 This is probably the biggest presentation that I've ever done, not in terms of number of audience, but the amount of content. So I have trepidation about the world and our future, and I also have a little bit of trepidation about sharing this with some of you. Some of you need to hear this for your work, and for those I'm being compassionate by sharing this metasynthesis, but maybe for some others I'm not being kind by sharing this, but I feel that in order to prepare and engage with the future, we have to understand it. Welcome, thank you. So I see some new faces that weren't at the other presentations, so I'm going to do kind of a brief summary of sorts. This will go probably an hour, an hour and 15 minutes, and then we'll have Q&A. Again, this is the summary of 20 years of my work. So we showed the film, we talked about human behavior in the brain, we talked about energy, technology, and money. On Tuesday we talked about the environment, not only climate, but biodiversity, plastics, other things. Today I'm going to connect everything and how it fits together and what it implies for various future scenarios. In the Q&A I would like to focus on understanding the problem and what various future scenarios might be and why, and we'll wait until Tuesday to talk about what to do, and I'm going to present my general ideas of the direction that we could go in our work, in our nations, in our communities, and in our own lives. So today I'm going to do a brief overview. I'm going to go through some popular myths in our society and some quick reality checks. I'm going to talk about the economic super-organism, and after that I'm going to add a few more myths which require that logic. I'm going to unpack what I refer to as the four horsemen of the 2020s. UD, when you hear them you will definitely not be laughing. And then I'm going to talk about four major possible scenarios of the future that really parched down into two, and then a summary of the main points of the first five sessions and looking ahead. So again I've talked about a human ecosystem, how energy and materials combine into technology, and we represent this with money. We do this all to get the same emotional states of our ancestors and the whole process results in pollution. Can you see over there a little bit? Is it okay? All right. So no one knows the future, especially me. So I view the world as a probability distribution. The most likely things that I can imagine about the future are in the middle of my distribution, and then there's some things that are really bad that are slightly less likely, and things that are really good that are less likely. My own distribution shifts every day based on what I learn, based on what happens in the world, based on my limbic system. So there is not one future. There are multiple, it's a probability distribution, and most people don't think that way. They think in binary this is going to happen, or that's not going to happen. But just so you know, the future is a distribution which changes all the time. The challenge with this is, as individual humans, we all have our own distributions of what the future is, and especially with artificial intelligence and disinformation in the media. Our distributions don't overlap with that of other people, which is one of the reasons I'm doing this work, so that more of our distributions overlap with others and we can have a discourse. If you're interested in this way of thinking, I made a video last year called Probability, Perception, and Reality. Okay, modern myths versus realities. I have like 50 of these, and I think I only included 20 because I was in a hurry. But just to give you a flavor of what we've gone over the last few sessions. The myth is that the experts have the answers. And the reality is that we live in a world that has islands of expertise separated by oceans of non-science. We are part of a system, and we need more generalists to understand if we fly up high enough and see how things fit together. Myth in our society, money and technology fully describe our wealth. Shown here is the classic economic duo of labor and capital. But as we learned, a barrel of oil has four and a half years of my physical work, and we have around 400 to 500 billion human worker equivalents in fossil hydrocarbons. So every single good and service requires energy. No matter how you make a cup from a coconut or plastic or ceramic or steel, you need energy inputs. Oil is worth way more than the equivalent amount of $70 worth of these other things. So the entire fundamental economic formulas underpinning our economy are wrong. They're energy blind. And so our money and our machines are both dependent on energy. And 82% of our energy comes from non-renewable fossil energy. Myth, society runs on money. Well, it actually runs on energy per unit time. And energy per unit time is called power. So power is how much energy you get when you're burning energy instantaneously in time. This is a logarithmic chart that shows the correlation between energy consumption per unit time and GDP. And you can see that it's quite track line. Here's India, United States, way up there. Myth, drilling holes is sustainable. This is Wyoming, United States. And hi. So we talked about this, that energy depletes. And we have different stories that technology can overcome this depletion. And so far in many cases it has. But the reality is, is that this technology like shale oil, et cetera, is largely acting as a bigger straw. And so we're getting more liquid out at the top and we're viewing that as a success. But we're that much closer to the slurping sound. And this is generally true globally. So we're drawing down the principle which supports our economic systems. But our narration in the media, in our business schools, in politics, this is the interest because innovation and technology will always overcome any resource scarcity. Myth, money is real. Well, money is merely a marker for real things. It's a marker for natural capital, social capital, built capital, and human capital. But since our modern culture is energy blind, money is real but it's a claim on future energy and resources. So all the rupees in your pocket or in your bank account, when you spend them, you're going to spend them on something that required energy. And by the way, before I go further, I should say that the people that invited me here have no idea what I'm going to say today. So if I say things that are outrageous or upsetting, that's entirely on me. No one has seen this presentation before. Myth, the American dream is based on hard work. The United States has used more oil, coal, and natural gas in the last 10 years, in the last 50 years, in the last 100 years, since the dawn of time, than any other country in the world. And now after listening to these lectures, you can see how powerful this oil, coal, and natural gas is. The United States was blessed with a geology. These are all places that used to be ancient shallow oceans and have lots of oil and gas. So American wealth is not a birthright, but mostly based on fossils. Mostly. Myth, technology will solve everything somehow. Well, as we talked about on Tuesday, technology in most cases is just building a higher baseline for demand for energy in the next period. Myth, the invisible hand of Adam Smith has a plan for the future. When Adam Smith wrote his famous book, Wealth of Nations 200 years ago, there was no end to resource growth in sight. And he actually foresaw that at one point his models would no longer work when we exhausted the non-renewable resources. But growth is a recent and rare phenomenon, especially of this magnitude in human history. There were long 500 year periods, 300 year periods where we had flat to declining growth. And all of our economic assumptions of how the world works were created in this last 50 year period. So economic theory taught in business schools around the world where 25% of 246 million college students go into business as a major, marketing or accounting or something. Economic theory has no plan B, and its plan A has an expiration date, which I'm going to talk about. I have no idea how that got in here. I was like, I'm juggling stuff around. That's my dog, Maisie. Yeah. Humans are mostly selfish. That is somewhat of a reality in our current culture. But the reality is that humans historically are largely egalitarian and cooperative. We intensely formed in-group bonds. For most of our existence, for 96% of our existence, we had no wealth to carry with us at all. Our wealth was in our relationships and in the natural world. It was only from the agricultural revolution onwards that we stored wealth and from that created hierarchy, et cetera. And I'm going to talk about that in a minute. Microeconomics is based on how humans really are. Well, we evolved to be wrong and we have a list of cognitive biases as long as my arm. But the reality is that humans are non-rational and we are not self-interested utility maximizers. We are extremely other regarding. Some of you sit on corners smiling at passersby and watch what that does. You can't help but smile. Our mirror neurons get triggered when someone is smiling at us. We are not what the economic textbooks say of Homo economicus. We care about other people and other people define who we are. Myth, money, GDP, and stuff are what make us happy. When you get home, go to Google and type in, why is everyone else? Why is everyone else so lucky? Why is everyone else better than me? Why is everyone else happy but me? Why is everyone else so pretty? Why is everyone else in a relationship but me? These are the most common things on Google. Why is everyone else so stupid? There are some exceptions. But we are living in one of the richest times and Google is a United States company in one of the richest countries in the world and most people are fricking miserable. So money and GDP, despite our progress or the progress of a small percentage of us, has not led to well-being for most of us or for other species, which I'll talk about. So from a biological sense, in our current culture, we seek money. Why? Basic needs, food, shelter, healthcare. To experience or stockpile novelty and comfort, which is of course linked to dopamine and neurotransmitters, for relative status comparisons. The vast majority of energy and consumption is for this last bit, relative status comparison, comparing ourselves to other humans in what the culture says is success. So 20 years ago, actually 25 years ago, I worked on Wall Street, and this is me on graduation day from the University of Chicago. And I went to make a lot of money and be with all the successful people. And then I quit and started reading books about ecology. And 15 years ago, my father, who's one of my best friends, would introduce me to his friends as his environmental wacko son, as if I was no longer successful because I wasn't pursuing money. So this is a huge driver of the message we're sending to young people of what it means to succeed. As I showed this the other day, as a person or a nation is poor, you get massive, hedonic, well-being, development benefits from more energy. But once you get to around 100 gigajoules per capita, it levels off and more is just creating this dopamine treadmill. You can see India has a long way to go to get to some of these other nations. So money, here's Guatemala, 7,000 per year, Kuwait, 10 times as much and they're equal on the happiness index. So yes, we need basic things, but above that, culture dictates our well-being, etc. So after basic needs are met, the best things in life are free. Here's me reading a book to my dog at night. This is my two best friends. This is Sammy and you can see this is my porch at Aditi Grieha. This was at Mejha's class the other day with the six-year-olds here, some of our coaches and participants in our mandala. Myth, the environment is a subset of the economy. This is what's taught in economic textbooks. The reality is the economy is a wholly dependent on the environment. Myth, humans are the only species that matter. We don't include them in our economic system, but there are other forms of conscious life that have followed similar evolutionary paths to get to this day. Humans are one of 10 million species on this planet and we don't often think about that. This is a bowhead whale and they live to be 250 years old at least. How do we know that? Because they found some that died recently and they had spear points in them from the late 1700s. They're having conversations under the ice about who knows what. They have incredibly large brains and consciousness. This is not something that we think about when we go through our economic decisions. Myth, we're headed for a Star Trek future. In my opinion, we're living a Star Trek future right now and that the reality is, and I'll get to that shortly, is we're headed for an Earth Trek future. Heaven and GDP are what we should aspire to as a country, as a species. I talked about the pulse in CO2, which keeps increasing and the impacts to our ecosystems and climate that are still ahead of us. We're all alive during this fragile and incredible time near the top of this carbon pulse. I believe that this Earth is heaven metaphorically, if not in reality, and that there's nothing more sacred than the living Earth. In my opinion, we're going to need new stories of humans and Earth going forward. To the main point of today's talk, we talked about the human ecosystem. How does all of that fit together? And we keep score of this system every quarter, every year by something called GDP, which is globally GWP, which stands for Gross World Product. Every single good in service that is in the global economy started somewhere with a small fire. So we might as well call it Gross World Burning, GWB. And we talked the other day about starlings, or actually I think it was this morning, I forget. Starlings follow three simple rules. Do what your neighbor does. Don't get too close and fly to the center. And those three simple rules create these emergent properties in the sky of these beautiful, they're called murmurations of starlings. So there's something in biology called Kleber's Law, which says that the energy use or the metabolism of an organism, whether it's a mouse or a frog or an elephant or a blue whale, is its size to the three-quarter power. And it turns out that if you aggregate all the human countries in the world, the size of our economy, the energy use is the size to the three-quarter power. This is a biological law being expressed at human levels. So I'm going to read a quote now. What took place in the early 1500s was truly exceptional. Something that never happened before and never will again. Two cultural experiments running in isolation for 15,000 years at last came face to face. Amazingly, after all that time, each could recognize the other's institutions. When Cortez landed in Mexico, he found roads, canals, cities, palaces, schools, law courts, markets, irrigation works, kings, priests, temples, artisans, astronomers, merchants, sports, theater, art, music, and books. High civilization, differing in detail but alike in essentials, had evolved independently on both sides of the earth. This is from a book called A Short History of Progress by Ronald Wright. So humans also follow simple rules in our modern system. We coordinate as individuals, as families, as small businesses, as corporations, as nation-states, as a global system to acquire surplus, profits and surplus. We pursue culturally accepted behavior and we spend the surplus. So the emergent property looks something like this. This is Tallahassee, Florida, an aerial view where there is a scaling metabolism of structures similar to Cortez founded Mexico but now at a much larger scale. So this is an aerial view of Los Angeles. And the brake lights and the headlights are not too dissimilar than the veins and the arteries in our bodies except the blood or the hemoglobin in this case is being powered by gasoline and diesel in our global system. And this has created a just-in-time six-continent, globally connected transportation system. So my academic work has likened global human culture to an energy-dissipating structure. It's blind, it's unthinking, it's powered by the financial markets and it's sloughing forward in time trying to access more power, which is energy, akin to a blind amoeba. So what happened over time is this is, by the way, I'm a big Lord of the Rings fan and if any of you have seen it, the eye of Sauron in Mordor was kind of all-seeing and powerful. So this is from one of my videos that we eventually stopped hunting gathering and we started to acquire agricultural surplus. That turned into fossil fuels and how powerful they were for our nations and our world in the last 200 years. Then we created money, digital money and paper money, which could act as a concentrator of wealth, an immediate transmutation of digits into real things. And now we're moving to artificial intelligence, which is optimizing all this stuff incredibly rapidly. It's like a turbo boost to all this other stuff. So there is no one driving the bus, not politicians, not the rich or powerful. We might think they are and they probably have a lot more responsibility for what to do in the future. But this is an emergent phenomenon. So from a climate change standpoint, we can look at all the climate change conferences the last 30 years and we can look at our energy growth. And if I was an alien that didn't know anything about this culture, I might think that the climate conferences were actually causing this energy. So there's a metabolism. So trying to mitigate climate change within our existing economic structures is like arguing with a forest fire. We just a few months ago hit all-time highs in coal production. India earlier this week announced plans to double its coal production, ignoring the climate threat. And you can't blame them because the economy is growing and you need power. You need energy. And they didn't have access to the energy that the United States and the West did in earlier times, which brings up another sensitive issue. As we have multiple overlapping objectives, climate change is a real and existential issue. Economic growth is very important and inequality or equity. We politically have this concept called net zero, which seems to be able to incorporate all these things. But the reality is, is that we can't optimize for all of these three things simultaneously. Pick two. Pick two of them. As evidenced by plans like President Biden, Richie Sunak in the UK are both very well aware of climate and yet they're pursuing new leases to drill oil in the North Sea and in Alaska, etc. Our economies need the power to continue what we have. So this artificial intelligence is is something that we're just starting to learn about. Some of our friends are working closely on this on the risks associated with this. What I'm hearing is there will be a couple 300 AIs in the world mostly owned by rich people or militaries that funnel resources and try to optimize things in a way that's not good for the rest of humanity. So I really do think that AI is going to be in service of the eye of Sauron in the same way that the super organism has acted as a larger straw on Earth's ecosystems. AI potentially is going to function as an even larger straw. So under this framing, what is not likely to happen growing the economy and mitigating climate change in the sixth mass extinction? Growing the economy by replacing fossil fuels with renewables. Renewables are growing much faster than fossil fuels right now, but globally we are growing fossil fuels at a higher amount than renewables as evidenced by recent coal. What's not going to happen is culture en masse choosing to leave fossil carbon in the ground. We know it's polluting. We know it's causing climate change. Let's leave it in the ground. I don't think we're going to do that en masse. Governments embracing limits to growth before limits to growth are well past. Under this super organism framing what is likely to happen? Growth in gross energy while the net energy declines and I'm going to talk about that a little bit later. Massive monetary creation and financial market supports by central banks and governments and this has already been happening since 2009. Wider and deeper poverty all around the world. Basic income support for more people like the maintenance idea in Oroville. A right word shift in politics. Why? Because the population is not evenly distributed and their big five temperament traits and a lot of people are not open to new experiences and when we experience stress a lot of people prefer to go back to the way things were and there will be politicians promising that even if they can't deliver because this is not a political problem we face. This is an ecological and systems problem. Reduction in global environmental regulations because we're going to need the energy and pedal to the metal until we hit a wall. Okay so based on that super organism I have a few more myths that I wanted to throw in there. Myth green growth is possible globally. Well we cannot decouple physical growth from energy and materials. We can decouple growth from carbon use but only at lower levels of throughput. So green growth is still growth not green and not sustainable shown here as the base of a wind turbine and the very complicated polysilicon plants. What's happening is someone's fault the Republicans the Democrats the people in the Middle East the tree huggers the rich the Chinese the reality is is that what's happening is biophysical and ecological and as I said before I have come to the conclusion that what's happening is no one's fault but once we're aware of it we're complicit and I think there are 1500-2000 human beings that have an incredibly large outsize responsibility to because of their capabilities to intervene on behalf of the future and that's one of the things I hope to influence in coming years because our ability to change this super organism is not equally distributed. The system is too huge what can one person do? Well anthropologist Margaret Mead famously said that individuals in small groups are the only things that ever do change the future. Myth it's too late we're doomed many benign and wonderful futures are still possible possible doesn't mean easy or guaranteed what is possible still needs help visualizing and actualizing that's going to be what I talk about on Tuesday. The US Constitution is the correct document for the future as one example humans have had many documents and social contracts all the way back from the cave of the hands the code of Haber Abbey, Syntagma Square in Greece, the Magna Carta, the US Constitution based on the reality of the time so we now live on a full planet with no historical ecological analog and the reality is we're approaching a species level conversation. Perhaps these conversations and similar ones scaled can act as the mitochondria of a new type of culture. Okay the four horsemen of the coming decade so there's a lot of people who are aware of the things that I've been discussing and they want to degrow the economy or have some new political scheme to make things more equitable or get rid of all fossil fuels by buying up the coal plants and retiring them are all kinds of things that we should do this. My work is more focused on what we're going to have to do as opposed to what we should do because I think there's a momentum and a metabolism of what's been said in motion that has got a certain inevitability to it and that's what I want to shift the conversation to now. So the first horsemen is the financial overshoot, the financial bend or break moment. If we recall from Tuesday the green is sustainable flows, the red is non-renewable at resources like copper or oil and we create money with no tether to how much non-renewable resources are left so we're creating debt much faster than we create GDP which is the income stream needed to maintain and service the debt thus stretching our tether to reality and eventually that tether will snap back like a rubber band so the highest growth rate in human history peaked 50 years ago which was exactly the time when oil growth peaked so we're still growing we still have productivity anything above zero is productivity we're making our labor and capital more productive and a large reason this because we've been adding more incredibly powerful energy every year but you can see that the productivity is increasing but at a declining level at some point when energy supplies start to decline we won't be able to have global or national productivity and the reason that we're able to do this now in addition to adding more energy is we're adding more debt we're basically consuming on a credit card let's start with China China is now just the government debt not the private municipal and and corporate debt is over 300 of GDP so just imagine yourself that you make 50 000 dollars a year or whatever number it is and if you owe the bank 150 000 and they're charging you interest on your growing amount that you owe them that would be somewhat unsustainable but our whole global system is like that and China is among the worst because they followed the western model and they're a communist country so the government has created all this credit it's it's a real danger these are the other main large central banks so from 20 years ago we've increased the amount of central bank credit central banks are basically act acting as hedge funds they will see a problem in the financial market and they'll say here's a trillion dollars and that we as a central bank we have a trillion dollar asset but they only have like 50 billion dollars of paid in capital so central banks from a monetary perspective okay they're big daddy they can handle this but from an energy and resource perspective this is the biggest bubble in the history of the world and they keep adding more and more credit to keep the system afloat so what we're doing is we're papering over our problems with more and more credit while the energetic and material basis for our currencies to plead okay i'm going to spend three or four minutes on a concrete example so that you understand this so this pretend you're an individual and that you make 100 000 or 100 000 rupees or whatever it is per year but you spend more than that you spend another 30 000 so you need to borrow money from the bank um you do this and the red line is your disposable income and it declines over time because the amount of interest you owe the bank increases over time so by the time you get to year five you're borrowing money from the bank just to consume at the level you originally started at because you have to pay a lot of interest to the bank then you're in year six and you start to have oh my gosh i'm only able to spend 98 000 because i owe the bank so much and the difference between year six and year seven is the bank says you know what gizm i'm not gonna loan you any more money and the second that that happens your income and your spending power drops precipitously this is what i think is going to happen to the global economy because we can't continue to pay back these claims um with energy resources the way that they are now um it might take 10 years from now i don't know um but this has happened many times in human history in the past it happens to argentina and places like that all the time it's just not happened at a global level so this is what i call the the financial bender break the second horseman is one that i'm reluctant to discuss because few of us have agency in this but i think in the 1970s it was discussed all the time and in the 1960s and now we just kind of sweep it under the rug but we have a serious geopolitical problem in the world now we've gone from a unipolar world of the united states and you could argue that uk and maybe australian european countries to now a multipolar world where russia china india brazil there are other countries that have a lot of economic and military power there are 13 000 nuclear warheads in the world um just a few of those would unleash catastrophic damage 50 or 100 of them would block out the sun for five to seven years and cause mass death on the planet even if you weren't in the country where the nuclear bomb went off this morning med medvedev who's the deputy director of russia's military warned the united states that if ukraine launches western missiles into russia they will respond with nuclear so i don't believe that anyone is saying yeah let's have a nuclear war they're not planning for that because they know what i just said but the way that these things happen in the world is that someone does this and then it escalates and all of a sudden it's out of control so we're living in a world now where this is not a negligible risk and what's going on with all the aircraft carriers and everything and earlier the between my last talk and now the us and the uk bombed yemen and iran supports the ansara rebels in in yemen and so now this is really about the us and uk versus iran and then israel's involves and it's a freaking mess it is not the way it used to be 30 or 40 years ago because now these things that i'm talking about today are not secrets so governments of the world are aware of these things i'll skip that another aspect of this is the complexity of our world way way more complex than it's ever been in the past the average supermarket has 120 000 skus which is the scanning number for a certain product you know different shampoo bottles or spark plugs or light bulbs or whatever it is and we have a six continent just in time supply chain 80 of the active pharmaceutical ingredients for the ingredients for the united states come from india or china the united states has 50 of the world's medical prescriptions and four percent of the world's population is that because we're sicker or because we're babies or because of the economic system the doctors are writing more prescriptions or some combination but we have used this comparative advantage that you learn in economic theory that if some country is good at getting bananas or butter they can specialize and everyone this country does just butter and this country does just bananas and the whole world is better off and that's true but what we what we've neglected is that specialization has caused brittle non resilient manufacturing in a lot of areas and we depend on cheap oil and cheap credit to import these things from around the world assuming that this will continue to happen indefinitely so complexity is a huge risk the fourth risk is the social contract and i know nothing about india but the united states is slowly but inexorably headed towards a a civil war i can't describe it any different we don't read the same news uh the left and the right aren't having the same discussions we've got two senile sociopaths running for the highest office in our country later this year it's just an unbelievable situation i'll say this even though i'm on camera if the us were to collapse it would take most of the rest of the world down with it because of how the military and because of how intricate it is with the supply chains and and the complexity now five-year warning and that could be totally changed but everything is interconnected right now and i just i don't see how this conversation is going to change i'm hopeful that someone will come out of the the blue and and run for president that's balanced and can unite the nation but it right now it's not happening and that's because of the vested power of the two political power parties and because of uh information disinformation so the reason i bring all this up which is very uncomfortable and depressing to talk about is when we plan about the future we have to keep in mind that these four things are our risks that we live with right now and they're all interrelated to each other so any destabilizing event in the world like a political crisis some political party comes and implements degrowth or does a debt jubilee or any block swans will likely trigger some variation of these risks so this is you know again i this is the analysis that i've come to and even my 19-year-old students in my class i feel bad about sharing this and yet i treat them as peers and i want to just treat them as human beings on the planet and share what i see how could i be wrong i could be wrong many ways we could have a new technology that boosts productivity and kicks these problems down the road some more we could have a change in consciousness which would be wonderful i don't know how to do that other than put psilocybin in the water supply all over the world but there there could be ways that we boost productivity a while longer but boosting productivity is still going to be a problem for global ecosystem speaking of which there is a fifth horseman that is disconnected from those four but is the ecological damage that is ongoing and the climate in the oceans which are going to be getting worse in our lifetimes just from what's happened before and those other four things are triggered this may improve or not but this is ongoing as we're going to see in the next six months with the the spike of El Nino and the lack of aerosols for temperature and climate probably okay so what are the scenarios of the future there's really four scenarios but i'm going to parse it into two one is green growth which is that we invent technologies that are able to pay back the debt of the past and maybe even green the earth and grow the economy and create more wealth equality etc i see nothing on the horizon that fits those things we can have growth but it's going to be brown growth um which i refer to as the mordor economy so let me explain what the mordor economy is this is a chart of economic growth in the world the last 200 years there was a famous guy named thomas malthus who lived 200 years ago and he infamously predicted that humans were going to run out of resources because our exponential demand for population and growth and and consumption would outstrip the linear demand of crop production malthus was wrong because he didn't know about mining underground coal oil and natural gas which gave a big boost to our global system in 1969 my friend paul urlick wrote a book called the population bomb saying many of the same things he was wrong because he didn't know about outsourcing in the world to the areas of least cost production nor did he know about debt because from 1969 to today we've grown our debt more than we've grown our gdp in every single year so those things allowed a can to be kicked into yeah let's do let's hold the questions till the end because i'm well sure it does but on average that hasn't that's been dwarfed by outshoring near shoring is certainly happening but as a percentage of our total trade the outshoring is is way dominant near shoring is what we're going to have to do that's one of the responses in 2009 we had the great financial crisis the central banks of the world took over the monetary creation role from the commercial banks and they've been doing fingers in the dyke artificial temporary guarantees in the financial system since then 2020 was covid the central banks had to come back in and do stimulus and guarantees and send out 1500 dollar checks to every american i don't know what happened in india but there were emergency measures to keep things going what are the future cans to kick maybe there's some new technology maybe blockchain or artificial intelligence will boost our productivity maybe we'll have a change in consciousness and the next can to kick is one to open not to kick but what this means is that if we continue to grow the rule of doubling is you take 70 divided by the growth rate all governments in the world expect us to grow at three percent a year going forward which means in the next by the year 2050 we will double everything the energy materials in the world by the year 2080 we will quadruple the energy materials in the world so what will happen is and this is what i wrote my phd in so this is something that i actually have thought about and and looked at a lot this is a graph showing the percentage of the economy in this case england that was dedicated to the energy sector so back here in the year 1300 like 60 or 70 percent of the economy was getting energy and only 30 percent was used by the citizens and so we found fossil fuels and then there was this massive drop until the low was 1999 where we only use five percent of our energy to find and deliver and refine and and get energy to everyone else which meant 95 percent of humans energy could be colleges and football stadiums and airports and shopping centers and all that other stuff now this is around 10 to 12 percent of our energy is going to the energy sector and the reason i refer to it as a mordor economy is i believe more and more of our energy will be directed towards the energy and mining sector which will leave less and less for everything else so when energy was five percent of our economy that's energy extract these three things then we have food basic industry infrastructure military hospitals education consumer goods jobs art novelty free time but in the mordor economy these things are going to take a lot more of our energy so by the time we get to hear all these other things are going to get this amount of energy they're going to get priced out of how things used to be and we're going to barring anything else this will be rationed to society by price which means a lot of those things will not be affordable unless there's some political change so the mordor economy is more of our economy is directed towards energy mining and environmental mitigation the third scenario is the name of my podcast and the name of my work i refer to is at a great simplification humans solve problems by creating technology and innovation and that innovation results in more complexity and that complexity requires a larger energy spigot and over time we have complexified by growing the amount of energy and once energy starts to stabilize and go down the first thing that will happen is we have to deal with the financial uh uh overhang but we're going to have a simplification and the easiest way to think about it is um i think one of the next three recessions will be a depression we had a recession in 2020 we had a recession in 2009 those were able to be uh stopped by emergency responses from central banks and governments one of the next ones won't be and it'll be a much deeper depression sort of thing which is why uh orville in many ways is so much more resilient than other places because you don't need a lot of stuff to live your lives and be happy because a lot of the ways you get your neurotransmitters are from community and food and singing and and things like that whereas the average city in america is not like that so when we remove low productivity credit uh with a shift towards lower productivity energy and resources meaning more costly shale oil that costs a hundred or two hundred dollars a barrel and with a return to full full cost solar panels for instance that will no longer be able to maintain our financial claims on reality and there will be a decline the fourth category is mad max which is that we don't manage to stabilize these things and we lose the complexity of our current system i actually think it's these two are the ultimate choices that over time everything parses in into these and that's what the work i'm doing okay uh a brief summary main points cheap abundant fossil fuel energy underpins our societies and our expectations but this is a stock that our culture has treated as a flow growth is probably soon over and the first major challenge is responding to a financial recalibration again this presentation is largely created for western audiences i think the situation rhymes but is quite different in india i just don't know enough about india to um really talk about it uh beyond the top level rather than choose austerity which is tightening our belts and saying we need to consume less governments and central banks will print and monetize debt eventually leading to currency debasement so the united states will try to inflate our debt away uh which means that poorer people that have very little money in the bank and that's their savings are going to get hurt again because that money if they have ten thousand dollars saved up in the bank will be worth less as more dollars and things are printed we do not face a resource shortage but rather a long edge of expectations again speaking to uh the western world we use a hundred times more energy than our bodies need so if we go down to 80 times in a great depression or something we still are one of the richest material generations in history it's just we've built a society around expectations that are not sustainable and don't make us healthy and we're just kind of going in a really unhealthy direction renewable energy nuclear technology these are the things we're going to need they're the right answers to the wrong question the question that we're addressing is how can we continue to grow the the economy by using these things the right question to ask is how can we use our declining fossil fuels as seed corn in tandem with more sustainable technology towards a lower throughput human uh collaborative existence but no one is asking that question because perhaps it's too threatening to to ask it there is a biophysical phase shift occurring in the global economy politics and alliances india is teaming up with russia brazil china china is doing the belton road initiative there's military presence in the middle east this is all this great game of risk that is happening in real time because of these underlying issues climate change and i talked a lot about that on tuesday climate change is not the problem but a symptom of a larger human overshoot and a systems problem that i've been talking about these last lectures what i'm saying today this complex predicament cannot yet be voiced allowed in politics and media because there are no easy answers to this there actually are no solutions to this there are only responses and that's what i'm going to talk about on on tuesday our current resource tech situation can power a great culture and civilization just not this one here's one of my favorite quotes what's drives some of my work when a system is far from equilibrium small islands of coherence can shift the entire system so i'm i'm going to close there for today on tuesday i'm going to have vertical and horizontal maps for what do we do going forward and it is somewhat hopeful but it's also realistic so if we think about the cultural conversations that this is the past 99 of businesses and philanthropists and people are planning for this line to continue there are virtually no one planning on what is the bender break moment and how do we stabilize once these events start to happen or what are the long term looking two or three steps ahead what are the things that our communities need to be doing and i'm going to talk about those things uh on tuesday that's all i had thank you for bearing through this intense questions comments disagreements um there was a chart that says like when we're used 15 percent of our energy to seek energy we have a lot less space to spend energy on things that yes even if the economy is larger that yes what is that timeline i don't know well it's happening right now i mean you see it happening all around right now we're at like 12 and i think in our lifetime we'll go to 15 or 18 percent or something like that um it's happening right now which is why some of these events are happening in the world that were norway just approved to mine the seabed the the floor of the sea to get copper nodules which we need for renewable energy and electric cars and such it's called the abyssal ocean and we're doing those sorts of things so we are expanding the biophysical footprint where we used to not have to worry about that for instance copper used to be 70 percent copper nodules and now it's like in the single digits same with iron ore it's all the the grave is going down so we need more energy and more land etc but as far as the timeline the timeline that is relevant to all these things is the four horsemen it might last another decade um i don't think so i think two to seven years sort of thing um but i but i don't know um but it's the military and it's the finance and then the resulting complexity namu um so the moral economy is based on the idea that we will still try to have the same level of conquered and lifestyle right there are economies yeah so if we instead like i guess then the great simplification is if we don't if we decide as a community not to spend all the energy and then go back to like i don't shitting in buckets and making your own food and well it's also possible that the amount of energy that we need is actually just for food and basic necessity you're conflating two things and i understand your question you said community i'm talking about the world so communities and i'll talk about this tuesday communities could choose to simplify first and beat the rush and i would argue that european nations are going to have to do this ahead of other places because of what's happening with natural gas um where they'll have to make do in different ways the difference between india and germany of course is germany uses eight times more energy so it's it's a it's a different situation as individuals and as communities we can choose to act ahead of this the global situation can't we can't shrink there's a metabolism and if we did if we had the political will that the whole world said you know what we're destroying the oceans and the climate and this is unsustainable and let's put a carbon tax on and let's change our values to well-being instead of economic growth if that happened we would still have the four horsemen because that would cause the monetary musical chairs thing to stop so we'd still have no matter what sustainable path we might like or plan for we're going to have to go through those four horsemen in my opinion the other point about it one nation decides to take down its consumption then the effect of it on the military and therefore the unlikely of that and well here's the other thing what if germany or france or someone decided oh we agree with everything that nate said we're gonna we're gonna get started ahead of time they would be out competed by everyone else who would still have access to the global supply chains etc which is why which is why that's not happening it's all or nothing sort of dynamic because if there's at least one country that's still trying to do that they'll just try to take over the entire rest of the world this is why geopolitics and power in the eye of sauron is a really crappy dynamic but i think it's it's real and my country is the most guilty by far uh ud will come back to you in a second because there's some other hands yes yijin and then you what's luxembourg doing uh drinking beer and uh why were they so high up on that chart which chart in towards the beginning oh i mean it's a really tiny population all of the scandinavian countries have a very high well-being because they have a scandinavian socialism they have the basic needs covered for most people and a lot of them have huge land masses with very small populations norway has a trillion dollar uh national piggy bank because of the oil revenues from the north sea i mean every every country has its own different um you know bells and whistles the luxembourg is like not much bigger than orville you know i mean it's a pretty small place yeah yes two people what's your view of robert kennedy running for president you only mentioned the two sociopaths i think i think he's a breath of fresh air in in that he really cares about um things and he's telling the truth on a lot of things i disagree with him on a couple things but i feel that he's a real person and some of our friends have spoken with him i don't think he has a chance of winning because the democrat well he's already chosen to be independent but the power structure in the political situation he just won't allow that i have actually been convinced though that his running originally i thought would favor trump and now i think it favors biden because he will take voters away from trump but i wish there was a third party person that would run okay so you're not giving any weight to it yet i mean according to him he's leading in young people but i don't know how many percentage people are maybe older people like me yeah i know jem yeah okay yeah about being together while the breaking is happening yeah i i agree with that he heavily referenced me in that book um if you read it i haven't read it very far yet okay yes when the finance is bend or break what happens to money in the bank a reasonable question uh so the government of cyprus a few years ago um had financial problems and cyprus was known for being a bug out place for russian tycoons to park their money outside of russia and their response was bail ins that anyone that had over 10 million dollars the banks took 90 of it anyone that had one million they took 60 between a hundred thousand and a million they took 30 and under a hundred thousand they took 10 in order to make the banking system solvent that's one path another path is the banks would all fail and have to be nationalized by the government i think that's more likely it's already starting to happen in the united states that a lot of people don't trust having their money so they're moving their money out of the small banks to move it into the the major four money center banks wells fargo and bank of america and jp morgan uh which are all really tightly linked to the u.s government and guaranteed but what we're what we face in 2009 was a too big to fail situation what we face in the next decade is a too big to save situation for instance if marine lapin were to get elected in france she wants to get out of the euro if the euro stopped there would be an immediate bender break collapse because the central banks of the world don't have enough money to bail out france um as one example and that's horribly complex but the the musical chairs example is is reasonably apt especially since all of us believe that money is real um and this is why i don't talk about this publicly much because not i mean who the heck am i but we trust trust is perhaps the thing that's most important of all of this stuff we trust that these rupees or dollars i can take them anywhere in the world and exchange them for things and if that trust breaks then we have real problems so i'm i'm not predicting it i'm just saying that that's a reasonable chance that something like that will happen like it happened in other countries now of course there are people that believe in something called modern monetary theory which is a more correct way of describing the plumbing of our financial system and it's true that the united states and in india's case with rupees the united states could technically never go broke because whatever we owe the government and the treasury can just print that is true now not every country can say that france can no longer say that because they have the euro which is part of the european union the problem is two three problems one is that ignores the energy and resources right so you can print more money but you cannot print more oil you can only extract it faster so that's one problem second problem is what is the carbon footprint of modern monetary theory we're creating money from nothing from the u.s government and it's being spent on real coal oil gas and copper and ocean acidification but the third and possibly most relevant one is other countries start to lose faith in the viability of your treasury notes and and things so that i think that the warning signs of all this will happen in the fixed income markets as interest rates start to go up and people no longer believe in the either inflation or the ability to pay and maybe we're a long ways away from that and maybe not i don't know i hope that answer your question yeah sandra yeah so again i don't want to focus on that because i don't think crypto is an answer to the issues that i'm facing but i do think bitcoin here's my view on bitcoin two views yes it takes a lot of energy to create the bitcoin but it's almost better than the creation of dollars anyways because when dollars are created they're printed on linen and that requires very little energy but the dollars come into existence from nothing and they're immediately spendable on oil coal and gas so those people saying well bitcoin sucks because it uses energy don't understand how much money how much energy our real money uses that's point number one point number two is i do think bitcoin and commodities are likely to go significantly higher as people in the world recognize that governments are going to continue to print money in response to the crisis that i've laid out so i think bitcoin has a 50 chance of going to 500 000 and a 50 chance of going to zero but it's 43 000 now so but i'm focused on figuring out how humanity and the biosphere make it through the coming century and so bitcoin is not that interesting to me from that perspective but eventually we will need some currency after the great simplification we will need it global or national or local currencies and the problem with our currencies now is they've not had a tether to anything physical and gold is physical yes but gold also you can't eat it it doesn't produce happiness or food or ecosystems so i think energy is more likely or productive capacity or land or something like that yeah namu ud and then you and then you vignette how would orville fit into this scenario because you said like small villages can start the simplification early on but the goal of orville is to kind of be the beaming light that the world will follow of course how does that how would that work with that i don't know enough about orville to say and i will talk about different trajectories and advice on tuesday my brief guess is a couple different things what happened in 2020 it will rhyme with that so whatever problems you faced in 2020 in orville it's going to be something like that i think one of the risks to orville is it's beautiful people love each other there's great food there's music there's connection there's spirituality but there are also a million visitors coming through here every year that each spend a certain amount of rupees and if there's a global upheaval in some sort of a four horsemen you will still have the community and the food and all those things but you won't have those million visitors so that's that's one that's one thing it seems like the people that are in charge of orville have well thought through the ecology and the the water tables and and things like that which are most places in the united states have not so i think in the in the meantime between now and the great simplification orville can act as a beacon and maybe do some public documentaries or something and get more people more examples of this way of living because the ultimate thing we're going to have to do globally we're going to have to use less energy and materials per human on average now the average the mean and the median is going to be messed up as we know it always has been but on average we're going to have to use less people in orville don't use that much a tiny fraction of what people in my city in redwing minnesota use because of the infrastructure because of the behaviors or you have to drive a car of 35 miles each way to work you know etc so there are risks and opportunities that are unique to orville and that's why i'm so glad that a lot of the people in the community are sitting here and i'm here for two and a half more weeks and if there's a talk that i could do with the senior people and at least expose them to this possibility and this is to all of you you don't have to agree with everything i've said here but if what i've said is even 10 percent possible how does that change your own outlook on your plans your professional path what you care about what speaks to you and again we'll talk more about that on on tuesday uh ud and then you and then i have i think a couple of questions um you mentioned about united states is likely head into with super work and then do you think it would not be safe towards the end of this year and and then and then where then where would be safe and also i have a question about famine um yeah so i mean and everyone that lives in the united states has an opinion um i don't literally mean bayonets and guns civil war though that could happen the problem is is no matter who wins the election 30 percent of our citizens will not believe that the election was fair no matter who wins so you can predict that now and so what happens then and i don't know um i mean as far as where is safe i mean i feel pretty safe in orville i didn't even lock my bike when i came in one of the things you might want to talk about is the increase in progress and what wealth is doing in terms of investing in real assets oh um so there's something i'm not sure this is are you leaving or oh um there's something called the cantillon effect in economics which is those people that are closer to the origin of money have outside advantage so very few people in the united states even own stocks the stocks and bonds are predominantly owned by the top two to five percent of people and the wealth inequality within the top two percent is extreme and then relative to the rest of the economy it's also extreme the united states have has crushing poverty 41 percent of households don't have enough to make ends meet 41 percent are one of the richest countries in the world um i had a podcast a couple weeks ago it's called alice asset limited income constrained but they still are employed um so this is a real wealth inequality um issue both within countries and between countries i don't know what you wanted me to say the direction in which the wealth is moving for two for the towards a great certification how they're buying into real assets oh yeah so lots of wealthy people understand this they don't quite get the energy thing because most people are still energy blind but i know of numerous billionaires that are buying bug out places on islands and they're expecting to survive the great simplification because they're rich and i think it's ridiculous we we are going to sink or swim together and so what i have a good bug out place what if i break my leg uh which i almost did today when i hit a cow on my way over here like totally veered um so we um we we we are in a moment where the people that have the power have an outsize responsibility to do something and chandra why don't you say what you want to say because you know that the response to this question of preparation is actively being pursued by wealth and i mean we i've just become familiar with some of these um i mean while the damage to the environment continues and the extraction continues the extraction is now being used to fund this exorbitant underground bunkers and cities and so you would think that seeing that we're about to go into catastrophe some of these people will wake up but it's actually the opposite i can speak to this here's here's what i've experienced thank you thank you so i'm trying to raise funds for my work to include increase my staff and my my voice and viability and i've approached some very wealthy people billionaires and said would you give some money to support this effort and most of them are like they have a billion dollars and they're maybe giving a half a million dollars to initiatives total and here's why and this gets back to the eye of sauron and the power is in a society that reveres power and that people's limbic systems are damaged or whatever they feel somehow that more of something will save them so and i know this in spades because i used to manage money for them and they had 500 million dollars and they're like nape i would get to 600 million i'm buying an island and i'm quitting and i'm going to do philanthropy and they got to 600 million and their bodies had more and they kept going it was a compulsion and so right now if you have a billion dollars that is a claim it is fungible on anything in the world you can instantly turn it into land or a corporation or gold or bitcoin or move to another country and that is called optionality these wealthy people crave the option of doing more which is why i firmly believe they should be spending down their wealth towards a pro-social outcome and helping the world navigate the bottlenecks of the 21st century and cognitively they might be able to understand that but emotionally they want the optionality is that good okay yeah okay famine yeah famine of course we're using natural gas and the Haber-Bosch process to generate artificial nitrogen 80 percent of the nitrogen in your body and 50 percent of the protein in your body came from natural gas fossil fuels if you're an average human because this is what we've pulled out of the ground and added to boost our food supply so when oil and gas declined this century which they inevitably will that will be a removal of fertilizer for food and probably pesticides and other things so our crop yields will go down etc now we'll still be innovating and coming up with new things but that innovation will likely be swamped by the magnitude of the the drop in inputs i don't think that's happened imminently but everything else being equal i would say that in my writing i talk about a gig of famine the second half of this century now it doesn't have to be that way Vandana Shiva is a good friend of mine she lives in the north of india and she's very proud of the culture and the communities of people that spend 80 percent of their time growing nutritious including micronutrients food locally without any fossil fuel inputs but a that requires a lot more time it like we need a lot of people spending most of their time in the fields because you need to do all the regenerative practices and such very healthy not only the food but the activity is very healthy but that means less accountants and doctors and lawyers and programmers and all that stuff because we need more people working the land and then the second thing is even if we had food for eight billion people without fossil fuels we would still need lights and fans and trips and shelters and and everything else so my personal view even though you didn't ask this question is human population is going to increase in the coming 10 or 20 years to nine billion nine and a half billion unless the four horsemen come first but the second half of this century we're going to go much lower than that which is not in the un forecast the un forecast says we're going to 10 billion but i think most of those forecasts are energy blind this is a big deal for india i mean india has a billion and a half people i don't i don't know what to say about that in the next hundred years you know but i think energy and ecosystems is is very very important and not often discussed sorry you had a question and you sir and then you and then you oh vina is next after her well i have long been a champion for a non anthropocentric view i think that is a huge risk and it's the risk i care about most as evidenced by some of my earlier comments were you here on tuesday i don't know no no no but it's different than the four horsemen because the four horsemen are a human system that is operating ignoring the ecology it's operating it's on its own so the politics the war the money the complexity of the supply chains and how we engage with each other that is going to stay together or unravel irrespective of the slow frog boiling uh you know climate thing i included it in there because it's going to increasingly act as a tax on our lives we're going to have to spend more money on air conditioning we're going to not be able to go certain places there's going to be weather events that we're going to have to respond to and that's going to take time away from other things so it will be that fifth horsemen will add pressure to the other four but i i do think it's separate because it's not included in our economic system so i i'm not being an anthropocentric focus by separating it i'm just being an analyst trying to look at what the causal things are of the coming decade i don't know if that answered your question yes yeah it's more unpredictable although we know i mean we can predict the general trend i see it so much in all the others so you you think that that's going to be dominant the number five i feel like if we don't have a language for it or a constant awareness on it for example we constantly report on the casualties of humans with every of these words but we never acknowledge the wildlife that has been lost you're speaking to the choir you are speaking to the choir you need to read more of my stuff my question is coming from and where my my curiosity is that can we actually see it as part of all of them either is a well the reason i separated it is it's not it it's urgent but it's not imminent these other things are imminent that we need to prepare for the climate and the ecosystem has been unfolding for centuries and decades and it's getting worse and it's horrible but it's not imminent there's not a tipping point like these four things that's why i separated them yeah but let's talk offline because my my heart and spirit is a hundred percent aligned with what your question was vinay and then over here or they're not publicly being discussed in their forecast i presented to homeland security a few months ago and they were blown away by this and they've been pestering me to give lectures at dhs and health and human affairs because they're completely energy blind they view the world as do most government agencies as a product of technology and money and that there's some natural law that no matter what problem we're going through now that technology and and money will solve it in the long run and i've talked to a lot of government people that that believe that so that's one point is i think our entire system is energy blind because most of the people that are leading the world are either themselves or directly flanked by a phd in economics which is the antithesis of a systems analyst and yes that's hubristic of me to say but i have a i have hundreds of science systems ecology friends and i've revisited this three times from scratch since 2002 and every time i'm like this can't be what's going on and i start all over and arrive at the same place but i could be wrong i by definition humans are have huge cognitive biases and are delusional i am human therefore i also am delusional i just don't know what i'm delusional about okay so this is something this is this is something i didn't talk about what do you think the odds were of a nuclear war from 1960 to 2015 80 percent the odds of a nuclear war in the cold war were 80 percent but most of us would answer zero because it didn't happen and that's something called risk homeostasis is that if something risky doesn't happen we adjust our behaviors to emotionally to match that i think one of my lectures i gave the example of running a red light on your vehicle 10 times and nothing ever bad happened to you you are going to behaviorally continue to run red lights this is true with debt it's true with the nuclear situation what do i think the risk is of nuclear war in the next 10 years 20 percent 25 something like that yeah the 80 percent is not my opinion there's been academic papers written about that it's in my 2021 earth day talk called myth and reality um so i i think it's larger than the average person expects but beyond that i'm just spit balling i i don't know i'm praying that it's zero yeah uh i think that these guys had questions first and then you and then dania yes sir okay go ahead one of the slides you mentioned on the myth that uh it's a myth that human beings are not selfish and you had this whole yeah yeah this scenario laying out of civil war so in like how do you kind of see the scenario of the paradox of both uh well it's it's first of all there's a nature versus nurture thing and i think our nature is that we're not selfish we are selfish and cooperative and we are incredibly behavioral plastic and culture dictates which direction we go our culture the united states culture has been very individualistic and it is attributed our gains and our amazing stuff to our personal efforts even apple computer the wondrous technology company 90 of the components were funded by darpa within the u.s government it was created by government largesse funded by taxpayers as one example um so how do i reconcile it is we've lost the type of community that you have in orville in the united states where people can get together friday night and have pizza and music uh and feel free and able to talk about things and of course there's problems in orville and there's human politics as there is everywhere but in the united states we are self assembling self assorting by political view and so the people who disagree with each other unless they're genetically related never even come into contact with each other um so i think if we were forced with some dry run of this like i'm like covet uh then maybe we start to have conversations about what we really care about but what happened in covet is we just got stimulus checks and bought dogecoin and stuff like that and didn't really address the core core issues nobody addressing in the u.s. oh there's lots of people that are working on one of my friends runs a big effort effort called civic resolve which is hosting gatherings and communities for people to talk to each other this is not unknown the the the risk of ai and the addiction of facebook and social media and how it's making young teenage girls suicidal and how we're not uh interacting it's well known in in our country and people are working on it but i don't know what the responses are yeah you sir your modeling approach is very energy and material centric and in one of your slides you mentioned how uh the cost of energy extraction itself will grow up yeah the energy is spent on energy extraction yes the budgets for society will shrink yes now my argument is that it's very intersectional right it's the crisis intersectional we are looking at prices of water prices of food climate change you know many other things right in that context the cost of food we go up right i will also i mean that possibly we'll shift a shift in how work is valued right maybe you'll see financial analyst going back right finally so hopefully but yeah so do you see that as a possibility and you know something that your model integrates in its hypothesis well i think what you're saying is that society is going to value different jobs and you're absolutely right it's already happening now um and i will hopefully you can come back tuesday um because i'm going to give recommendations on that but yeah we're going to need um jobs that are more related to the future that is likely to come which means some things that are in the leisure retail frivolous consumption are not going to be needed or available in the future a lot more things dealing with basic needs basic goods local supply chains things like that are going to be needed yeah yeah you're talking about all the systems problem and institutions are also part of systems right and we had a sort of a paid call so do you think the governance of global institutions especially let's say World Bank UN call also need this significant shift to to uh to navigate the emerging crisis within the performance yeah the the question if you didn't hear it is um this is a systems problem and do the world large institutions like um the UN World Bank need to change of course they need to change but they're at the top of the current power structure and this story is is so anathema to the current structures within those organizations that i don't think they could take it full on but i think what we could do and this is an effort that i'm working on in the united states called advanced policy which is the things that we're going to need to do cannot be politically or publicly spoken right now but we can get constituents and people within the government working on them and doing what if scenarios and workshops and break glass in case of emergency blueprints ahead of time and so i think at those institutions you could have that um but you know i'm also i'm always asked this nat if you could press a button and have every of the eight billion humans understand everything that you believe would you do it and i i think the answer is no because people generally a lot of people in my nation have trauma and they're motivated by fear and not a holistic sense of what's going on and the the response would be anti-social as opposed to pro-social which is why i want to share this with pro-social people as much as i can now yeah yes sir so one of my takeaways from this is that we have a ratio of being the gdp to uh how much energy is consumed yes and um one of the reasons and they're evaluating this ratio out on a daily basis and given the amount the amount of momentum in which like economies have like to be pointed incredibly hard to put a full stop and be like we're going to transition entirely from a correct uh economy to uh green economy and one of the things that helps all of the sustained longer is that we have a lower cost of operation right but as like you said that we do notice come out here so everyone can hear you so we do notice uh growing trajectory between um how how people are normal people are going to get priced out yes similarly certain communities are going to experience um a lack of resources due to a lack of energy much quicker than all the people so in orville like we notice a circular economy we're quite sustainable but other economies how i mean other communities how would we notice them adapt or like what a possible expert they can adapt that's a huge question that i i i think you've described the dynamic quite well um i i don't know um i'm an expert on the problem i'm hoping young people like you figure out the responses but the circular economy in orville and the fact that you're resilient to these sort of shocks that's a really good thing most places aren't but you need to do lots more um so hopefully you can come tuesday and i'm going to give my sense of direction but you've asked an excellent question yeah thank you sure uh yes um so and these people also are from scotland behind you if you haven't met them yet but go on um so it's quick to forecast for people's diets in the years to come that are maybe less sort of based on elite war insects or plant-based or whatever it is if there were some sort of like large change like that like at a significant level how would is that just buy more time or how would that influence the financial situation i think that's as far as i think it's unlikely that the world will shift away from meat and towards insects on any near-term time frame i mean look at china they're getting more wealthy they're eating more meat um so a chinese economic collapse would have a little bit of a benefit there but i think in the scheme of of these things that are these four horsemen i think that's a small one i think the the default is that meat will get more and more expensive for a variety of reasons and so people will be able to afford less there will be more and more environmentally conscious people that eat less meat so that will help um from a climate perspective um animal agriculture is is almost up there with fossil fuels as far as its impact but the majority of that is the finishing of the cow in the last three to six months on the on dry distiller grains the the rest of its life isn't that huge in terms of and i have colleagues of mine that say that the full-on carbon cycle if you have free-range cattle that poop and fertilize the the grass and then cycle that is actually healthier but we clearly have to eat less meat as a global society but that's one of those things that we should do but i don't think it's actually going to happen um i've eaten sandwiches made with worms and cricket flour and i thought they were okay um but i wouldn't like rush out after this and go get one i'd rather have some paneer or something yeah dania you said aggregates ultimately account for that consumption of energy materials in the regions yep not needs to reduce will reduce yeah also if you want to have a viable sustainable planet yes correct but those are two separate statements yeah you also said that the ultra rich are not willing to redistribute the resources for the most part of a more sustainable planet correct in between that we have the effort of the united nations to grow the sustainable development of this my question is you must have looked at that how relevant are the sustainable development goals inherently of taking us in the right direction and how successful can it be if we have the ultra rich not being on board and the majority of the population in the world not being ready to say we are able to go to a lower sort of like consumption i think sustainable development goals are like a marketing ploy i don't think they're really relevant to the future that that i see coming it's a political you know marketing campaign yeah because it's socially acceptable to focus on that and i think now this year people's really started to realize how crazy bs those cop things are so i i do think next year whatever than one is next year it's it's going to be different i expect but but here's the thing you know i care mostly about climate change and other species but if we do that if we value nature and put a price on carbon and put a price on everything we still have to go through the four horsemen which is why i'm focused on that because no matter what we end up doing we're going to have to prepare communities and nations for for this financial unraveling of of the the over consumption and overspending that we've had the last 50 years on credit cards but in a sense then the cop 28 and so on has achieved our blinders yeah yeah i mean it's a socially acceptable conversation that gives the appearance that we care about the issues going on in the planet climate change inequality sustainability but the teeth and the reality are not really there from from the lens of this presentation yeah uh how are we doing on time okay a few more questions yes sir so we've been like for last five sessions we've been talking about problems or understanding the depth of the problem and now we are going to talk about the solution in the you are going to give some recommendations responses not solutions yes the question and i'm gonna and i may start tuesday by asking all of you what you think the solutions are but go on one is that what do you feel about that most of the conversation is somehow coming from the brain and your you started your lecture that about the feeling and everything what are the other agencies that can understand the problem not just the brain and the data and the research and and you know that i mean and i totally believe because i've been noticing you that you are very grounded and you believe in those other agencies because you have been somehow pointing at those so i'm not coming from that space and other is that i also feel that in your articulation that you understand that the problem is this that we can look at but we are humble enough to understand that there is something unknown that we cannot comprehend and the the recommendations or the solutions might be reinforcing the problem so i mean what is your take or understanding about this lens and the other agencies for sure my initial take is that's one of the most eloquent questions i've ever received in all these years um i'm here to learn about other modalities that's why i'm in orville i have a big problem of course because the story that i'm professionally put together over the last 20 years generates feelings in other humans who hear it that is kind of unavoidable this is not a funny thing unless you do sitting in the audience um and so i i struggle i struggle with that and yet what i firmly believe is that we have to understand our situation because so many people are like oh we just need to build more solar panels and everything else will be fine the conversation the ask of us as individuals and as communities and as nations is so much larger than the environmental movies are showing it's way way bigger and i'm trying to convey that but i totally agree with you that we will not solve this with our heads we will have to solve this respond to it with our hearts and our hands as well and i'm still learning on that all that myself because i as i've learned from my coaches and my experience here the last three weeks i apparently have spent 90 of the last 20 years in my head and parts of my body don't are disconnected from my head so my understanding these last five lectures and being able to convey it in a condensed way has taken a physical toll on my being and i'm trying to to fix that i think ultimately we need to have people in the same room who think with their head and with their heart and somehow have them able to have facilitated discourse and i don't know how how we do that but i think you know one thing that i'm feeling with the group that i'm with here in orville is and i've known this already oh let me tell you this here's something i've been thinking about the last couple days in sustainability and climate and resilience there's a lot of talk about community we need to have a community because community we can share tools and we can build things together and we can plant a garden and i think all that's great that's what i've been thinking but now i'm starting to realize that the real benefit of community is how it makes me feel sitting with other humans and singing or chanting or talking or humming and when i leave that i feel like a different physical entity that is able to do other things in the world so i think the real benefit of community is is almost that and the other stuff is secondary but i'm still processing that so i don't know if i answered your question right i'm saying that maybe i might have articulated wrong or bit skewed but i'm just saying that i really value this robust understanding of and lots of data and understanding of the problem so that and this is one way of looking at the problem and as you said there is diversity people are looking at the problem differently through different lenses and when they come together there are higher chances that we have more holistic understanding of the solution maybe people with different modalities don't ever need to see this yeah that's an open question to me and i've struggled with that because i'm like dude you gotta see but maybe we just we don't need to know all that we just need to move in a direction that's more linked to the best things in life are free after basic needs are met and and those sorts of things so therefore this story is really important but it's not for everyone um is another way of what you're saying maybe last comment is that when you said that the brightest minds i mean that gave some sort of that's because maybe the brightest minds are the most destructive minds well there's no doubt the person from the village who's doing amazing stuff and has a different kind of intelligence might come up with some solution i'm just saying that you're right i will change that in the future it's just kind of a flowery language that i've become accustomed to using but you're absolutely right and and how do we get the person from the village to be part of this conversation they wouldn't have understood this but they would have had something important to contribute and i don't know the answer to that yes because of you i've come across your um ben not break yeah podcast with banyan yeah and i mean he's probably one of the most amazing minds i think i would agree so so in some ways you know and he seems to have a wonderful heart also he does so i mean actually you've got somebody there who's got an amazing mind and a wonderful heart yes i think actually people like him may actually help us find a way through this actually because i he seems to be able to be both compassionate but incredibly rigorous in his explorations for sure but he's very very erudite and uses fancy words that not everyone can understand and he swears a lot too yeah shanker debbie i was discussing this with you that day like you seem to have a lot of hope on our way and even in the talks you keep repeating like companies like oracle have a like a future or a solution but i'm also skeptical about this scale of operations in oracle like is the scale so small that we don't see the problems right now at least well that's for sure and um there are a lot of glamour that is all that auto lateral axis because the scale is so small and if the scale is blowing out we'll actually end up in the same situation as we are here yeah um my my um thinking is also about like the things that we discussed in the morning session morning sessions around the science of satisfaction for example like um things like those i feel like hold the potential future and that's something that is not even talked about in oracle like we talk about everything the world talks about and and if we don't do those things and i feel like we are only happy with the scale the the smaller scale of oracle and not really equipping ourselves for it it's a great question anas was here anas just did some interviewing of people on their opinions of the future i think to do a survey of satisfaction and do kind of a scientific survey of how satisfied people and where they're lacking and compare it to others and and document that i think it would be really cool but i agree with you um the superorganism can even reach in to the mother's plans and disrupt them and it is um okay so well let's wrap up for tonight thank you all for sitting through this