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TMIQ Today: Beyond Our Lifetime · The Most Important Question

• 0:00
  [on-hold music] Hey. Chances are you're working on something right now that you will not live to see the finish of,
• 0:12
  because each of our time on this rock really doesn't measure up to the size of some of our projects, personal or otherwise. Maybe it's just your job. Maybe it's your kid. Maybe it's debt.
• 0:24
  Maybe it's rewilding somewhere special or a mentorship or, you know, vaccinating kids against malaria, whatever. A lot of days, these long projects can feel like losing. Sometimes we call that the long defeat.
• 0:38
  Uh, sometimes, though, we snatch victory from the jaws of defeat for a little while, at least. Sometimes we're even alive to see it.
• 0:46
  But in his book, Four Thousand Weeks, Oliver Burkeman said, "We're all in the position of medieval stonemasons, adding a few more bricks to a cathedral whose completion we know we will never see."
• 0:57
  The cathedral's still worth building all the same. I remember living in Barcelona and hearing that La Sagrada Família would never be done.
• 1:06
  Well, in the early 1950s, a guy at Caltech named Clair Patterson was measuring lead in rocks. He was trying to figure out how old the Earth actually was. He figured it out. That's great. Four point six billion years.
• 1:19
  Crazy. But like any great scientific process, something else came up during Patterson's reshar-- that he, research that he just, this dude could not shake, right?
• 1:29
  He couldn't get a clean sample of anything he touched, not a rock, not seawater, not the air, not his own hands. It was all full of lead.
• 1:38
  That's because a chemist named Thomas Midgley helped put lead in gasoline back in the 1920s. Fun fact, that's the same guy who later invented Freon. One guy, lead in gasoline and Freon. We'll come back to him.
• 1:53
  Anyways, Patterson had to figure this out, so he built himself a room with no dust in it just to measure properly. And in 1965, he wrote down what he had found.
• 2:03
  He said the average American, and these are his words, was "being subjected to severe chronic lead insult." Patterson spent the next thirty years fighting the oil and chemistry industries over all this.
• 2:16
  He didn't do it alone, obviously, and apparently he was not an easy dude to work with. But it worked. In 1973, America was putting about two hundred thousand tons of lead a year into gasoline.
• 2:29
  By 1995, it was under two thousand. Here's the thing. Clair Patterson died at home in California on December fifth, 1995.
• 2:39
  Twenty-seven days later, January first, 1996, the Clean Air Act banned the last leaded gas you could buy for a car in this country. Patterson didn't see it.
• 2:50
  Dude had no idea he was twenty-seven days out from lights out, and neither do you or me or I, whatever. The point is, we got rid of the lead in gasoline, but my kids are going back to school tomorrow.
• 3:05
  The lead in our pipes, the school water fountains, it's all still there, and that's 'cause not enough of us have committed to doing work that's gonna go beyond us yet. It's a different job,
• 3:18
  and someone else is gonna finish it after us, but we have to kick. So tonight, you can start by looking up what's actually in your water, right? It's free, takes two minutes. And then
• 3:28
  maybe go back to the thing you won't probably see the end of. And if you haven't figured that out yet for yourself, what it is, head on over to whatcanido.earth and go ahead and choose your battle. [on-hold music]