 Matters. Here's the five o'clock block. I'm Jay Feidell. This is Think Tech and the beautiful lady on the other side is a little bit Satoris and she joins us to ask the age-old question here on Community Matters. Who will create our human future question mark? Hi Elizabeth. Hello Jay. Good to see you again. Yeah, we get together on an annual or semi-annual or tri-annual basis and this is our big show together here. So Elizabeth, you're still teaching right? I haven't been during COVID. Everything got shut down. Oh my goodness. I mean I still do a lot of teaching online but I haven't been at the university. Okay and at the university what have you been teaching? What were you teaching? Well I had the good fortune of working together with our now-departed elder Kaweila Clark and Ramsey Tom and the then head of the business school at Shamanad to design living economies courses especially for our island economies here in Hawaii to help us get sustainable but they they haven't been very good about promoting those courses I'm afraid and that's the problem we face here is that we're not taking sustainability and better living economy future seriously enough. But you know it's going to catch up with us. Oh yes it is. I'm sorry but that's the reality. So let's ask the age old question. Who will create our human future? And I mean to get specific about this so let's name names. Yes, well I think our title actually was will it be the Corporate Autocracy or will it be We the People? Okay well the first part of that I knew you were going to say that and I made a mental note that we're going to ask you about what is a corporatocracy? Well let me start just with a little bit of introduction of myself as an evolution biologist because the most important thing I uncovered in my study of four billion years of evolution was that species. How long did that take you by the way? It took a lot of years but it's hard to condense four billion down into a few minutes so that's what we have to do now right? Yes. So the point is that there is a maturation cycle in evolution where there's a youthful expansive economy mode like when you're growing up and your cells keep doubling and you get bigger and bigger and bigger up to adolescence and then you have to level off and spend the major part of your life in that size body which shrinks a little bit again at my age but anyway it moves from an expansion economy where there's lots of creativity and lots of competition and hostilities all wound up in that youthful mode and then you have to make the shift into a cooperative mode for the rest of it. So you have to go from the hostile competition to the mature cooperation. That's exactly the inflection point where we people are at now and the contenders are those who have been in control in the youthful mode which is the corporatocracy and this is made up of our biggest corporations including the banks and the googles and the you know the ones that came out of Silicon Valley as well as the older ones but the Silicon Valley derivatives of of course now completely taken over. Someone pointed out the other day that when you go on to Google or Amazon you're moving into a feudal autocracy where one person has the algorithm has is in charge of the algorithms that drive your behavior. I thought you I thought you were talking about Vladimir Putin there for a minute. How did that come in? One person can drive your behavior. Oh I see well we've had a number of those seven to eight over time and we had a president who was behaving that way ourselves in this country and who was best friends with Putin and and the others right. Well let me but let me go back for a moment you know there's a movie which we review here in Think Tech called The Gilded Age and it's a documentary and it talks about the railroads and steel and oil. Yes it talks about the Robber Barons. Robber Barons yeah all in the what they call the the Mumford deck the the brown decades and that was a subject of a book by Lewis Mumford covering between the Civil War and the end of the 19th century and and and that effectively ended that period with the election of of McKinley, William McKinley. It certainly put a lot of restrictions on it. It didn't exactly end it but it certainly tried to bring it into a more democratic model right. Right right but the the end of the the the throw on that was this election of 1896 where McKinley represented Wall Street and William Jennings Bryan represented the people and it's the same question that you're asking today. Exactly. Will we have this corporatocracy or will we have government a country in Lincoln's words by foreign of the people and the election showed at least at that point that inflection point that it was going to be a corporatocracy run by Wall Street. And now we're in the situation globally where the dollar is not likely to remain you know the main currency much longer and the corporatocracy is now wanting to create a completely digitized currency which is part of the whole control mechanism of what I call the this great reset takeover that the corporatocracy wants. You see they've we've done about 6,000 years of empire building as humans and this is the last gasp. This is where you want the empire to be global and so you have organizations like the World Economic Forum which gets all of the big bankers and the heads of the biggest companies everybody all onto their team including from China they knew that you have to bring China into the new global empire you can't don't want to end up fighting them. So they all got together and they've been training leadership around the world including Angela Merkel and Macron in France and Trudeau in Canada and even Jacinda Ardern in New Zealand and Bill Gates and all these people are graduates of the Young Global Leaders Projects of the World Economic Forum and they look good because they kind of hide behind the millennium development goals and make everybody think oh this is going to eliminate poverty and this is going to you know bring the the people into a better world that benefits everyone but what it's really going to do is going to completely digitize the economy as long as they can and this is where Jay I'm going to argue that global warming may be on our side to scotch that little program but you've now got a whole generation or two already you know wedded to their iPhones and thinking that this is a great world we're going to be in where we're going to get free money from the government and uh and so what if they surveil us what have I got to hide you know there's no problem I won't have to own anything and I can get anything I want right through my cell phone and they don't even ask if if the people don't own anything who owns everything they don't even ask this question so this is a the boiling frog situation where young people have grown up on their iPads and iPhones and and they think this is perfectly fine and of course China developed the whole social credit scores and things so that only if you hang out with the right people and behave yourself according to how the government wants you to behave will you be able to get that pay and be able to buy the stuff or lease lease the stuff you won't have to apropos at that point just last evening on 60 minutes there was a very interesting segment you know we have a housing shortage in the country we're four million houses behind the curve right now and steadily increasing and there are there are capitalists in this particular segment it was a company out of Toronto believe it or not that was buying houses all across the country huge numbers of houses and then renting them because the people in the country could not afford to buy them the market is so you know hot and and you know inflated that the average Joe cannot buy he has to rent so these companies come in they buy lots and lots and lots of houses they fix them up and they rent them like hotcakes results on a demographic basis I'm sure you'll appreciate on a demographic basis the American dream has become all the more elusive somebody else what did you call them the the corporate talker sees are buying the homes that a generation ago people could and would it did buy they want to own everything Jay I mean who's who's the biggest holder of farmland for food growing in the country Bill Gates he's the biggest landholder of agricultural land he set out to buy all the farmland up so what's that going to do to the food supply when we know that he's supporting Monsanto and don't you love Bayer having swallowed up Monsanto so that they can make huge profits toxifying your food supply and then huge more profits selling your medicines because you're now sick from the bad food well I mean you know this is a problem that that has been nipping at us for a while is but and not a lot of not a lot of writers and thinkers have focused us on it you know it's sort of gotten by us but nevertheless it's happening and worse and so the question I put to you is the one you put to me who will create our human future will it be the corporations because back in the turn of the century in the year 1900 the people said we will trust Wall Street you know to determine our future they know best of course that was a hard fought election bottom line though is that's where we have been we have allowed corporate process corporate ownership and all that goes with it to control so much of the American society exactly and that's why the maturation cycle is so important to grok because it's like the the caterpillar in the chrysalis right that caterpillar is doomed whether the butterfly is going to emerge or not it's up for grabs whether we the people are going to build the new light on the earth society the butterfly society or not is still up for grabs but we know that the caterpillar can't last and that's what gives me hope the corporatocracy cannot last it is unsustainable what does unsustainable mean it cannot last it won't last however it's going to take everything it can get while it can get is go down screaming but that's why I say climate change is exactly what may be what may get in their way because when when we have sudden sea level rises of several millimeters overnight it's not going to go gradually up a nice linear curve and no one understands the exponential curve we just got a report this past week that in the Arctic the average temperature in one place is 70 degrees hotter than normal 70 not 770 that is a wild wild fluctuation why do you say that's a good thing why do I say what it's why do you say that's a good thing because we are going to be so busy bailing ourselves out of the sea level rise catastrophes that we won't be stuck in our cell phones listening to what the corporatocracy is telling us how to behave we're going to be trying to scrabble to provide food and shelter and water and transportation whatever for each other when you're talking about an apocalypse you're talking about people starving dying yes they're already doing that that's already happening it's not in here on our turf but it is in other parts of the world it's there already and what do we do what does the corporatocracy do it keeps making wars it keeps selling weapons and beating each other up instead of making peace and going into the cooperative mode this is the caterpillar's nature the youthful economy does not want to let go and they will drive this thing into the ground and then the people will have to rise now there are many examples of people already rising up and we see them here in Hawaii there are important movements trying to get Monsanto out of here still and and you know poor Gary Hoos are trying to reform the government and getting it to act by its own according to its own laws and and all of the people that are working to to grow more organic food the whole Ulu movement with Tusi at University of Hawaii my dear friend Tusi and let's look at the two possibilities here one possibility is that the corporatocracy will continue to run things and maybe run them into the ground the other is that the the people um what did you call it in your question well the human being people those people um they they will rise up and they will determine our future okay that's us I and I think we covered a little bit about the corporatocracy because if they keep doing that without regard to the impact of their bottom line you know philosophy on things Milton Friedman said that bottom line philosophy is bottom line um if they keep on doing that there will be a disaster an apocalypse that that's a good last one that's one identifiable option but the other one I'm having trouble with the one where you say well no the people will achieve the leadership the people will rise up they will take over they will be in charge and they will they will stop this corporatocracy how in the world no no I didn't say they would stop it they will build the alternative just as the the butterfly doesn't stop the caterpillar it builds the alternative within it how's that going to work well for example every time there's a catastrophe here and we've seen this through COVID to all kinds of every time there's any kind of disaster what happens people start cooperating they start helping each other they start pulling each other up by bootstraps the best thing that came out of COVID was that we elevated caregivers cooperators to the heroin status the heroin heroin status that's an important lesson right there and when the sea level goes up two meters and a couple of hotels fall into the Waikiki beach and become the new coral reef believe me people are going to scrabble to feed each other to take care of each other to provide shelter for each other just as they have an every disaster through history right well I'm you know the question is whether mankind or womankind whether the species is perfectible or imperfectible and some people would disagree with you they would say it's imperfectible they will fight with each other they will try to steal from the other yeah the evidence only about their own interest the evidence is against that sure there are always a few renegades who will do that but the evidence is against it when you look at human disasters everywhere all over the world every flood every fire every famine you see Fukushima the Japanese sharing their rice down to the last grain with other people this is the real nature of humans the real nature of humans is to cooperate we can we know how to do it in families we don't see a lot of families where what one kid is overfed and the rest of them are starved you know that's considered a wild anomaly isn't it uh if you do get that somebody chained up in the basement or whatever we are natural cooperators and we cooperate all day long okay well though you're opening you're opening a large door for me to ask you about uh reconciling all of that with Ukraine ready go look i don't think we should try to get into Ukraine in in this particular uh talk because we have only a half an hour and it's a very complex situation there very complex and we don't get the complexity of it in our daily news there are people who always want warfare because they can sell weapons to both sides and we have to get over that and move into our human cooperative mode we have to get out of patriarchal uh top-down authority and the people must reclaim the power to take care of each other and that's what the people of the world want they just feel powerless but i can give you so many examples of pockets of the world where this is all this cooperation is already happening and it's very successful we have the role models and we can see it here in Hawaii we just have to look back at our very recent history you know a century ago two centuries ago Hawaii was feeding as many people as as live here now and they were doing it with the ahupua system and it was working well and it was equitable uh and yes they had wars and they had conflicts and things but on the whole they were able to feed these islands sustainably and we could do that too what is preventing us from doing that it's absolutely stupid of us to to live with a three-day food supply and not take care of that in a better way what is preventing us from doing that short-sightedness and greed you know the people in charge are as greedy and corrupt here as they are elsewhere otherwise we wouldn't be building big condos for people who buy them up from Asia and don't live in them so they become the dark towers and the local people can't afford to live in them you know all of that stuff is is corruption and graft and people taking bribes and stuff and as i say we've got wonderful people like Gary who's are trying desperately to change that situation within the government but we there are times when you have to take matters into your own hands and hang the law about whether you can do it or not you're going to grow food you're going to build green more green energy we could be doing a hydrogen economy here a solar or a geothermal we've got everything we need for clean green energy and it's just that the the will is lacking in the government because nobody wants to rock the boat because somebody else might hurt them about what they're getting under the table you know how it is jay but we i mean i i don't disagree with anything you said but but i do i do wonder about who is going to do this because you talk about the government well who is the government and where are the people and the people are perfectable and they will rise up and and fix this um uh then uh where are they it's not about fixing it's about building the local pockets of self-sufficiency so that they become attractors to others who say oh my god they've got enough food on that island why aren't we doing it on our island or on this part of the island you know if that community uh over in why and i can take care of their homeless and set up education and health care and stuff how come we're not doing it on the rest of in the rest of Hawaii you know we even right here have these examples of people who have shown sustainability to work what about the political officials who we have elected to run our communities they're enthralled to the corporatocracy i'm sorry so we need new ones yeah and who are who are they where we find them how do they get in position they they will emerge through the practices jay they will emerge through the practices look what i mean i've i've talked myself silly about preparing for sea level rise and nobody wants to hear it they want to sandbag the beaches you know that doesn't help if you've got a tsunami coming in and when it leaves the next morning your sea level is two meters higher uh and and your canals have backed up the sewers into Waikiki and Waikiki is like finished um you know how much tourism are we going to have then is that what our economy is going to depend on i don't think anybody's going to be coming to Hawaii once the hotels start falling into the ocean there are other people who feel the same way good as you and i that these are problems that are not being addressed and that they you know they're ultimately going to be very serious problems and they're going to affect the state in profound ways many many profound ways and you know how soon ultimately is we if we could only teach people the exponential curve you know if you put pennies in a gallon jar and you double them every day takes a long time to get that jar a quarter full how many how much more times does it take for it to be full i give up when it's one fourth it's going to double every day the next day is half and the next day is full that's what 70 degrees higher temperature in the Arctic means that we're around that hockey stick curve of exponential curves and that it can come any day now any night now we can get this kind of a sea level rise it's well i had i had to be self interested about this elizabeth but what do i do i accept what you're saying yeah what do i do what you do is you you do what you're doing you bring people on to talk about it we talk ourselves blue in the face about it until people but for some reason humans seem to have to be driven by catastrophe to cooperate instead of using this mind to foresee the disaster and cooperate ahead of time right now let's take Puerto Rico yeah let's take Puerto Rico they they really didn't handle their electrical system very well their economy was 80 billion dollars in the hole when that maria struck them and and they never did recover uh there's they're still you know way behind the game so what did they learn there having been the object of a tremendous you know apocalyptic tragedy in within Puerto Rico what did they learn they learned a lot about local production of energy and things and and we here in Hawaii we know what to do we know what to do and we know we can do it and we it's just the will isn't there yet because we really don't believe that this disaster is is coming our way no matter how often the news reports california is burning and asia is drowning and whatever we don't want to believe it's going to happen here and we know that our beaches are eroding we've got this in colds we've got the houses falling into the sea and we still don't move back from the edge you know you know there's an organization called run for something dot award she run for something it's it's operated by a woman named litman on the mainland and uh i i i'm very interested in organizations like that where they're saying run for something um get in get involved in the fray that is our structure that's what we got may not be perfect but that's what we got and if you run for something you can have an effect on it have you ever thought about that elizabeth i'm not quite sure what you're i'm i'm suggesting you could run for something could what run for something yeah oh it's too late for me i just had my second hip replacement i'm hoping i can walk again okay well then all right then let's assume there's there's a there's some people out there listening to this and making careful notes what should they do there's a lot of people there are a lot of people jay working on getting better people elected that grassroots movement is there in politics it's there in food it's there in energy and it's you know it's going to weave itself together it's just at my age you get very impatient i have six great grandchildren you know like uh they're all going to be facing this and i would like to see more proactive stuff going on we've got to get our living economy going here in hawaii in a much stronger way and we have the people who have who have led the way already uh who is dotty what's her name up on the on the uh on our east coast you know who who put together tens of thousands of maybe 100 thousand meals during coveted you know we've got we've got our heroes and heroines already here in hawaii okay we can do it okay as rumy said long ago why do you stay in prison when the doors so wide open well but you know what well what i get out of this is that the probability is a significant possibility if not a probability is that as in biblical times we won't get it together and if you if you follow all these threads you've been talking about the result will be a disaster and we won't be able to eat and people will get sick and they will die and the population would be less and others and others will live and others will live to carry it on yes and so what you're really talking about is the survivors it's like they say you know the war the the the details of a war are not told by those who were victimized uh it's told by the survivors so you don't get an accurate picture of what happened and i would apply that to all of history yeah that you know the people who tell the story are the ones who survived the story and the survivors in this case are going to be those who are not dependent on the digitized society who are growing food who are taking care of water and food and healthy living which makes a lot less sick people than when you're eating unhealthy food and and uh you know i believe nature nation states will go down the tubes historically they're they're too unnatural they're unnatural lines scratched across the earth right through cultures they create warfare they won't work they won't survive but cities cities do not have standing armies and they have a long history of relationship and cooperation within they will be the distributed networkers of the future insofar as they're not on the coast being drowned uh the surviving cities will be those on higher ground who evolved from small communities into big cities not the ones where you build a big infrastructure overnight like in china and the middle east and then throw unrelated people into them those are doomed to failure but actual real cities that grew from towns have a have a chance of surviving if they're on high enough ground and have enough good agricultural land around them and water supplies we have clean green technologies including you know hydrogen clippers coming up i'm living for that one that can carry huge amounts of of uh cargo and and water to put fires and inter-island i call them sky canoes about two years to launching the first ones of those so we we have wonderful technologies coming down the pike and we have to not depend on this big digitized money economy i don't think we the people can do anything about that except build alternative currencies and i have long said if the hawaiian state government would issue alohas freely to people and tell them they can pay their taxes in alohas that will immediately lead legitimize the currency good only in hawaii it'll never go offshore because it won't be of any use to anyone offshore but it will keep our local economy going and that's a big one that we should be pursuing now because if the whole bank failure and stuff comes down the pike and we're operating on alohas no problem you see we operate on alohas too you know and uh right now i think we're out of time actually elizabeth so we're gonna have to operate on an aloha now is there any message you want to leave with the people who are viewing this as to what's going they want to be on i already said it why do you stay in prison when the door is so wide open we know what to do let's do it all right elizabeth said torus joins us every now and then then we and we solve the problems of not only this world but the future of this world thank you so much elizabeth aloha