From Drops to Waves: Rethinking Our World's Water Dynamics

"How do we mass manufacture civilization? It's through figuring out how to build cities in chunks that are distinct modules, like cells in a body and that is what water decentralization is."

Buckle up for a cerebral joyride stretching possibilities for water, technology, business and beyond. Our latest Liquid Assets features Dr. Michael Stanley Gallisdorfer known colloquially as MSG, whose innovative insights are reshaping our understanding of water's role in society and the economy. MSG's discussion with host Ravi Kurani focuses on the transformative potential of water as not only a vital resource but also as a catalyst for economic and environmental regeneration. His concepts of decentralized water systems and ecological engineering offer a provocative vision of a sustainable future.

Delving deeper, MSG elaborates on the cutting-edge ideas of using water for carbon sequestration and biomaterial production. Our conversation is not just an exploration of technological advancements; it's a journey into a new paradigm where water becomes a key player in addressing global challenges. The episode promises to broaden your horizons, challenging conventional views and igniting a profound conversation about the essence and future of water in our lives.

What you’ll hear in this episode:

• Water Freedom via Decentralization & Democratization: MSG explains how centralized water systems constrain freedom and shares his vision for modular, small-scale infrastructure enhancing choice.
• Hacking Ecosystems as Infrastructure: MSG introduces cutting-edge concepts like assistive ecology using technology to create cybernetic ecosystems that support human systems.
• Water as an Economic Medium: MSG makes the case for growing bioproducts in water to replace mining, unlocking a blue economy centered around aquatic resources.
• Optimizing for Edge Thinking: MSG analyzes how modern systems optimize for reliability and risk mitigation rather than creativity. He advocates embracing edges and uncertainty.

Listen On:

• Spotify
• Apple Podcasts

Watch the interview:

Meet MSG

Dr. Michael Stanley Gallisdorfer widely known as MSG, is a trailblazer in environmental science, merging his expertise in ecological restoration with a passion for technology and creativity. He is a geographer & entrepreneur, a multidomain, transdisciplinary water & science communication expert. Raised in a challenging environment, MSG developed a resilience and determination to make a positive impact. His approach to water and environmental science emphasizes accessibility and public involvement, believing everyone can play a role in scientific discovery and community betterment.

Beyond his academic achievements, MSG's 26-year tenure in the hospitality industry has enriched his understanding of human dynamics and the importance of communal spaces for idea exchange. With his innovative perspective, he envisions water as a catalyst for economic growth and sustainability, advocating for natural solutions like algae-based systems. MSG's unique blend of personal experience and professional diversity makes him an influential voice in shaping a more inclusive and sustainable future in water and environmental management.

The Book, Movie, or Show

In our quest to discover the literary influences shaping our guests' visions, one title stand out in MSG's repertoire.

Energy and Form: An Ecological Approach to Urban Growth by Knowles is a seminal work that delves into the dynamic interplay between energy flows and urban structures. The author advocates for an ecological perspective in urban planning, emphasizing the importance of aligning city design with natural systems. MSG further emphasized how urban forms affect energy utilization and sustainability and promotes the integration of ecological networks into city planning. It's a must-read for those interested in sustainable urban development, offering practical examples and innovative solutions for creating resilient, efficient, and harmonious urban environments.

Contains affiliate Amazon links. 

Transcript

00:00
Dr. MSG
How do we mass manufacture civilization? Well, it's not through building, you know, cities that are one offs, that are not modularly constructed, that are kind of organic. It's through figuring out how to build cities in chunks that are distinct modules, like cells in a body. Now, that's what water decentralization means. This means you can just drop something in a neighborhood, say, here. Here's your water source. Have at it. Have fun. And that changes everything.

00:29
Ravi Kurani
Welcome to liquid assets, where we talk about the intersection of policy, management, and business, all as it looks at the world of water. I'm your host, Ravi, and today we have an awesome guest. Michael Stanley Gallisdorfer for you, or commonly known as msg.

00:45
Dr. MSG
So I'm msg. I'm Dr. Michael Stanley Gallisdorfer, and I'll leave you with this. And I'll start you with this, too. Just remember that art is technology and beauty is power, and beauty is what you look at to know it's going to work.

01:01
Ravi Kurani
Michael, were talking earlier, before I hit the record button, about the future of water and freedom, and you had talked about kind of four main concepts that were briefly chatting about. Let's go ahead and dive into those for the audience.

01:13
Dr. MSG
All right, let's do it. Ravi, thank you for having me on today. I really appreciate it. It's a real pleasure, and I'm looking forward to our conversation. I hope all of our audiences, too, when it comes down to the future of water and freedom. What am I talking about? Okay, so I define freedom as you can't say yes if you can't say no. And right now, when it comes to water, you can't say no. You can't just go and get your own water these days, because if you're taking it from, say, an urban waterway or a lake, it's polluted. And you can't exactly just make it on your own. There's some desalination occurring, atmospheric water generation. So when it comes to this idea of the future of water and freedom, here's the four concepts now. So three come as one.

02:00
Dr. MSG
So there's decentralization, diversification, and democratization of water. And we'll get into that in a minute. So decentralization, diversification, and democratization of water. Think off grid water. Then there is this bigger idea, which ties into the concepts like regenerative economy. It ties into things like the blue economy, an economy that revolves around the use of water as an economic medium. So water as an economic medium, a medium of commerce, is not just shipping, it's not just aquaculture. It's not just water for drinking or for irrigation. It's this idea that water is really a primordial soup. And we can use that soup to support our economy. Why is that? So we'll start with that first. Seems like a pretty natural transition there. So why water as an economic medium?

02:57
Dr. MSG
Well, if you could figure out how to produce all of the biomaterials we need to replace mined materials, petrochem, anything like that, using water, then that kind of cuts the cord to the mining economy, an extractive economy. And that allows us to move more towards an economy that has what my pal Nicola would say would be like a regenerative coefficient. So we got an ocean, we're growing a bunch of algae for fuel or for polymers or whatever. We know that each year, under typical conditions, will yield x gigatons of algae goo, which we can then refine. So why? Interesting point there. The whole refining industry can still have jobs. Interesting point there is. Why aren't we doing that yet? It's because we don't have the means to really work with our oceans and our big lakes yet.

03:47
Dr. MSG
We just kind of view them as this place where we go to move stuff around cheaply on big ships. So I'll leave it there. Water is an economic medium. Do a lot with it, can change the whole world. Different kind of economy. Two, let's get to this idea of democratization in water, and that's diversification and decentralization. Now, okay? Right now, either you're getting water from the ground, you're getting it from some sort of national source, like a lake or a river, or you're getting it through desale. And there's a few other minor players in there. There's a few emerging areas too, which we could talk about later. That means that you aren't free as an individual to go wherever you want, because unless you're going to carry your water in or make your own water, you don't have a choice.

04:32
Dr. MSG
So what that does is at a fundamental level, it ties us into one type of civilization, a civilization that needs to be near water. That's limiting us. We can't say no to water. So the future, if I was going to look at it from a very high level perspective, like a chief technology officer's perspective, I would say first let's look at where the holes are in the system. If we look at the world and say, where don't we get water? Where is water too expensive for a company as we know, a company, a business as we know a business to deliver water. That area is not economically productive. It's not part of the economy. The people who are there are spending so much time and energy just to survive that it's limiting economic development, it's limiting complexity in our economy.

05:15
Dr. MSG
So you can't think about what to do for business if you can't feed yourself, take care of yourself with water first. You need water for everything, right? Straightforward. That's old hat. Now, democratizing water, finding new technologies and sources of water that changes that make them affordable, right? Make them cheap so you can build it out of anything really easy. Now, when it comes to diversification, how does diversification of water supply, water technologies enable that? What it does is it allows people to adapt to conditions rather than forcing the world in a procrastination way, force fitting things, trying to force fit an engineering solution to a really dynamic and wonderfully complex world is kind of adapt to technology to say, well, I'm using atmospheric water generation on an industrial scale. How can we do that on an individual scale?

06:07
Dr. MSG
How can we take desalination using reverse osmosis membranes and multi walled carbon nanotubes? Perhaps in the future, how do we take that and scale it down? How do we miniaturize it the way that Steve Jobs and Apple took a iPad and turned it into the iPhone? Remember, you want to put technology in the hands of people to drive technology adoption, it's got to be easy. So we hit what diversification we did. Democratization. Now decentralization. The outcome of this. Pardon me a moment. The outcome of this is decentralization of power related to water. Think about water utilities, water authorities. Right now, everybody needs them. Everyone needs them, and they're stable. People get into those career fields because it's stable work. Everyone needs water. The problem is that it's extremely expensive and difficult to maintain this one off infrastructure. Our infrastructure is not modular.

06:58
Dr. MSG
You can't just pop out a block and put in a new block and replace the infrastructure with it. So when people built in the past, think about how firearms weren't standardized until, I think, the early 19th century, standardization allowed for mass manufacturing. How do we mass manufacture civilization? Well, it's not through building cities that are one offs, that are not modularly constructed, that are kind of organic. It's through figuring out how to build cities in chunks that are distinct modules, like cells in a body. Now, that's what water decentralization means. It means that you don't have to have one big plant with a spider web of pipes coming out of it that cost a lot of money that you might not even have recorded because they're 100 and 2200 years old.

07:46
Dr. MSG
This means you can just drop something in a neighborhood and say, here's your water source, have at it, have fun. And that changes everything. So once again, recapping overall water presents a tremendous potential to expand the economy, to grow a more complex economy. Why is that? It's because through diversification of water supply and technologies, including recycling technologies and reuse technologies, and decentralization of water systems and authority, you make it more democratic, which means that people have more options to choose their life for themselves. And that's a rough summary of those initial four concepts.

08:24
Ravi Kurani
There's so much to unpack there. I want to kind of go back and I love what you said.

08:29
Dr. MSG
Right.

08:29
Ravi Kurani
Freedom is you can say yes if you can't say yes. If you can't say no, right.

08:35
Dr. MSG
If you don't have can't say yes, you can't say no.

08:38
Ravi Kurani
And so it makes so much more sense, especially when you look at water as compared to telecom, right? Or potentially like electricity. We had this conversation on the podcast a few times around how other markets have looked at decentralization, diversification, and using that technology as an economic medium.

09:01
Dr. MSG
Right.

09:01
Ravi Kurani
You kind of brought up this apple example of we've opened up an entire world of web developers and app developers that now make millions, tens of millions of dollars off of the App Store, right. Which didn't exist 15 years ago. And so I think there is a lot of just thematic parallels between what we see in the world today and what we could potentially do with water.

09:22
Ravi Kurani
There was one interesting point you made around water as an economic medium, around it being a primordial soup and almost this cutting the cord analogy, and I really like that, of how do you cut the cord on things that we're dependent on so we can go ahead and then decentralize, democratize that particular asset that we need, this being water that we're talking about to build an entirely new and more complex economy that is second or third derivative, more complex than what we're living in today. You had mentioned that from the kind of algae side of cutting the cord on the kind of fuel and oil and gas industry, is there other examples that you can give from a water as an economic medium standpoint where we.

10:10
Dr. MSG
Can cut the core?

10:11
Ravi Kurani
How else can we kind of explore that territory?

10:14
Dr. MSG
Sure. Let's dive right in. Let's dive into the wonderful world of carbon and carbon things. Carbon sequestration, carbon fixing carbon, anything. Okay, so we talked about this. Cutting the cord. Algae, biomaterials. It's one example. Now, most people don't really know this. They're not aware of this. What part of the planet really fixes the most carbon? What part captures it and stores it? It's the oceans, and lakes. Yeah. So all this insanity about carbon capture and storage plants, it's like, no, that's super wasteful. In an energy stressed world, it's going to cause even more stress. It's like the drunk drinking even more to cover up the pain of last night's hangover. Right? Doesn't work. So stop doing it. Right. Don't be insane. Be smart. Now, let's focus on this. So how do we go from zero to a million miles an hour?

11:11
Dr. MSG
How do we go from zero to the speed of light when it comes to carbon capture and sequestration and long term deposition? Well, you try it in lakes first, because plankton are these really tiny microscopic plants, and the animals eat them. That's the beginning right there. And there's this problem right now, which is there's a biolayer that's been disrupted on the surface of lakes and oceans, and it's because of all these surfactants and detergents, soaps and all sorts of crap in the water. And it floats in the surface. Right. So it ruins it. So without that layer, this layer of lipids, organic living molecules, things like that, we can't get there. So we got to start with some places that we can control. First good example would be lakes.

11:56
Dr. MSG
You test a solution in lakes, figure out what your biogeochemical exchange or I have a background in biogeochemistry, too. You figure out what your exchange rates are, and you figure out how much you can do, and then you treat it like an engineering process. You're engineering for ecological productivity. Ecological engineers know this theoretically already. They're just not given the resources to really go for it and do it on a big scale. So then from there, figuring out how much is being sequestered, captured and sequestered, you got to figure out the structure of the food web, all those interconnections in the network of matter Energy transfer from sunlight to the bottom of the ocean or the bottom of a lake. There's got to be connections there.

12:35
Dr. MSG
There's not a connection there if there's animal missing, if there's a plant missing, if something's missing, you got to fill in the gap. So this is where we get really weird and far out. So this is where we start talking about water and cybernetic ecology. We're not talking about cybernetic ecology from an information systems perspective. We're talking about think of how there's cyborgs. What if our ecosystems themselves could be kind of like cyborgs in the sense of media, not in the sense of systems theorists, not like morbid Weiner would say, now you got to fill those gaps in. So think of it as, like assistive ecology. You know how you have a prosthetic, you lose a hand, you get something that works, that kind of does the job. Maybe eventually we'll replace it with a new hand. Well, you do that for ecosystems, too.

13:20
Dr. MSG
So all these drones and robots and stuff like that's useful. We can build that technology gap out right there. What we can also do is create tons of jobs. People can actually farm living systems to sequester carbon and also get biomaterials out, too. At the same time, multiple benefits. Finally, you got to figure out how to store it on the bottom. So all these dams that are keeping sediment, sand, dust from getting into lakes or oceans, get rid of them, because you need the sediment there to bury the stuff so that it gets into anaerobic conditions and then gets long term, moved underground and transformed and stored, eventually it'll turn into something. You got oil, coal, whatever. Now, that's how you do it. The rough chain is in three parts. Make sure that the surface works.

14:03
Dr. MSG
If the surface works, little creatures can capture it. Then figure out what the connections are, make sure they're there. Employ all those unemployed ecologists with phds, and then figure out how to keep it on the bottom. Take down the dams, let the sediment come in, let it do its job. Just copy Nature. Do it a little bit better. That's what we do anyway. Now, from there, for talking about this as a technology scaling problem, say we start in lake Erie because. Why lake Erie in the Great Lakes? Because it's the warmest and shallowest and most polluted of the Great Lakes. Plenty of nutrients. It's a perfect soup for growing stuff that captures carbon. Try it there. See if it works. The lakes are already somewhat controlled in North America through the IJC, the International Joint Commission.

14:43
Dr. MSG
Then start working on estuaries and bays in the ocean. So we talked about carbon. So water is the medium for carbon capture, sequestration, and storage. Stop the insanity. Otherwise. Now, what's another part? Let me think about this for one moment. Food. Not just fish, not just seaweed food. Think about where the earth's population centers are. They're these coastal cities. So why are we growing all of our food hundreds to thousands of miles kilometers away inland somewhere, on soils that are getting rapidly degraded, like all these really rich, low soils from the last ice age, all of a sudden beating off the ice sheets? It's not working. We're destroying soil. You ever seen those pictures of cornfields in Iowa where there's the house that's, know, 8 meters above the current working surface of the land? Doesn't work.

15:37
Dr. MSG
Grow food in the water near where you live, it's easier, and it creates lots of jobs because it's hand work, it's intensive, there's a lot of maintenance. No one loses jobs. In fact, there's more jobs in a water economy because the oceans are 70% of the earth's surface. Right. That's it. So I got more stuff, too. We can talk about that later. Wrapping it back around. Let's look at it again. What we have right now is we have biomaterials, algae, plants, things like that. We have as feedstocks for our various industries. We also have carbon capture using lakes, streams, rivers, wetlands, and oceans. And the final part was food. Grow food in the ocean.

16:19
Ravi Kurani
Awesome. That's such an interesting way to look at it. I mean, honestly, my background is in mechanical engineering.

16:25
Dr. MSG
Right.

16:25
Ravi Kurani
And I love the way that you explain it from a systems diagram standpoint and this concept of cybernetic ecology. Right, where you just said you have this prosthetic arm, if you break one off, there is a chain of functions that need to be achieved off of the actual food chain and the ecological dependencies that are there. And if there's a part that's missing, I think we probably have the technology from a systems diagram standpoint and the technology to actually implement something, to stand that ecosystem back up and then go ahead and kind of move forward from there. That makes a complete amount of sense. You had mentioned that ecological engineering. Ecological engineers kind of have a lot of these solutions in their mind, but they're not really given either the capital or the resources to kind of do that.

17:13
Ravi Kurani
If the knowledge is out there, that kind of raises a question in my mind of what will get us over the hurdle so we can actually start implementing parts and parcel of this. I mean, you'd mentioned a great mvp is launching in a lake, but what's really stopping that kind of key from going in the ignition?

17:29
Dr. MSG
It's uncertain. And I've worked with lots of engineers. I've run engineering teams to develop products. Engineers want reliability, right? So there's an inherent sort of. Remember, your license depends upon if you're a PE, professional engineer, your license depends upon you getting it done, that it works. You say, I can do this, and I know it's going to give this result. If your business is reliability and you're stepping into new territory, there's no such thing. It's all risk, it's all insanity, and it's all crazy. You don't know what's going to happen tomorrow. Yeah, you can't think your way ahead far enough. Remember, we can only see this far in front of our face. We can't analytically solve everything ahead of time. We don't have a system diagram for the place beyond the horizon.

18:15
Dr. MSG
So there's sort of an inherent anxiety and uncertainty towards the opportunity presented by the edge. What do the old greeks say? Paraphrasing immediate. The escatole. Make the edge near so you can look across it. So we got to get over that, get used to edge thinking. Get used to looking over the cliff and saying, let's jump. Why not? I might make it two. Our economy right now is not set up to take chances. Business runs on reliability. What do you think? People use all the data that they scrape from all the apps for figuring out user personas and just pumping more juice into someone's veins, being like, here you go. You want more of that, right? It's all about reliability. It's all about reliable flows of capital, especially, sorry, revenue, especially in tense times where people have less money. So it's getting tighter.

19:07
Dr. MSG
Our economy is at the end phase of its development. It can't grow anymore in its current system. So it's trying to say, we'll do it this way, and it's trying to force fit. So one of the big problems is this linear economy that requires things to be predictable all the time. It's because it deals with scarcity and material production, and if that's your goal, you're not going to be thinking about things like, well, how do I get a different source of this biomaterial? You're not thinking about that. You're thinking about how I can minimize the cost of my current feedstock by, say, opening a new mine. Sure. So lack of creativity economically, lack of creative economy. What's the third thing I could say? Social disconnection. People don't have salons anymore. They don't just hang out and try stuff and think freely.

19:59
Dr. MSG
How many times have I been in a conversation with somebody who's some sort of expert in something or other, and they're like, no, that's not going to work. Why? Because of this. And I said, have we done any sort of empirical investigation? Have we taken a look at it? No, we haven't. People forget that there's this thing called the narrative fallacy. It's most popularly presented in Black Swan. And the idea is, forget that their theoretical narrative is not reality, their platonic narrative is not reality, that form is not nature itself. So when you're working with nature itself, you've got to be on the edge taking chances because things are going to break. Right. When Elon Musk blows up a rocket, is that a failure? No, he succeed in learning.

20:45
Dr. MSG
So an attitude that looks forward towards taking chances and learning, a true pioneering attitude, is what's needed. What's holding us back is a fear of change. I want to retain my wealth and power. I don't want to change because I enjoy my comforts. It's red pill, blue pill thinking. I advocate taking all the pills. Take blue pills, red pills, green pills, who cares? And see what happens.

21:05
Ravi Kurani
Yeah, totally. We were talking about earlier how you go to these un, these sessions that are not directly in the main trunk of the water conference. If you had a magic wand and kind of all the playing cards in front of you with the governments that be.

21:27
Dr. MSG
Right.

21:27
Ravi Kurani
You kind of mentioned that the system that currently exists today is what it is. And that's also, in a sense, holding us back because we've kind of developed where we are today, to its almost maximum capacity. What are things that we can do? And even kind of almost a shout out to the listeners of, is there anything that you would advocate for?

21:48
Dr. MSG
Right.

21:48
Ravi Kurani
Do you have any suggestions? Even like a one or two? Do these two things first, because I think that put these people in office, whatever it might be, we need to go ahead and just change government in this particular way. Any thoughts on kind of what could be solutions on how we even kick this off?

22:04
Dr. MSG
Yeah, don't start with government. It's too big, it's too centralized. So to maximize creativity, you need a lot of individual parts and small groups doing a lot of stuff. Look at how DARPA does things, like throw a little bit of money at a lot of things and see what sticks. Right. And put a lot of weird, smart people together and say, go have fun. See what happens. So to two things, I would say, one, put your phone down, turn off all your stuff, maybe put some music on, maybe play your own music and hang out with people in garages and tinker, screw around, have fun, drink beer, whatever, and take your time. And replace entertainment, which is unfulfilling, with tinkering, which is fun. And you might come across something interesting.

22:53
Dr. MSG
When I say tinkering, I don't just mean physical, that I mean playing games with your mind. Free thinking. Engage in free thinking and the free interplay of concepts and ideas. No holds barred thinking, speaking, acting. True freedom of speech. A place where nobody gets canceled because we're living in times where we got to play games to think about where we're going to go tomorrow because we don't know what's going to happen. Things are changing. So spend time with people, doing stuff for real, including building technologies and identifying new solutions to problems that we have these days that you could do yourself. Two beyond that, I guess this one is from government. Two is for government. Throw lots of little chunks of money at a lot of people who have decent ideas. Don't expect them to be perfect.

23:39
Dr. MSG
Don't expect them to always follow your grant application format. Just say, hey, if I gave you 50 grand and you put in 30 hours a week, and you could prove it for one year, $50,000 us. I should say, what can you do? All I want to see from you is effort. Because we can guarantee efforts, we cannot guarantee results. I'm not looking for a specific product at the end of it. Failure is always an option. Just do something. Spend a year doing something. So imagine if everybody on Bruce had a year or two of sabbatical where they could just think of stuff and not worry about everyday life. What would that do for us? So once again, the two things are spend time with people, doing things, having fun, solving problems together.

24:17
Dr. MSG
Two, throw lots of little bits of money at a lot of people and just ask them to show up 30 hours a week and do it. That way they can work on their jobs, too. And don't expect them to deliver some crazy product that's going to scale infinitely. We don't want that. That's not what the economy needs. It needs more little stuff, not these huge gaps. Right.

24:36
Ravi Kurani
I love that so much. I like to explore a little bit about kind of why guests on this podcast arrived at where they're at. And your thinking is just so interesting. What's your story, Michael? Where did you come with these ideas? What's your background? I know you've been in academia. You have a PhD. Walk us through the story of you.

24:56
Dr. MSG
So how did I get into this universe else here now? And me being me? Well, everything that anyone ever told me to do when it came to what I should do with my life, I said, no, I'm just going to do the opposite. Because going back to principle one, you can't say yes if you can't say no, right? So if you're going to tell me that I can't do something now, watch me do it, because I'm going to prove through real results that I could do it. So cross the line. Always see where it says. And where does that come from? So I'll start with where I came. Know, I grew up poor in the ghetto. Like I grew up in probably one of the worst ghettos in the country in York.

25:46
Dr. MSG
You know, I grew up in a part of buffalo that's like sort of the upper east side of Buffalo. Buffalo is a pretty large city. It's just no one knows it. And it was in a place called Central park. And if you want to talk about watching a system fail people, I mean, like living through neighborhoods falling apart, living through just decades of intense human suffering, I can tell you from experience what it's like, and it's awful. You feel terrible every day. You're worried about your safety and your survival. You don't have money, your food, your house is leaking water when it rains, things like that. So suffering makes you strong. And without suffering and the will to proceed through it unabated, that persistence, you're not going to get anywhere. People talk about this stuff all the time. They talk about grit.

26:35
Dr. MSG
Well, how do you get grit? You do the hardest possible thing you can think of, and you just do it every day. You punch the board like there's no guarantee you're ever going to break through. That's what it came from. At heart. I came from a place where there are things I've seen and I've been through that you wouldn't believe. And I could tell you from firsthand experience. And so I decided that I didn't want that anymore. Because, remember, there is a way out of suffering. And the way out of suffering is not necessarily just acceptance of your current condition. There's another way. And that way is action. That way is willful action towards creation. So I read a bunch of books as a know. Of course, it was like, I read Dune. I read all the dune books by Frank Herbert.

27:21
Dr. MSG
I read a lot of, you know, luckily I had grandparents who knew how to know. And I spent a lot of time in, weirdly enough, catholic churches and just experiencing the beauty of those traditional spaces. And that kind of got me into this whole world of, well, let's see what I can do. And what I decided that I wanted to do is I decided that I wanted to build and rebuild cities, and I wanted to cherish warm planets and I wanted to create ecosystems because that sounds like fun. And everyone said, well, you're never going to get a job doing that. I said, I don't want to get a job. I want to create jobs, and I want to invent my own jobs because it's more interesting than doing what you're told all the time because that doesn't work for me.

28:10
Dr. MSG
So that got me through many years of sort of undergraduate academic work, graduate PhD research, and I got into this weird sort of interdisciplinary ecosystem restoration program at the University of Buffalo because I decided I wanted to stay here. Why should I not be able to make that choice, right? Why should I have to travel everywhere all the time? I wanted to contribute to my community because I saw that there was suffering there and problems there. And so I went through the whole PhD thing. It took me a long time. I worked full time with kids, two jobs and a PhD, and I got divorced, and it was additional madness on top of suffering. You just got to keep going through it. You can never quit, right? Because if you quit, you're never going to get there. You got no shot whatsoever.

28:54
Dr. MSG
You must keep focused on the point, on the horizon. I also race yachts, too, so I've almost died a bunch of times. Let me tell you all about that. So it changes your perspective on the world, right? When I finished my PhD, I realized that I wanted business as a vehicle for creative action in the world. And when I talk about business, I talk about serving needs. People forget that purpose of business as sort of a social machine is to transfer information around, share information, and to convert energy to matter and matter to energy and back and forth. It's a transformative system. And I, I think, was thinking about ways to treat ecosystems as infrastructure to help people live in better cities and get smarter. So that's where I am right now.

29:40
Dr. MSG
I mean, I did start my own company with my business partner, Dr. Tammy Malillo, and that'll be emerging in the future. We're not ready to reveal that yet, but we do interesting work. But my idea fundamentally is I started out seeing a lot of problems and I decided to do something about them because it felt better than just accepting them. And then I spent 25 years doing all this academic work and other work. And on the side of that, I was doing all this other weird stuff, too, like taoist yogas and things like Raja yoga processes, not your traditional yogas and I'm at a point now with you saying that we have a chance to build an economy that is more complex and powerful than our current economy based around water.

30:23
Dr. MSG
And that involves places like Buffalo, New York, because Buffalo is one of the few cities in the world that was custom built to be sort of a replicable city and scalable. And I can tell you that on another podcast in the future because I also do that kind of thing. So there you go. That's where it came from. I do things because I want people to be happy and healthy, to make a better awesome.

30:43
Ravi Kurani
That's. It makes so much sense. When were talking earlier, you had mentioned that you also wanted to make environmental science more accessible for people. Yeah, go ahead.

30:54
Dr. MSG
Well, the biggest problem now is that regular people don't realize that they can do science. You can do engineering, whatever. It's not like this thing that is a secret behind closed doors, but that's kind of what it's turned into, where people don't, pardon my dogs are barking, people don't realize that they have this power. And it comes down to very simple things. What it comes down to is it comes down to taking the time to see the world around you for real. And what does that mean? So when I say environmental science, I mean being in the world around you, whatever your environment is. I'm sitting in my study right now. Kitchen is my office, my studies upstairs, and seeing the world around you and then not being attached to one idea of what you see, like looking at different patterns in the world.

31:41
Dr. MSG
So teaching people that kind of cognitive flexibility, we could say that it's an offshoot of cognitive diversity. When it comes to the environmental science side. Specifically, what I'm working on is helping people to understand how to take that basic observation in their daily life and gain some insight into their condition. For example, people wonder why they feel the way they do. Often they're like, why do I feel tired today? Well, it's probably connected to, maybe it's raining, maybe there is some smoke in the air from fires. Without the environmental awareness, people can't connect how they feel with what's going on in the world around them. And that connection is fundamentally always there. It never ever went away.

32:18
Dr. MSG
And by expanding the population that has access to environmental science on a ground level, we can start solving those problems for ourselves and improve public health on an individual basis. You don't have to spend months waiting for a Doctor. You can say, oh, I feel sick today because I smell this sewer gas. Pardon me a second. I have a blue tick coon hound. His name is Foster and he just barks at everything. And yeah, I got two hounds challenging dogs. Anyway, so the point is expanding access to environmental science allows people to know more about the world and solve their problems on the spot. They don't have to wait. On a business level, what does it mean? Well, right now it's really expensive to get anything done through universities. Consultancies are super expensive too. How do you make it faster, better, cheaper?

33:05
Dr. MSG
So that if you're like say a real estate agent and you want detailed information on a group of properties that you're looking at buying, you want to know you're not going to be stuck with stranded assets. You want to be able to sell your portfolio. If you're a bank trying to loan money, you want to know that there's going to be return on there because you don't want to realize, oh, ten years down the road, there's no water. There's no water, there's no lands, dust. You don't want to live in Mad Max world, you don't want to live in blade Runner because you want to make money. Right? So that's it. That's the whole point of expanding access to environmental science. And when I say environmental science, I mean total environmental science, not just limited studies, publish a paper and sit on a shelf.

33:43
Dr. MSG
I mean dynamic. So it's a service too. You might have an initial product, which is an assessment or analysis. Then the services. We help you be aware of what's going on in your world. This applies to, say, the government too, like the public sector. If you're a city and you don't have the experts, well, we want to be able to be there for you to fill in that gap so that you can become aware of how you can adapt to change. This is a global market because change is coming. It's already here and you're going to need people to help you with it. There you go.

34:14
Ravi Kurani
Which really ties back to your kind of initial point you made about putting your phone away, sitting down and really just tinkering in garages or with groups of people. Because you're right in the point that you made earlier is we don't have these third spaces anymore. Right? We have the work, the home and the office. And we used to spend a lot of time at these salons, the cafe, whatever the name is and whatever culture you come from. But these third spaces used to exist. And people used to have a lot of information transfer then, right?

34:49
Ravi Kurani
They used to have a lot of communication, a lot of collaboration and totally makes sense that we do need to bring it back a little bit from the world we've been living in the last few years to kind of getting back out to those salons and those third spaces 100%.

35:03
Dr. MSG
And it's not predictable and it's not safe either. So here's a fun fact about it, too. I've been to the hospitality business, restaurants, bars, everything, for 26 years now. And chaos is creative when we start putting safety above risk. And in those spaces and those third spaces, they're wild, they're ungovernable. No one cares what the rules are, other than don't burn the place down. And that's where that cutting edge creativity comes from. Now imagine a group like that, equipped with the tools to do real time environmental science on a little pond. It becomes almost like a hobby. It's like, imagine all the tech nerds in the world saying, let's figure out how to take all of our stuff and put it together for a purpose. And then we'll see things like self assembly.

35:56
Dr. MSG
Because remember, the more chances for these random occurrences to take place, the more chaos we can create, the more chance that something is going to stick, right? Exposure to positive black swans and chaos has value. And that's kind of what Silicon Valley was like back in the day when it was cheap and you had some jobs at, what was it, Dell and Hewitt Peel at Packard and some Stanford people probably smoking weed, hanging out in, you know, that's where it came from. And a lot of vast spaces, like cow country. I spent time in farms, too. Those vast spaces that you don't get when you're staring at your phone while you're sitting in just rooms all the day. Those vast spaces change how you think. So do it together, outdoors.

36:44
Ravi Kurani
Love it. I ask everybody a final question before we close out the show, and you kind of alluded to this, that you did read a lot. I ask everybody, is there a book or a show or a movie that has maybe had, like, a profound impact on the way that you look at the world or the way that kind of has moved in your interest towards water?

37:11
Dr. MSG
I'm not going to say what I want to say because it would be a little bit too weird for most people, but let's just say I'm not going to tell you what book has probably had the most influence on me, but let's just say that it worked like magic. But I can give you something that's more palatable. And let me look at. I'm looking at my bookshelf right now. Give me a second. Give me just a moment. I'm going to get up for a second and actually see if I can find the book. Okay, so this one has lost the dust jacket. I think it got destroyed a while ago. But you can see it's maybe energy and it's from MIT press. And this was. Oh, here's the dust jacket. So remember, let's think of it like this.

37:55
Dr. MSG
There's a concept in esoteric bruising known as, like, Vashrani bruising called knowledge of the know. So when you understand the root of reality, you understand that form and function. Go test. How do you think Tesla figured out three phase power? He's like, well, how do you stabilize the flow of power? Well, linearity will cause pressure and backup, so you have loss, like linearity and sort of like the transmission of energy. It's like it creates sort of a bleed. Now, where you spirally, just like rifling a bullet, it'll actually self stabilize over time. How did I get into this stuff? Here, here's the COVID Got a pretty cool, sort of early geospatial Mandel Brodian thing that's. There it is right there. Yeah, it's pretty cool. I love these sixty s, seventy s style books. So, an ecological approach to urban growth.

38:47
Dr. MSG
Well, this book really kind of followed up on a pattern language. And why does it matter? To me, it's because when you start designing at the level of basic forms and geometrically, then you can begin to understand how things will flow through systems. So say we're designing an ecological network in one of the great Lakes or an ocean. Lay out the form first, and then allow the dynamic components to show their stuff over time. Put stuff in place and see how it moves together. And it's like playing sports. It's like working at a restaurant. It's like working on a systems design problem. Get it there first. And that's why this book is so important to me right now. There's a bunch of other ones, too, like I said. But this is the one that's currently the one that has really changed my mind. Awesome.

39:31
Ravi Kurani
Yeah, we'll definitely throw that onto your show notes. I think our readers and our listeners actually love picking up the books that everybody that we interview has. And there's always an interesting answer that we get. Well, that's all we have time today for. Thanks again for coming on the pod, Michael.

39:49
Dr. MSG
Yeah, sure thing. I love talking about what's possible and how to get there, because you got to be more than an idea guy. You got to be able to go from the idea to the reality and do all parts of the process. And getting back to the idea of decentralization, with centralization, there's over specialization. So despecializing, becoming expert generalist is the know, broad and deep. Well, thanks for having me, Ravi. I really appreciate it.

40:19
Ravi Kurani
Yeah, I think we'll need to do another follow up because there's so many other directions we can go on.

40:23
Dr. MSG
But where do you want to, where do you want to go?

40:28
Ravi Kurani
Awesome. And so for all of you out there listening, you can find us wherever you listen to your podcast, be that on Spotify, Apple, or Google, and you can follow us at Liquidassids CC. Again, my name is Ravi Crony, and thanks again for coming on the show, Michael.

40:42
Dr. MSG
Yeah. And this is Dr. Michael Stanley signing off, saying thank you once again, Ravi. And let's follow up, let's say, know for the holidays. Be good.

40:52
Ravi Kurani
Perfect.

40:52
Dr. MSG
All right, cool. Take care. Bye.