, and I would weed, and I would go into the forest with my grandpa, and we would get water from the stream. And I always remember, I still hold on to that feeling of walking into a forest that is mostly untouched by people, and it’s just so magical. And I think having a personal connection with nature has definitely given me a push to keep learning about more things related to climate scientifically. And I’m wondering if you have any memories of nature that you’ve built throughout your life that you hold on to.
Eugene Kirpichov 26:54
Yeah, I want to challenge the question. I want to challenge the idea of connection between the climate crisis and nature. So I think, again, I think this represents misunderstanding of what the climate crisis is about. It’s not about saving nature. You know, nature has been through far worse. Nature has been through. You know, asteroids hitting Earth, and nature has been through, you know. The whole evolutionary process of Earth is going to be changed. Is going to change. Fine. Change a lot. And what the climate crisis is about, it’s a it’s about the destruction of human civilization. So for me, my love of nature and my concern about the climate crisis are completely unconnected. There is no connection between them whatsoever, except that I acknowledge that, you know, because we’re causing the climate crisis, nature is going to, you know, look different, and the way it’s going to look is not a way that is comfortable with how our human civilization functions today.
So for example, you know, the boundaries of continents are going to get redrawn because of sea level rise, the boundaries of where you can grow food are going to to get redrawn the boundaries of where humans can live in, what temperature regimes are going to get redrawn, and that’s going to cause a rapid and profound shock to all the infrastructure we built. You know, we can’t simply move Miami by a few 100 miles, because Miami is going to be flooded. We can’t simply, you know, move Bangladesh somewhere else, which, like almost the whole country is going to be uninhabitable. We can’t easily, you know, find the new place to live for a billion climate refugees, which, a billion is actually the average case projection of how many climate refugees we’re going to have in a couple of decades.
So again, these are just completely different things. I do love nature, but that, no that has, that has nothing to do with my concern about the climate crisis. And you know, when you’re motivating somebody to care about the climate crisis, you know, don’t talk to them about nature. Talk to them about fact that in order to adapt to the pace of change that’s happening, we’re going to need to, you know, move all of our infrastructure and most of the humans, and we simply can’t do that. It’s going to be a massive scale global economic shock that we’re probably not going to survive, at least most of us. And that’s, that’s what’s concerning.
Marie Fadeyeva 29:15
What you just said, massive economic shock, right? Billions of climate refugees. It can sound very scary, and you previously talked about people feeling paralyzed, and you talked about self regulation, right, working with your emotions. I want to go back to climate emotions a little bit more, right? When you were experiencing climate anxiety, right? You talked about that you started working, or you were able to join a project where instead of worrying about, you know, the state of the world, you were worrying about bugs and software. So that was sort of a refocus of where your focus, your energy, was going. Do you have any suggestions or any experiences with managing emotions? I noticed that you can definitely speak about the bad things that will come calmly. Rationally. You talk a lot about facts. Were you always like this, or were there moments when you were experiencing as you mentioned before, anxiety, maybe even fear. And what would you say to people, I know a lot of young people are definitely in the same boat. I know a lot of young people can definitely feel paralyzed, scared and feel like there’s nothing that they can do. Do you have any insight about how to manage those emotions, especially as maybe someone who isn’t in a leadership position yet, maybe someone who’s in high school, someone who’s in college, someone who’s just starting out their work.
Eugene Kirpichov 30:49
Yeah, so I have two answers to this. So one answer, one of the transformative moments for me was when I stopped thinking that we can, you know, completely avoid the damage. So when I was in the state of basically emotionally running with my pants on fire, wondering, how do we solve the climate crisis, you know, how do we stop this before, before it gets really bad? I don’t think we’re going to stop it before it gets really bad. I think there is going to be, honestly, a complete collapse of the global economy within my lifetime. I think there are going to be hundreds of millions, if not billions of people dead. I think it is going to get really, really, really, really bad. But I think that we’re going to, you know, it’s not going to destroy everything. It’s going to destroy a lot, but it’s not going to destroy everything. And the way that I frame, frame my work to myself, is, how do we make sure that the second chance we get we build something that’s really beautiful, and we’re not going to rebuild exactly what we have today? You know, a lot of this will be irreversibly destroyed.
You know, like once, for example, once a culture is gone, it’s gone. Once a species is gone, it’s gone. But if we build a regenerative economy, where the entire power of the economy is geared towards creating thriving around you and, you know, building, it’s not going to build exactly the same natural systems that we have today, but it will build new and beautiful ones. It’s not going to, you know, build exactly the same communities of humans that we have today, but it will build new ones.
So the way I frame my work is, you know, creating the foundation for a humanity that is a positive force one day. So that really greatly helps me and but I think, you know, not everybody will be in the place of being able to accept that, and that’s okay. So in terms of, you know, the biggest upgrade in my own emotional resiliency, honestly, it was, it was a pretty long path. I mentioned that it involved, you know, years of working with a couple of different therapists. It’s something that you like, really should do, even if you’re not, you know, identifying as somebody who has an acute psychological problem. It’s just really good, you know, it’s like a workout for your brain. And the same way you need to work out your body, you need to work out your brain, but like, if you’re, you know, looking for, looking for a quick and profound experience, and if you’re not into psychedelics, go take a 10 day silent meditation course. So, I took a few of these courses, 10 day silent Vipassana meditation courses. This is honestly like it’s even harder than running a nonprofit taking one of these courses. You’re not like sitting there and relaxing and chilling. That’s not at all what it’s like. It is incredibly, incredibly difficult and at times, miserable, both physically and mentally. But you come out to it with a new nervous system. You come out with it with a new nervous system that is able to accept uncomfortable things. Is able to accept, for example, it’s able to accept that you’re wrong, which is a crucial leadership skill. It’s able to accept that things are going to go bad and you just have to make the best of it, so that you can focus your attention on making the best of it instead of on freaking out. So this was the biggest upgrade for me, and I very much recommend it to everyone.
Marie Fadeyeva 34:19
I’ll ask a question that we ask all the guests on the podcast. If you were to design a class for a high school curriculum focused on climate, what would you teach them? Let’s say you couldn’t put them through the 10 day silent retreat, because those high schoolers probably wouldn’t want to stay silent for 10 days. Let’s say you couldn’t do that and we gave you a semester. What would you put on the syllabus, or what would you talk to the students about?
Eugene Kirpichov 34:52
Yeah, I think I would structure it in the following three parts. So part one would be just basically to see about, you know, why this is even a problem worth solving, like explaining why it is important, explaining that the problem exists. How do we know that exists? And so on. And this kind of stuff is taught, I think, in many places today.
But the second part would be explaining, you know, where does the problem come from, systemically, and what do solutions look like? So not just that, you know, oh, there’s carbon in the atmosphere, and therefore things are, things are bad, but, you know, explaining, for example, the role of transportation, explaining the role of the food system, explaining the role of the energy system, explaining, why are these systems playing that role?
For example, you know, the food system, why is it the way it is? And what does a lower carbon food system look like, and why doesn’t look? Why doesn’t it look that way? Yet, you know, obviously the things I’m saying are things that maybe we wouldn’t necessarily have the space in the curriculum. But a guy can dream. So if I can dream, I would put in things like, you know, in a chapter about the food system. I will talk about how is the food system governed? You know, who makes the rules, and how do you create change in that kind of system? If you want to change what the system does, how do you do it? You know, where do you go? Do you just, you know, are you confined to just voting for a politician that promises to transform the food system? Well, no, luckily, you’re not confined to that. There are far better things you can do, and the curriculum would tell you about what those things are, and so on.
And part three would be leadership skills. So that would be the whole complex of leadership skills that I talked about. You know, management, listening, motivation, self regulation, planning and probably even also, very importantly, systems thinking.
So that’s actually, I haven’t gotten to that today yet, but it’s a really, really important skill. I think I do want to say a few words about that. So I think a lot of people, especially engineers like myself, tend to think that because they’re being quantitative, that means that they are getting at the truth, and that is true when you’re operating, you know, at a very simple level, like you know, if you’re optimizing a factory that makes cars, yes, no, quantitative approach is the right approach for that. But when it comes to something as complex as the food system or the energy system, things get way more complex. They get to the level of our quantitative methods simply stop working. And the reason they stop working is not that, you know, we like data or something like that, but more like because these systems behave like chaotic systems. And in chaos theory, you start needing to think about like you start needing different tools for reasoning about what’s happening and what you want to do about that. Or, you know, the political system. And all of the systems we’re talking about, there are inherently, they are political.
Systems thinking is the overall discipline of reasoning and understanding and reasoning about and thinking how to influence systems that are as complex as, for example, US politics, or, you know, global politics, or the global food system, and it has many very profound insights.
A couple of the most important concepts, one is the concept of leverage points, which is, you know, where do you intervene in order to change the system’s behavior? And most of us are accustomed to thinking about intervening at very, you know, basic quantitative levels, for example, you know, like, if the government needs to raise more tax revenue, it must raise taxes, right? That’s one way to think about it. But then, you know, there are, there are a lot of feedback loops in the economy, and then there are leverage points like, you know, who gets to make the rules. There are leverage points like, you know, what are the rules even optimizing for? For example, are they optimizing for a metric that we take for granted, like GDP, or are they optimizing for a different metric, metric like, for example, what percentage of people can afford to buy a house?
These are completely different metrics, and which metrics you know a system chooses as its goal profoundly affects what it actually does. Another really interesting insight I want to share, and I’m probably rambling a bit, but another insight I want to share is so the behavior of a really complex system is not actually determined by its parts. It’s determined primarily by how the parts are connected to each other. What kind in what kind of relationship are they with each other? And in fact, even the behavior of the parts is not determined by who they are or what they are. It’s mainly determined by how they are connected to other parts. So really, it’s the structure of a system that is most important. This is one of my favorite insights. So I encourage you to Google “Thinking in Systems,” by Donella Meadows. Especially Google her essay called Leverage Points, Places to Intervene in the System. This was one of the most impactful pieces of writing I’ve ever read, and it affected how I think about everything. And I recommend that you reread it every few years, because it’s going to affect you differently each time you reread it.
Marie Fadeyeva 40:05
I know we talked about a lot, is there anything that we didn’t get to that you wanted to share or talk about?
Eugene Kirpichov 40:13
Well, yes, there is. Thank you for asking. So I want to talk a little bit about, like, what does it mean to actually work on this? Like, does it mean finding a job at a company that works on this? Does it mean, you know, working on electing politicians who make it be this way? Or does it mean, for example, creating change from where you are at a company? So I think there is a place for all of these things, but I think it’s, I think most people wrongly think that the more pure the company at which they work, the more impact they must be having. For example, if I want to make an impact on climate, I must find a company that does the most important work on climate and work there. This is simply not true for the following reason.
Imagine if, for example, you are, you know, an accountant, right? And you really believe in ocean-based carbon solutions. So you find an ocean-based climate startup, and you join them as an accountant. And does this mean that you’re making a great difference for climate? Well, sorry, no, it doesn’t mean that. They’re going to be fine without you. They’re going to find a different accountant, right? So you’re not actually making any difference there. But like, it doesn’t mean that they don’t need an accountant. They do. But like, this isn’t necessarily the path where you can make the biggest difference.
So in terms of where might you make a bigger difference? Well, let me give an example. I have a friend. His name is Kyler. He’s an accountant, and when he was looking for a way to make an impact on climate, he made a different choice. He joined the building inspection company called Inspectify, and while joining them, he convinced them to start a line of business focused on energy efficiency opportunities. If they hired anyone else, they would not be doing this. They would probably never be doing this, honestly. Like there isn’t any kind of, you know, policy that any politician can pass that’s going to force a building inspection company to find energy efficiency opportunities. It’s just like, not the kind of thing that policy does. So he was able to exercise power in his role, even though he was not an executive. He didn’t even work there, like he pitched them on that while joining them. So I think, like, the frame I want to give you is, like, ask yourselves, how can I make the biggest difference in terms of what would not happen if I wasn’t doing this right? Like, can I take initiative? Can I make the case for something? Can I come up with a new approach? And again, this is a much harder path, because it requires leadership skills. And you know, when you’re leading, you’re lonely and you fail a lot. In fact, you fail most of the time, but you do end up making a difference, and you do end up being, you know, satisfied when in the times that you do succeed, and you do end up being recognized by your peers as a leader, and you build a community of people who believe in what you do.
So in many ways, it’s it’s also a very satisfying path about the main message I want to give you again is, do not confuse purity with making a difference. These are simply different things. They’re not contradictory, but they’re completely different things.
Marie Fadeyeva 43:17
Thank you so much for sharing that message. I think if I would have heard that in 2020 when I was a freshman, I would have had a much more positive perspective on my future in the workforce. Thank you so much. Eugene, are there any questions that you have for me?
Eugene Kirpichov 43:33
Oh, well, maybe my question is, does what we just talked about, is it inspiring you to do anything in particular differently, or is it giving you any ideas about what you can do?
Marie Fadeyeva 43:46
Oh, yes, absolutely. I think I am definitely working on self regulation. I’m working on introducing a little bit of discipline in my life. I think that is my main focus. Is establish a good routine, healthy sleep, healthy food, healthy relationships, and then I’m going to look for a window for myself to start some sort of leadership opportunity. And I definitely feel much more inspired after we talk today.
Eugene Kirpichov 44:14
Awesome. Thank you so much, Marie, yeah, I completely second simply staying healthy, because really, if you’re going to be a leader, this is your probably most important and fundamental job is to stay healthy and to stay in a state of mind where you are able to think deeply rather than react.
And when I’m able to take the time to take care of myself, I make much better decisions. And the quality of these decisions now out dominate any amount of, you know, zeal and vigor I might, might put into my work when I’m when I’m less mentally healthy. So, like I it’s not really about, you know, working 16 hour days, you’re going to be 10 times more effective if you just take better care of yourself. And the things you do are things that strike at higher leverage points.
I want to add one more thing. So many people who are listening to this are probably thinking, you know, how do I choose a career path that will lead me to have a lot of climate impact? And a lot of people think, you know, I want to work on climate therefore I must get an environmental science degree. Well, that is, I have to say this is probably not the not the right path. You know, we have enough people with environmental science degrees. And the reason why we have a climate crisis, it is not the lack of people with environmental science degrees. It’s not that we know lack some environmental science knowledge. It’s not what’s preventing us. So really, what has to happen in order to solve the climate crisis is we have to transform our industries, right? We have to transform our industries and our policies and our communities and so on.
So I would suggest that when you think about this, you make the decision differently. You ask, like, what industry do I want to transform? And then get the kind of degree that enables you to transform that industry. For example, you know, if you’re really excited about transportation and you’re, you know, you’re super into electric vehicles, then, you know, maybe get a degree that allows you to make waves in the world of vehicles. Or, you know, if you’re engineer, then you probably want to study electric chemistry, indeed, which we which we referred to, because it’s going to play a big role. You could go to a business school that’s also in a pretty good path to develop leadership skills, which you are going to need just make sure that you actually put them to this use, rather than just to the use of getting a really good career. So yeah, I think that’s what I want to say.
Marie Fadeyeva 46:29
Thank you so much. Eugene, it was a pleasure talking to you today.
Eugene Kirpichov 46:32
Likewise, thank you so much.
Helena Rambler 46:36
Thank you for listening to our tiny podcast about a giant topic. We’ve learned. We have listeners all over the world, and we’re curious who you are and what you would like to hear on the show. So if you’d like, please send us an email at podcast@thecityatlas.org That’s podcast@thecityatlas.org. Thanks for listening.