He’s talking about how the standard unit of alcohol definition bears no resemblance to anything people actually interact with in the real world. For example, one unit of alcohol is ~200mL of a typical beer. When was the last time you saw beer sold in 200mL containers?

He is saying that if you want to communicate such ideas to people you need to speak to them at their level, not something geared towards scientists. If you ask random people on the street how much beer one drink is, they will likely tell you it is one pint (473mL), when in reality that is more than two drinks.

And when one finds out that, they are not going to reel in horror, they are going to laugh at how out of touch someone was to communicate that idea so poorly.

Also the social network of people even just including the closest friends and family usually even in dense cities spreads out at least a few km.

Who do you think is going to maintain friendships across a few kilometres? Maybe the hardcore walkers, but the average person is just going to find new friends, just like they do now when distances become too great.

their entire supply chain would be much less (thermally/CO2/resource) efficient if we were to split theses factories to enable local production.

That’s a feature. Have you seen how much Canadians bitch and moan about wealth inequality? Splitting up central operations into small, local operations is how you beat wealth inequality.

But I get it. Change is scary.

Approximately nobody is going to live close enough to the workplace of everyone in the household who works.

Then who is going to be left to support the walkable economy? You need approximately every working person who lives within that community to be active in the walkable economy, else you will quickly find that services are no longer within walking distance.

Are you imagining that you’ll hop on the train to go work on the other side of town, while someone living on that side of town hops on the train to work in your neighbourhood? That is not a good reason for transit at all. That’s just silly.

pushing for better transit

Eh, I’m still not sold on transit (for people). If you live in a well designed city, everything should be right there in front of you, no more than steps away. The need to move further than your feet (or wheelchair, if that’s your thing) can reasonably allow is a straight up urban planning failure.

I can buy into the idea that, given our existing urban planning failures, it is better than nothing. As a bandaid, sure. But in the context of looking to build the world in which we want to live, why settle for bandaids? Why not go straight to building cities properly, thereby having no need to move people around with external propulsion at all?

Those in the rural parts are a harder problem, but it seems you think the car is still their best option. So, when does transit become useful?

Is it the freight transit infrastructure you see as needing improvement? It is true that, even with the best laid plans, we are not in a place to give that up yet. As interesting as vertical farms are, the technology just isn’t there yet to supplant food grown in rural areas, never mind things like lumber and other commodities that aren’t usually found in cities.

But when it comes to people, concentrating them close together is kind of a city’s whole deal. Why then pretend it is a rural area that requires travel over long distances?