 All right. This is an inside Jerry's brain call on Monday, April 27th 2020. We are six weeks into lockdown I think this is more or less start of week seven for people in the US It's the age of eternity for people in China and other sorts of places, but some places are seeing daylight so that's kind of interesting and We don't want The pandemic to frame this entire call because there's a slice of food security that is very much about the pandemic And what's happening? We're trying to kind of look beyond that at the larger trends that were happening and what else was up So I'm going to do a really brief intro and then see where people would like to take the topic There were a bunch of questions in the invite that I'll probably just restate just to turn that around But we're trying to figure out How do we get to a much better food world down the road? What is the role of science and technology in this process? What is the role of indigenous wisdom and permaculture in this process? How does this this all sort of take us somewhere better in the long run and Probably some of us will want to pick up the word better and go like what do you mean better? and April sort of provoked this whole topic because she has a talk coming up That is about this kind of thing like food security in the future and I have to keep an eye on the waiting room admit people That's very fun. I totally knew to me that the managing the waiting room So I so as a starting point I'm a giant fan of regenerative and natural farming and a bunch of other different things I'll put a link in the chat right now For the place in my brain where all these things live and as we start talking I will overshare that And advanced warning here because this these are inside Jerry's brain calls I will periodically as you are talking I will periodically do a little screen sharing to show different parts of what I'm hoping Additions to what you're saying because you're mentioning a book that I've already curated into the brain or whatever else And so right now you can wander to the link I just put in the chat and that will take you into the nexus around food soil fertility All those sorts of things that I've been tending for a while and that particular nexus is new Maybe a year old when it dawned on me that I had all this disparate stuff about once the one straw revolution and regenerative agriculture and soil fertility and biochar and You know microbes in the soil and all of that and that it really kind of belong together in a nexus And I'm hoping at the end of this call I will be adding a butt-cut of new stuff to that to that nexus And then let me just restate the things that were in the invite As a starting point so How can we make our food systems more resilient? What is the balance between industrial local and regenerative farming? In particular, what should big food do like with these large, you know industrial agriculture industrial farming Caffo all of sort of industrialized food production What what is the reasonable path for them to get to a more sustainable place in the long run? What might we individually do what role should food science play what new technologies will help us thrive? Are we all going to be eating, you know algae that grow up to look like beef? I don't know How do we minimize the food systems negative effects on climate change or maybe even reverse them? One of the really neat things about regenerative ag is that it have it has five or six different pluses for climate change And then what attitudes need to change to get this all done? What what how do we need to think differently or be differently in the world and again back to How what arguments do we make that convince people to head in those directions? So I am going to go quiet now and see who would like to jump in and start the conversation for us and the chat I'm pretty sure will be active Well, I'm sure Jerry you're thinking about how this crisis dovetails into climate change issues and I think that we're facing a lot of pressure to try and make the economy look like it used to At the same time we have an incredible opportunity to make it different Yes, you those were like five different things that are all interesting to me In particular in the middle of the nexus of things on the pandemic that I'm curating I have a thought called might this might coronavirus tip us into new better ways of organizing society of doing things so I would love that and there's a lot of a Lot of force being applied to bring you know to reopen America or to reopen the world and to head back toward normal Anybody else want to pick up on this thread and run with it? I I guess I think that that we should take this It's an opportunity to have a better normal than what normal has been and I think a lot of people are learning new ways to communicate and new ways to share information that Hopefully will become more systemic But I'm also perplexed about the role of the individual in helping that change occur I understand the impact of big egg, but I also think that the question is how do we? Assist in information and learning and changes of behavior or awarenesses in populations of large groups of people Totally agree love that can Yeah, well ready First of all before we get too far down one I want to point out that it's Doug Carmichael's birthday. So happy birthday Doug I hope that you have many more trips around the sun and that despite all this chaos that this is gonna launch a really great year for you Thank you so much Ken and I just said happy birthday on Facebook and I'm totally totally spaced on that So I really appreciate that So last fall I had the opportunity to go to Montreal and work with a large ad company up there They recently passed the billion dollar mark. They're on track to look at how to get to two billion dollars And I was really stunned by a couple of things one not once did the word regenerative appear in this two-day meeting with all of their senior people Organic was there but not regenerative and two They are focusing on the most profitable part of their business, which is prepared foods So it occurs to me that one of the big changes in big ag is Has to do with the profit motive if it's all about profit Then I think we're gonna continue to have really bad food security problems If we can somehow shift big ag into a more of a service mode of this is required for the survival of people on earth And what's a reasonable margin, you know that we can work with and move away from you know We're gonna chase whatever makes the most money into we need to produce things that provide the greatest level of food security for people Does that require unwinding Wall Street pressure and profit optimization and like there's another Giant set of conversations that we've all been in about about, you know, capitalism's effects on everything Do we have to hit undo or redo on all of that to get the motivation shifted around or are there other things that people are seeing That that are working here Ken if you want if you have any April in the library Yes, it is it's my um, it's the Leidener library for anyone who's familiar I got the they they sent out like snapshots from campus Delighted to be here and I do not I want to listen and learn as much as I can But I do want to share that As part of the research I've been doing I have been digging deep into what's needed and I feel like we have Lots and lots of solutions that we know will that we know would work Where I am running into just it feels like not brick wall after brick wall, but where I'm just I'm running into all of these challenges is how do you It requires so much system change and it ties together what Judy was saying Which is like it's all it's great to talk about system change But individuals end up feeling really hamstrung if it's just about changing the system and no one individual is going to change it And yet without system change you can't have that individual level Activation and you know, whether it's grassroots farming or whatever. I'm not grassroots fine whether it's bottom-up Farming urban farming etc. I Am getting really stuck on exactly what you're mentioning Ken, which is okay We know what should work, but the current primarily economic and business models Are so entrenched and like what the question that I posed in the chat was is there a way to for big food to become smaller? And if so, where do you start that conversation? What nudges are necessary? How do you help big food see that through a different lens because it is going to require I don't want to talk just about power But it is going to require Letting go of some purse strings letting go of some degree of power Rethinking everything but as some others on the phone on the call. No You know at present rates one of the stats I just always like to throw out there is that if it's 2050 and we have 10 billion people in the world We don't have the ability to feed that many people given the current structure and I'm and I don't think that bigger is better But we have a bigger food is like the elephant in the room. So let me pipe down there, but that that's where I'm really I'm not I'm not running into problems around solutions that are out there. I'm running into problems as to activation Turning that into reality Fred now my name is Fred Davies and I'm a horticulturist at Texas A&M University and I would just like to remind everybody that 70% of the world's food is produced by small holders people who have 25 acres or less So the small holders are not going to go away and it's it's also a world of niches where we do need larger Industrial farms, but we also need small holder farms and one of the things That I think we're trying to do particularly in a developing world is to make small holder farmers Make make the jump from subsistence farming which sucks to becoming commercially successful and and servicing urban markets because the developing world the Urban urban places is developing fastest in the urban urban world And what happens is there are real opportunities to be servicing those markets So that's one comment I would make from the standpoint. It's a world of niches We're not going to do everything through vertical farming that has a niche but you're not going to grow fruit crops and Nut crops and vertical farming. So it's a world of niches. I would also say to there's some low-hanging fruit we should be going after and One of those is we waste a third of the food that's being produced on this on this planet I mean, that's just the disgusting waste of energy of land of people and everything else and There are ways we can dramatically Improve that if we're talking about climate change and what have you that's something we really need to address and there are some small companies that are doing that the Fact that we're connected to the cloud now a lot of apps have been developed to for for going ahead and actually rather than having on You know, for instance, if you go to a really nice supermarket here in the US, you know It's it's it's a it's a world of abundance when you look at all the the fruits and vegetables Well, a third of those fruits and vegetables are going to get tossed or They're going to hopefully end up in a food bank But again a lot of times the food bank doesn't have enough sufficient refrigeration to handle all that So there are real opportunities of changing that and there are real opportunities of changing that in the developing world Where they lose a lot of their product actually out in the field just due to poor or poor management Techniques and what have you and one of the things that we're really interested in is what we call sustainable Intensification and sustainable intensification means we're going to use organic We're going to use synthetic But we're going to use our resources much more smartly much more efficiently and we have tremendous opportunities of being able to do that now Love that And and some of these niches might be extremely I'm projecting here and furring and throwing it back to you friend Some of these niches might be incredibly natural and all about soil fertility and and and all that and some of them might be completely scientific and synthetic and be like Matt Damon on Mars And and we I think we're going to wind up with a way of that these things will blend as our food sources Certainly and and and I think another thing too for instance like one of the things that Bannon Garrett and I did as we wrote a report for the global Federation of competitive councils one of the things we've also talked about too is as an example like West West Africa is doubling its population in the next 20 years. They currently can't feed themselves now So they're in a real mess two of the six largest cities are going to be in west and central Africa So urbanizations happening there very quickly Sub-Sahara Africa only five percent of it is irrigated And you cannot grow reliable crops without irrigation particularly high value fruits and vegetables and also a lot of protein sources as well too As an example of technology, we've had drip irrigation around for years it's a very very efficient way of being able to go ahead and apply water And one of the things we now have is we have off-the-shelf Sensors that that can be hooked to the cloud can be also hooked up to solar Solar air power to irrigation because again electricity is a huge problem in the developing world And that can be put together as a package We have these opportunities of doing these types of things and we absolutely have have to be doing that as well too And it's all about sustainable intensification. It's also it's also using good soil conservation techniques There's a greater appreciation of the rise of spear the microbes and what have you And and how we can have a more sustainable type system. I mean we we have these technologies It's just the question of adapting adopting these technologies and it's it's creating policy to drive that as well too Love that. Thanks friend. Anyone else want to want to join in? Please Kevin I just typed into the chat that you know, we're seeing right now with the restaurants being closed How much inefficiency there is in distribution as we were just discussing because farmers are plowing under crops, you know, they're throwing milk away If you know people were more able to You know cook on their own you would see a Much better and efficient use of what we do know how to grow I'll also remind you Jerry that in Oaxaca You introduced Me to one of the first places that I had eaten insects on any regular basis in the in the food and You know Anyone who has a home is perfectly capable of raising their own protein if they're willing to become insect farmers, right? and You know, there's a certain revulsion to this that is built into You know what we consider food to be but if we were to rethink what is food what's protein and what are the sources of it You would be able to um get a lot more You know close to home and scale than what we have, you know, right now At a mass production level. So those are just some random thoughts that I thought thrown into the mix Thanks, Kevin. There's really there's really an enormous number of sources of food once you sit down and start making the list April go ahead okay, um Quick question which relates to kevin and what you were asking and then can your earlier comment I'm just curious and fred you may know as well when it comes to things like alternative protein um Those seem to me to be on the one hand at least in theory highly profitable Although they require a lot of r&d dollars right now um Ken when you were in montreal, I don't know if this if alternative protein was part of the conversation But if so, how does that factor into the Where is that on the profit versus? Certainly it's more sustainable But just trying to figure out What the economics of that are today or could be in the future It was not a focus of this particular companies. Um, they're They're looking at how to make proficiencies by, you know, using every piece everything in the corn plant like, you know we cite just Really good use of materials and and um, they were not looking at stuff like beyond beef and all that which um, that's a whole other Piece of the puzzle that uh, personally, I'm not a fan of of fake meat I don't have real meat that's sustainably grown and harvested It made me crazy to go to chinese restaurants where there was like fake pork fake chicken and fake beef Where the only difference was the satan was a little bit darker each time Like they really know no difference in flavor no difference in anything and the faking of meat seemed so weird So so dysfunctional to me. Fred, you raise your hand. I just want to make a point 25 of the world already eats insects as a source of protein. So that's already happening um also to uh with 3d printing The ability of being able now to make composite foods uh Insect protein is it's actually insect protein is is is more efficient than Then beef beef is about a 15 to 1 from the standpoint of what you need to The feed to get a kilogram of of protein out of it And actually insects are even more efficient than plants something like soya bean from the standpoint of producing protein as well too so We're going to see the the composition of foods that are made in the future with three 3d printing the mixing of Mixing of different components that we can we can use in food and banning you can probably add some stuff to that as well too But um, there are a lot of opportunities in that area and it's all a question of You know, it's it's all about marketing and and and behavioral change and and and what have you I mean um, and and one of the ways of actually changing that too is It's the mcdonald's Hamburger approach that you get to the family through the through the kids through the young people And that's where the that's where the changes can can really start to happen actually how Behavioral change critical thinking if we get at critical thinking any more in this country Starting in uh starting an elementary elementary school From the standpoint of the foods we you guys are talking about the nexus Well, everything as you know is all connected food energy water human health nutrition uh GDP all connected Just think of all the good fiber you get from an exoskeletal, you know protein too sure Sure in Curitiba brazil in the seven days They um became the greenest city in south america by teaching the kids and the kids came home and said all right Here's what sorting does here's recycling. Here's where you like all these different things But they went straight for the kids and it worked Uh in central america to get literacy up They basically took two weeks off school everybody got two weeks home and the kids taught elders who were illiterate how to read And it worked great literacy rates like skyrocketed. So kids are a great avenue Judy did you want to jump in? Well, I just wanted to get in the drivers behind this because At the end of the day it has to meet the needs of human beings as well as the needs of the planet And so the elements of social education and social change are rooted in the cultures in which people reside in the values there So if people want to be healthier and if it's healthier to eat different kinds of food and they taste as good as other foods They will naturally migrate in the direction we want them to go And so somehow that connectivity needs to be explored And maybe it is the kids bringing things home and saying look how great this pace mom But i'm not sure what the answer is but i don't think that you have to look at an oppositional point of view between Human needs and planet needs and business and economic needs because the most successful products are the ones that people gravitate for But if you were trying to push a product to people who don't want product You can't make money. So Those are the the questions that are there. And I think the the covid situation Really triggers a lot of issues on multiple levels because of the disparity of how it's being handled in a lot of different places And the capacity of various people to respond to it in certain ways and others not to be able to respond So I don't know how to dip into that deep well But I just want to kind of keep in mind the role of the individual because it is ultimately the individual that drives the economics And there's there's always sort of this this backdrop when people complain about capitalism One of the rebuttals is but by people vote with their feet with their dollars basically by buying or not buying certain Different things and I'm always a little skeptical about that argument in particular because and I'll just share my screen again here things like Uh in the nixon administration nixon told earl butts His nickname was rusty. So I guess he was rusty butts The secretary of agriculture to go make food cheap. And so high fruct of the fact that high fructose corn syrup isn't everything Uh, this leads the cheap cheap calories. This leads to the industrialization of a lot of agriculture us policy basically favored creating cheap cheap carbs and screwed things up for us um, and so there's these Really massive policy interventions that happen that that make all these things, you know So now you're you you're a family with not a lot of money resources And you need to feed the kids like a dollar hamburgers not a bad deal considering what it costs to buy natural ingredients and then go cook them um, so yeah, the It was one of the specials I saw on climate change emphasize the fact that almost everything we eat That's prepared anyway has palm oil in it. And of course the palm plantations are one of the key things leading to deforestation that All the problems associated with climate change. So but that has been driven by a lot of policies and various things I think you can uh, you have to to delve into that and try to try to change the policies on a macro level Back to some of the other things. I think I remember 40 years ago. I used to make a Shake for myself in the morning with some protein powder I don't bananas and milk and orange juice or whatever And that was 40 years some pro I have no idea what was really in that protein powder, right? But it seemed like it was going to give me some extra pushes that went from my morning run And uh, so I think that you look at the insects You turn those into powder. You don't sell people insects It's some kind of protein powder of some kind and it and it's mixed into other foods and as fred pointed out. I mean I think we will see home 3d printers. I mean, they've already been made like pudini and others Actually made a home deep 3d printer where basically have cartridges. You can mix different ingredients. Some might be, you know Mashed up tomatoes. Some might be protein powder, whatever So if you get it to that realm and you get people experimenting and I think the kids are Certainly key to that You find that's just another ingredient is to put some protein powder and that happens to be made from insects Or wherever so that that can that'll come along And I would add too on the on the meat front Actually, I've had it had an impossible burger X price Convention last fall and I couldn't tell the difference between it But you know those those are crappy burgers to start with right? I mean, it's You know, they got all this other crap in them and who knows but it seems like it's it's really taken off I mean if you saw the news today beyond meat, it's just skyrocketing in value as a company, but they're signing contracts with china now and you know, this is where you're seeing Taste in the sit in the country has changed and is willing to accept this But the other thing, you know for for ken, you know, there's the cultured meat Which a number of companies have been Where you basically are taking cells from a live cow And culturing it and turning it into designer meat now that meat should be theoretically far better than eating an actual steer Because you don't have any hormones no No, you know artificial ingredients or anything else And you can design the fat content you can design the meat, but yet it's based on real meat Obviously between the two you have a huge Improvement in terms of climate change, right? I mean 98 99% reduction in the use of land 90% reduction probably not that much in water. Maybe 80% certainly less energy I mean your whole would Beef alone is what 14% of global emissions all that everything associated with beef and it takes what 25 Would know what 25 pounds of grain to get one pound of steak. I mean, it's highly inefficient. It's using up a huge amount of arable land Moving away from beef production with actual animals. In other words cut out all the Unnecessary part, which is everything but the meat, right? I mean why not just grow the meat instead of growing the whole animals Much more efficient. So, you know that kind of thing. I think is in the offing and we'll see He wants his steak from texas. I know Well, I want an animal that's been out in the world Absorbing sunlight and eating grasses and you know and like if you look at something like salatin farms, you know Polyface farm stroll salatin. There's a sustainable model um, it's I think separating feedlot beef from Small producers is a really important distinction that's being made. I Hate feedlot beef. It's like, oh, I don't want to I'm with you on that. I mean, but can we can we meet the quantity? So I mean right now we have something like 75 billion farm animals a year or slaughter I mean just think of that quantity and all the people want As you're rising middle class and we go to nine and a half or 10 billion people on the planet and soon we ever get back to The growth and you have the middle class instead of sinking is rising and they all want to have high protein diets and and beef I mean the challenge of producing that at that scale of what the nature we're Uh Figures are that we could be seeing the end of fish in the ocean in the next 30 years Classification how much Fish is used to feed Beef and other animals chicken. I mean there's fish meowing all of this stuff. So massive amounts of fish are caught It doesn't matter. They're clear cutting the ocean and then that's ground up into into food for chickens for cows So I think that's going to go away pretty quickly and that's going to reduce one input there And the other is we don't I don't have to have steak every night. I'm happy to have a burger once a month I don't you know, I don't need this all the time, but I want the option of having my burger when I want it Well, it'll probably be around for a long time Too too tiny thing for expensive two tiny things and then to Doug. I think who's uh looking for the floor One small thing is there's two grades of cricket flour The premium grade has had the antennae and legs removed Which is like human operators sitting there and pluck pluck pluck pluck pluck and it's like ah But it's it's smoother better better flour apparently and then a story more toward what april's looking for about palm oil Which is I happened to be present one time years ago when they're the founders of rainforest action network talked about their first projects with mitzubishi corporation and how the chairman and the chairman of mitzubishi was in the room when I heard the story and So the story goes that They approached rainforest action network approached mitzubishi and said hey, you're farming palm forest everywhere. It's terrible for orangutans It's a mess and there were like two really bad Rocky meetings went through and then at the third meeting the first sign that they had that there might be some kind of understanding happening was um, the the the chairman of matsushita had had his card because they did a ritual presentation of business cards at the end of Each of these meetings had had his card printed on recycled paper and it said so sort of on it And the head of the rainforest action network had all of his vitals in japanese on the reverse of his card printed And so as they exchanged cards each had a gesture of acknowledgement And what had happened was the chairman of matsushita had traveled down to borneo and had seen what his company was doing And it had a profound personal experience of the results of the policies and then mandated that across matsushita Changes should be made now palm oil is still being you know harvested everywhere So I don't know what what that led to but but personal connection trust built over time Plus personal experience of somebody actually from big food going into the place. I think paid off. I think really helped Um, so now dug Okay Listening to this conversation It almost sounds like the problem is basically solved which is kind of interesting A lot of optimism But in fact we're up against the situation where the big corporations Are going to try and define what this new normal is And if it's based on profit We're going to have a distribution problem at the bottom half of the population Because there's not much profit there So I see a big political issue coming up that's different than the technical issue I kind of like the idea that the technical issue is pretty solved But it's got to be solved by people who are in institutions And that seems to me going to be really dicey And this takes us back again to my original question Or it's very related to the original question to your point diagram like lots of solutions There's a lot out there that we know or have very very strong reason to believe scientifically Um culturally that it could work But and I guess I don't know I hadn't put the political spin on it Although I suppose it is very much a political issue It's just more that there's a massive shift in expectations, but also the balance of power And who holds the economic upsides As well as in fairness some of the risk And that's the piece that I'm still not squaring despite and I love I mean I love this conversation This is we're sort of tilling the soil figuratively But um Where does and is it public policy that Are you going do you try to impose something on this like this and more from a from the perspective of Distribution Supply chains and so forth Sorry to cut in Judith remarked a few minutes ago that Pushing a product doesn't make money Um and this is the same problem We can't push this stuff. It's got to be pulled It means you go to the supply and demand issue Instead of trying to push the supply chain you empower the demand chain On a localized level With recirculatory currencies that have Presence in the domain the geography the bio region You make it more profitable to farm Because not only are the nutrients and resources being circulated at the level of equipment and materials, but also the labor I mean farming in north america occupies what proportion of the labor force? Single percent two percent Well, I'd love to see it hit 20 You know all over the place my own community vancouver island The local farmers are talking about the problems here. It's not production of problem. It's finding labor And then it's finding market. Now if you have a trouble finding labor and finding market There's a connection problem And that's called money frankly, so Let's change the money, but you're living in paradise on vancouver island Yeah, it's about the same size as taiwan with um, I think The 60th of the population That's beautiful Doug. We're gonna jump in. Yeah, you put a lot of Uh pressure on the increasing the demand side But at the moment we have a problem the demand side is weakened by the fact that people don't have any income so the problem of the demand side is rooted in a the reaction to the virus And probably that sums a lot of other problems that already existed But people are uh, I have friends who this week have run out of their last money and their last food So they need a different money because if we understand money as a measure system A social agreement An interchange record system Why are we restricting ourselves to bank money? I mean curious that the last thing to be slowed down in this COVID epidemic is the banks Interest is still charged rents are still charged. It's just labor that's put on the side mara burner Well, can we not monetize that labor on a localized level Frankly, it's very simple to do this the technology is available. It's just a question of perception in my view This is a tiny aggression Tiny aggression, but I think that the monetary system is going to see a series of rippling shocks run through it as people Stop paying rent as people go on rent strikes as As the people collecting the rents aren't able to pay their debts It's just going to whack all the way up and down the system And we are not quite beginning to see the beginning, you know, the effects of of those movements. I think it's sort of a jubilee It's it's closest thing we've achieved to a writing off of the So my understanding of christianity in the south was that uh, people were allowed to go preach around the south They just weren't allowed to talk about jubilee Because it was the freeing of slaves and the clearing of debt every seven years And so long as you don't teach jubilee, we're good You can go proselytize all across the south because people need some hope and salvation To get back on your point about demand though Um, and I I agree the the pull through is is is critical in all this I think one of the things you're seeing in millennials is not only are they looking at a label to see that It's not a gmo, which is totally blown out of proportion. And that's another conversation But also also what are the ingredients? And I I think you know with amazon picking up whole foods, you're going to see some real changes as well, too from from the standpoint of Was this sustainably produced? And and I think that's going to gradually change the game and it's very interesting that The largest seller of organic produced produce in the u.s is walmart So there are going to be some changes that that that go on as as as far as as far as that goes We have a long ways to go and again, I think it's an educational process beginning with teaching young people good food systems in grammar school And and like the state of north carolina, for instance, they require 10 or they're The food that goes into the school systems there is local And and I think those are great opportunities of bringing in fresh fruits and vegetables and other things and teaching young people about eating healthy One of the problems with local is that climate change is going to make a lot of places incapable Of producing local food So we're still going to have a distribution of the distance problem Either we move the food or we move the people Or the food moves into some kind of synthetic environment where where it's controlled Climate control water controlled whatever else and not grown where it's becoming hospitable outside Again, we have a lot of opportunities with what we call controlled environment agriculture There's what we call plastic culture There are very sophisticated systems like, you know, dutch greenhouse type systems and there are very low tech Poly type houses the use of drip irrigation with a polyhouse. For instance, it doesn't need a fancy Pad and fan cooling system. It can be very very much run off the grid But it allows you to extend the season and you can actually increase the productivity And you can also grow your heirloom products if you want to too in these systems as well It's niches informal poll going back to the question of Whether and how big food can transition to these sorts of Environments and methods that we're talking about Hold up a think a number of fingers between one and ten If you think that 20 years from now this change will have largely happened So one means no, it's going to be pretty much business as usual and a 10 And gene's holding up a zero A one means business as usual a 10 means things will have changed largely in 10 years. So quick poll Hold up your hands in front of the the camera five Six April how many fingers So So big food will it have made the change or not? So one is business as usual industrial farming everything else today 10 is This will have changed wholesale and we will have we have achieved some kind of sustainable food production So I hold up the number of fingers just a minute. Just a minute. Did you say and we will have achieved some form of sustainable? No, or I mean, yeah, these are two different businesses usual different from we will have achieved sustainable Okay, so Good seven eight 10 five five five a wavy five eight Cool. Thank you Kevin go ahead. You look like you're trying to jump in or I might add that the I think that Big agribusiness will still be involved. I just think that it's going to be You know Tyson's foods in my backyard That they're going to have systems that they deploy right and you know, it'll disaggregate It won't necessarily be factory based But you know, they'll still be just like mcdonald's and the mcdonald's all right the Uh mcdonald's corporation is a landlord and they control the supply chain into the store Um, I think that what we eat will still have Supply chain players that are you know supplying things that we need To grow on our own and for it to be closer to us, but I think that there will still be big players So that's just my spin on and their roles will have changed Yeah, I think that they're you know, there will still be a You know, they'll see the trend they'll address the trend But there will still be some centralized profit taking right as as the result of it You might see some very different players. I mean going for 20 years Maybe impossible foods is one of the really big players And maybe the way they produce food is that they have breweries In cities all over the world That the ingredients go there, but the actual meat or whatever it is is produced in a local brewery I know andres forgosh who started What's it called a modern meadow Who originally, you know 15 years ago wanted to do cultured meat. I think he's now doing Leather That's real leather but made from cells But he had a vision of these breweries throughout the world to culture meat So you go down and I always joke with him We'd have a cow in the in the front of my glass And that cow would be there forever because you're just getting cells from the cow But you don't kill the cow and inside it's like a brewery with all these, you know clean Tanks and everything else making your food So but that brewery might be like the kinkals or it might be or you know Owned by some multinational or have a franchise gets a lot of the material from the global system But in fact actually makes the food for you Locally on demand in a much more efficient way Uh a different kind of food that itself is more efficient, but it's less moving crap around the world Yeah I don't know you but the uh, you know, it's picking brewers as a as a community That is one of the most collegial Competitor environments. I've ever seen them ever, right? They're willing to share with each other. They share ideas They help each other It would be good to see a little bit of that, you know, move into food at large So I'm just just certainly divert from the food specifically. I mean, I've done work on, you know, 3d printing stuff and And my vision is I mean, I've wanted to challenge somebody a crowdsourcer next prize to To develop a universal scalable universal manufacturing facility And of everything from two people in a garage to an amazon warehouse full of machines That makes on demand the product you want is produced there the files are sent around the world And of course there's raw materials, etc But it could be at any scale in a local community So that the means of production are actually in the community or the larger urban area or whatever Uh, but maybe it may be a multinational that sets it up may not be but it's Particularly when you get to something like 3d printing and I think also in this whole food production area There's a potential for all kinds of scalable projects was starting with individual entrepreneurs small groups And scale it up and and it could be As ken was saying very collegial But a very different business model, even though you may still have giant global corporations Yeah, go look up neil gershenfeld's work at mit media lab and his fab lab Right. Yes. I read his book and I know I know I mean it was it wasn't the right technology at the right era But what you're talking about they were thinking about Yeah, exactly and also the uh What designing the world or the one by the the three brothers Uh, yeah, there's a lot of thought and a lot of potential and of course 3d printing has become extraordinarily Okay, April go ahead jump in This is just Interesting, um, I'll be right back in a minute There we go um Jerry, this is the brewery concept is taking me back to and jerry feel free to chime in Back in the time of various european famines where the carlsberg And I know that we're talking about breweries for different kinds of cell culturing and different kinds of food But speaking of breweries for beer the carlsberg brewery Open sourced its most prized form of yeast It didn't see this as it's protected intellectual property that it was going to go make a bunch of money on They actually realized that if they could make the yeast openly available That more people would have access to nutrition but also more innovation could happen on top of this culture And so i'm just wondering i mean it's more of a I'm just i'm just totally in mind meld mode, but this notion of breweries and what What a brewery stands for and what it has the role it has served in the past In different circumstances, but how useful that concept could be both as a means of food production But also as a means of collegial to your point kevin Information sharing et cetera and also just rethinking business and community as a whole So the carlsberg story is fascinating when you look at what they did I mean it seems like we're talking about a bottom-up approach To read redeveloping restructuring the the global food system community by community and new technology combined with many old ideas Offers incredible new potential to do things differently and i that's sort of been my theme is Is how does this technology offer off with innovation? offer opportunities to do things differently better and More democratically in the sense that the technology itself has been democratized and democratizing innovation So you know and what pred and i did was you know on the ecosystem was Almost all of it revolved around connectivity because that provides a whole new capability for you know connect You know producer with distributor with with consumer et cetera It's a different world in what's possible, but it's very bottom-up kind of world too in terms of connecting people in the same community to To create a whole ecosystem for the for food. So it's a whole different way that we can erode the current structure sort of subversively in the sense that you just start doing things differently and It shows success and profitability because anybody doing it's got to make make a living And also fred has been very big on creating a whole new generation of urban farmers urban food producers making it a cool profitable a good career and not out there with the hoe in the hot sun and some dirty field, you know like I was worked two summers on the cotton ranch in central california. So I know what that kind of work is like And I If you want make sure your kid doesn't want to be a rural farmer just send them out to work in the farm for a summer Good lesson. I'm gonna get it. It's a different world forward. I guess what i'm saying It has a lot of possibilities that we can explore Yeah next to to david then dug but a quick question which is has anybody written Has anybody posted any place sort of the menu of local food creation opportunities as we move forward? You know whether there's 3d printing or you know Food grenades, you know seed bombing your your next next door yard or whatever But what is what does that menu of possibilities look like and I'll just ask that let me go then to david and dug I think our report lays that out in a big framework. Oh cool. Okay, and I wrote I mean, I was did you post a link to it? But yeah, we can post the link to that one one of the things that we already been posted on the chat Okay, one one of the things that we really Advocated to was technology is not a panacea. It needs to be interwoven with smart policy. There needs to be mentorship. I think Also too for instance, there needs to be a linkage with markets if it's not market driven It's not value chain driven. It's not going to fly And there's a lot of opportunities of actually attracting Young people by young I mean the age of 35 and younger into this business who had nothing to do with agriculture before in the past and if you Unless you come from a successful Farming family nobody wants their kids going into agriculture because agriculture sucks. It's a horrible life They don't realize the technology and all the cool stuff that's that's happened and it's coming about All with the apps and the Connections to the cloud and what have you and there's a food revolution going on right now And that food revolution is not going to stop I mean look at the look at the interest there is right now and food around the world The anthony bourdain's are all over the world locally And that's that's that's creating this this this pull through And there there's a big interest that's going on in foods right now How it's prepared in in east africa for instance They boil the hell out of their native vegetables and they have wonderful native vegetables there And as you all know when you boil vegetables you basically get rid of the nutrients and the vitamins and the stuff that you really need to be using So there's opportunities of being able to go ahead and and present these native foods For instance in a much more palatable way because the middle class is very much interested in eating native and eating local And what have you there's there there's great opportunities in that area David then Doug My question, let's see. Yeah, I'm off mute. Um, my question is What are the sociological or economic precursors of In the brewery community that Causes the brewery community to be so extraordinarily Cooperative and sharing Um, my perspective, you know as an observer is that it has a very Clubby insider vibe to it right that they feel like they are a part of something Uh, you know where they have You know, they they like people tasting their beer But they like, you know, their recipes and their sharing and their sharing techniques because The Goliath is You know in Bev, right? Or, you know, that bud wiser and owns all these, you know other, you know, or You know a you know Miller brewers, um You know, they feel like what they're doing is Superior and is adding to a quality of life for both them In terms of what they can consume that they're making themselves And the ability to Work with each other and they feel good about being, you know, the label of being a brewer so That's just my perspective on why it works So it's an alliance of the less powerful It seems to be all right. That's the that's the engine I mean as as That is the you know, there is a Force that's saying, yeah, you can go in and buy the crap. Okay on the, you know store shelves or You can make yourself. I'll show you how to do it. All right, you know, you ought to get started, you know They're you know, they readily will proselytize somebody Into becoming a craft brewer. All right they're only a handful that try to scale up and You know own a bar or, you know, buy the big copper vats and and make it at that level Most people just have, you know, the the conversion kits where they're making it and keeping it chilled in a refrigerator. So Doug and I don't like to make room for people who haven't had a chance to get the floor in case maryland Aleem Howard gene in case you have a question or a comment. I'd love to go there, but first Doug Yeah, first odd brewery. I think part of the brewery system Is that drinking beer is a social activity? And that really affects the way it's produced It's it's the production among friends rather than producing for customers So it's different. The point I wanted to make here is That the technology paradise Is taking all the world's data And assimilating it to big data that's managed by algorithms They don't even need human intelligence. It's just all the data And it seems to me the kind of farming that we're talking about would be a prime candidate for integrating Into big data now the problem with that is you get a single system Who owns it? How's it regulated? And what's it going to do to surveillance and politics? and John Deere has done to data in agriculture horrible horrible things that I wouldn't wish on any smallholder farmer So we don't want to follow that path and I won't go into that in any depth But I want to go quiet because Marilyn Aleem Jean Howard any Want to jump in I'll jump in please do Um, so my name is Marilyn Paul And I'm here because I'm working on a book called Get food on the table without making such a mess In the kitchen and on the planet And so I find I will just speak for a minute about that That we're talking about local food production, but also local meal production and Good meal production has been abandoned by a lot of people. I think people are coming back to it now In the current situation My first book was it's hard to make a difference when you can't find your keys and what that's About is my struggle With being chronically disorganized So I'll just say another word about the book Which is that I think that when we're all moving So fast and trying to be productive and really entering the capitalist sort of system which has us as producers and consumers that we have left out a lot of Of The importance of household and home and wendell berry talks a lot about this And what I wanted to do was integrate The just the dailiness of just getting food on the table. That's healthy And healthy, you know, I think a couple of you brought it up doesn't just mean vegetarian But it does mean if we're going to eat meat eating responsibly eating regenerative meat from regenerative agriculture, but also valuing The quality of life and experience in the household Which many of us including myself this why wrote the book I discovered having been a climate activist for years how Food waste all kinds of aspects of food production and food waste Contribute well more to global warming than transportation and oil So I'm very happy to be here listening to you because part of it is what are policies that we can devise but also I read recently about Boredom foods and how they had to change their sort of a lineup of Offerings to the consumer because the consumer is looking for better less processed food And as we keep learning that Processed food is bad for our health Leads to diabetes leads to obesity I would not want this conversation to not include the health impacts Of the terrible ways that we eat And the ways that big food really contributes to creating not just profitable food But food that's designed to be addictive And that's a part of the story Maryland, thank you. That's wonderful. Do you have any great questions for that? Do you have any questions for everybody else in this in this conversation? So one one one reason why I'm here is I'm very interested in learning more about the policy end of creating healthier foods So we know for example our obesity rates are going up and our diabetes rates are going up In relationship to big food. What does anyone here know about creating better Health parameters for a public that's really suffering from poor food consumption patterns And now my partner at bridgeway partners wrote a book called systems thinking for social change And so we're looking at this from a systems thinking perspective Looking for leverage in ways to make change and I'd love to hear any comments about where's the leverage and We're talking about embedded systems and I'm looking at how do you look at embedded systems and make changes? Not just in policy, but fundamental values And I'm sort of ransacking ransacking this wet brain on board for Examples and all I'm thinking about is you know regulations that force stores to put some fruits and foods where there's food deserts You know in other locations so that so the people who live in food deserts have some access to natural foods But I'm not coming up with a whole bunch of things Probably I'm just not being creative enough and thinking about what's been done because I know that there's much more planning go ahead just what do people think that This situation will look like at the end of the covid crisis whenever we can call it an end, but it's how is this changing People's both their habits and their because they're having to cook at home and a lot of that and just be there's going to be so many changes in terms of employment In terms of bankruptcies. I mean We're we're headed to it Probably a depression or something close to how will that change the baseline from which we try to move forward in Implemented the kind of changes we're talking about here Anyone go ahead I mean, Marilyn, what are you thinking because you know, are we moving towards worse habits of what we eat or changing habits or I think that's the key is changing habits of thought and habits of behavior And one thing is that when people have Perhaps a little more time because they're not commuting What what do they do with that extra time? sort of since at least I grew up thinking that making food Was sort of a woman's thing to do and since I saw myself as a feminist and so misguided Let me just say I was not going to make food I was not going to value food production and what a misguided way to look at creating a good life Now that people are many people are home cooking Maybe that will lead to greater value placed on Family meals, but that's could be wishful thinking Doug and then I'd like to go back to Howard Aleem Jean if you'd like to speak in Yeah, just really quickly How much are we going to have food riots or food violence and let's say the next two weeks? I wondering myself And yet and yet providing some sustenance to people is not a difficult or expensive thing to do if If you're not providing like ribeye steaks and whatever else like there's a lot of really good nutritious food That's very easy to cook That is not expensive. So it's kind of a crazy thing that that people are suffering and struggling to get any kind of food It's really it's really nutty. Well, let me just add one statistic here. I got today My grandson goes to a high school in Enfield, Connecticut Where 12 of the kids in that school are homeless And they live in the forest The school Fortunately is open for meals for breakfast and lunch for those kids when nothing else is open But the fact that 12 percent of the children in that place are living homeless in the woods. It's just frightening Connecticut where it's very very cold in the winter, right? Yeah Most people don't realize that but in public school systems almost 50 percent almost 50 percent Of the food is subsidized On those and those those are kids getting like a breakfast and a lunch, which will probably be their two best meals of Of the day. So for a lot of people on Food insecurity like one out of one out of seven Americans is is receiving some type of food food support I mean, we're the wealthiest country in the world and we have this problem going on You can imagine what it's like in the developing world Yeah There was an interesting report on the problem of all this food being destroyed And it leads to the systemic question Because the problem was the kind the way the food is product is produced and shipped Does not work for for supermarkets. It only was working for restaurants. For example huge pallets of eggs You know to go to a restaurant Well, they're not put in the one dozen containers to go to a supermarket And apparently that that was a problem just across the board They couldn't just simply take it to a supermarket. Now that is shows what you have when you get this kind of system That's so specialized and supply chains are all done a certain way that you're not flexible You're not resilient. You couldn't take that food and ship it down to I mean I had a friend who's driving up from florida where the the cars were lined up for two miles to get to the food bank And I'm sure it has been all over the country. There's been this 10,000 people in line. I mean It's insane. It's morally insane But it's also system systemically and structurally insane that we can't figure out how to get food to the people who need it When we are throwing food away And I saw a little piece of this a couple years ago when I was talking to somebody about Bakery's or whoever that had excess bread Let's say that they wanted to donate to you know worthy causes and the recipients of the bread wanted it sliced and bagged And and couldn't deal with just loaves of bread and I'm like, whoa, okay. This is like we've got food And yet we're sort of stuck in between Jean and Howard. Do you want to jump in? This is like The analogy of the toilet paper story. You may have seen about the supply chains for household use toilet paper versus supply chains versus commercial use toilet paper and how it was Demand in one was not shiftable to demand in another Yeah, I mean the the issues around health and hunger And supply chains bring me back to resilience and regional food systems I've also been very very concerned about these the health and hunger issues. I've been looking recently at Um, uh, this idea of universal basic food as a compliment to universal basic income Uh I don't see how This these type of supply chain issues are going to get Resolved without some type of de-complexification of of these systems, you know pushing it pushing it down to to regional scales And to compliment big food, you know squeeze squeeze big food out of out of the eaters Food baskets a little bit at least To to put more redundancy into these systems Universal basic food just seems to me an idea I like the phrase I love the phrase too and and and I always have a trouble I always have trouble with money and apolosis, but when when Somebody's well-being is measured by how many dollars they have in their pocket And that's what we start using to go create policy and do everything else. It just frustrates the hell out of me I'd like people to have two dollars in their pocket, but be completely fat and happy and not worried about their next meal like Or maybe like trim and tone. I don't know but but I want them to not worry about food and not associate food with money Because before the industrial revolution, that's how everything worked Right and we we have an inability to see a world that might operate like that We we just it sounds like charity and it sounds like you know the beggars bowl Or maybe there's a couple surviving sort of examples of what you know, how this might work or what this what this feels like And and the idea that people might have access to good food as a routine thing and that that they wouldn't have to pay is is Anathema now which scares me about where we've gone in society. Go ahead David Um one thing that uh, we might Look to as a root cause is the idea of just in time supply chains Just in time supply chains require every Link of the chain to be strong And of course the chain is only as strong as its weakest link The uh The financial times had an editorial Yesterday or the day before on how business has to go from just in time to just in case And that relates to your resilience question. Uh, Howard, you know, I mean How do we have multiples multiple sources or and of course, how do we have more local production of food? So that you're not, you know, you're not stuck in what happens to the global supply chain It's just like going to why wouldn't you go to solar energy where one? You never have to pay for energy that fuel ever and secondly, you're not subject of global You know vacillations and price rise Shut, you know embargo all the things that happen with oil don't happen when you have You know renewable energy, right? So from a logical Resilience point of view it really makes sense to be able to do much of what you can locally Um, it doesn't take you away from all supply chains, but it it changes the whole mentality of how you organize your society Even just the pricing slice of everything you just said, which was all really interesting Even just taking out that pricing slice I was in a conversation a couple days ago where it turns out that when the railroads get out to the agricultural section in the middle of the country They are the buyers of grain and they set price and they they have people back home calculating for each farmer What is the break-even amount for the railroad not the farmer? What is the amount of money? They will pay for that farmer's crop that will barely keep the farmer alive into the next season and let them buy some seed In the next season and that's the price. They said they said like this incredible bare minimum and because they're a monopsonist because how else are you going to get your grain to market in that era? that that worked and It's craziness and never mind all the other dysfunctions of markets that that we know about through food in the world so So and that's just one layer of you know soil fertility They may be metaphorically being down here and people's attitudes and desires and you know as people rise economically They want more meat in their diet way up here, right and It's insane. This is this is clearly a wicked problem Um, April April just real quick. This is just an anecdotal comment. I love this. Um just in time from just in time to just in case but also it's really Making me rethink we think that we've built not we collect but you know for the last many decades We we think that the most efficient the most lean the most optimized the most um You could look at it in some way, you know efficiency resourcefulness in a certain way But like trimming down all of the resources was the best way to build business the best way To make the most of what you have in fairness But what you see is that I'm just thinking about all of this in the context of fragility You have really traded off efficiency A system like that might be hyper optimized And it will break the moment. It's so thin. It's so fragile. It's so prone You're walking on a tightrope with that kind of a system And if you can balance the tightrope, then you're awesome and the moment anything comes along to disrupt that tightrope You or those you serve and those around you are are in a really precarious situation So I'm just wondering, you know, even as we emerge as this next chapter begins and that sense of You know in this in this shift from normal, what's what parts of normal are worth going back to what parts of normal Are we going to go out back to I don't you know, a lot of things have changed whether or not we wish for them to Whether or not we wish to go back to something it's that's not there But a recalibration of this trade-off between efficiency and precariousness efficiency and fragility David, did you want to jump in? Oh, okay. I saw you unmuted a little earlier Yeah, and and part of the conversation April and I had yesterday was Which big changes do we think are going to happen if if if we're going into a new normal and everything We've thought of as as normal right now has blown up How many of those things are actually going to pass Two ten years from now and how many of them are just going to be like, well, you know There was this bump in the road and now we're back to life as it was before and I'm extremely curious about this question because Because this global, uh, you know musical chairs moment where everybody had to sit down and stop Like we had a musical chairs moment when everybody was in a bucket brigade I'm mixing metaphors here, but work with me So I see capitalism as this series of bucket brigades that are working really really fast and behind each bucket holder passer Is somebody with a whip? It's an economic whip. It's a threat of unemployment. It's a threat of starvation It's but everybody's passing buckets passing buckets and all of a sudden we told everybody to find a seat You know the music stopped everybody find a seat sit down and the buckets are needed by the next bucket You know catcher and they're not moving and a few buckets are going because they're essential services and whatnot But we've really disrupted the bucket brigade which was designed for optimization not for redundancy Etc in most cases. So we're seeing the supply chains just being smashed at this point And some very large upscale producers like tyson like pork producers are shutting down plants because they have in You know in infiltration by coronavirus, etc. That's going to disrupt all sorts of food system, you know back and forth and up and down so how do we You know, I'm interested in people's opinions about what is new normal. How does this fit banning you had your your end up and then I really liked the question and what what april said. I think Fragility is the right thing that we've just learned in the last three months how incredibly fragile global civilization is I mean you Positive this would happen six months ago. Nobody would believe it, but we're very fragile I mean if you want to really get freak think of the internet going down Society ends. I mean everything runs on the internet from your bank account to your store to your water We would not I don't even know what we do because we'd be Worst often being in the middle ages because you couldn't have seven and a half billion people all going to the Countryside figure out how to grow their own food So we're very it's very fragile and the other point I want to make is that You can see a system that outlives its usefulness The we if we hadn't had fossil fuels, we would not have been able to have the industrial revolution But those fossil fuel now are destroying our planet and a huge threat to us So they can outlive the system that they had and yet you don't have to condemn everything that was done in the past I would say the internal combustion engine was a very bad alternative to the electric car, which was actually dominant at 1900 but the Internal combustion engine was cheaper and we had the fossil fuels, etc But now it's clearly obsolete and you know, I don't know how many years it's going to take to get rid of our inventory of Internal combustion engine cars, but they will be electric and have huge advantages, etc, etc. So the reason I say that is One of our system is really proven to now be obsolete You know, we can say that just in time global optimized supply chains work for a long time It got us You know the wealth we have etc and the inequality and a lot of other things but that's not That's not the way forward and you know a lot of the things that we have been doing have been proven to be Fragile not anti-fragile to use nasim talents work and how do we think about What is already going on what has been demonstrated to be Less than adequate and when we move forward and I think we can see it in the healthcare That even Republicans are going to realize G It's you really need to have everybody have healthcare because that person doesn't have healthcare They might infect and kill you So we need universal healthcare. Maybe we need universal basic income and maybe universal basic food but These kinds of things that we're not on Really seriously on the table Three months ago Now are becoming like of course So, you know, I think that there's a lot of opportunity to understand try to understand where how we emerge from this What we've done changed accomplished and learned To rebuild a system that's different To transform the system and we're the you know, the seeds of the new system are already Exists, but they're just you know on the fringe or noise or whatever But I think that that's what we need to be figuring out What you know how is what we've learned how things have changed, etc Created a basis for for actually moving in the direction that I think all of us want to want to see that we do What does this mean? My apologies, I usually I usually explain it In sign language, this means happy or applause and I'm borrowing from from uh From the Occupy movement because they started using you know these signals This means I agree with what's being said This means I disagree with what's being said No, no, no, I'm so sorry, but but I I introduced this all the time. This is a fabulous zoom hack because If you're in gallery view, you can tell who's happy. Who's not without it without interrupting And a lot of people were taught to snap their fingers in class I don't really like the finger snap thing. It doesn't make sense to me but I get it and Sir Homer has the floor now So I just got a new one of these last week on a call someone said this Which means you're going down the rabbit hole so Not that he's doing that, but just you know So, um, my favorite biologist says uh, america matrona says every in biology everything changes around what is conserved So I think a really useful question for us to ask is what is worth conserving about our food system And then what needs to change in order to make sure that that does in fact get conserved Say that can say the question again everything Everything changes around that which is conserved. So, you know, we have a we have a an economic system that Changes the living systems the earth into waste products and consumable products and doesn't give a shit about You know, whether it's a an open loop biology or a closed loop metabolism using, you know the next industrial revolution from uh mom garden and We'll take we'll look at a forest and we're going to cut it down and we're going to change it in money And so what gets conserved is money and what gets what changes is the world becomes less capable of supporting life If you look at our food systems, what's worth conserving? Certainly having supply lines that allow people to get Food on a regular basis from anywhere is worth conserving Is it worth conserving having anybody who wants to Consume massive quantities of beef every single day or huge amounts of macaroni and cheese And then there's the what is the purpose of the food system that we're designing here You're on mute jair Um, sorry david go ahead and i'm about to post the article ken wrote some time ago about the thing he just said Okay, two things one is that um Uh, the you're looking for what's happening. What might happen 20 years out in the future. Well, there's already several attempts to chronicle The weak signals from the future things that are happening right now that are positive And one of them is called the new possible dot space I posted the link the new possible dot sp a c e um, and I commend everybody to look at it. It has stuff like cities are um considering permanently banning cars from their centers and the Water in the venice canals are getting is getting cleaner, etc, etc um, yes a collection of the new possible That's new possible dot space a woman named eletra bietti is Uh, the co co curator of that second thing Was the fella The guy in the lower left hand corner who I don't know I was talking about The brittle systems that we are afraid might fail And he mentioned the internet banning banning said he mentioned the internet But the internet the good news the internet is not going to fail The internet was designed for resilience and despite the fact that It's largely controlled by big companies They haven't been able to successfully change the design to make it More monocultural and it's still resilient and it uh is still way over capacity And it can handle the surges at night and the work at homes during the day And with very few exceptions The internet remains robust and is uh almost certainly not going to fail In in this crisis despite many many many attempts by the legacy incumbent organizations to try to do the opposite many And we can we can recount them if anybody would like That's right This is great David. Um, are you seeing new inroads to That sense of you know, it began much more Not to democratize this incredible belief and then there's this been this consolidation And are you seeing as as other parts of the non-internet system break or crack? Are you seeing inroads that might not have been there a year ago? To inroads to other systems To other systems, but also that sense of recalibrating How do I want to say that how do I want to phrase this? Um Building the internet that we want for our grandchildren does that feel That sounds familiar somehow. Yeah Is this the kind of Are you feeling are there glimmers of hope because of co vid that give you I mean, I think there's a lot of sense of the Increased anxiety that that many of us are feeling writ large, but I'm also realizing all like that that The kind of internet that we want to see There's also an opportunity In these moments to come together, but I don't know if that's making any sense at all, but jerry I think you know what there's been no serious efforts at redesigning the internet in in response to the current crisis In large part because it's responding quite well There's been a lot of discussion about are we running out of internet and stuff like that the answer is basically no, we're not But it's still early days and and there could be additional robustness efforts to come along One thing and I'll just add briefly in my just globally There I have It is becoming so clear how for any country any government that's looking at long-term Survival much less thriving that the the mandate around digital inclusion in terms of It's never been stronger and you're starting to realize it's not just Okay, it's not just access to education and information. It's sort of you want public health You want any kind of stability you want a workforce Any of this the digital inclusion one of the best investments because so many times you know It's like we can build all these great apps and so forth and then I say well and half the half of the world is still not online And so you and the overwhelming majority of those people are women. So I get in my global community I've never seen that degree of conversation get ratcheted so high. So Right now there's been some efforts by some of the big guys to for example put up Wi-Fi and parking lots so kids can drive up and do their homework and so on but Those are largely bad dates And So No, not yet, but we can keep our fingers crossed hope prayers Thoughts and prayers whatever and maybe someday action Thoughts and prayers seem to be so valuable Or such an excuse we're nearing the end of our call time I know Benny would like to floor mr. Bellinger You can say no if you've been doing other things during this call But you're a deep systems thinker or anything you'd like to throw on the table here The system always makes sense To those who have the leverage to ensure that it stays the way they want it So if you want to change the system figure out how to remove their leverage Otherwise As but mr. Fuller said fighting the system is a fool's errand Because you can't you don't have the power of the leverage and as tom peter said Innovation always comes from wrong people the wrong time and wrong industry for the wrong reasons Asked the people that used to be in the mini computer business Or the typewriter business or the buggy whip business Or the airplane business before the jet engines came along I contend that we have no clue As to what things will look like in five years from now And that this will be a decadalizing event into that world Yes, we I keep looking at all of the things that are happening And I still say I don't think we have any clue as to what's going on Some place it will just emerge And we will transition the the industrial factory farms will die Because they become outmoded Not because we forced them to change Because the economy no longer supports them And we don't know why yet Thank you. I've decided to reframe this this this now means I want to tickle banning David thank you for being on the call banning you get the last word. We have like a minute and then I'll take a Oh, I wanted to ask David one question. Well, he's gone. Oh shoot. He bounced All right, go ahead banning Did you want to jump in banning? Oh, I was thinking of something else But I do think that what you said is exactly right. If you look what's happening in the auto industry right now There's one company that that is stock values Seems to be going up by the week and every other company isn't that it is fighting for survival And that's obviously tesla versus almost every other company on the planet because they are the future I mean the old I think the adage from you know, william gibson the future is here. It's just unevenly distributed works two ways One way it works, you know tesla the electric car is the future. I think and uh, you know, I see he's gone And uh, you know, I see he's gone, but it's also the future is the fires in australia It's all the things we're seeing in climate change Impacts all over the world are the future as well And we have to kind of balance those two things both things are changing the world and the context we have to work on very very rapidly and and I would say we can predict certain I mean I've worked with long-term global trends with the national intelligence council and people And I think the trends you can like demographic trends, urbanization trends population trends As I said and food demand, etc You can outline those trends pretty well with a certain amount of probability And then there are all the wild cards that come in like, you know, like pandemic can happen anytime or never It's not a trend or nuclear war And then there are all the uncertainties with technology change But you can sort of put it together to get a sense of parameters of What is more possible than what is not possible And now we're in this very strange period where we've had this You know wild card hit everybody It's the first global crisis in history where every person on the planet is affected by it in the same time frame So I'm never going to sleep. Yeah or two And it's a bionic The bionic plague happens like 12 times 30 times over lots of countries over big spans of time Everything like everybody on lockdown at the same time more or less brand new It's unbelievable. I mean I mean my sister warned of it in her 1994 book coming play but nobody believed that right and uh, so, you know, here we are and but that's a whole new set of actors and possibilities and trying to understand where we might be at How do we come out of this? What does the status quo look like at that time and what are the opportunities is it's really the challenge? I think we all need to to think about and of course april's trying to put it together on the food front But it's it's obviously that's one piece of it And how does this system start changing because of winners and losers so to speak was what what gene is Trying to you know get across that the system isn't going to change because we like it to change What are the factors and forces within it that we could promote? And say this is the way we should go, but it also has to involve all this You know people do it about voting with their feet changing the systems and And and things going bankrupt. I mean if we reach peak demand for oil Will it ever hit a hundred million barrels again? I kind of doubt it And you know a lot of minus 40 dollars a barrel was that Nothing, but yeah minus 40 is probably not going to go too well Somebody said it's like you want to move from your apartment and you have this couch and you need to get rid of it You put it up on ebay and for 50 bucks. Nobody wants it. You say take it away for zero They still don't want to say well Hey, but can I pay somebody 50 dollars to take away this couch and that's what happened with oil? But you know, that's temporary but It's because the bucket brigade came to a halt and yet the the source was still pumping right and that's right Got no place to put it. We have a lot to think about I'll say april. Do you want to take us out? No, okay, then I just want to say this has been hugely helpful I mean, I don't want to sound selfish it like I'm just so glad to have all these Voices and perspectives and and gene actually bang on it's just gonna I was just putting all things considered I think we're not really very smart Um, I've been looking at this most recently from the perspective of on the whole I get that we're all having to like adapt a lot and we're doing a pretty good job of adapting to a crisis that has hit not not a good job, but we're In many ways, I think we're rising to the occasion, but overall I'm concluding that human beings are very very bad at adapting to change And so forth. So anyway bad changers bad Um, with that I want to thank everybody for being here It's lovely to see your faces and hear your voices the zoom thing ain't so bad because we're in very different places And this was a lovely conversation. I really appreciate it So I'll post it online. I'll attach the chat and send it to everybody and Thank you for being here. Marilyn. Can you write me an email so I can have contact with you and I'll put my I love email in the chat right now. I volunteered to connect you on email Jerry Brilliant Awesome. Thanks everybody. Thank you all very much. Take care. You all stay safe and healthy. Yeah