 The book was trying to make the future not seem scary. There are so many books out there that talk about the technology of Vance and it being a scary world and talk about the challenges as opposed to the positives. And we were trying to help people to just think, wow, so this is what my kitchen would look like. This is what my bathroom would look like. How would I travel? What would travel look like in 2030? Felix Dodds is my guest on this episode of Inside Ideas, brought to you by 1.5 Media and Innovators Magazine. Felix has been a leading thinker in the area of global governance for 30 plus years. Now adjunct professor at the Water University of North Carolina and also at TELUS Institute Boston. He is also an international ambassador for the city of Bonn. He was the UK government candidate to be the executive director of the United Nations Environment Program in 2019. In 2019, after a three-year campaign, he succeeded in securing an annual UN General Assembly resolution on sustainable investment. During the SDG negotiations from 2013, to 2015, he was the advisor to the Ford Foundation grantees on the SDGs and the co-founder of the coalition, Cuminitas, that succeeded in lobbying for SDG-11 on sustainable cities and communities. He has authored or edited over 20 books, and it's probably still counting and growing, one prior to this was stakeholder democracy, represented democracy in a time of fear. He also co-wrote negotiating the sustainable development goals, and he has been a guest on my podcast before. He's a wonderful person. This is a fabulous book negotiating the sustainable development goals, but we're here to talk to you. About a brand-new book, Tomorrow's People, The Impact of Disruptive Industries in Our Lives by 2030, which came out in October of this year, 2021, and is co-authored with Carolina Ducat-Chopita, if I say that right, and Ranger Ruffins. And he's also working on another book that'll be out in June of 2022. It's going to be Environmental Heroes in Diplomacy, Profiles in Courage, basically looking at 10 individuals that have been leaders and leaders and have been leaders and leaders have been leaders and front-runners who had a lot of courage to do some great things. And I don't know if we'll go into all the chapters, but there's 10 chapters, and Maria, Louisa, Voiti, Cristiana Figueres is in the book, Barack Obama, and just these heroes that have really done some amazing things around diplomacy and always with, like any of the books, and concerns from Felix, there's always that nice hint of sustainability, environment, and concern for our future humanities. Welcome to the show, Felix. It's so great to have you. Thank you so much. It's great to be back. How have you been now? It's been almost a year since we've spoken, and a lot more craziness going on. So we spoke at the beginning of the pandemic times and the beginning of some craziness. I'd just like to know, besides pulling out a couple of new books that you're working on, congratulations, but how have you been? How have you weathered this time? Most of the time I do work at home, so it's not been that much of a change here. Of course, the clients I have that I work with around the intergovernmental negotiations, that's all had to be done virtually, and you can't do negotiations virtually, so to some extent all of that until COP26 in Glasgow was really just treading water, or at least trying to increase the knowledge level of the negotiators so that when they come to the issue, as we move out of lockdown, that they can maybe make better informed decisions. Do you think that the pandemic or that pause, what the World Economic Forum's calling the great reset has been a negative or positive in the growth for environmentalism, for biodiversity, for awareness, and especially in what you just experienced at COP26? So I think that the pause and perhaps the pandemic itself has given people an understanding of the kind of challenges that we face, and people have often been talking about COVID and pointing out that the climate change challenges are even greater than those that we are facing under COVID. And clearly many governments are developing their recovery packages around green types of technology development, and I think President Biden said in the next 10 years we'll see 50 years of development. So I think that it's helped the issue, but it didn't necessarily help Glasgow. I think the problem we had in Glasgow, and I think Glasgow achieved pretty much what it could achieve. And if you think, I mean just to help your listeners, if you think that prior to Paris, the World Bank was saying we're on a trajectory of four to six degree temperature rise by the end of the century. After Paris we were on, in a sense, a 2.7 to a 3.7 trajectory. And then as we come out of Glasgow, I think we're now on a 1.8 to 2.4 degree rise. So in a relatively short time period, we have seen, I think, an advancement. Now it's not enough, and of course those are commitments the governments have made, and we know from past experience, that doesn't mean that they will be delivered on. But I think the trajectory is right, and I think the decision in Glasgow that they will review the commitments, again, not in five years, but in one year in Egypt, was an important decision. And that the UK presidency, as you know, will continue until the Egyptian COP, that's the way it operates, and it will be up to the UK to get additional commitments over the next year to those that were made in Glasgow. So we're definitely going to talk about your book. I just want to get two more things out of COP, which it really ties to your book. It ties to all your work that you do. And so it's not that big of a drift, but I just want to get people up to speed since we're so close to having left COP. We had this entire year, and it was actually supposed to be in 2020, the UN Food Systems Summit, and that was kind of pushed to the pre-summit and the summit in this year. And then we had the climate conference, the COP26, and I really expected to see a lot more things in regards to food on also the UN Food Systems Summit, transition into there, a little bit more awareness. That wasn't so strong as I had hoped. The usual players were there, obviously the FAO and the EAT Foundation and the World Wide Fund. And there was a lot of outside side events, outside of the blue zone, outside of the, even outside of the green zone at the Salvation Army, Danielle Nirenberg from the food tank. She was doing some food events and side events, talking about this with different players who were in that area. You specifically were on the agriculture side within the blue zone at the COP, kind of doing some things there as well. What's your view and your take as far as food at COP26 and how that went? Can you give us a little insight on what you saw, what you observed, but also what you contributed with, what ended up coming out after you were done? Yeah, so I think people need to understand what the COP is about. And too often they don't understand it. And so you have two subsidiary bodies for the COP and they meet normally for two weeks in June. And they tee up most of the text that you would then negotiate during the COP. That of course couldn't happen because they weren't negotiating. So though they met actually for three weeks in June, they were much more, in a sense, kind of creating a more of a knowledge base to be able to go into the negotiations. In certain areas, they advanced that discussion. The Madrid COP had asked in 2019 for five agriculture workshops. Three of them had happened before the meeting in June and a kind of summary by the secretary that was produced for each of those but couldn't be negotiated. And then two happened in September and October before the COP. So you had a lot of material going in based on what, I mean, some of them under, there was a whole session, the whole workshop on diet. There was one on livestock, there was one on economic and social issues. So that material. And even the first day of COP, I think, was the food theme or the second day was the food theme, something like that. Well, the thing is that those themes don't relate to the text. Yeah, not to negotiations either, which is interesting. So I'm glad you're telling us this. Yeah, so people misunderstood. I mean, it was a good decision by the UK government to have the themes because it allowed a lot of organizations to, in a sense, build narratives, but they didn't feed into the negotiations. The negotiations were continuing once in the first week on a number of issues, one of which was agriculture. The problem we had is that we had so much material that had come in and we had so few time slots that it made it impossible. And this is what I predicted would happen within the COP to do anything other than to, in a sense, produce a document that said, we've had these five workshops. These are really important issues. We need to go into proper depth on them and to pass that on to the 2022 meeting in June. And that's ultimately what they did. Now, a number of people didn't seem to understand that that was happening during the negotiations. And that's a shame because they could have perhaps participated in those workshops. Maybe some of them did. But it was, in a sense, now left until the June meeting to decide what to do with that material. And then in the context of that, it's going to be an extremely controversial area. It's not an uncontroversial area. I was disappointed to see that the food systems summit didn't, in some way, come into that discussion. I wasn't in the meetings because most of them were closed, except for one end bit. But by that time, it was clear that they were passing it on. So I think that there were so many events around agriculture and food, in a sense, gives impetus to the process that we'll have to go into June and then to the Egyptian COP later in 2022. So are you also, in some respects, preparing or surlending us all know that should we have some more pandemics or we have some more variants or something else that we could see delays, just like we've seen now, where there might be times where those workshops don't happen, where that negotiation could be delayed or just some natural climate catastrophes or pandemics could interfere with how that goes coming up in the future? Well, that's absolutely true. And the workshops that we saw were virtual workshops, not in-person workshops, which they would have been. And the amount of people who were speaking at those workshops was limited because what the member states decided to do was to work through their group chairs, whether that was the Africa group or whether it was the EU or whether it was the G77 or least developed countries. And the problem with that is that you missed the richness that you would have got if you'd have had an in-person space. So it is what it is. And we now go, you know, I think a number of organizations, you mentioned EAT, they were doing a strategic look at how they can address this come next June. And I think there's an issue around kind of financing that they need to look at in agriculture and how to value all of that. I think that's going to be an issue. I mean, if I took a kind of just, if you don't mind, I'll take it just to kind of... No, that's fine, please. I think that's the top learn, I think. So there were, for me, three or four things that came out. One was the national determined contributions, which clearly we are in the right direction. We still have to do more. The second was the hundred billion, the commitment to reach that, which is clearly inadequate, but is something which we're close to in it. And I think we'll get there either next year or the year after. But then there's a commitment to relook at that at a much higher level by, I think, 2023 to 2025. And then the third thing with these coalitions are the willing. So these aren't part of the negotiations. So that's the methane coalition, the deforestation coalition, the Mark Carney net zero finance coalition. All of these that happened outside of the COP, but were kind of using the copper as the place to make those announcements, will need to be looked at in the next year to see how real they are. And in a sense, the way of judging how real they are will be whether they set up independent accountability mechanisms to be able to check whether they are actually doing what they're saying. And so that's the challenge that's at the moment already being discussed around the finance initiative, whether or not there can be an accountability mechanism to say this bank promised this, but they haven't done it, in which case you call them out or the independent accountability mechanism calls it out. I think then there was a whole lot of really good material. I mean, you were around the pavilions. I mean, a number of opportunities for new coalitions around issues of resilience or issues around agriculture that can in themselves have an important role. But I guess my final point, the fourth one is that, you know, there's this real recognition, I think, now that subnational local government can play a more critical role in bringing forward commitments to the targets, but also into, you know, designing planning processes that are actually going to be built into how their cities of the future will look like. And then just the final, as we wrap this up with a cop, cop 26 kind of the input. So a lot of this is my takeaways and as well that I want to just from nations and countries, we kind of are still behind. We have a long way to go. We didn't make quite the ambitions or the commitments that we wanted to do in many respects. We got some things in there about the fossil fuels. We really talked about methane. We also, you know, took a step in the right direction on national determined contributions. We spoke about the 100 billion and things, but we fell short. And as you said, when I left on Saturday, it was, it was still 2.3 to 2.5 range. And so now there's still that fluctuation of saying maybe it's a little bit on the positor side, but it's still clear up to at least 2.4 on the top end range. But what I really did in the first week, it was already by Thursday, we'd seen Leonardo DiCaprio come Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates on and on. And, you know, there was numbers of 10 billion private from Jeff Bezos Earth Fund, specific monies in the billions, 1.2 for Hindu, Ibrahim, Umru, Ibrahim for indigenous peoples. Then there was a lot of money around food and agriculture given out in the billions as well from Jeff Bezos. And then I think it was by Thursday, we'd already heard numbers of 130 trillion U.S. dollars on private corporations, organizations and foundations, commitments or, or kind of pledges. And I don't know if this is what you meant by the Mark Carney group or if that, if that's separate. And so that was kind of pro kind of positive that like the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, UN Global Compact and a lot of these private coalitions were coming together and saying, Hey, we're going to step up to the plate. We're going to try to do something. And so I want to, I want to get your take in your feel on that as well. Okay, so, so there, there is a website called sdgfunders.org. And in theory, if those people have made their contributions through their foundations, it should, at a certain point, be registered into that database. So you can look at each SDG, SDG 13 is this climate want to see what funding is being put available for different things. The Mark Carney initiative was built on the work that the UN environment programs finance initiative has done. And that's looking at the principles for responsible investment, the principles for responsible insurance, and the principles for responsible banking. And those groups came together. And the Mark Carney 130 billion is how can we move the capital markets to, to fund the things that we want, the positive things, the sustainable development things as opposed to the things that they have been funding. And to help that's UNDP is setting up, in a sense, matchmaking systems in a number of developing countries because investors like PIMCO or Aviva don't know where to put their money in developing countries. And so the UN is hoping to try and, in a sense, act as that matchmaker saying, here's a great project on renewables or here's a great project on water that you could do. And so that's an emerging area that's happening. And that 130 trillion, that's the issue where we need accountability. We need to know that that money, those, that money that's been put on the table as possible, money that can go to this cause is actually going to go there. As the market shifts towards that, to some extent, the government's become less important because the market just reorganizes itself to funding good things as opposed to funding bad things. And then, you know, if you elect someone who's not keen on doesn't believe in climate change, it doesn't really matter because the market's already delivering about. So there's a couple of ways to push that. One is that a number of countries have introduced it as a listing requirement that all companies listed on the stock exchange must have their environment, social and governance reports and produce a sustainability strategy. So South Africa has it. Brazil has it. I think Shanghai has it. The European Union is introducing it. If that happens, then companies will have to show that they're actually doing the right thing. Even down to their supply chain, that they're actually doing the right thing. Although they'll get bad, their rating will go down over time. Yeah. I mean, I really see that as well. That in 2020, we actually had a lot more taxonomy and discussions around ESG come out and then July 12th, the European Union ESG taxonomy actually went into force. Yeah. And you see a lot of private investors, investors, banks, a lot of people making sure they're up to speed, asking questions just since that time I've been on. More than a dozen different panels talking about the taxonomy and what it does. As we transition into your book, this is a perfect segue because there's, you mentioned a couple of times, Elon Musk in the book and some of the things that he's done. But there's this interesting kind of tweet. And when we talk about the future, a lot of things moving towards the future a lot, or to our tomorrows. And I don't know if it's good or happening via tweet. But there's this one in particular, tying to agriculture, tying to food, tying to some of the things you've done. And Elon Musk, where the deputy general of the world food program gives out a tweet basically to Elon Musk and say only 2% of his money or giving that would be enough to fix world hunger. The problem that they have around world hunger. And if you get into the tweet, it's a little bit funny because you're not sure. Is it really solving world hunger? Is it just one year of solving world hunger for one year? Which isn't truly a solution, but they came back. They did the banter back and forth on the tweet. And it was, you know, the world food program came back and said 6.6 billion US dollars. And we could solve it for one year. And here's our plan on how we would outline and do that. Is that the future of not only democracy, but some of the things on how these negotiations or not even negotiations, how we kind of sparked these billionaires to get into the game of sustainability or what are your thoughts on that process? Kind of tying also into your book, what you've discussed as well. Well, so I think, you know, we know that we already have food prices coming by 2030 that we're looking at 30 to 40% food shortage based on India and China developing more and therefore their eating habits changing and the impact that has. And we have about the same amount of food waste that we do. So one of the answers is to reduce our food waste. And I think technology can help in doing that in a number of ways. I think the future fridges in our houses should be able to be much more precise when things go out of date so that we can eat those things as opposed to throwing them away. And I'm sure like anyone, I sometimes forget I've got things in the fridge that have passed their date. And I think we can do a lot to do that in the developed countries to reduce that. And then in developed countries, food waste often is that there is a problem in getting it to market that some of the infrastructure isn't there and that they wasted there. So there's opportunities to address that. Should we be making these statements by Twitter? I mean, we live in a world that there will be so many different ways that people will be inspired. And you have to give him credit. He then asked his Twitter followers whether or not he should do it. And I think they voted yes. And so at some point, I assume there'll be a deal between the World Food Program and Musk in trying to address that. It's generated money that wouldn't have otherwise been there so that that's not a bad thing. But I mean, there is a club of billionaires that are working together to try and move money into particular areas. And again, should this be the case? Well, no, it shouldn't be. It should be the governments are doing it. But we only now have, I think, five governments that are giving the 0.7%. I think the US is below 0.2. The UK has just dropped back from 0.7 to 0.5. And so there's less money for development aid than there was. And so there's a lot of money that's needed by itself won't be enough. Billionaires giving money won't be enough. They can help. It is about changing the market and making sure that in fact, we're supporting the development of good food around the world or we're supporting the promotion of renewables around the world. And that's the big bucks that need to go to that. And that's how you address that. Your book is beautifully written. It's a wonderful read. The cover is on your background, but that we're seeing here on the book cover. I was kind of lucky. So I got the digital version. And because this is your Rutledge publishing and it's kind of was UK based. There was no physical copies in Germany or would get here in time. So it's a great read. And it says, how about let me pick it up there? And it worked out perfect. It's a great read, but I need to ask you a couple of questions that. Who's your audience? Why did you decide to do this? And what's your hope with? Why do you say this is God? I've got to bring this out. That's an extremely good question, Mark. You know, been involved with the climate change process from 92 from the Rio conference, having seen how we approached it through many times, doom and gloom. And found that that, you know, there are only many, yeah, we've, there have been so many. This is the last chance statements. I just don't think that we did it right. I think we needed to start that conversation. If I had to redo it, I'd start by talking about better health, better water, the things that people, you know, would like to have in their lives. And I think the lesson I have is that, you know, you have so much that's going to change in the next 10 years. And you're seeing it now everywhere in the media. You can, but there's no national conversations about it. There's no discussion about how this new technology is going to affect jobs, what kind of jobs. We're talking about 70% of people being freelancers by 2030. Well, that's, that's fine for the younger generations who are very much more entrepreneur than your generation or my generation. But for those people who are in the blue collar worker jobs at the moment who are taxi drivers or lorry drivers or, you know, how are they going to be able to deal with these changes? And what I wanted to do was not put another doom and gloom book out there or another book that talked specifically about the technology. I wanted to talk about how the technology might be in your life, how it might enhance your life, but also to raise some questions. So in the cartoons that we have in the book and in other places, we try very carefully to raise concerns. A deep fake is one of them that we raise clearly, privacy is another. So by doing that, we hope that the readership is a greater readership because we've written it as populistically as we can for people to read. But also we're hoping that it will make them think about things because we're not pushing it down their throats. We're just having it as a backdrop to the conversation. I love that. And yeah, there are some, some nice, you know, illustrations in the book as well. Could I just say that they were done by a Marvel comics artist, John Charles. And we chose because Carolina is from Argentina and Peru and Ranger Ruffins is an African-American, former student of mine. And so we made the family an African-American Latino mix. And they, the text you see there is a text that they developed. I had no involvement in that. And it was beautiful. I actually like it not only as a diverse, as kind of an interesting picture of a, you know, what's 2030 look like? What do those roles fit into there? As far as it goes on books, I don't know. I'm a big fan of Yuval Noah Harari. I don't know if you know he's doing all his sapiens book in this illustrated versions. He's come out with two of them now. Basically, you know, this comic book of sapiens and beautifully told. And so I think that's nice. This other one is the most important comic book on Earth. I don't know if you've seen that, everything from Jane Goodall and that, but it's all about environment. It's all about our fabulous. Well, there is a website called comics uniting nations. And I did the comic on how Santa found out about climate change again with John Charles. And we try to make it again, something that you could read to your children, but it also has some adult jokes in there as well. So that it's more of a Shrek approach to humor. I absolutely love that. I don't know. I've been going to the cops a long time. You as well. There's a Santa Claus, not a Santa Claus at all the cops, the sustain a clause. You have seen him around. I'm sure before I have him, but I'm sure you haven't. Yeah. He carries a red sack and dresses kind of like Santa Claus, but it says specifically not Santa Claus, sustain a clause. And kind of his own way to make it entertainment, entertaining to talk about climate change. This book is not written academically. So I just want to make it clear because although you are, you are a professor and you teach. Don't, don't anybody suspect this is gonna be boring. But the reason I ask you that question is there is this clear thing that I see in a lot of, a lot of books and you know, I read for about four books a week. For all the podcasts that I do. I've been into this, this thing is probably been around forever, but we, you start out in the first little bit, almost giving us a history lesson. And the, the funny thing is, and I want to kind of have a discussion or maybe even hear why from you. We're not getting this in school. I never got it in school. My kids didn't get it in school. My grandkids didn't get school. And when I talked to people about environment and climate, they're like the first time they've ever heard of it. But in reality, it's big history. It's actually all, all has been there. So those who, who are well read or how, have these degrees and have had to dive into it for their profession, kind of know about it. But it's something that we're almost bringing those. And so I'd like to get just kind of your point because you start out telling us about the industrial revolutions, a little bit history of transformations and how we got where and what we got. Yeah. And so, I mean, your point is well taken. I would say that I was influenced a bit by a book by Mark, by Nick Robbins, which he did on the East India company. I've forgotten what the name of it is, but I mean, basically no one in the UK knows about the East India company. We were pretty evil people. They had their own private armies. I mean, we did terrible things around the world under the name of it. And it just dawned on me that you can't just assume that people have that knowledge. And so it was a discussion in between myself and particularly Carolina because Ranger came on later, how we were going to start the book. And so, you know, we wanted to make it accessible. But I think we've succeeded when you get to the home chapters, the entertainment chapters, the transport, it's got some nice little stories there. But I think we felt we had to at least explain what the industrial revolutions had been and their impact, just so that you started from the least level playing field of knowledge. And we tried not to make it too heavy. It's a difficult subject. No, it's definitely not too heavy. You did it very, very nice. And I think it's a, I see it, you know, obviously I've read it before in other books. One, you list the references and kind of flow it. So it's historically accurate, but it's, but it's done in a way that it's almost fun to learn. It's a different way of, it's kind of like, is it David Christensen who did, you know, does the big history and that it's done in a very nice way to get that information because it's a form of empowerment. You've just empowered everybody with that knowledge and say, okay, well, here's how we've gotten here from history so far. So if we take that model and we push it out into the future, how close is this? How quickly will these things develop? And so there's a nice succession progression throughout the book that I really like and enjoy. There is one thing, and I've even struggled with this myself. And so I want to throw this question out to you as well. When you talk to Jeremy Rifkin or read any of his books, we're still in the third industrial revolution. Well, so, so two things. One is you're right. It's not written for academics and Rutledge are an academic publisher. So it's a little bit out of their belly wig, but they love the idea of this kind of book. We have referenced it with, in most cases, it's not, not that chapter that we're talking about. Most chapters don't go back for references further than two years before because we recognize things are changing so fast. So if you want to know more, we have tried to give you at least directions that you can go in. The reality is that the four industrial revolutions are happening at the same time. And particularly in developing countries that, you know, you're dealing with all of the four industrial revolutions and that means it's a bit of a mix. And it's having its own different impacts. Each industrial revolution has an employment impact. You know, if we take, for example, the, the prediction of Uber that by 2024, their taxes will be driverless. Well, what happens to the Uber drivers who've taken out huge loans to buy their cars to be an Uber driver? Well, they won't necessarily be needed, but they'll still have that debt that they've done, the taxi drivers. As we know already, there are, I think it's a number of companies that are trying out these lorries around the highways. So they're taking two or three lorries with one driver down there. If you go five, six years ahead and you've lost all the lorry drivers, you've lost all the taxi drivers, it's very important that, for example, Biden's package that at the moment is in front of the Senate is passed because it gives that 10 to 15 year protection. Those people will have other jobs to go to where their skill base is still relevant. But the changes that are coming, if they aren't in some way helped through that, it's going to have a massive social impact. And we've tried to do that, but carefully, we've tried to also, as you've seen through the book, use kind of popular culture at different points to express things. So, you know, if you remember Luke Skywalker's aunt and uncle in the first Star Wars movie were water harvesters. So they were collecting moisture from the air. So we've tried to, where we can, reflect on films or books that we think have people having there, you know, they have read or seen to try and help them to think about these things as well. And I think that's a huge challenge. It is, but you do it very well. And I think it's nice to, here's the other thing you do. So you're not talking 2050 and you're not talking 2100. You're talking 2030. So it's surprising how, how many people or how many of us, humanity don't understand the exponential function and how quick the future actually can get here of new transitions. If you would have even asked the majority of us three years ago that we would have autonomous driving vehicles on the highways in Germany, the strictest, most police place around, they'd say there's no way in heck, but we do. It's a different technology. It's a different LiDAR approval, but it's here and it's coming in those places. So it happens pretty quick and you describe that so nicely. But what we're talking about, so I mean the underlining tone of it all is the sustainable development goals by 2030. The date that we're talking about in the future, tomorrow's people is 2030. And how do we already start to get a feeling? And I wrote the manifesto for the SDGs, kind of how does it look and feel to be there? You're doing the same thing in a much grander way. What will it really look like and how are some of these transformations? In order to reach the sustainable development goals, we need six transformations. And one of those six transformations is the digital transformation. Coming back to the pandemic a little bit, boy, I don't think we've hit that transformation yet. I think we're still working on it. We've seen that broadband is not a universal right and not everybody was prepared with the technology to educate their kids from home, let alone the internet. So I'd like you to kind of, how do you discuss that in the book and how do you see those transformations being reached? Well, so we place the book in the global north. We do have a chapter, as you know, dealing with the south, which Carolina wrote because that's where she comes from. And I think she addressed some of the issues there. In the context of that, there is the Secretary General of the UN brought out in September our common agenda, where he talks about a future summit. And I have been having initial discussions with a number of governments about an SDG and innovation summit, which is very similar. He talks about it being on the digital issue. I think it needs to be much broader than that. And I think it needs to encompass what the food system summit did with national dialogues. Because I think that's where we have a problem. That people aren't discussing the future and the future's coming so quickly that there are points where you can make decisions to either slow something down or to at least create a cushion for people. At the moment, none of that is happening that needs to happen. And so I think that's crucial to what needs to be done. I think that clearly there's a huge mismatch between broadband being available just in the developed north. Forget about the developing countries who didn't have any of that. And that needs to be addressed absolutely crucial. But you have seen a whole number of things that will have huge implications as we move forward. So I can't remember what the figure in the book was, but that we only had a couple of percentage people who were doing tele-doctor meetings prior to the pandemic. The UK government's tried to now force doctors to go back to meeting people in person. And the doctors union just did a survey of its members and 80% of them did not want to do that. 80%. And so we're going to move much more to a situation where health will be delivered, or at least the initial part of health advice will be delivered as we are talking about. Kind of telemedicine, yeah. And we've got in the book that the toilets will be able to tell a number of things that are wrong with you. Your wristband can be linked into your thing and it can give a certain amount of information about your heartbeats and anything else. All of that will, I think, be a really positive impact. Who wants to go and sit in a doctor's surgery with other ill people and take half a day off? I'd far prefer to talk to you as Dr. Mark over the internet and you say, well, look, it seems to me that this is the issue. And then I go off and get the relevant medicine. So I think that will be a positive thing. I think the developments are some of the robots that are going on, the SOFIA robot, where people are living by themselves and feeling isolated that as we move through the 2020s to 2030, the chance of having a robot in the home where they can talk and they can develop and understand what your history is and talk to you about your friends or your former partner or whatever, you may in fact have a robot that looks like your former partner with a face. I mean, all those things are possible by 2030 and I think will add to addressing loneliness, which I think is a critical thing. And on old age, as the greatest generation or the generation of the 60s moves into old age, there needs to be something that helps them to do that because we're moving away from large families to smaller families. But the other thing that happened, which was really good, I thought was that we've worked out we don't have to go to work in an office. We can in many cases work from home. And I think that's going to over the next 10 years we'll see people moving away from the cities back to small towns where they can be with their family. I think that will strengthen families in the long term. I think it will strengthen communities. And those are really positive messages to give to people. Now that won't be true for everybody, but it will I think have a big impact in helping to repopulate rural areas that have in a sense lost huge populations because people will want to have a nice place for their kids to live. I think it will have big impacts on education. Will our universities look like this? The way they do today in the future? I don't think so. If I want to put together a course, maybe I take a course from Harvard. I take something from San Paolo. I take something from Johannesburg. And I create something that is something useful to me. So the opportunities are there, but we need to make sure that we don't increase inequality in the country so that the access to that technology is only for a part of society. And we may need to make sure it is something that we share with developing countries. I think 90% of patents are owned by six countries. We need to move to much better cooperative approaches to developing new patents with developing countries so that they have an opportunity as well. I love that. You talked a little bit about the pavilions and how we're seeing a lot more with the resilience and these discussions, whether they're supported by the secretary general. I was, as you were so correct, I was mainly at the UNFCCC pavilions for the climate conference, and specifically in the resilience frontiers and the resilience labs and the resilience hubs that they had there in the pavilion areas, kind of looking from 2030 to 2050. And so when you mention that we need the conference, the futures conference and discussions, and that you're talking about that, what needs to be discussed, that's kind of in some respects what these pavilions are trying to do. They're trying to project 2030 to 2050. Matter of fact, in the resilience lab, we had Kim Stanley Robinson. I don't know if you've ever met him, or read his books. Yeah, it's amazing. But he was there and we had an axle panel kind of on the mindset of the future and kind of how he not only does his books, but why is he involved? Why is he at a climate conference? Why is he at writing about the future? And how do we get that same feeling that you're giving us here for 2030? How do we start to, what does it feel like? What does it look like? How can we imagine that? How can we use movie magic? How can we use storytelling? How can we use animation cartoons like you've done to get that feeling so that we can start to engineer, create, architect, and designed to make sure that we get there? Because if we don't, Felix, if we don't, what's our future? So I think there are a couple of things. One is I'm hopeful that if a country picks up the suggestion, and I did have a meeting with One Country's Ambassador of Innovation on Monday in New York, who is, they are interested. We have to see if they pick it up to run it. I think that what you want, one of the things we need is to look at 2030 and to then look back. What is 2030 going to be like? And the book kind of indicates what some of it is. What are the policy implications in 2022, 2023, that we need to address? What are the things that need to be done to advance many of the green technologies? Now, as you notice in the book, we come across an issue that's relevant to the SDGs. We actually put down what the SDG is, and that's both an educational attempt, because we're hoping the book will be read by people who may not have actually been aware of the SDGs. But we're also trying to indicate that there are some interesting things that are going on there that are really trying to move that, but they need accelerating. They need to be available to more people. And so again, if people are aware that things can happen, I mean, we talk about a moisture collector on your house, which for places like Texas or southern states in the United States, if I use the United States as an example, may very well become critical to give you at least a bottle of water a day to be able to drink, because some of the issues that we're going to see are going to be dictated by a lack of water availability. We talked about food availability. Water availability is also a critical issue, 30 to 40% of people will suffer water shortages by 2030, and that's not just in developing countries, it's in developed countries. So if we can accelerate those technologies that can help address that, then we're going to do something which will, I think, make their lives more liveable and perhaps not put more people into poverty. I noticed that in the book and actually at least three places where you kind of talk about that, and you've done a lot of work on water in the past, so I would expect nothing else. I'm always have been a big fan of ambient water harvesting, rainwater harvesting, and with climate change in general, or climate crisis we're having, it's warmer. There's more heat, there's more humidity in the air. That's why the storms are slower and more intense and bigger. And just because you're in a desert doesn't mean that there's no moisture. It's mainly in the air. That's why you're sweating to death. There's so much humidity there. You get out of the shower and feel like you just got out of the swimming pool, you know, and there are some tools or maybe jobs of the future that are very renewable, they're very environmentally friendly that if we put them into practice, I think we could be ambient water harvesters, we would be rainwater harvesters, even if it rains three times a year, but if we're prepared to catch every last drop of that and use some techniques, permaculture, some regenerative ag or some of those technologies. Boy, then we lock it back up into the ground, into the watershed, into the cycle of life, again, and we do amazing things. And I love that not just water, but many things you kind of talk about, well, what could it look like and how do we get there? And those tools that not only the big history, but those innovations or things, we've probably heard just when you watch the news or if you read something or if you're traveling somewhere about the ticklings of some of those or kind of like, oh, yeah, I haven't really had time to think about it. But I believe it's not even a setup, it's just a preparation that, hey, imagine this. And could you imagine, yeah, you might not be that Uber driver again, but there's an insurance and there's a security that you can continue make money off of that car that's now autonomous through an insurance setup or that that's still your Uber, it's doing autonomously, you're safe at home, you don't need to get the COVID or any other pandemic, but it's still earning you money for the next five years until you can transition to you're another form of transportation, you're a hovercraft or an electric vehicle, director of traffic or something, you know, who knows what it could be, but there's so many things like that available. And we list a number of those in the book. We call, yeah, the jobs of the future and a garbage designers where you're taking garbage and converting it into things that people might want or personal data broker or weather modification police to stop people from modifying the weather or classroom avatar manager. I think some of the interesting things in the classroom will be the use of virtual reality. So you could put yourself on, if you remember the four students who went into the Woolworths and sat down at the all white counter. Well, you could be one of those in a virtual reality, you could address racism in a way that we couldn't do through just books, but through using virtual reality, you can walk around and use augmented reality as you go past the building, you can find out what the history of that is. So I think that education, some of these tools hopefully will make our students more knowledgeable, more understanding of culture as we move forward. But I think some of the jobs that are in the future of virtual farmers, you know, we could see our shopping malls converted into virtual farming areas. I think those are really interesting places to do. So I think there's some interesting places, interesting jobs for the future, but the issue is how do we transition to that? How do we help people? In the UK election, the Liberal Democrats in 2019 were advocating for a £10,000 voucher, which you could use at any point in your life for retraining. Those kinds of things, that kind of discussion we need to have, and it needs to be something that doesn't become just the response that you're responsible for, but that's something that the government can help in a sense, the transition to that, to address transition. I love that, absolutely love it. The last biggest takeaway, if you don't mind, of what you want to achieve with the book and what would you say, this is my hope for those who read the book and that find it, that this is what they get out of it. This is what their takeaway is and how they can maybe use this to improve their futures. I think that the book was trying to make the future not seem scary. There are so many books out there that talk about the technology advance and it being a scary world and talk about the challenges as opposed to the positives and we were trying to help people to just think, wow, so this is what my kitchen would look like. This is what my bathroom would look like. How would I travel? What would travel look like in 2030? What would entertainment look like? What would fashion? We may be that you're 3D printing your fashion at home or it may be that you decide to ask for something to be delivered by Amazon or the equivalent the next day and there's a 3D printer in the local shopping mall which prints out clothes for you. That's less waste than if you were less transport than if you were doing it from possibly India or China or Vietnam and having to bring it over. Less waste is good because we need to conserve. We need to create much more of a circular economy for all of our things. One of the problems we have with solar roofs at the moment is we're selling them as opposed to renting them. If we rented them then you will create a circular economy that after 20 years they will be replaced. We don't want to see the solar panels end up in the waste stream and at the moment we're in a danger of going there. So again we try to raise questions where we think people need to think of policy options but not in a way that we hope creates that we're preaching to them about things. It's almost like a perpetual leasing model. It's that you always have the latest technology but it's also getting recycled. It's not cradle to grave. I love that. When we hit December 2030 and we achieve all the sustainable development goals and we've got the 1.5 degrees of the Paris agreement and we've made those achievements and those determined contributions and everything that we're really working towards. Is that a new sustainable economic model? Would you say that the sustainable development goals are an economic model and entirely new operating system? Or is it circular economy? Or is it donut economics? What do you see or do you even see us shifting to more ecological and economic models in the future? Is that what we have? So I think there's no contradiction between the donut economics and the circular economy at all. I mean because you're basically defining a safe place for humanity to live and in the context of that then of course the circular economy does nothing but support that and so I would see those as complementary to each other. I don't think we have any great green economists that has got a vision that will take hold globally. I think it's more difficult to do that nowadays. So I think it will be an evolutionary approach and I think if the more we can move to things like circular economy and recognizing that we're under planetary boundaries but also recognizing that we, that it's common but differentiated responsibilities that we in the developed north have used a huge amount of resources to get our form of development. We need to make sure that the global south is unable to develop as well but we need to make sure they do that in a green way not in the way that we did it and so that requires a transfer of funds and technology to enable them to make the right decisions because those right decisions will help create a sustainable plan. You have an innate knack to really do politics, democracy, diplomacy, sustainable development, how you weave it all together. And democracy and politicians, I struggle with that. And this next book, Environmental Heroes and Diplomacy, I really like that because we need more diplomats. We need people who are willing to be bipartisan, to be diplomatic, to work with each other for new things for our world. I don't want to kind of transition into that but that last question that we just had which you discussed is a nice segue because and you tickled upon it. So I'm a big fan of Herman Daley, steady-state economics or ecological economics. We've heard terms, circular economy, donut economics from Mariana Mazzucato, mission economics, we've heard planetary boundaries which could be a form of circular or donut or its own type of economic model. We've been working for, I think we're on 50 or 51 years or close of ecological footprint. So we use it to calculate Earth overshoot but did we know that we could use it in another way to actually maybe have another economic model instead of just saying what bad we're doing or what our footprint is doing. How do we use that to stay within the planetary boundaries and on and on. And so how do we tie those economic models with diplomacy and democracy because we're always kind of going back and forth with the negotiations, the politicians and these models and business and how do you do it? How do you tie them all together? So I think we're going to see a very interesting attempt to do that next March. The UN Environment Assembly has two resolutions in front of it to set up a negotiating committee for a new convention that deals with plastics. One of them resolutions, the one from Japan just wants to deal with marine pollution from plastics. The other one which is supported by a number of countries including Switzerland and the European Union I think talks about life cycle analysis, talks about a circular economy for plastics. And so they're going to try and build a convention which has the circular economy at the centre of its model. That will be I think a trial run for the kind of way we might approach things in the future. I love that, I absolutely love it. You always have your finger on the pulse on these negotiations, these workshops and things and I just wanted to tickle your new book that's coming out in June enough that environmental heroes and diplomacy, 10 chapters from Luke Hoffman, Dr. Matthews, Eskander Friuz, I also mentioned Obama, Mustafa Tolba, the Egyptian king, you know, France Perez, Raul Estrada Oyala, you know, hero of the Kyoto, Barack Obama, Christiana Figueras. There are some amazing stories I'm sure going to come out of that. It's probably been a nightmare to pull all that together but I'm excited to see it and to read it and I hope we can have you back on the podcast again to have a discussion after we review that book and just to have a catch up because there's so much wisdom and that we need your help to have that but can you maybe tell us why did you decide to tackle this project as well? It was very kind words that you've given. This project originally came from my co-editor, Chris Spence, who wanted to do this kind of book and I told him I was far too busy and then he just hassled me for a long time until we agreed to do it and the title as you say is environmental heroes in diplomacy but the second part of the title is profiles encouraged and so it's very much like John F. Kennedy's book of 1956 where he looked at, I think, the same number of senators or former presidents who had gone outside their political parties to do something that was for their country as a whole as opposed to for their political party. Here what we've tried to do is something similar. These people, some of them were scientists, some of them were activists, many of them were either diplomats or were playing particular roles in UN negotiations. We have Maurice Strong, who was the father of sustainable development as well. Paolo Cabarrero, who's the mother of the SDGs and we thought, who were these people? Where did they come from? And so we go back, the authors of those chapters go back and look at them as people. How did they grow up? I mean, Maurice grew up in the Great Depression which had a huge impact somewhere near Alberta, had a huge impact and then how did he get there? Well, he traveled down Africa and then he ended up in Kenya and he started working for the oil companies. Well, how could environmentalists do that? And so you start to go and understand them a little and then when the issue that you're focusing on, whether it's the climate negotiations or the Rio conference in 1992 or the whaling commission, what role did they play to move that process forward and then what happened to them afterwards? So it's a way of trying to kind of let the reader get into understanding, into governmental processes through, in a sense, the eyes of someone who played a critical role to be more than just a government official or more than just a UN official, more than just a scientist, but really in a sense helped craft the global environmental regulations that we now have. I only have six more questions for you. I want to have a couple of light ones as well. So we touched upon this briefly in our first podcast, but you always have these crazy ties and comics and you have these movie hats and you're there. But I don't know if you knew that I also am kind of a Marvel superhero kind of person. He's reaching in their old grogo from the Mandalorian or I'm a big group fan. I'm a big Hulk fan because of the green aspect and the ties to nature and that. What got you on that kick? Is it just something that you enjoy or is it because of that vision of the future? Is that kind of that movie magic or fantasies? We're both tricky fans. We're both well versed in Star Wars and that as well. So why is that? Is that a tie that has a deeper meaning? I think growing up we probably both collected comics and then as an adult you're not meant to do those kinds of things and so you don't for a number of years and then you realize actually well I quite enjoyed them and so I do collect comics and in fact I have some that are being graded at the moment to see how much they're worth and whatever and I've been buying up comics with the dog Crypto in it because I had a dog called Crypto and Crypto as you may know is Superman's dog and there is a film coming out the League of Superpets It's a great movie. Saw the preview, it's amazing. With the Rock and Kevin Hart playing two of the characters Rock playing Crypto and I love it and so I have it as an escapism I have it as something that you know I'd always wanted to do a comic as well which is why I ended up doing the Santa Claus thing because I think you get to a different group of people and you talked about you know entertainment earlier and you know we've got to find different ways to engage with people it can't just be you know all the world's terrible we have to solve it, it has to be creative it has to be interesting, it has to be fun you know and I think you know if we're able to do that I mean the Global Goals campaign does a lot of that with the music content. I mean I think those are all very important we have to be multi-tasking to engage with people in different cultural venues as well. I agree, we pick up everybody where they're at and kind of address everybody's thing and I think in some respects we all start out at that just the basic entertainment that basic you know vision of the future this alternate reality it could be escapism but maybe you're escaping to a more sustainable place maybe you're escaping to this future that boy we'd love to have a future where we have have the ability to do some of these things and it's sustainable and beautiful as well I really see that as well and I don't believe we talked about it in our first podcast but we have so many dystopian movies and commercials and TV programs and you know Black Mirror and we have TED Talks but they're a little utopian future but they're not really movies or too many visuals besides presentations but really everything showing us the future is Mad Max Total Recall dystopian fighting over something it's very great, it's very sci-fi but none of it's this showing us this new vision and so I really think well how can we show a beautiful, desirable, resilient, regenerative future something where we've achieved the sustainable development goals where we've really got this future and what would it look and feel like similar to when we were younger seeing Star Trek and we'd say wow okay let's engineer let's figure out how we do hologram and 3D printer let's a food printer and how do we do these things the tricorder and the cell phones and how do we engineer that first we've got to do the movie magic so we can have the vision but then let's get the engineers the architects, the creatives on board and say wow that would be cool I want to live in that future let's do all we can to achieve that to get us there you know in your book in your book Tomorrow's People that we really discuss you talk about the future of taxis autonomous taxis and things but did you know basically you also talk about William Shatner you talk about that quote of Star Trek in there not only William Shatner go with blue origin Jeff Bezos he went up to outer space he was overwhelmed, crazy experience but on SpaceX the Falcon rocket that Elon Musk sent up to the ISS or up to outer space and back not only was that fabulous but I want to tell you that was pretty much autonomous I don't know if you watched it from beginning to end those astronauts didn't know what to do with their hand they didn't even have armrests so they're not they had 12 buttons to push they're not controlling it it was basically autonomous through computers from beginning to end yeah they were trained they had skills they knew in case of emergency but that was already an autonomous to outer space we can do that here on earth and in very short time the technology is already there we just need to make it happen and I think the thing with Bezos blue origin rocket is it uses liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen so it's not a polluter well I think Virgin and SpaceX are so I think there is an issue about legislation that needs to be passed absolutely you can't stop people they've already we've privatised space and so now it's going to happen the question is can we make sure that it doesn't contribute to polluting as well and clearly there is a way of doing that so I think the question is to turn around to Virgin and SpaceX and say you need to change your propeller system and if I was basis I would give them the information to do it and I think it would be a good idea to address climate change I absolutely agree with you the other thing is not even a week ago Rolls Royce just came out with the fastest electrical airplane single-seater but I think it was 280 something miles an hour and ran for an hour on electricity a long plug a long plug that they had trailing out yeah but the thing with that is that all that is happening and the hydrogen approach to air travel will be I think really important we have a shortfall that we need to deal with in the next 10-15 years and that is we have all these planes that are not going to go out of service because they've invested a huge amount of money and it's not yet being done which it should be done what we need to do for hub airports is to make household waste to air fuel the intent so you take household waste out of landfill and you use it to convert to air fuel and as you know aeroplanes can take biofuels we don't want them to take the wrong type of biofuels we want them to take the waste biofuels we want them to take the wrong type of biofuels and that is a waste-to-air approach which would have a 70% reduction in CO2 emissions from those hub airports yeah I love that there are so many things out there they are endless and we need imagination and we need those people who say hey I'm okay not being an Uber driver anymore but you know you have a space travel a next air travel or whatever it is there are so many opportunities there the last three questions I have and this first one will be the hardest you have you've answered it before but I believe your question will probably be a little bit different then what does the world that works for everyone look like for you Everyone has enough sufficient sufficiency to be able to live and to be able to provide for their family and to be able to educate themselves in whatever way that they want to. I think we all want to be able to have that for our family and that should be in a sense a right for everybody. If there was one message you could depart my listeners as a sustainable takeaway, even two messages that has the power to change their life, what would it be, your message? My message would be getting involved, be part of the change yourself. This process has, I mean, the whole book that we're doing that's coming out in June is showing individuals can make a difference and I truly believe that if we all participate in making the world a better place, then the world will be a better place. Why should young innovators or what should young innovators in your field be thinking about if they're looking for ways to make a real impact? As the book says, the innovation is happening on so many fronts and to be young now and to be, I mean, I think young people realize that they can be those innovators of tomorrow and that there are so many opportunities for them and the companies that don't move towards addressing sustainable development will be dinosaurs. They will close down because no one will want to work for them. The last question really is what have you experienced or learned in this professional journey, this life's journey you've had up until now that you would have loved to know from the start? I think that, you know, everyone is trying their best to do what they can and if you work together more and you don't go in and try and lecture people but you try and work from where they are, then if I'd known that at the beginning I would have approached a number of things I did differently. I now realize that if I approach it from, we're all going to problem solve together to make the world a better place as opposed to I potentially have the right answer. I think that is both better for me as an individual but also better for the world because, you know, to imagine a world where everybody has an opportunity to contribute and make it a better place through cooperation is better than having a dystopian world where it has to be forced on us all. Felix, thank you for letting us all inside of your ideas. It's been a shared pleasure. I love your book, Tomorrow's People, a new technology. I recommend anybody go out there, get it, read it. It's a tool. It's also an empowering thing. It's a nice read and I really thank you for doing that. I'm looking forward to the next one and that's all I have unless there's something you didn't get to let you speak or say. Now's your chance. Yeah, I guess the only final thing is do remember it's Christmas and many people would like that book as a present. Great. I love it. Thanks so much, Felix. Have a great day. It's been a pleasure. Bye-bye. Oh, bye-bye.