Why The World Feels Weird

Explainer: I was asked to speak at the graduation ceremony for Duke University Nicholas School of the Environment 's Class of 2025. Below is the script for the speech. The video can be found here. They differ slightly due to the fact that I've never been great at staying on track. Regardless, the point of the talk was simple: to reassure students entering the workforce that they are making the right choice by choosing careers focused on environmental and economic issues, to encourage them to know their minds and use their own particular views of the world to guide their careers, and to share how doing so led me to my own understanding of why the world feels so weird, and what I could do to help make it a little less strange. Posting it here because if this helps one person to find the confidence they need to build a career helping to fix the relationship between people and the planet then I'll consider it a success.

I wanted to start off my remarks today by saying that I was asked to come here and provide some comments that would direct, challenge, and motivate you all as you head off to the next phase of your careers. Careers that are focused on solving some of the hardest challenges in the history of our species. Careers that, if successful, will somehow, someway, provide the answers to society as it figures out, for the first time, how to decouple economic growth from environmental degradation.

But this morning as I was thinking about what I wanted to say today I started to doubt the assignment… Because I realized you all went to Duke. And you all studied at the Nicholas School. You all know the science, you all know the economics. You all know what is on the line. And you all know what needs to be done.

I don’t think I need to try to direct you. I trust that you are focusing on the right things already.

And I don’t think I need to challenge you. I’m sure you put enough pressure on yourselves as it is.

And I don’t think I need to motivate you. I’m confident that you’ve already been taught that action is the best antidote to anxiety.

Instead, I wanted to do something else.

I wanted to come here to reassure you.

To reassure you that it is ok that you might not have all the answers. Nobody does. That it is ok that you might not have it all figured out. Nobody has. That it is ok that you might not be able to solve all the world’s problems by yourself. Nobody can. And that it is ok to struggle with finding balance between pondering the peril of failure and the promise of success. Everybody struggles.

And I feel at least a tiny bit qualified to give you that reassurance because, like you, I too graduated from the Nicholas School. I too came here to chase my dreams. I too sat in that chair, and wondered how it was all going to work out.

But unlike you, I actually have a few years separating me from my graduation, and with that hindsight, I can confidently say that you made the right choice.

You made the right choice in coming to Duke, you made the right choice in studying at the Nicholas School, and you are making the right choice in pursuing careers focused on addressing the major environmental and economic issues of today.

And the world needs you to do what you do – now more than ever, whether it is ready to admit it or not. Because you are entering the workforce at an absolutely historic time. For the past two hundred years or more society really has basically operated by borrowing from our environmental future to pay for our economic present, that loan really is now coming due, and fair or not, it really is up to you, me, us to figure out how to pay it back.

We really are the ones that have to somehow figure out how to stabilize our climate systems, sustainably feed somewhere between 8 and 10 billion people, ensure resilient water supplies, and stem an ongoing and catastrophic loss of biodiversity.

Trust me. I’m lazy. I’ve waited. I know. There is nobody else coming to do it for us. This is up to us.

And so each of us has to figure out, in our own way, how we are going to contribute. Are we going to focus on the science, the philanthropy, the business, or the policy and regulatory side of things? Are we going to focus on building things from scratch, or transforming existing institutions and products? Are we fascinated with molecules, or mitochondria, or species or space or food or fuel or fibers? Are we engineers, or ecologists, or something in between?

Now the good news is that at the societal level it really doesn’t matter what you choose. Because at the end of the day we need all the people doing all the things. There is no single silver bullet to fixing the relationship between people and the planet they call home. It just matters that you do something, and that the something you do is what you are best at, and what you are passionate about.

The bad news though, is that you will be constantly surrounded by people who disagree with what I just said. Some of them will be opposed to the very premise of your work – they don’t believe there is a problem, or they don’t believe that people are the cause of it. Those people I don’t worry about much – you are too well trained to be distracted or dismayed by their criticism. But there is another category of people that I worry about more. Your people. The people who are working to solve the same problems as you. The people on your side. But who believe this is a zero sum game. Who believe that if you aren’t working on what they are working on that you are part of the problem and not the solution.

And you need a way to handle that. You need, in the words of my PhD advisor Stuart Pimm, to ‘know your mind’. Because if you don’t you will spend all of your time battling your own doubt, and clawing your way through your own confusion, and you will struggle to ever make progress on anything of importance.

And I remember the first time Stuart told me I needed to know my mind. I was losing an argument, badly, about my interpretation of an analysis I had just finished. And in truth, I didn’t know what to make of the results, so I ended up asking a bunch of other people what they thought, and got a range of opinions. When I discussed them with Stuart he had a different interpretation again, which I pushed back on. And when I did that Stuart asked me what I thought the results meant, and I couldn’t form a coherent response because my thinking was really just a mix of other people’s thoughts, and my own uncertainty. And I’ll never forget what Stuart said that day. He said “well, at least I know what I think”. And that was when he told me I needed to go, take some time, and know my mind.

And I think that is really all that any of us can ever ask of anyone, and so it is all I wish for you, as you embark on the next phase of your careers.

Now, of course, some of you already do know your minds. And some of you don’t. But at the very least I thought it might interesting to understand how I thought about things when I sat where you do today. About how I learned to know my mind, and how the worldview I created guided the decisions I made, for better or worse, in my career as an environmental scientist, corporate operator, and technology investor. Because just like I did when I sat where you are today, you have a lot of decisions ahead. And I've found it helps to have a process.

So lets start with one important decision – the decision to come to Duke, and the Nicholas School.

The seeds of that decision were planted when I was a kid, growing up in northern Wisconsin where I spent most of my time avoiding homework and wandering around in the woods, filled with a sense of wonder about how the natural world worked, and as I got older, an increasing amount of worry about what impacts people were having on it. The decision was strengthened during my time at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where I studied wildlife ecology, and learned the fundamentals of conservation biology. And it was solidified during my time in Malawi as a Peace Corps volunteer. Because the more I saw, and the more I learned, the more weird I felt like the world was.

And so I came to Duke to figure out why. And to get a job.

And when I left I had, against my own expectations, achieved both of those things, although neither were anything like what I thought they would be when I started.

Because when I came to Duke I simply assumed that the world worked in rational ways, and I just needed to learn what they were. I assumed that the things that I thought were weird about the world were instead logical, and that I was the crazy one. And if I just went to school some more, and read some more books, it would all start to make sense.

Well, spoiler alert. Things did start to make sense, but at least for me the answers sure weren't satisfying. Because the more I learned the more convinced I became that I wasn't crazy. For the first time I started to think that I might be the normal one, and it was the rest of the world that had gone mad.

I had started studying what economists call the 'four factors of production' - land, labor, capital, and entrepreneurship, and how they form the foundations of economic systems.

And I learned that for most of modern history economies have developed by operating as if the supply of land and labor were infinite. Birth rates were rising, populations were growing, natural resources were plentiful, and our climate was stable.

And all that land, and all that labor, allowed us to do incredible things. We invented new forms of capital that increased worker productivity which we put to work to explore, discover, extract, consume, and discard ever more natural resources. The wheels turned faster, and the graph kept going up, and to the right. Life was good.

And this all happened so incredibly quickly, and it all happened so incredibly recently – in the lifetimes of your great grandparents, your grandparents, your parents, and you.

But I also learned that two of those four factors are now starting to crack. For the first time, land and labor are in decline. Natural resources are no longer plentiful, our climates are no longer stable, and birth rates are starting to fall. We can no longer brute force our way to growth. The past no longer predicts the future.

And so, the world feels weird, and people are starting to panic. The evidence is all around us. Desperation, extremism, geopolitical unrest. Us versus others. Mine versus yours. For society this is scary, for those of us who hold higher ideals it really really sucks, but for anyone who has studied these things it is far from surprising.

But what I realized that as strange as it might sound, the more I clarified the challenge the calmer I became, because I realized I could use these four factors of production to structure my decision making. In other words, I learned to know my mind.

Because what I decided is that for growth to continue in a world of declining land and labor, capital and entrepreneurship were going to have to pick up the slack.

And I realized that it just might be possible. Because the most powerful capital of today’s economy is composed of the computational hardware and software that sucks electrons in, flips some bits in the middle, and spits photons out into cables that can transmit information at the speed of light across the world. And in that magical economic box incredible value is created. And this is all quite new. The internet didn’t exist when I was born, search as we know it didn’t really exist when I was in high school, and cloud computing didn’t exist either when I was here at Duke.

And critically, I realized this had the potential to be the most resource-lite form of economic growth we had ever produced. Because while our traditional forms of electricity generation were inefficient, dirty, and catastrophic for the climate, we were rapidly developing something previously unheard of. New energy technologies were not only superior in price and performance, but were also infinitely renewable, and didn't destroy our climate.

And I realized that if we could put this all together, and decarbonize our electricity grids while racing to electrify, digitize, and potentially virtualize as much of our physical economy as possible, we might just have a chance to create the net zero carbon economy that the world’s scientists and governments all agree that we have to do, while simultaneously optimizing the use of the world’s natural resources, and providing the efficiency tools a shrinking labor force will need in order to continue delivering economic growth.

But I also understood that while it was possible, it wasn’t exactly inevitable. It wasn’t even necessarily probable. It needed people to push.

And so ever since I have used this framework as my own personal career counselor. Because it told me I would need to understand natural systems, and how they worked, technology and how to build and deploy it, and finance and how to use it to build economic value and vibrant markets.

This framework was why I didn't complain that much when Stuart shot down my dream dissertation of doing fieldwork, saying that it was time that I sat my butt down in a chair and learned the fundamentals of modern ecology - by which he meant computer science, software engineering, and computational statistics.

It was what gave me the courage to abandon my career ambition for a tenure-track faculty position when I got an unexpected job offer from Microsoft, to join their blue sky research department as a 'Computational Ecologist'. I knew I needed to understand tech from inside the beast.

It was why I decided to leave my dream job in Microsoft Research for a corporate job as Microsoft's first Chief Environmental Scientist, creating and building a new customer facing program called AI for Earth. I knew we had to get these solutions out of the lab and into industry.

It was why I left that dream job to become Microsoft's first Chief Environmental Officer and help the company develop its goals to become a carbon negative, water positive, zero waste company, and build out the programs that would see it become one of the world’s largest climate investors, renewable energy and carbon removal buyers, and more. Because I knew it wasn't just about what tech was used for, but how it was sourced, operated, and managed at end of life. And I knew the world needed someone to prove that it was all possible to do at a large scale in a large company.

And it was what convinced me to leave Microsoft for my current role in private equity as a software investor and operator, trying to deliver the first net zero portfolio in the industry while also investing in the sustainability software solutions the world needs. I knew we had to prove that we could profitably normalize net zero, and scale it across a whole host of companies, to convince the world it was repeatable.

Now, I don’t tell you all this because I think you are really all that interested in my career. I’m guessing, and hoping, that you are all way more interested in yours than mine. And I don’t tell you this because I think my worldview is necessarily right. In fact, I’m sure many of you are wondering how I could have managed to graduate from Duke and still be so wrong about so much. And that is ok. If I were in a place with as many smart people as I am today and we all thought the exact same thing I would be worried. Because all of us, in our own way, need to be confident in our own ideas, but accepting of the ideas of others, if for no other reason that, on the off chance we are wrong, we are going to need someone else to have been right.

Instead the reason I tell you all this is because I am confident that without a deep sense of curiosity about the world I never would have taken even the first step on my career path, and without a firm worldview, right or wrong, I never would have had the courage to make the decisions I did. Because those decisions were terrifying to make. At each step I worried I was making the wrong choice; people told me I was letting them down, I didn’t know what I was doing, I was unqualified for the role, and I would fail. But I trusted the process. And for better or worse, I still do.

And so, as you move on from Duke, all I ask is that you develop your own theory of change that can guide you through your own tough decisions, one that will keep you calm, cool, and collected in the face of increasing craziness. If you have one today, fantastic. If you don’t, I encourage you to spend some time writing one down.

And then, when you feel confident that you know your own mind, I encourage work hard to be around others that do so as well. Because the best advice I ever got came from my mom, who once said that that "interesting people are interested".

And so my parting wish for you is that you remain interested, in the world and in others, so that others may find your ideas interesting, and together, you, they, we can work on making the world a little less weird.