 Let me ask the audience this question, if it is even possible to limit self-dealing in a scarce world where needs are fine, where means are finite, but needs are insatiable. It seems we are caught in some kind of bad equilibrium. Welcome everyone, hello. Hello, hello. Can we get a little energy from the audience? Hey, there we go. Thank you. It's Friday afternoon. Evening. Yes, yes, it's so nice to see all you beautiful people out here today. Thank you, thank you for coming out. We're very excited for this panel on identifying and correcting perverse incentives. We're super duper grateful for you all coming out. We're very grateful for IndieBio for hosting us in their beautiful space. Thank you IndieBio. Also grateful to BioCaptivate, Ian and Lewis for partnering with us. I'm Alan Saki on the host of Simulation, which you may have seen before, where we interview some of the greatest minds alive. Ron Vagus is our producer-director. He's back there doing our camera for today. And unfortunately for those that may have seen that Esther and Eza were both on the panel originally, but then Esther messaged us with an emergency and Eza was sick. So really unfortunate they weren't able to make it, but we did our best to find replacements last minute. And we're going to have an incredible evening together. For the last minute changes, actually Lewis has offered everyone in the audience a free ticket to his biology is not programming. Introduction to DNA, RNA and proteins course that he's going to be teaching. That date is still to be determined, but you all can reach out to BioCaptivate and for attending that event. I actually have had an incredible experience attending the first class that Lewis taught, and I thought it was one of the best synthesis of biology, making it really relatable. So highly recommend that. So also, and we'll move to the next slide to see that the UN Family Foundation helped their incredible people. They have a book that they release called Interdependent Capitalism and make sure that everyone gets a copy of the book on the way out. It's right next to Lewis right there. It's again just one of those books that really puts it so well what's going on with our world, with those perverse incentives and solutions for our way to move forward and why they originated in the first place as well. And they are also behind the incentive prize on incentives. And that's an incentive competition designed to nurture innovations that promote a better future for all through inclusive stakeholders, vested interdependent interests, and goal congruence. And that challenge invites social innovations from any discipline including economics, politics, arts, technology and sciences, including the social sciences. And the website is there, the incentive prize on incentives.org. And if you put in the code 71919 into the How Did You Hear About Us field, that would help identify that you found out about it through us. And the challenge runs from July 1, 2019 to December 1, 2019. And a select number of winners will be chosen to receive $5,000 each for the best proposal submitted in accordance with the terms on the website. So the deadline for submissions is October 31. So remember from all of these things that we're going to be talking about with identifying critical perverse incentives, you can submit a proposal to the incentive prize on incentives. Alright and just a couple quick thoughts before we start. This big human experiment that's unfolding on planet Earth is both marvelous and fragile. And there's no guarantees within immense amount of civilizations that have collapsed before us that we were able to handle the godlike technologies that we are creating. Our maturity, ethics and wisdom need to skyrocket if we plan to make it through these challenging times. We know thanks to much of the globalized infrastructure and incentive systems, people have been pulled out of poverty at unprecedented rates and quality of life is increasing around the world. We also acknowledge that many of these incentive systems have evolved self-dealing tendencies, embedded growth obligations, oligopoly dynamics, lack of inclusive stakeholder with non-represented entities like the ecology we all reside in, and future generations who would like to inherit a well-functioning Earth not polluted with problems. We have tools ranging from ancient wisdom to new technologies to correct these perverse incentives and ensure greater propensity to make it through these challenging times. This is what our panel conversation will be about tonight and I ask you for a favor, embody a couple words into your essence with me. The first word is nuance. And one of the, if you've seen any of my social profiles, that's my middle name now, I changed it to nuance. Purposely I'm trying to subconsciously help people move into non-binary thinking, this multivariate mindset's equanimity, so staying even, keel, calm and composed, gratitude for life that we are even here and there's something rather than nothing, for every breath, for every drink of water, for every bite of food, gratitude for us being here together and humility. So again, I welcome you, extend deep gratitude and wish you all fruitful experience with our event. So let's start with panelist introductions. Again, thank you, thank you everyone for coming super duper grateful. All right, can we all maybe take a deep breath in together? Let's see one more. So nice to be present with you all tonight. All right, Po Brunson is the first one here to my left to your right. His wide-ranging published works have earned national awards and bestselling titles. He's a storyteller in futures, reconceptualizing complex challenges into more elegant forms to broaden understanding and highlight priorities. Next to my left and your right is Nishan Degnurain. He's focused on climate and ocean issues as unprecedented. He founded and shared the World Economic Forum Special Initiative on Oceans, wrote Soul of the Sea in the Age of the Algorithm, and is working on a new international UN Treaty on Life in the Oceans. Next up is Maya Lockwood. Maya Lockwood empowers entrepreneurs, voices, emotional intelligence and leadership skills. She oversees Indie Bios Communication Strategy and Community Building Around Content, Thought Leadership, Media Events, Speaking Engagements and Strategic Partnerships. Next up is Parikshit Sharma is a principal at IndieBio doing analysis, market research, modeling and automation for their portfolio and data pipeline. Also actively works with the portfolio companies on Building Data Rooms and Techno Economic Modeling. And last up is Lewis Metzger, who is co-founder of BioCaptivate and Chief Scientific Officer of Tierra Biosciences, believing that the precise engineering of biology will enable a coming revolution in how humans live, work and interact with our planet. Alright, let's start things off by asking you, what is the most first principle or upstream root issue with these perverse incentives? And feel free, whoever would like to start things off. Who, Berkshire? You and Gopal. Alright, well upstream, way, way upstream for me, and one I spend a lot of time thinking about, is that the material world is visible and our internal worlds are not necessarily visible. And the net result of this is that our status systems are primarily based around the visible world, and it leads us to seek property, money, status symbols, use a lot of the world's natural resources in a way, and that we don't have a way to essentially display the value of our internal states of mind. And now my dear friend Maya may remember everybody's name, and I can't remember their name. She may have incredibly wild dreams and minor pedestrian, but there's no way to have status in a sort of social way around that. And on the deepest level, way, way, so this is very, very upstream, right, but is this fundamental problem? How can we make people value the things that we all individually try to value? We all individually try to reward with each other and talk about ours being super important, but we don't have, you know, you can't like, I can't just like post on Facebook like, this was my dream last night, it was awesome, you'd be jealous of my dreams. But if I buy a condo over the ballpark, and it costs $2 million, and I post a beautiful photo of the ballpark from the view of my condo, you can all watch. And I think that fundamental element of how to bring our interior worlds out and more visible is one dimension that's way, way upstream that I find myself thinking about a lot. Thank you. That was beautiful. A great place to start. I think that we need a reward system or incentives that recognize people who have taken 100% responsibility for their lives, for their happiness, for their emotional intelligence. And I don't know if we have anything like that yet, but 100% responsibility. I think I would agree there, and I was just thinking about reverse incentives in how they relate to one, me being a millennial where it feels like all people are giving us a future we don't want, and to me being a third world or global South citizen where it seems the post World War II economy seems to favor developed nations and there's this cycle of emerging developing that we just haven't been able to break. And I think it comes from caring, ironically, how much we care, how much institutions care. That has bred a form of paternalism, and I think that's central to institutions at the family level as well as the global level. So paternalism and caring, ironically, is breeding perverse incentives in my mind. And just to build on this and the caring, I know a lot of you here have got a big background in science focus. And so several months ago we had a meeting in India with the Dalai Lama, and one of the challenges that we were talking about, some of the big challenges from a science and spirituality perspective, and one of the big challenges is climate change, oceans, what's going on with our environment. And we asked, well, where do you see hope? Where do you see change actually emerging in this world of turmoil and turbulence? And he said, well, he actually thinks that we fundamentally misunderstood science. So what do you mean by that? He said, well, our science basis, it's still based on Darwinism, a concept 200 years ago, where you see something very dramatic, a lion attacking a gazelle or attacking a penguin. So it's extremely dramatic, and it's based on survival of the fittest. And that mindset of survival of the fittest in a natural world then percolated down into our social systems, our political systems, our economic systems, where we encourage competition and dog eat dog. So, well, actually, that's based on a misunderstanding of science, and I'm sure there's a lot more scientists over here correctly. He said, when you actually look at certain species and genes that have actually survived for many thousands of years, these are species that exist in herds, in shoals, in communities, and interdependency of different species as well. So actually, when you look at survival, although one is very dramatic, we're really talking about survival of the kindest. And as well as survival of the kindest, can we bring about a new age of empathy where we can actually create this new value system that we'd like to see? So I thought that was very powerful and profound in terms of how do we just move beyond the last 200 years of a certain mindset to a new paradigm of compassion and kindness. So I would see a major upstream determinant of some of the perverse incentives that we deal with being this idea of a runaway objective function. So, especially in the age of the algorithm, we're in a position where we can really efficiently optimize the extraction of resources or the creation of wealth, however one wishes to define that, and so many other objectives. And in doing some things perhaps too efficiently, we're undermining our future and creating conditions where maybe we've over-optimized. And this is in so many different fields. So I think this runaway objective function optimization that runs throughout modern economies, academia, many other fields is one cause of perverse incentives. It seems to be that this idea that the internal state of how one feels with their own well-being, with the family, the community and the world, that needs some sort of an incentive for us to figure out how to make that incentivized for people to talk about and to want to share and also for people to rank themselves up in terms of their own divine connection with their purpose and with the world's trajectory. Now, indigenous tribes from around the world have for the longest time been talking about that this first principal issue of our disconnection from nature, from what sustains us, is directly reflected in the issues that we have in our civilization. Where do you believe that the disconnection from nature, this first principle of indigenous wisdom, lies with the issue we have with perverse incentives? Well, I'll take the start of that. I mean, I think what's interesting is we're starting to see this recognition of different value systems that exist. And I know in the U.S., I know one of the Native American cultures here talk about the seventh generation principle, really thinking much more longer term about how the seventh generation judge decisions that are being made. And somehow we still have an economic system that's based on a GDP, and GDP is a very modern concept. It's only been around for 70 or 80 years post-Second World War as a way to measure instruments, and even central banks are a relatively modern concept. So I think part of the bridge is how do we actually start harmonizing our institutions with some of the other value systems that we've had? Why can there not be measures beyond GDP, value systems or institutions that link to our value of our elders or wisdom, or the value of nature, for example? So I think that those institutions will need to be modernized in sync with some of our ancient cultures. So, I mean, one thing that I think is the indigenous people knew and know that many modern societies have partially forgotten is the value of what's evolved in deep time and nature. And if you think about green chemistry, or actually many of the pharmaceuticals that you all probably have used, maybe they've even saved your life because they were an antibiotic and you would have died of sepsis had it not been for that treatment. These are natural products. Lots of them are natural products. So that means that they're made by enzymes encoded by DNA in organisms and plants, bacteria, fungi, all organisms, all different types of organisms in nature. And I think that looking back towards what's in nature for an added value of a species diversity and a value beyond ecotourism in terms of preserving beautiful and diverse ecosystems is something that we learn from indigenous cultures. And the field of natural product chemistry has been quite dependent on indigenous wisdom. And in fact, many of their medical interventions have been borne out by solid science. So I think that that's one thing that in my field I think a lot about. Well, two thoughts on this. One relates to property and fundamentally, like today I was talking and someone was asking me, do you think biotech is like IT startups? And I said, no, this next decade is not the same. And the most fundamental difference is IP. In the software and internet world, you maybe have IP on your algorithms and some of your chipset designs and this and that. But people basically just move past it really fast, don't care, not that big of a deal. You don't really corner a market because you have IP and biotech you do. And in fact, if you're a biotech startup, you have to be very nimble around other people's IP to try to figure out how to move forward and take out a market. In fact, and it's necessary, it's oddly necessary for our 105 companies that we've graduated so far. Virtually all of them had IP and if they didn't, we couldn't have funded them and they couldn't have gotten follow on funding from other ventures. It was necessary to extract these amazing solutions for human and planetary health out of this sort of idea stage and the research stage and the commercialism. So it's necessary, but it's also sort of tragic because this fundamental element of property and defending property means that even for a lot of those solutions we'd want in the world, people literally own them and own the right to use those and certainly use them in a commercial, in any sort of commercial venue. Reminded of that Abraham Maslow before he created his famous sort of triangle of hierarchy of needs. He was sort of working on this idea of it and he went to visit a friend who wasn't an ethnologist and anthropologist studying the Blackfoot Indians in Canada and he went there and they had their own sort of triangle of needs, but he kind of inverted it. And so what he took as our sort of Western idea of a hierarchy of needs, he simply inverted it and what's really clear there where we think of this idea of respecting your elders or hanging on to what your elders knew. Like we have this sort of mysticism around that concept, but in fact if you think of it like more like there at the level, like your elders taught you, eat this bush, don't eat that one, it'll kill you. This is how you catch a fish, not like that, you'll die. Like don't eat that, it looks yummy, but it's not good for you. It was a matter of, when we say existential threat, it was an existential threat. There was no books, there was no Wikipedia, there was no Nature Reserve to store all this information. You literally had to remember what your elders told you or you would die. And that we've mysticized that, but not really understood that when we basically learned to record information and pass that on by other means, we didn't have to. It wasn't an existential threat anymore to pay attention to what your elders said. And today we think of existential not even as a threat to our existence, but almost the opposite. I don't have any threats to my existences and therefore I'm kind of drifting in the world in lack purpose. And we've sort of inverted it just as much as Maslow did and how we think about these things. And so I think fundamentally a lot, even just like recording of information itself would arguably have changed that paradigm. You didn't have to listen to your elders if, I could go look it up in Wikipedia rather than ask a dad or remember what he said. Going back to Nature, I think we will have to reclassify this divide between urban and Nature, urban spaces and natural spaces, I should say, because most of humanity, as we know it, is going to live in cities. Maybe. Trends are moving there, but also we have this deep yearning to be out of the massive concrete jungles too. Yeah, and I think again going back to this idea of the love of Nature and appreciation of its mystical beauty or this romanticization. If you look at most tribes or primal cultures today, they are living in this hybrid urban, rural dichotomy where they're very disengaged from the aesthetic value of Nature. I think of Indian shrines where there's so much plastic around it and actually I'm from the Himalayas and once I went on a hike where the temple groundskeeper said that they don't care about the plastic because they're disengaged from the aesthetics of the plastic and I also think about birds that are more successful in urban environments as predators because there's just so much food out here than birds that live in bushes. So just rethinking our environment and this urban nature divide I think is very important and you know just disengaging the aesthetics is also very important to if we are to identify this perverse incentive is my take somewhere down to the use value versus the exchange value of things we have to deconstruct it more. I don't claim to have an answer but yeah I think that's part of the problem here. Maya, thoughts as well on indigenous wisdom? Well just one thing comes to mind and that is that we don't have initiation rights to become adults and so a lot of indigenous cultures they do have those ceremonies in which they are strongly rooted in nature that help people become and they learned that from their elders as well. Communities are involved and we are disconnected from each other, from our communities, from our families and therefore we're also disconnected from nature. Yeah it's like third graders with godlike technologies. We haven't initiated ourselves into the deepest spiritual wisdom that they know and that we get to play with the technologies that are being democratized in the hands of everyone on the planet that have so much power now. Yeah, what is the best tool for identifying the perverse incentives? I don't know. Lewis come on you've got a lot of this one. Alright well to put it simply I think one could get a good start by following the money and not that money is bad but I do think you know I really think that pose comments earlier about how does one signal one's inner wealth and how do groups of people signal their collective additive or multiplicative wealth of their you know minds and passions about things they're trying to create and it's different than accruing money it's but not incompatible but I think that I'll give you an example so I like to use the example of universities and I've seen some bad things happen in research universities and in how big academic research is funded and conducted and again it's not all black and white but there are big perverse incentives there and if you follow the money you will see those perverse incentives so long as graduate students and post-doctoral trainees are cheaper than robots they're going to be transferring small volumes of clear liquids into other small volumes of clear liquids and learning not very much from that you know it's 95% prep time 5% collecting real data and thinking about it and so there is a perverse incentive grants have large overheads taken by universities so for instance university x will get a grant or a professor at university x will get a grant for a million dollars for basic research 500k of that is typically taken off the top by the university ostensibly to keep the lights on but then one sees a proliferation of assistant associate deputy deans of this or that and you know another wastage that really doesn't have to do with education and you can see how grant harvesting and turning the other way when fraudulent data are used to obtain grants is something that's incentivized so that's one example but you know you follow the money and you can see in that many other cases well I was thinking along the same lines I don't know if the Kung-Fai forever I word for it which is this sort of you know beware the nobility of first appearances and the way that universities fund themselves on by taking half of on or half again of each every grant is sort of NIH gives $39 billion every year to our universities to do science work it's really important it drives everything and all the solutions that we need it's fantastic but there are these sort of things you wouldn't see until you look at it you know I was very excited when with the U.S. we created the 45Q carbon sequestration tax credit $50 for sequestering a ton $35 for just capturing but then I looked up who's the actual number one user of this and it's the PetroNova facility in Houston where the WAP Parish boiler number eight burns coal and they are so they're coal burning they capture it good for them they pipe it 82 miles east into Louisiana where they use it as fracking the new fracking material to push up yet more oil so the oil field there which was doing something like only 300 barrels a week is now doing 15,000 barrels a week or something so and they're getting paid the whole way to do that and the U.S. gave them a $190 million grant to build the whole sequestration and pipeline facility so the nobility of it is fantastic right like it's a great thing then you'll go look at the number one user and I don't even know if it's good or bad Nishan tell me out here but like it doesn't feel like that was the outcome we wanted to create yet more fossil fuel extraction with it I don't know if they were extremely cunning or they planned this in advance or what it is but there's definitely a sort of a beware of the wolf in sheep's clothing I was actually before you said money it's good you reminded me I was thinking of data but now that we have money I'll add to that we don't have to think about money per se rather the time value of money I think up of us in saying the time value of money capitalism as it's set up works between 5 to 25 years discounted cash flows and interest rates work only work between 5 to 20 that's when they're meaningless and if you look at capitalism today or globalization today we have not reconciled our past we are thinking of universal basic income to offset future inequality but we don't think about how that stems from historic inequality and so thinking about time value of money is I think very very important something we are very bad at and something we have not thought of and I have only learned working at a VC firm where there's this concept of a cap table or a capitalization table which is the spreadsheet of who owns how much over time and at IndieBio we have a saying we'll only fund a company with a clean cap table so where the skin in the game from the day an idea is thought of till the day someone is funded is proportionate to effort and it seems the world is being investing on a faulty cap table and you know capitalists have figured it out no one in the valley funds a startup with a faulty cap table if the history of your startup and effort and talent is disproportionate you're not funded but global trade has it been carried out has blood has a very very gruesome past that we don't talk about so we've been funding our world on a faulty cap table so that's what I would say time value of money is something I want to learn more about I'm sure some of the audience members probably have some views on perverse incentives and others that I could actually contribute but my two cents worth is it's a workshop time to do that fantastic so I think talent is a good indicator when you look at the top of organizations whether it's the public sector, the private sector you wonder whether this the talent at the top level really reflects the talent in society is it a fair representation on every metric that we look at of society and linked to that the other point is around certain stereotypes in terms of just challenging certain assumptions I think so in one of my roles I'm an advisor to the Chinese government on their ocean and climate strategies one of three foreigners in that capacity and what's interesting is right now we talked about fracking, we talked about the US and historically it has been western nations it's been Europe, it's been the US, Canada, Australia who's been leading a charge around coastal stewardship but the scale of what we're facing with climate change is so acute within 12 years we hit these tipping points and I'm from a small island called Mauritius in the Indian Ocean I've just come back this week and it's devastating when I look at that I was around some of the reefs which are most pristine marine parks we used to have one of the largest brain corals in the world probably about the size of this room only two percent is alive today and 10 years ago this was vibrant full of color so even in the country that I'm from in 12 years we're going to hit that tipping point where I will not have any coral reefs and that's a third of my GDP the protection of our coastlines, our hotel sectors so this is a very existential crisis I'm sure if the US had a third of its GDP at risk there will be a lot more activity than building fracking stations and so what's interesting is what is the role of democracy in this and we're finding countries like the US obviously everyone's followed what's happening politically here like the UK like Europe democratic countries are not moving as fast as they need to on some of the big challenges and so one of the really important questions we've got to put on the table is are they going to be transitioned are we going to naturally progress to a cleaner world using market mechanisms using democracy or would there be another mechanism to do that and what's interesting about China is that China is A very large, B they're building the Belt and Road Initiative that will touch 60% of global GDP a third of the world's population of 68 countries for better or for worse and yet they're moving a lot more aggressively than Europe or the US in terms of climate and environmental standards and so that I think it's something that we'll have to grapple with at some stage what are the trade-offs and values but at least on one metric on the environmental side although there's a lot of stereotype in the US media when you actually go to China and see the progress that's been happening almost on a quarterly basis it is actually very profound so I think that's something just to be aware of as well Okay and then I'm curious on like which if when you think about things as code which which governments and which organizations and which companies around the world are running the best code to be stewards of the planet how do we take that and build on top of that what do we do to correct self-dealing institutions and increase kin altruism so the self-dealing institution and it's really well explained in the UN Family Foundations Interdependent Capitalism self-dealing can be thought of like when in the days of the kin tribe as Po was explaining to you with his incredible humor as well that you would tell a story to someone else for the benefit of the other person because you would want to make sure they don't die eating the wrong thing nowadays you have all of the propaganda that's occurring with food self-dealing food company self-dealing physician self-dealing everybody in so many ways and so what they're doing is they're just propagating a meme to try and earn more money for themselves instead of something that's actually helpful to you so how do we how do we correct those self-dealing institutions and also how do we increase kin altruism across the global scale yes ma'am well I think June would say the media is a good place to start and the storytelling that we choose to share so if you're talking about how say for example a food company pedals their product to people you want to start telling the story of truth whether it does contain the things that it does contain and that's it comes down to the narrative po don't look at me man I don't know the answer to this one I mean this is really I mean I know I live in this world and I've been a member of the media for a long time and I other than like trying to be honest and tell it like it is I don't I see this insane problem today there's been every organization is a media company and they put out a message that makes them look good and there's not one that doesn't do it not one and maybe they write some you know occasional maya couples or whatever an apologies but usually not and and and your to your point like it's one thing that you lobbyist you don't even lobbyist you just you know put out your message and spend it I don't I don't have the answer to it I really don't I wish you did but you guys have answers for it I mean I will say that it's it sounds easier than you think because every and we often do this as truth and or as science and anti-science but every scientific breakthrough fundamentally is anti-science is violating what scientists thought was possible and it is what they thought was impossible is possible so when people make scientific breakthroughs a lot of people read it and think see science didn't know all the thought it did and so every scientific breakthrough they're having more and more more continues to emphasize this message was the science thought they knew what they were doing with it actually don't know what they're doing and so it fundamentally creates this psychological landscape where it's up for grabs and so it's not as simple as people think you know downstairs we graduated 11, 15 companies every time and they're doing something people thought was impossible that the NIH wouldn't give them a grant because this is going to break the laws of physics they would say and then it turns out to be true, possible so when you're living with that is at one end of the spectrum there's a problem I don't know how you define the difference between stuff we think is good and noble and stuff that shouldn't exist I don't I'm not sure I'll be able to follow that in terms of the that but I do think self-serving institutions one of the questions we're facing we're on the spectrum we're going to be is every organization a media organization there is certain power towards transparency and truth for the longest time it was a media with a broker we're obviously in this era of Twitter or Facebook the lowest common denominator do we rely on the madness or the wisdom of the crowds and mob rule to actually make decisions whether you're private or public organizations or at the other end do you need these these mandarins of technical experts actually making judgments for us or is there some kind of halfway house and how do you decide to wear that halfway house I think that's at the core of what the question is and I certainly don't have a good answer to that but I think economics tells us there's infinite wants and finite needs and so or finite resources and so you know if it's if everything is decentralized to everybody expressing their opinions we're never going to truly I know Peter Demandis talks a lot about abundance and this era of abundance but are we are we ever going to meet everybody's needs and so you know who has that mechanism to actually control who gets what on a redistribution I think that's a key question but you know trust is going to be absolutely core to that so on the subject of self-dealing combat self-dealing again I'll go back to the example of funding of academic research and corporate research through government academic corporate sort of three corner triangular funding approaches the problem I think is regulatory capture so if you look at NIH study sections so the panels of people who review grants to the National Institute of Health they're disproportionately professors they're disproportionately high-ranking long-serving professors and not surprisingly such professors have the highest rates of funding of their own grants and so it's easy to look at someone's nascent research program and say well that's not established compared to my own you know I'm not I'm not going to fund that but professor XYZ the hall for me has 50 grad students and 20 postdocs and cranks out papers you know that research is more precedented and more fundable more achievable and so I think that the solution to this is not to remove senior professors from study sections but it's to supplement those study sections with people with other perspectives and I would go so far as to put research trainees to a percentage on study sections because they their lives are in many ways affected by these grants being funded and so if you're going to bring in all the stakeholders to make this more sustainable I think you should bring in all the stakeholders to some extent and so I'd like to see to sum it up us moving from regulatory capture to an expansion of regulatory responsibility again I have no solutions here but I would echo what Nishan brought up this concept of scarcity and self-dealing is the best response to scarcity if someone tells me Bank of America has a million left I'm going to run to Bank of America and everyone should run for Bank of America towards Bank of America it's a negative destable equilibrium and as long as I would ask the audience this question if it is even possible to limit self-dealing in a scarce world where needs are fine where means are finite but needs are insatiable it seems we are caught in some kind of bad equilibrium and we know the answer to a bank run is to tax people ironically not the banks but the people so let's think in the framework where there exists scarcity and where can we eliminate this and who we tax for what purpose to eliminate this best response because currently the only thing I can think of is if scarce then safeguard yourself so that scarcity is central to me and I just want to even see if there can be ever no scarcity and I'm wondering Maya, thoughts on this topic and how about we talked about this a little bit but we have this massive economic machinery that is continuing to just churn and churn and churn on a daily basis we created a beast that doesn't have a pause button and it also doesn't have a recalibrate with a little rudder to help us recalibrate it in a different direction and so this machinery continues to move so it seems as though it's to find new markers for flourishing, new markers for well-being, new markers for figuring out how well someone's doing on the internal, how well they're doing with nature what are some of these new markers of the future and how do we measure them, how do we make them common around our world? I think you're spot on one of the biggest challenges of our time if we look at the next 30 years is how does the middle-income countries progress because if everybody aspires India, China, Indonesia, Brazil aspires to a European Union or a US standard of living at 30,000 or 40,000 dollars per capita we burn through four times our planetary resources and that's a challenge within the next three decades and if you think about the 1950s in the US, the American dream the mod cons the microwave, the suburb and car and the commute that's still permeating on televisions and mass media around the world, whether you watch Bollywood or Chinese TV or Indonesian TV we haven't yet defined what that the China dream is or the India dream or the Brazil dream and that's going to be absolutely core as a marker for what our new economic system should look like can we look at an economic system that's dependent more on access or consumption should we be consuming it's also ironic we talk about scarcity in certain planets we have this obesity crisis in the western world so there's clear discrepancies in our economic systems in the US and Europe, the wealthy world versus the global south so how do we define the new dream if you're a 16-year-old in Indonesia today or in China today what does that 35-year-old look like for them in terms of children lifestyle, weather, consumption what does that look like at a $20,000 per capita measure that hasn't yet been defined so that's a center part of your question what we need to look for so that's really because I was going to say lower quartiles income growth and just like late last night two in the morning I was looking at news saying oh you know wage growth is over 3% again, finally it's going up and I was sort of like really? I got to look at this by the quartiles and it's a different story you see that in the top quartile wage growth is terrific and other quartiles it is going up but it's gone from 1.2 to 1.3% annually to 1.6 so it's going in the right direction but what you're telling me Nishan and I don't want the audience to miss this you've told me this before but actually is that if all those people do better the net result is we run out of resources four times over and therefore it's not about sort of on some level the desire to raise a standard living for all is fundamentally up against a constraint around resources and how we use them and not that we couldn't come up with future technologies living buildings made from coral that grow themselves where everything is sustainable and we reuse our resources not necessarily the mass but it's the way we're using them today that makes that so incredibly impossible even to desire for the world that's fascinating I wish there was a way that we could identify how emotional and mental freedom can be captured and defined and how there are so many well a tremendous amount of people on this planet today who are living with generational trauma and how we can heal that generational trauma and identify that we've healed that successfully I don't know how that's articulated or defined I think that's a great point not just trauma but also generational aspiration so going back to Po and Nisha's point a deli boy today dreams of an Audi while my friends in Frankfurt go to yoga class cook Indian food and ride their bikes to work it's this dreams of a generation which they thought were possible that will not be satiated right if the world has to be sustainable and going back to trauma going back to our past how do we create an emotional baseline for our generation for our previous generation I would say the abolition of slavery was a defining baseline that was undeniable to everyone what would that look like for our generation is something I invite that because if it weren't for that I would be in more issues working on a tea farm and I wouldn't be sitting in this room so there has to be a baseline and I just don't know what that is so emotions are a big part of it so thank you Maya for bringing that up so in terms of a hallmark of our times or the changing hallmark of our times might be I think transitioning from short termism to a greater appreciation of the long term well just time scales in general when you need to accomplish big goals and obviously we have so many large objectives as a species ahead of us if we wish to survive in some comfort but I think a lot of what ills us right now is the quarterly financial report there's one example but this short term incentivization and a great example of that is the pharmaceutical industry and I'm leaving aside for the moment manufacturing generic pharmaceuticals but if you look at pharma companies that are doing basic research discovery so they go from first concept to discovery and development pipeline to bring small molecules or antibodies of therapeutic value to the market and now of course we're seeing even engineered cells and this is great the work is good the problem is the scientists don't run those companies the accountants run those companies or the development executives and so programs that took 15 or 20 years to build and are close to bearing fruit in the area of infectious diseases multidrug resistant bacteria the plug can be pulled on them for short term financial incentives and what was lost is it's not even calculable and so I think that to achieve to solve difficult problems I see evidence in what's written in the mass media even that people are beginning to rebel against this excessive short termism and so I hope that sometimes is people collectively in all different areas and science too thinking about okay I can make I can contribute part of a 20 year experiment or a 20 year series of experiments and developments that will make the world better and that's a good use of my time and effort I don't care about quarterly profits so anyway let's wrap on this question which is this is actually really close to the heart at IndieBio I'm a huge fan of this 50 years from now what will the kids say I can't believe you were fucking doing that and for example at IndieBio that's so close to my heart is the billions of animals that were slaughtering on the planet for food when we're pursuing bioreactors in our future another example are these gorgeous coral reefs around the planet that are under destruction Maya as well with how I can't believe you weren't mapping your mental states I can't believe you're just self dealing pharmaceuticals into people's throats so I'm really curious 50 years from now what will the kids be saying I can't believe you were fucking doing that letting the north pole burn you mean I so I could say things like I can't believe that you used to try to treat people's brains without looking at their brains but I will just caution that I don't believe we can even whether you look a linear or exponential model to predict the future that it is going to work out like that one of the things is that all of the unseen unknown undiscovered technologies that nobody has seen none of us on the panel have seen or even thought of and how they will disrupt things will come to bear to change things as well as economic systems hopefully and you know I like to say I spent in my years before coming to new bio I was doing futurism helping corporate venture times and doing some sustainability work and I was doing a lot of lucid dreaming and I would get up in the morning and then go back to sleep and I would play this game of chess set in the year 2030 and there were five players so five player chess and one player was climate change and one was AI and inequality and one was genomics revolution and one was China and one was savage income inequality and I would try to play out what was going to happen and I was desperate to try to figure out the future and coming here and being with Arvind and it was surprising that Indie bio I found out that I can come in as strategy director because actually they haven't been planning really focused on experimenting and reacting very very fast finding what works and what doesn't work and finding the ones that work and keep going and it came out to me in this phrase which is I understand that hunger for a plan but that I ended up saying to seize this opportunity there is no plan just a way there is no plan just a way you will end up with what retrospect was a good plan if you try to plan your way through all this unknown there is no way that plan is going to work so in terms of the values I think it is interesting what you said about vegetarianism and that value some of you may have heard me speak before I have talked in a modern era about the four industrial revolutions and we are in the fourth modern industrial revolution and if you think about the industrial revolutions they weren't about the widgets and the gadgets they were viewed from steam or wind to steam steam to oil it was about the institutions and the value systems that pervaded ourselves at the time so if you think about the 1750s to the 1850s that was an era of colonialism of empire the time of conquest of the east of Africa of Latin America and so value systems like slavery was prevalent at the time it took an act of leadership around the 1850s around the world in order to bring about an end of slavery in many regions of the world in the British, French, Spanish and obviously in the US as well and then if you look from the 1850s to the 1950s that next industrial revolution as we we moved into the 20th century we had the horrors of the two world wars the first the failed League of Nations and the United Nations Eleanor Roosevelt with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights after the the horrors of the Holocaust but that again brought the world together and set of values and so those values kind of pervaded and then as we move from the 1950s through to the 2000s that third industrial revolution as the oil multinationals started to expand that was the first time the satellite era started so in 1968 I know we're going to celebrate Apollo 11 soon but 1968 earth rise the first time a satellite left earth orbit took an image of the earth and that was the birth of the modern environmental movement ADWF was created in 1968 Greenpeace 1972 a lot of the environmental movement Rachel Carson's Silent Spring came out around that era as well and so that value systems around the environment came about and we started bringing about legislation to protect whaling for example to prevent DDT and so that has taken us up to this point and so as we look now and say okay for the next 50 years that fourth industrial revolution is the era of biological advancement digital advancement robotics, new materials what's going to bring about a consensus we're already seeing a consensus around plastics and around the environment we're seeing a broad consensus around climate and some of our institutions are already being challenged our democratic institutions so I think you're right that when you look at this the question is is this something that's going to be created centrally or will there be technologies that we develop that could actually shift our value systems in ways that we cannot expect today so just as the satellite took that image of the earth had no I can't remember the name of the astronaut who took one of you guys will remember the astronaut who took the image of earth in 1968 but they had no idea that that was going to lead to a profound environmental movement in the same way that we've seen those who fought against Tiananmen Square or some of the declarations that have been made how this has had a profound impact so it could actually be technology that shifts our value system in the most profound way in ways that we can't assess today so that could be where you hope would like I hope that in 50 years the children will say I can't believe you didn't listen to nature I can't believe you didn't tune in and see what was going on around you and I actually believe that nature is speaking now and we're going to be seeing a lot more of her intelligence as we progress some of the indigenous tribes even say it's having an allergic reaction right now to the humans yeah I would hope that in the next children in the 50 years from now would look back and be really shocked how we are so gendered and we have we are not safeguarding rights of people that don't fit into binary genders and sexuality norms so I really do hope personally that there's a shift away from that and children are disgusted by how we treat some genders and norms set around gender and sexuality still it is 2019 yeah looking at this question there's so many potential answers but the one that came to mind was I think children are going to wonder why we allowed ourselves to be so digitally manipulated and I don't mean digitally as in fingers digits but electronically digitally but well that is a bad well anyway but well maybe both but I think that that we are thinking is fragmented and I'm guilty of this too I mean I think many of us experience this you're on you're on your corporate email at strange hours of the night because you sleep with your phone because it also has an alarm clock function and you know you have Slack and other message you know apps and it's convenient I mean it certainly helps things but I think we immensely overuse it and I think it's bad for areas like science like thinking you need time to free associate I think and and and bring together disparate you know viewpoints but also disparate pieces of information in your mind and if you're interrupted every few seconds by your watch vibrating on your wrist telling you that someone posted something on Instagram or you know you have an email from your boss at 2 30 in the morning you know this is not conducive to good thinking and I think that we don't need just good thinking among us we need good quality thinking among all of the people on earth people need to be able to think deeply about important issues and not be so distracted and so when I look at what our descendants will say if we have any which hopefully we will is why did they let themselves be so distracted and and moreover distracted to generate profit for some companies that say that they're helping humanity but really they're not and because ASA wasn't able to join us in the Center for Humane Technology we'll speak on behalf of one of their main pillars of ethos which is that if you take these institutions that have these business plans that are in the form of self dealing as much of your attention onto the device as possible they're trained on billions of psychometric profiles of people from around the world and that sort of computing power targeted at your face we need to humble ourselves and turn off our notifications turn off our ringers and take these long periods of time like the geniuses did in the past to just free associate in nature all these different types of things so this has been such a beautiful conversation thank you everyone for joining us on the panel thank you our audience we'll have a Q&A portion now let's get a round of applause whoo!