 Welcome to the final installment of this series and Happy Pongal. This talk I've never given before, I've created it over the last three days. I have over 50 suggestions. They will not be for everyone, but I think something in here will be for everyone. A brief recap from the last talk, we talked about four potential future trajectories. Green growth, there's a little room up front here. We talked about the Mordor economy, which has continued growth, but more and more dedicated to environmental remediation and mining and energy. We talked about the great simplification, which is instead of continued growth and complexity, it would be post-growth and less complexity, it less energy and material use, and we didn't talk much about Mad Max. But these are the four scenarios. In our culture, these four scenarios are not treated equally. The vast majority of people are believing in this green growth scenario. I think the odds are more like this, and my work is focused on the great simplification. I think if you watched my first four presentations here, you can see that our genome, our species, our brain and behavior have paired with energy resources and ecology to create a novel predicament with storm clouds on the horizon. On Saturday, I talked about the four horsemen in the coming decade, and what was your name again? Corina. Correctly inferred, especially for India, that the fifth horsemen should be included, which is climate and ecological constraints, and I thought about that and agreed. The financial overshoot, geopolitics and war, complexity, the social contract and climate and ecological impacts. For most people in our culture, there's two predominant cultural narratives. There's a Green New Deal where we migrate our energy systems towards 100 percent renewable, and we work towards zero emissions. On the other side of the political spectrum, it's business as usual, nothing's wrong with the past model. There are no shortages of anything, and all we need to do is deregulate and reduce taxes. My work shows that there is a bigger picture and it tells a different story. Today, I'm going to give an overview of what should we do. Before I do that, I would like you to pick a neighbor, and if you're not conveniently by one person, you can pick two other people, and just give a 30-second opinion, your opinion to your neighbor, of what you think we should do. Given what you've learned the last few lectures, or if you weren't here, what do you know about the world? What do you think we should do? Spend 30 seconds and then I'll tell you to switch. Okay. So just a show of hands. How many of you talked about a solution that or what we should do at either a global or a national scale? Okay. How many of you talked about Oroville or a community scale responses? How many of you talked about individual responses in your own life? Okay. So I'm going to cover all three of those. Because not only do we not share a current distribution of the future, there are many possibilities, and I think there could be really bad things happen or really good things happen. The great simplification and the Mordor economy are in the middle of the way I see the future, but all these things are possible. So there isn't one thing. Not only that, we all care about different things. Most of us care about ourself. The only thing we care about more than ourselves, most of us is our children, our family, our community, our region, our nation, our world, other species, other generations. I care a lot about other species and other generations. I just did this as a hypothetical for the average human. This is what we care about. So we care about lots of things, and there's lots of things possible. So my work has used the carbon pulse as the backdrop of our civilization. There are many stories out there that are counter to the one that I'm telling here. But a lot of the stories about a Star Trek future or colonizing Mars, or we each are so rich and we have our own robots are predicated on the fact that every single year, with the exception of COVID-2020, with the exception of 2009, the great financial crisis, with the exception of two energy crisis in the 1970s, two world wars and a great depression in 1930, every single other year in the last 150 years, humans have had access to more and more energy than the year before. Not only has that given us an abundance on average in the world of material wealth, but it has changed our expectations about the future that this will always continue. And so a lot of these plans about the future are both systems and energy blind. So some people get upset when I keep talking about the somewhat depressing and onerous constraints that are in our near-term future. But if your hair was on fire, I would feel compelled to continue to tell you that your hair was on fire. And so that's why I believe knowing this story and the more people that kind of squint and can see how it fits together, the better our individual and our cultural options will be. So there are three distinct timelines. Not only do we care about things different, not only could the future be different, but what we do is different in timeline. The red one, which is what most people are working on is now. What do we do now ahead of great simplification? The yellow is what I refer to as the bend or break moment when our financial claims and our complexity re-tether back to something that's more in equilibrium. And the green is how are humans gonna live 30, 50, 80, 100 years from now? What are the things that are longer-term sustainable? So those are three different timelines. And then there's three distinct areas of intervention based on my work. Number one is what do we do during this yellow area? Like we have to bend and not break because break would be bad. Number two is what are the directions and the projects and thinking two or three steps ahead to get to a more sustainable culture? And the third thing is how do we have more sustainable and engaged human beings? And this is how I'm gonna structure the rest of the talk. I'm gonna have a list of suggestions at the global national level, at the community and civil society level, and finally at the individual level. So for those of you that have been here the prior five events, it's pretty clear that I believe we have a road closed sign ahead of our current cultural expectations. So my work is to try and change the initial conditions of when we hit that road closed sign. And if we had a time capsule today knowing all this science and the synthesis of how things fit together, what sort of ideas would we put in that time capsule that we would want in our own lives or in our communities? So let's start with global. So first of all, as I mentioned, we're heading from a unipolar world to a multipolar world. And how do we have global governance when we struggle to even have community governance or in my country, national governance? So we're going to need new arrangements that don't end in wars and also take into account the needs of the global South and the environment. Our current institutions, the United Nations and other ones are not really up to this task. I don't have answers for this, but we're going to need some new international agreements and interactions. Incentives, our current economy, we self-organize as individuals, families, small businesses, corporations and nations to maximize profits. And those profits are based on the vast majority of the input are non-ruable resources on human time scales that we pay pennies to extract out of the ground for what they contribute. So all we care about is profits. That is our international success metric. But we really need to consider well-being, the oceans, the biosphere, a more holistic goal. One way to do that is to pay more correct prices for the main inputs to our economies. So if we were to remove all taxes on humans and all taxes on corporations, and again, I don't know the situation in India, I'm talking globally and the United States, but 95% of our taxes right now are on individuals and corporations. If we removed all those, and instead taxed any non-renewable input that came out of the ground like copper or fossil water aquifers or coal or natural gas, anything that's non-renewable on human time scales, we tax that significantly. What would that do? It would balance these things out. So number one is it would send the right signals to innovators and technology people that oh my gosh, these things using oil and lithium and neodymium are really expensive. So we need to use those inputs sparingly. We can use human input and renewable energy in more abundance. So we give the right price signals to the market. Also, it would signal to us that we would have to conserve because this would be $3,000 or something like that. And so we would generate simpler materials that don't need quite as good of screen. We would have repair people that were experts on this and humans en masse would conserve more than they are today. The reason this won't work right now is if we taxed everything like this, it would crash the system. But in a depression or something like that, we could, and oil was $10 a barrel, we could do something like this. This is something I'm working on at one level in the US government. Aspirations, we're born in a time when our cultural aspiration is to make a lot of money. And I think that has shown as I showed this graph before the energy supply per capita or the money per capita gives massive wellbeing and human development increases when you have very little. But when you have a lot, you get hardly any hedonic benefit from more. In the United States, if you make over $70,000 a year, you get very little psychic benefit from that, even if you make $10 million a year. And I used to manage money for billionaires and most of them were miserable. So we have to remember that after basic needs are met, the best things in life are free. And that's kind of a silver lining in all this because most of you intuitively know in your own lives that this is true. So if I asked you, what are the five best experiences you've ever had in your life? Most of you, almost all of them would have to do with friends or family or a loved one or playing cards or games or somewhere in nature. They're not gonna be huge energy and money expenditures. We talk about the future. There are like 8,000 emojis online. There's not a single one to represent our collective future. So I humbly offer this tea with an arrow to represent a future and it's not related to GDP or anything. Global advanced policy. So I've determined that the things that I'm discussing in these presentations cannot be heard by current politicians, even if they're understood by them one-on-one, because they're too threatening to say to the public. Yet cognitively, they're relatively true with some gaps and holes that need new research. So this concept of advanced policy, which is getting the things ready at the national level, a global level, a local level, a Tamil Nadu level that are going to have to happen in the not too distant future but that are too difficult to say outwardly today. This is a concept of advanced policy and a big one is bend not break when our financial claims on reality tether back to reality. Governance is a huge one. I would argue that most of our problems today stem or have a core issue of governance. So from the perspective of the carbon pulse, if we're somewhere between the yellow and the red star, what governance structures would fit for humans after the red star? I don't know. Back in ancient Rome, they had something called a council of contrarians where these people were scientists and lay experts and they didn't have the power to vote for something, but they did have the power to vote against stupid things. So if there was a way to have a structure of politicians that would have veto power over something dangerous or stupid, I think that might segue into different governance structures. Appropriate technology. So solar panels can power a wonderful civilization, just not this one is one of the core conclusions of my work. And yet when we talk about technology of the future, we're sending Teslas into outer space and flying cars and all this story, which could technically be possible, but is not scalable or even desirable for most people. So if we think about technology, it's such an important word in our culture. From the perspective of the carbon pulse, what might be the top four inventions of all time? And I will give you a hint that there's one of them in this room. Number four, this is according to Nate, of course. Number four is the bicycle. The bicycle is the most energy efficient device for transportation ever invented. The only thing that rivals it is a double-decker bus in London with every seat with three people on it. So we use very, bicycle uses much less energy, human caloric energy to get from A to B than walking does. So it's an amazing invention. Next is the story. Think of how much enjoyment and human pleasure we get from telling stories and there's very little energy input. As someone said, the second best invention is a dog. This is my dog Murphy. And there happens to be a golden magic in here, which I was quite surprised. And until this week, this is how I ranked them, but I've thought about it and with our Mandala group, I think the best invention of all human time for what it gives us relative to the energy input is music. For what it, oh yeah, well, I didn't want to discriminate North American dogs and other dogs is music. So when we think about technology, we need to think about clever and wise. And so far we've not lived up to our moniker homo sapiens, wise man, we're more clever man. So what technologies will be most suited for the downslope of the carbon pulse? We're gonna have to think of ways to get the same brain services by using less energy and materials. So how, what factor of energy are these guys using less than this guy being transported? And in other type of technologies, obviously this person is meditating, which is also a career type. So when we think about all this, it's going to be part of a super organism. And maybe as we can't totally step outside of the super organism that I described in the last lecture, but we may be able to wall it off in some of our plans and our futures. And maybe appropriate tech using, for instance, sodium for batteries instead of lithium. And things that don't give us quite the power or quite the speed, but give us something that's more sustainable and actually cheaper for more people. Another issue in the global situation is all we care about is GDP. And because of that, we've created a metabolism and the waste from this metabolism is warming the earth and the oceans. And so we're going to, like it or not, have to start to peel off money from a government's and from either regional or local governments to support ecological efforts. We're going to have to start actively cooling the planet. And there are a lot of ways to do that. Shown here is whales that are pooping as they come to the surface. And that creates food for phytoplankton. The krill come up and eat the phytoplankton. It is this enormous food chain that creates pulse carbon from the atmosphere. Yesterday I put up a short podcast with Sir David King who was the chief science advisor to the UK government who's working on bringing back blue whales at scale as one way to affect global cooling. Planting trees also creates cooling. Why is this town, this community cooler than the surrounding ones? It's because of all your forests are degrading the incoming sunlight. So we're going to have to at scale in our world massively change our mindset from, hey, how do I make more money? To how do we help the ecosystem services of where we live and our nation and our world regenerate? And it can happen relatively quickly but we need to divert resources away from our current pursuits towards this. What would help with that would be some sort of an educational, almost spiritual life ethic of which I've wrote a few lines here. Life existing is preferable to no life existing. More kinds of life existing is preferable to fewer. Vibrant complex ecosystems are preferable to small fragmented brittle ecosystems. Ecosystems with large complex life like humans or dolphins are preferable to ecosystems with only microscopic life. Ecosystems supporting conscious minds, the virtual worlds of our minds are preferable to ecosystems without them. It is preferable to maximize existence, happiness, love and understanding and minimize the suffering of minds in the universe. The future both near and far is real in the same sense that now is real and via causality is determined by what we do now. Things which are preferable by this definition may be considered good. Things which are less preferable may be considered evil. We should maximize good and minimize evil since the universe does not. So I really feel strongly that we need to educate and inspire more humans to culturally expand our boundaries of empathy as opposed to narrow them to our circle of care beyond our own species. Ecological restoration can happen very quickly but we need human labor and efforts directed that way. Okay, so those were a few global suggestions. I'm sure there's many more and we'll have time for Q&A. Now moving to community and civil society. On the heels of what I just said, we need to educate our young people in things that really matter and are relevant to their lives. One thing is ecological knowledge the soil and earth systems and the local biogeography of where they live. We need a systems understanding of our world. The time of reductionist experts is passing us. Now we need especially young people to understand the earth, their place in it and where they live. The title of my podcast is called The Great Simplification and I think a simplification is coming. Paradoxically because of what the tech bros are doing and what the governments are doing with stimulus, emotionally we might not get the signals that a simplification is coming. We might get a turbo boost of stimulation checks, stimulus checks, also stimulation checks ahead of that. So the key would be to kind of try to look two or three steps ahead at what's coming and plan for that. Now, communities and countries that simplify first, say we understand what Nate is saying, we're gonna stop growing and do things locally and consume less. First of all, it's unlikely that a lot of large scale places will do that. But if they do that, they will be outcompeted by other places that continue to have just in time supply chains and things coming. So we're in this like finger trap that we can't get out. We're just going further and further in. But last year, because of the Ukraine-Russia situation, a lot of European nations had to really tighten their belts. In Germany, they were advising people to take one shower a week. In France, even President Macron said that we need to have a society of sobriete, which doesn't refer to drinking, it just refers to being more rational behaviors. And they would turn off street lights at 10 p.m. and turn them back on at 4 a.m. And there were all kinds of things that were planned in case things got worse. So it's an open question, whether those places that simplify first will be at a disadvantage or an advantage. I think they will be in an immediate disadvantage, but the learnings and the things that they will be forced to do will actually make them way ahead of the game of other places that have plenty of energy and will be one of the last places for this to happen. Kind of an advanced esoteric point, but as I mentioned two lectures ago, Jeven's paradox is as we get more efficient, we actually use more energy. But on the down slope, as we get more efficient, we're gonna use less energy. So Jeven's paradox becomes Jeven's dividend. So if we're in a declining economy and you improve your efficiency then by 2%, you're gonna use 2% less energy. So it's actually gonna be a really important thing. Supply chains, we have a six continent just in time supply chain that is predicated on available credit and very cheap energy and over time that is going to simplify. So where I live here in the middle of the red circle, maybe instead of getting things from South Korea and China and Bangladesh, we'll get things from Canada or these other states. Maybe Tamil Nadu might change the supply chains of very important things. And I think you're on this note, you're much better off than the United States because a lot of your main inputs come from India, come from your community. Shadow Council. How many of you saw the movie Contact with Jodi Foster? Okay, some of you. So in the movie they had these plans to go to outer space that the alien had sent and some religious fanatics scrapped the machine that they were building and the movie was over. But unbeknownst is they had a plan B in Hokkaido, Japan where they were building this machine to go to space and Jodi Foster ended up going to space. The things that I'm discussing in these last five lectures are very difficult for an elected town commission to discuss because they're threatening to their built power, their status, the blueprints that are already in place. It's a very difficult political conversation to have. Which is why if there was a Hokkaido Shadow Council that wouldn't have authority per se, but they could do scenario analysis and do blueprints and come up with suggestions and ideas and just let the real council know that this exists. It's not a power thing. It's we wanna help our community and start thinking about these things that you won't think about. So I think this is a viable suggestion. So these are a friend of mine made this list of a bunch of different online tribes in the United States. Social justice, this starts from the left and goes to the right. There are so many different flavors of conversations online. And as we hit tougher times in our culture, these people are unlikely to speak to each other and they're likely to just dig in and talk to their own people. So we really, it's the same slide. Yeah, I think we really need what I call memetic tribe diplomats, which is people that have the ability to speak to several groups at once and facilitate a conversation by suppressing their own identity perhaps and having conversations. And then if this group and this group, then you can actually approach a collective intelligence. So especially some of you youth link pro-social diplomatic personalities, Giz and I'm looking at you. You can talk to multiple groups and we need those translators and facilitators. So one thing is our culture has taken financial capital and turned it into things. And this is accelerating. So, but now the central banks of the world are creating many, many, many more dollars and euros and yen and everything else then can actually ever be spent by my analysis. So consider transmutation, which is spending dollars now or soon to turn them into real things before they might not be able to do that. I mean, this is a long conversation, but especially to philanthropists in the room, I'm not sure there are any, but they have a billion dollar thing and they just generate 5% a year and they spend the 5% and they never touch the principle. And I think a spend down strategy given the five horsemen of the 2020s really makes sense. I think we need libraries of healing around the world. And I think Orville has the seeds of such a place if not the sprouts already. We have many people that have trauma and are afraid and are mentally not well. And I think we need a lot more locations where people can meet and heal and connect and learn and share. My personal view is we also need to protect nature at a local level. I came up with the term life brigade. You know, this place was where I went the fifth day we were here. There was a nice tree there that I went and sat in front and did my initial humming. And then a couple of days later that forest was taken down. That's right across from where we're staying. And yet the forested area here is still incredible. But there are many ways to get to 50,000 people. There are different pathways and Orville is not immune to the super organism. And so I think everywhere in the world it's gonna be up to local people to say the natural world where we live is non-negotiable and play a role in defending it. And I don't know enough about the local situation here. I went for a bike ride, which I always do before my talks. And I was just bombarded with beautiful bird song that way on Matchman Deer Road all the way into that forest. It's just so stunning around here. And I hope you can maintain that. Fiduciary. So in my last talk, I talked about the power dynamic in our world where we went from agricultural surplus to fossil energy surplus to monetary surplus. And now AI is accelerating all of this. So I think a real issue is those people that have the power and the means have to pay it back in service of life, in service of our communities, in service of stability. And it's a mind shift. On my bike ride, I pass the guy on by Matchman Deer that doesn't have any legs. And I wave at him every day. And my way back, I'm like, you know what? Chandra this morning said on Pongal, you give little bits of little monies to people. And I checked my pocket and all I had was a 500 note. I'm like, well, I can't give him that. And then I'm like, wait a minute, that's like $6. The guy doesn't have any legs. And $6 is not that much. So I gave him 500 note and he was like so happy. And then I was happy. And it was just a mental shift of, oh, 500 is not appropriate, that's too much. But those people that have means are going to, ahead of the great simplification, have an opportunity to play large roles in our communities, in our world, in our ecosystems. For instance, one thing I'm advocating for philanthropists in the USA, USA is one of the richest countries in the world, but 40% of the people are very poor. In fact, I had an Afghani cab driver a few months ago who's trying to be a computer programmer. And he's like, I hope I can do it. I hope I can graduate and get a job. He's like, I wouldn't wanna be poor in the United States. If I'm poor like homeless, I'm going back to Afghanistan. So in the United States, I'm advocating for local people that have money to donate to young people and build gardens and public land that isn't used for agriculture or airports or things like that in the community. And I don't know how that maps to Tamil Nadu or Oralville at all, but I think generally around the developed world, this is a viable thing to recommend. Human behavior, social capital, reciprocity. So as people learn about the details of the great simplification and climate and financial overshoot and everything else, there will be people that want to leave Oralville. And there will be people that want to come to Oralville. And I think now in the time before these events start getting topsy-turvy, thinking about the real structures and the values is really important. I think our culture is so plastic in what we do. Last week I was in Matrimandir Gardens walking with my phone, which I sometimes do. And three young Indian women in their late teens, early 20s looked at me like in horror, like what the heck are you doing on a phone in Matrimandir? And I felt shame and I put it away. So there's something in evolutionary biology called reciprocity and strong reciprocity. Resiprosity is when you punish the cheaters and reward the helpers. And strong reciprocity is when you punish those who fail to punish the cheaters. And this entire dynamic of what's socially approved and what's not is going to change. And it should change because right now those people who have the most digits in the bank get to call the shots. But we can quickly change what is socially acceptable. I mean, my behavior changed in two seconds because I realized what was going on. Okay, moving lastly to the self. So these next recommendations might be in contrast to our morning sessions, although some of them are also rhyming and overlapping. So when you hear about all the things that I presented these last five lectures, it is an appropriate response to grief, especially if you've not heard these things before because you've been told this was going to happen and now you're hearing this or this is going to happen. And grief for a future that you thought would exist is an absolutely healthy and natural response. If you were indifferent or thought it was funny, then I would be quite worried. But it's okay to grieve and reflect on this. The other thing is to keep perspective. We're living somewhere near the top of the carbon pulse. If I told you, especially you living in Tamil Nadu, that I would drop you on an ice flow at negative 30 degrees Celsius with just a coat, you would think that's a death sentence. But to an Inuit, it's just another beautiful day in the Arctic. So we have to keep perspective on the times that we're alive and look at, I mean, yes, we have some risks, but look at the amazing things that we have at our fingertips. Don't forget to live life. Music, love, laughter, games, badminton, singing, all the things that humans love to do can't be put aside because we know a disturbing story about the future. We can't let the future interrupt our life of the day. And gratitude is very important. I think we need to every day feel gratitude for what we have and what we see and what we experience because there's a lot and I'm learning that myself. There's something in psychology called compartmentalization, which is, and again, these recommendations on the self are mostly directed to the youth link friends of mine who are 20-somethings because they're adapted from what I tell my students, but they could apply to everyone. When you hear about climate change and the likely forecast as one example, it is natural to obsess about that and to think about it all the time and to research it and to talk to people and have it consume your presence and your consciousness. Compartmentalization is the ability to totally focus on something and then have it set it aside and focus on something else that you need in your life. I have this thing called a Pomodoro clock, which you can set on different sides and it'll be a timer for five minutes, 15 minutes, 30 minutes, one hour and I set it and I do one task during that time instead of turning on my internet and checking my email. It's really harder than you might think because multitasking, we think that we're multitaskers, there's no such thing as multitasking. There's serially single tasks that we sequence together in rapid fire, but compartmentalizing and getting a healthy habit of that rather than put everything in a blender and do it all the time is something I would recommend. As far as the being part, we need to nourish ourselves and I think we forget this a lot and this is something we've talked about in the morning, sleep, food, exercise and especially time in nature to regenerate our bodies, our physiologies and our health and we often neglect that. There's something in Japanese called Shinroku which stands for forest bathing which is the serotonin and other psychic benefits we get from spending time in nature and all of you living in Orville have the opportunity to do this every single day with the bike trails and the forest and the ocean is not that far away. I highly recommend spending time in nature. It's my favorite place. And then there's inner tech which I think is important on our trajectory and this is from the last couple of days in our morning session. What we think how our bodies and brains are responding to things is our cognition is in charge and underneath it is our limbic system, our reptilian system and our enteric digestive system but the reality is our cognition is a really tiny tip of the iceberg and these other things underneath it are much, much stronger in our behaviors and the enteric system deals with stability or a homeostasis. The reptilian system is fight or flight and we go towards a sympathetic or a parasympathetic response and the sympathetic is unhealthy. It's fight or flight, it's cortisol, it's constant stress. The limbic system, are we satisfied or dissatisfied? And only if we're satisfied, we're in the parasympathetic system and we're in a period of stability can we actually use our cognition to the ways that it was intended? I just did a frankly on this called the behavioral stack and now that we've actually talked about it in real time I understand it much more. But there is a huge amount of dopamine in our cultures. I've become aware of this in my own life. And so if I go to a place called Whole Foods in the United States, I'll spend $200 because they have like the most unbelievable foods. Here's Las Vegas or some billionaires mansion. So I personally have created speed bumps that don't allow me to do those things. I've used my neocortex, my cognitive brain when I'm in a good state to create rules for myself that trump my emotional systems when in the future when I run into what is problems for me is eating all this rich food, et cetera. Especially for you young people, social media, computers, iPhones all of this is doing is shortening our attention span so that we need quicker and quicker stimulation. What it's doing is it's keeping our minds in the shallows. And as you get older, you won't be able to enjoy the deep end of the pool because your brain will be stuck in the shallows exactly when our culture is gonna need people to do 10 hours in a garden and read a book or a manual to learn something where we don't, and I'm not speaking to youth link people because you guys are rock stars in your early 20s. But most people in the United States who are in their early 20s can't even read a book. They do not have the attention span to read a book. And this is a real problem because technology has hijacked our brains, including mine and I'm not young. So one thing I've done is I took an old ginseng box and I created a dopamine sarcophagus for my phone. And before I go to sleep, I put it in there. But that would be somewhat lying because I only do that three or four nights a week. I don't do it every night. But I do try to do it every night. But how many of us sleep with our phones next to us? I mean, that's just like not a stable long-term thing. So what ends up happening is dopamine ends up being the predominant neurotransmitter or hormone in our lives and it's not a healthy allocation. So if you were here for my last talk, I talked about the asset allocation, financial asset allocation of the past, of the present and of the future. These are financial things. But the real asset allocation shift is from dopamine predominantly running our mind and having oxytocin, serotonin and endorphins be a much smaller part to having something much more balanced. Four-legged stool that is the doing between dopamine and endorphin and the being of the human being of our experiences between serotonin and oxytocin. It should be like a equal four-legged chair. And if someone wants a reference on this page, I could give it. So these were the lists of being. Now moving to doing. When you hear all this stuff, whether your focus is on yourself, your community or climate change or the future, there's something that's interesting, which if you really think about the story that I've told you here, you can intuit and understand that our culture, our global culture, our national culture is not going to simplify first. It's not going to leave resources in the ground. It's going to continue to go forward trying to access more energy. I told you that India plans to double coal production, coal consumption by the year 2030. If you really, really understand that, it actually does a strange thing, which is it gives you the impetus to overcome our own biological steep discount rates, which is where we much prefer the present to the future. And it pushes you through to an emotion of, wow, I actually have the ability to make changes in my own life, my family's situation in my community, and to actually do things ahead of time. One of those things for most people, and again, this is directed to a Western audience, is we can simplify. We don't need all this stuff to be healthy or happy. I told you the other story that my storage shed is half the size of this room, it's full of stuff, and I haven't been in there in nine years. So I'm guilty of this too, but here's the thing. Be happier with using less energy and materials. Don't do it to save the planet. Do it because it makes you more resilient for the future. Buddhist economics is assets over desires, and if you reduce your desires, that's just the same as increasing your assets. Skills, what we think we need to know for the last 50 years is going to change. And yes, computer programming and AI and things like that are gonna take away a lot of jobs, but if you can imagine the great simplification and you live in Orville and you're a long time Orvillean, what sort of skills do you think you could have that would contribute to this community? What's gonna be needed? What are you interested in? What are you good at? A lot of people don't have any skill other than their job. So try to learn something that you enjoy and would be useful to a future. Goals, there's two kinds of goals. There's a conditional goal and there's an unconditional goal. A conditional goal depends on who gets elected president or what the financial system is doing. An unconditional goal is something you yourself control. Here's shown as one of my neighbors planting potatoes because he wanted to be a little bit more food self-reliant. So unconditional goals actually improve your serotonin and reduce your cortisol if you accomplish them. So that's a suggestion. Another thing is we will continue to hear all kinds of things in the future and to avoid the consensus trance and think for yourself or with a small group of people that you trust. And I don't expect you to believe everything that I've put forward these last six lectures but please on the things that you're questioning, look them up yourself and go from understanding to knowing these things but do not be afraid to think and act for yourself. Intermittence, we talk about we need 24-7 base load. Humans are base load. We don't need 24-7 access to 100 light bulbs worth of energy which is what the average American uses. So the first few will charge a laptop or a computer. Then there's enough. We have enough energy and then there's plenty and our current cultural goal is to have more stuff and another speed boat and an extra house and all this stuff which doesn't make us happy or healthy. Carrying dissonance. So being uncertain and having dissonance is physically uncomfortable to a human brain. So the typical response of hearing this story of limits to growth, climate change, the five horsemen is either, oh, humans will always figure out a problem we always have, we're gonna end up on Mars and things are gonna be great or, oh my God, we're screwed. It's Mad Max, just give me a beer. And because both of those poles obviate the need for any personal response. So carrying dissonance, being unsure, being uncomfortable, being uncertain about something is actually a skill worth fostering. We need to navigate the pathways between fantasy and doom. Find the others. So not so metaphorically, we are on a runaway train where the super organism and the elite are shoveling coal and other hydrocarbons into the engine and it's speeding out of control and there's no plan and there's a bridge out ahead. So my recommendation is find people that you love and care about and meet in the dining car. And there's three reasons I say that. Number one is, and maybe you find these same five or six people and they can cover all these bases. In my life, I have three separate groups of five or six people. One is people I just love to be around and we play games and we have a bottle of wine and we laugh and we listen to music and we don't talk about any of this stuff and these are my friends locally and we get together once a month and they're my core people. Another is I'm really interested in these things. You might be interested in basket weaving or bike repair or whatever. Find people that are really interested in the things that you're interested in and share time and space with them. And possibly most importantly from my vantage is find those five or six people that share your worldview and your deep calling for what you think is important and to engage on some project larger than yourselves. Maybe something in Oroville, maybe something in India, maybe you wanna protect some species in Tanzania that no one has a spokesperson for. That can happen with groups of three, four, five, six people. It can't happen with groups of hundreds of people. So really important, find the others and things that you care about in these different domains. If some of you weren't here on three lectures ago, I introduced this character as the agenda of the gene who is walking forward but the eyes are looking backward meaning that we are a product of our evolutionary past. And a question I posed is the agenda of the gene, our friend. And we don't have to follow the dictates of everything the agenda of the gene. Oh, pizza. We don't have to do everything that the agenda of the gene is pushing us towards. So I don't know enough about most of you to know when I say sharpen the sword, you are the sword and you know yourself well enough to know what are the things that you wanna sharpen about yourself over time. And I'm still working on this and I have given this advice for 10 years and mine is still kind of really dull in places. So it's not like you're gonna have a sharp sword, you're just keep sharpening. This is a really important point that I think I made the other day. We're alive at such a monumental time but there's a difference between absolute wealth and relative wealth. And most of our culture determines our success based on how we compare ourselves to others. And instead, we can compare ourselves to the people in the distant future or the distant past or don't compare ourselves at all. Just live within our own minds and awareness. And if you do that, we are unbelievably wealthy. Most of us, probably everyone in this room, in what we have access to today, it really is abundant until you look at that fast car that went by or some new bling that this guy I work with was wearing or whatever and then I feel inadequate. But I think to be happy with absolute wealth as opposed to relative comparisons is a helpful thing. So that was the doing. Moving on to the final component of this talk and the final and most important component of individual behavior is the we in quotation marks because it doesn't just mean we, we, but a broader societal we and also a broader other species and other generations. So if nothing else, be kind. And this is something I learned from my coach that we each of us have the ability to short circuit and reverse a chain of human behavior. We're such performative social creatures that if you smile at someone, they don't know you. They almost invariably will smile back. And so a bunch of frowny faces and you break the chain and something emergent happens after that you walked away and you don't see these people again but they did something in their life that maybe your little small action helped cause. So if nothing else, be kind in your life. Wend for you non-native speakers is following a path in a non-direct way. This guy's name is DJ White. I've written three books with him for college students. This is him when he was 22 years old, not the most impressive picture. He had a degree in geology and he was working in Indianapolis at an oil firm. But all he knew in his life is that he loved whales and dolphins. And he figured out, cause he was smart that there were no whales and dolphins in Indiana. So he bought a one-way ticket to Hawaii and he volunteered at a local aquarium to clean out the dolphin poop from the aquarium feature. 10 years later, he was the most successful environmental activist of our time or on the road to being. He single-handedly with his organization Earth Trust stopped the drift nets in the ocean in the 1980s. He stopped the dolphins in tuna cans. He negotiated with Starkist to have dolphin-free tuna cans. He stopped the only dolphin drive-kill in the world, that Black Cove, that movie you never even knew about, because it never became public because it was part of the agreement with the Taiwanese government to never show the footage. So here he is with a dolphin friend of his. They're doing yoga together. She led him in the exercises. They knew hundreds of poses. They had the choice of a thousand songs to pick, and she would always choose on a different grid with her, yeah, now knows Beethoven or Bach or Mozart like classical music, and she had options of everything else. He has told me unbelievable stories of the consciousness, humor, cleverness, and their interactions together. And DJ and his wife decided long ago that they didn't want to reproduce another human, they wanted to reproduce other species. And because of him, there's probably at least a million more dolphins alive than without his efforts. He had no idea about any of this. He took a single step in a direction that he felt passionate about, and he didn't know where he was going. He went his way there. So that's my advice to you, is give yourself a 24 hour vacation from other people on electronic media in a place you personally find meaningful, and ask yourself, who do I wish to be in this life? Why do I wish that? And how might I make that real? The answers are for you alone, but you'll find you'll be glad to have them, especially at a young age. We're in a time where we're going to need brave people that speak out, speak up and do bold things, because the default path is that people will be quiet and not do these things, and then we're on the path of the super organism. So I encourage you on the things that you truly know, and truly deeply care about, and want to play a role in to be brave. Also, we live in a culture where we are externally validated. We do an action or a behavior, and we look to others to get validation from outside of us. But many of you, I believe, especially the youth link people, and the people in our mandala have an internal compass that has a true North reading. And so I think we have to gradually be happy with our own decisions and our own path that we're going, and get intrinsic validation from ourselves, instead of from others. Do something for the benefit of someone else that nobody else, including that person or animal, will ever know. Examine the complex feelings this causes to arise within you as a first step in sorting social motivation from personal altruism. The first time I did this, I was at a Starbucks, and there was a really cute barista serving coffee, and I paid my bill, and she turned around to get the coffee, and I was going to give her a $2 tip, and I was waiting for her to turn around so she would see me give the $2 tip, but then I thought about it, and I put the tip in as soon as she turned around and wasn't looking. Just one tiny little stupid example. But there are ways we can go through our life and think about our little behaviors like this. Rocks in the river. I think I mentioned this in one of the prior lectures that we're downstream from a body of water, and at some point with the great simplification, the water's gonna start rushing quite fast, and a lot of rocks, meaning people or groups of people, are not really tethered to the ground and will tumble downstream. So we can, with ample preparation and fortitude and some of the things I've been recommending here or suggesting here, act as metaphorical rocks in the river that are anchored, and then when the water starts rushing, we hold our place, and we can then help people around us. And if there's enough of us in a community that do this, we can actually redirect the water when it comes. Lastly, there's, especially in my culture, there's a lot of talk about don't eat me, don't fly, drive electric car by solar panels. All these things are good for mental hygiene, but we're alive at a time where consuming less to be one eight billionth smaller part of the superorganism is less important than maximizing your impact. And the time now is to maximize our impact on a collective future, not to minimize our impact. Yes, we should be happier and healthier by using less resources if we can, but if you overly focus on that, you'll spend all your time trying to do that when your skills are better spent on a broader, maximizing your impact. So ahead of the great simplification, my work is mostly to explain reality to people, to explain how energy, materials, technology, money, human behavior, ecology, the environment fit together. And above that, I've just outlined recommendations for being, doing, and the we, which is beyond our own self. The reality is, we don't really need to know all this to do this stuff. I think it helps. And for those of you that are into the infrastructure and actual planning, knowing the reality helps us avoid some dead ends, but all these things we can all do without understanding all this stuff about climate change or resource depletion and the five horsemen. When a system is far from equilibrium, small islands of coherence can shift the entire system. Thank you all.