Disaster Response and FinTech – The Inevitability Curve EP7

Hello, my name is Chris Blas, and you have landed somewhere along the inevitability curve in this series. We've talked to interesting folks about hopefully interesting topics, looking at where we've been in the past, how we got to where we are right now, perhaps what that looks like, and with that, maybe some idea of where we're going in the future. So, joining me today is Emerson Tan.

How are you? Emerson? Hello?

Uh, I'm in, uh, sunny Washington DC Stuck in a basement because that apparently is that a, a a, a, a good place to, uh, uh, ride out a crisis? I think. I think that's a ion now.

Right. So, uh, speaking of crisis, so I, I normally don't do a lot of intro stuff into this, but you know, I don't know how to describe your background. You're a certain emergency response cyber e economics guru from hell.

What do you do? Um, so, goodness. So these days I run, um, my own little, I, I have my own little FinTech firm, which builds payment technologies for the developing world, um, but also cri like disaster resilient and crisis resilient, um, payment technologies.

Um, but my career history is somewhat insane because, um, I started out in, uh, computer security and the whole hacking world before, um, such things were a crime. I'm a lot older than I look. The reason I say the sides of my head is because that's where all the white bits are.

Um, and, uh, from there, my career took me into the world of national security and cyber warfare For about a decade, I was the, um, head of external research and development for one of the first companies that ever produced cyber warfare, anything for the five eyes. Um, and in parallel to that, then I have, I've also got a 20 something odd year career in humanitarian aid, um, and disaster management. Um, and all of those things have kind of come together to sort of like feel really my interest in, in, um, in resilience and, um, disaster and crisis management.

Um, my academic academically, I studied planetary sciences at, uh, university College London, so, which makes Perfect sense. Linear path, I can see it. Yeah, Yeah, yeah.

You know, it's like, it's, it's like earth and space science, you know, like computer hacking, cyber warfare, humanitarian, Emergency response Stuff. And, you know, Well, you know, that is such the, the thing, and you know, I've, I've, you know, I, I still get excited by getting on airplanes, right? I try to keep in mind the fact that I get to drink coffee at 30, 40,000 feet and just blow the speed of sound, which is kind of unique in the history of like, history.

Um, and, and, but, but this, getting to do what we do, you know, every, you know, Rakesh, you know, mutual friend was, you know, we had one of these conversations a couple weeks ago and it's just amazing. You know, none of us, I don't, you know, I think my, you know, I'm just lucky I fort come my way through everything. I didn't, I don't have a high school diploma.

How did I get here? I don't know. But one of the defining characteristics about what I consider my community is that everybody's sort of like, you know, I'm really, is this real?

Am I really, I'm in the White House, where wherever, you know, we get to, and it's like, really? So, you know, following that path, right? This again, and this whole inevitability curve thing goes back to 19 91, 92.

And I was trying to explain to my boss, Let you know, stop arguing about it. Let's assume for a second that everybody on earth is on the internet. Say, you know, 20, 30 years from now, there's a line at that point you can look back, we'll all be sitting there looking back and say the distant future of 2024, looking back and say, oh, here's how it happened.

Yeah. And it's like, it's all blow. It's like pre all day.

Some Once you get there. Yeah. Once you get, exactly.

So, um, so, so on on this, you know, I've done it, I've done a bunch, bunch of these sort of pieces, you know, over the last, uh, number of years. Anyway, so in this series, just digging into it for half an hour saying, alright, where have we been? Where are we right now?

Where are we going? And you know, with your background, you know, we can take it way we want, but you know, it's hurricane season. We've got all sorts of disasters we've own, is, you know, well, we're dealing with the, uh, outcome of that.

Milton's about to take out my boats in Florida. Plus a lot of people's, you know, lives and livelihoods, and we've been responding to disasters. We've been having disasters literally forever.

Yep. And in our working lifetimes in the green room, we're talking about this a little bit just now, you know, things have gotten better, worse, different, right? And they're going someplace.

Yeah. Different. I mean, so one of the things that's really, really clear, at least, so like if you, if you can, if you come to climate change and, and the effect of our pollution as, as humans, if you come to that as, uh, um, from, uh, the perspective of someone who, whose science background wasn't particularly great, right?

You're, you're, this probably looks either terribly overblown or like terrifying or some conversation, some, like you, you, you, you, you see sort between these two emotions. Um, if you come from this sort of geo, from like someone who has a good understanding of like geological science and is kept up to date. And if you come to this with someone, you know, with like a, you know, planetary sciences background, then what this is, is actually, it is about, it is about that inevitability curve.

Because at this point, it's not like the 1960s where everyone was like, oh my God, you know, like, the world is gonna starve 'cause we're gonna run outta phosphate or this and that, right? Or, you know, the world can only support 3 billion people, da, dah, dah, dah, dah. This is actually all about physics.

And one of the things that people don't properly gr is that the cold state that humans evolved in is not earth's default state. Earth's default state is pretty warm. It has, for most of its history, earth has had no ice at the poles.

Um, and for most of its history, um, it has had life forms, uh, latitudes that you just wouldn't think of. So, I mean, like, you know, the closest analogy of where we're going is probably the early Miocene. The early Miocene, you know, had, it was a, it was quite a few degrees warmer than it is now.

Um, it had giant snapping river turtles in Berlin. Uh, horses were about this big. Um, and it was significantly warmer.

Um, one of the reasons that we kind of like have kind of like not really sort of clocked all of this is that the techniques to actually look at the temperature record are actually very, very, very new. Um, I mean, like, we are talking, you know, like less than 50 years old, get down to the sort of like fine grain resolution that you actually be need to have to actually sort of right. Drill into these things.

And, you know, it, it's also new that in fact, actually a lot of the analysis just simply hasn't been done. But the physics will tell you that, you know, like if you go and shove a bunch of extra CO2 into the air, then you will end up with radiative forcing. And that's actually an experiment that you can do on your countertop with a couple of soda pop bottles, some water, a bit of sodium bicarbonate, and like a couple of thermometers.

In fact, actually, I could go and rig that experiment right now with the, um, literally the contents of this, you know, of, of the kitchen here. Um, and you know, like once you kind of like do that, I mean, it, it goes to show though that the, the terrible state of science education around the world, basically, you know, that, that, that we can't actually gr this, but what that world looks like and what we know from the geological record is that we evolved in a time of actual right. When times are actually pretty good storms were particularly huge, you know, um, Milton is the norm through geological history, which should be a real kind of like wake up call.

It's like, it's like these sorts of things where you kind of like, you know, start to sort of like push the limits of like what's actually extremes of the norming geological history, not the Clement environment that we, that, that we grew up in. Because like, if you compare the history of earth, you know, a few billion years with human lifetime we're this big, Well, not just us, you know, 500 million years for anything much more interesting than, uh, than pon scum, right? Yeah.

And It's, you know, like most of mo, most of the first history now, like the, the dominant form of life was, you know, like unicellular, Right? Busy making oxygen, right? And that, so they've, let's think about where to take this, right?

So to your point, you know, this has always been happening literally, literally forever. Thank you. We're literally evolved and all our ancestors are involved to deal with this sort of stuff.

Now we're in this spot, right? Where we like to build along the coastlines and we like to not get wiped out by things. And, and, and, and, you know, now I'll say it, you know, the, the disinformation, the cognitive security campaigns are going on right now trying to convince all of us of seven different things at the same time.

Um, we're gonna be like electric monks for anybody who gets that, uh, that reference. Um, and it's, You know, but, but, but the reality is that we like these sort of things. Like, you know, anybody looking for some optimism, Isaac Arthur, you know, look up Isaac Arthur on YouTube.

Yep. You know, the real science guys produce huge amounts of content. You know, a lot of it, you know, this, this medium and far future looking in terms of decades and centuries and millennia, right?

And the, the opportunity to in, on those timescales over the next could be decades, certainly over the next several centuries. You know, we could geo engineer the earth to maintain that happy spot where we are, which is not the natural state, to your point. No, I will get that.

Well, it's not the default. It's, it's always been natural, but the world, the word natural is kind of like, Yeah, comets hitting planets are also, is also natural, right? Yeah.

It, it's, It's, it's, it's like, but you wanna sort of keep it in that sort of like happy, sort of like, ha like it inver comm the happy spot. But the, the thing is, is that, or one of the reasons that, that all of this is turning out to be very much more complicated than everybody thinks, is that our understanding, um, of a lot of this is actually surprisingly weak, right? The core, the core, the core physics well understood.

We have natural laboratories and throughout the solar system that we can look at, um, uh, we have the geological record, but when it comes to actually the really fine grained stuff, our understanding is quite weak. I mean, just the other, just a couple of weeks ago I was in, um, I was in Tonga, uh, for the Pacific Island Forum, um, leaders Summit. And I, I ran into a, a famous Australian environmentalist and, and naturalist by the name of Tim Flannery.

And he's very famous for producing books like The Future Eaters. Um, he is, uh, a former Australian of the Year and, uh, like quite renowned in inside that community. And he, and we were, we got talking and it turns out that we'd both been reading the same science papers, um, as have some of my old professors, and we all still talk.

Um, and like, the amazing thing is, is that all of the models, for example, from the IPCC, actually, it turns out not all wrong. We actually got, um, our sensitivity calculations, um, off by maybe a factor of as much as two. So in other words, the overall system might be twice as sensitive to CO2 levels.

And we previously thought, and what that means is that everything that you see that is marked in these reports says 2050 to 2100 actually should really be thought of as now, which is like, oh. And the thing is, is that we can manage the really gross, big changes, but this fine grain stuff needed to actually keep you inside, if you like, our comfort zone, um, we still haven't got a f*****g clue how to do any of that. Um, and you know, it's the, it's the fine control.

You know, you can stop somewhere running away. It's being Venus, but it's really, really fine control that we, that we really, that we really struggle with. And we'd better off, frankly, um, trying to keep the he the hemostatic controls, you know, that provided by things like forests and coral reefs and, and so on and so forth.

Because those systems are actually better at self-regulating that very, very fine control than like humans. I mean, a good example of this is, um, sulfur dioxide. So because we don't like acid rain, we decided that it would be a good idea as a planet if we stopped putting sulfur in fuel.

So we took out sulfur from diesel oil, we took it out from aviation fuel, and we took it out from marine fuel. And the last of that to go was, um, marine bunker fuel and that, and marine diesel. And that happened about, I think it was like 20, 22, 23.

And what we've seen is basically a vertical rising temperature, because it turns out we've been running our own geoengineering experiment for the past, you know, like 80 years basically ever since the Royal Navy went, you know what, this whole coal thing is, uh, coal no good, no good for battleships, too big, too heavy. And with some Churchill went, you know what, we're gonna use oil. We're gonna turn all of our dread battleships turn running on oil.

And at that moment we went, right, okay, you know what? No more coal syrup and the rest of the, the world exploded. And we started, we start pumping all of this alpha in, in sulfur dioxide into the air.

And that experiment came to a pretty abrupt halt a couple of years ago, and now everything's just gone like this straight up, right? So we can run in this experiment, but it just goes to show how weak are actual, like, core like fine understanding of these fine grain mechanisms actually is. So, you know, like, could we do it?

Yeah. Could we do it with confidence? No, No.

Well, And I think that's as good a, uh, uh, some age of where we are, because I feel the same way, you know, as a kid I remember thinking that, oh, wow, I missed it. Everything's, you know, already sort of figured out, you know? And, and I look back at, you know, what I was reading then, you know, early seventies and so forth, and realize we didn't know anything.

Like literally compared, you know, the, the, you pick any individual discipline and every, the best people on earth, you know, having this debate about things that these days, we go, well, well, we all know. I mean, literally know one of those. And the debate is now 10, 10 layers, uh, deeper in the same way, you know, to so many of the points you make, I hardly know which one to squirrel on.

But looking on the future, you know, I, I think it's very easy to say that 50 years from now, versions of ourselves, you know, um, or others will be looking back and feeling exactly like I do about 1970, which is like, it seemed we knew so much, but I, I just want to, you know, sort of challenge the, the stock, uh, public, you know, common, uh, assumption, right? Is that we'll never know. It's like, that's not true either, right?

No, these are not infinite systems. You can find the boundaries and you talk about, you know, bio systems regulating climates and so forth. You find out that a lot of the things you, we can take the path we're on right now, we'll just have Moore's Law and we'll have faster computers.

A lot of things are beyond computational management. You literally can't get there from here. Yeah.

So it's not that we're gonna math out the, the Speed problem, Right. And we're not, we're not gonna, you know, there's no free diversion where we know where every cubic centimeter of air is moving, but we can understand the systems well enough. So, and, and the thing, and, and the thing to me is, is is that like there are two way there, there are two ways that you, you could go, you can either de devolve and decentralize the system so that, you know, like, or you can try and centrally control it all.

And the problem we're trying to centrally control it all is that there's a span of control problem. Um, and I think that when it comes to trying to work out, for example, how to keep the planet livable or try and keep it within that safe, happy zone, um, it's big enough and complicated enough actually that you should just be able to, that we actually just need to be able to agree on a bunch of core principles, you know? And then it's like, okay, everybody, you know, like, you know, leave it to the trees, you know, leave it to the trees, the fish and the, and the, and the coral to actually do the actual like fine, you know, like fine twiddling of the knobs and the rest of it.

And you know, like if, if we think that like, putting sulfur back into the fuel, I mean, 'cause then it becomes a management problem, right? Because the thing is, is that you, you end up with this situation where once you commit to actually trying to manage it yourself, you are committed to do that for. And the minute that you take your finger off the scales and the rest of it, it will rebound to whatever the physics says that where wherever the physics says there is gonna go and out of the happy place.

And that's bad because we know from the history of humans that we are supremely bad at running anything forever. Um, funnily enough, actually the closest thing to forever is actually probably the Catholic church, because the Catholic church, as it turns out, actually is the linear successor of the Roman Empire. And if ever look at the, the, the, the, um, the names that the Catholic church uses inside of its organization like parishes, diocese, and so on and so on, right?

They, they're actually the lineal descendant of the Roman military province organizational structure. But that's the closest thing that we actually have to forever. So you wanna talk about actually trying to commit to managing something forever.

That's probably the closest that you've got. And that's not very old in terms of like geological history. Well, in the, You know, as I've, as I've thought through all this stuff, you know, I, I expect, you know, there's such common expectation that, you know, we're not gonna live till, you know, Wednesday, right?

You know, this, this, this again, you know, boomer era, um, legacy pounded into me. It is like, it, you think gonna be 19, you know, it's gonna be overpopulation 19 70, 19 84, 19 99, 2000, the apocalypse is coming, you know, and it turns out there's been lots of apocalypses sort of forever and afterwards we all clean up and, and move on to the next one. Yeah.

Um, there will, I always, I always tell people, there will always be people, the only question will be how many and under what conditions will they live? That's it. That, that is literally it.

You look at civilizations through history, they kind of like go through this sort of curve where they, I mean, like, so, you know, here's a, here's a, here's a, here's an example. The Mayan civilization is still there. The only difference is, is that they're in like, like the, the, the, the culture is still there except they're just in little villages up in the hills and, and the rest of it.

And they're no longer in these sort of like, great cities and the rest of it. And they all speak Spanish and kucher, you know, they're still there. You know, the, the, the, this is, they're not the do, they're not, you know, they're, they're not a dominant hyper dominant civilization anymore.

So, you know, like the, for us, the aim of the game should be, we wanna like keep, keep ourselves, we as individuals wanna stay alive, but also like, we quite like our civilization as it is, you know? So we wanna make sure that all of that knowledge survives and our ability to do things like, you know, not die from a paper cut or, or, I mean, like, one of the most amazing things that you can do is it turns out that you can actually directly trace the history of vaccines by going to a cemetery that has been in continuous use, um, for the last like, couple of hundred years and go to the children's section. Oh yeah.

Do, do your ancestry tree at some point. And, you know, you go back a couple generations, all these little leaves, you know, that never went very far. It's just like, oh, everyone died before they were like five.

Right? Well, you know, either birth, giving birth or being born was the most dangerous thing, you know, we could Do before. And then, you know, like you make it to 35 and you're suddenly like, you know what, actually I'm good.

You know, it's like, oh yeah. Life dys, I've, I've had all that s**t. I'm, I'm good.

Well, you know, It, it is all common, you know, people, folks our age. Right. You know, uh, just love to get into the, oh my God, I'm so old.

Dis hurts and everything else. I'm sorry. I just go through the whole thing.

Bonus rounds, bonus. Hey, look, hey, I have original point and this is actually Just wearing out. Yeah, well, exactly.

It's like, it's like, oh, you are old enough now that, that's prob guess what, that's something that like your ancestors just didn't have because Right. They didn't have aches and pains because they were dead. That's right.

Yeah. 37, oh, you poor old man. You got all your limb Still.

So, so, so like, the aim of the game should be, it's like, we enjoy all of this stuff, and the aim of the game should be, well, we actually wanna make sure that our descendants, your kids, you know, and their kids like, can enjoy the same stuff. It might be slightly different stuff, but we want them to have the same sort of like broad, broad fulfilling lives that we, in our incredibly varied careers have taken for granted. Right.

Well, And that, that's a perfect segue into this, into just looking forward. Right? You know, I, and just in my own experience, right, and the things I've seen in, in emergency response and disaster recovery of all sorts, you know, cyber and physical whatnot.

And what r Rakesh and I were talking about in the 20, 25, 30 years, you know, that, that he's been, you know, involved with that. You know, when you see right now we have a star link, you know, you know, showing up in the middle of emergency response, now you got 150 megabits, you know, broadband, that changes a lot of things. And I mean, you know, quad coppers and drones, I look out five years, 5, 10, 15, 20 years, our ability to respond to disasters like we're seeing right now.

We'll be fundamentally, fundamentally actual conversation purposes, fundamentally different. If I can send out, not just, you know, helicopters, you know, from enthusiasts and people who happen to have helicopters, but just a fleet of bloody drones to find every individual within 90 minutes, you know, assess them. And we won't imagine, be able to go back to where we are today.

I, I actually think somewhat differently, which is the, one of the problems that we have is that we've built a bunch of systems that are in fact, actually both ubiquitous and actually very brittle. And it's that brittleness that is actually a problem. So yes, starlink is great.

The problem with these constellations, for example, is that you can only have a couple of them, Right? And they are actually, in many respects, quite, quite vulnerable. Um, Well, but let's just ratchet forward really quick on that, so that Yeah, I, I agree.

Yeah. I, I love, you know, I specifically, I love SpaceX. That company is amazing, the stuff they're doing, everybody there, it sounds very controversial these days, but there's only one of them that makes me nervous.

I'm a security geek. Anything can happen to one of anything. But just, just inside this topic, you just assume that if I was, you know, responsible, gimme a 10 year timeline and, and a reasonable budget to develop, you know, a disaster response drone, you know, uh, fleet capability, you could, you know, drop in a container mm-hmm.

Into someplace like d Andrews, Tennessee and have it up all the valleys and find all the people. Um, yeah, you can do that. And it doesn't need any, you know, you take brittleness and fragility in, in, uh, you know, some of them are gonna die and some of them are gonna run into trees and some of 'em battery, you know, they won't be able to get a connection.

You can build that with today's tech. You can. And, and the, the cost of not having that becomes enough to actually have that.

So I think that's the kind of thing you realistically forecast, you know, one in two decades out, that emergency response turns in, you know, the time it takes, the time it has taken in North Carolina to get to some of these folks, uh, has probably got to them all by now. But you never know. It gets really windy up there and those little Oh, yeah, Yeah.

No, I mean, the thing is, is the other thing to, to bear in mind as well is that I was told, you know, right. It's the classic William Gibson quote, the future is already here. It's just not even the distributed, and in my mind, the, so like, like I tend to take quite a, a, a, a pessimism is the wrong, pessimistic is the wrong word.

Realistic, Yeah. Possibly realistic. Um, realistic is not a bad word.

So we, we kind of have this sort of, so both of us grew up in a world of, essentially a world that wasn't actually at war. And this is not, again, The norm, The norm, the norm is in fact actually a state of pretty much permanent wolf. If you look at the history of the United Kingdom, for example, um, it's actually been at war with France for most of it Or itself the rest of the time, Although, yeah, yeah.

Basically it's like, it was always war somewhere, usually with France, often with somebody else into the mix. But one of the fascinating things about the second half of the 21st century in my mind is that we now have a state, or, or the second two thirds, 21st century, is that once again, we have a state of permanent war, but not war. And the thing that actually is find, I find actually most fascinating is, especially when it comes to the cyber stuff, is that you end up in a state of war, but not war.

It's undeclared war, but it's still fundamentally war. And what I find fascinating is that, for example, Russian botnets amplifying the disinformation and misinformation, which is actually now impeding the response to Hurricane Helene and now threatening to actually get people killed Oh, Yes. Of Florida.

Um, because, you know, like you have things saying, you know, like, no, don't evacuate. You know? And so it's, well, It's, you gotta stop there because the, the the, you know, with as a binational co, uh, family, right?

With Canada and the US to, to compare to the same time during the pandemic, if the US had the same per capita death rate, COVID death rate as Canada, there would be 700,000 Americans alive today. Right? And that's, so we're, we're past the point of potentially killing people with disinformation.

And in fact, I think that's, again, if I switched hats, if I was a bad actor, I would be more concerned with my ability to run free in the disinformation space, not lasting much longer. 'cause the costs are getting high enough that we had to find ways around this, this, if we're stuck in this again, over the long curves, if we can never, if we, the state of not having any agreement about what exists, if this stays like this and or continues getting worse forever, we can't have electricity, Yeah. We're f****d.

Yeah. That's, that's actually the thing. And that's, that's one of the things that's actually really interesting is that this appears to be a generational thing.

So again, but the, the question, the, the question is, is can we sustain ourselves through this transitional phase to younger people who have a much better set of information hygiene in their heads? Because they've grown up in an information where everything in an environment where everything is hostile. But the thing is, uh, is that they're not in charge Yet.

That's right. Yes. Well, I mean, like, if you've noticed like, like, like the boomers are still f*****g in charge.

'cause they make up the largest voting block. They, after this election, they won't. But right now, in this set of elections that's happening globally, the boomers are still the largest voting, you know, the largest effective voting block.

Even though they're not an absolute majority, they're the ones that still come out and vote, vote. And that's why 2024 is such a pivotal year because it's like, if you end up with another four years of institutional decay, chaos, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, you know, like that's super bad news because your ability to sustain yourself and recover in the next 30 maybe really badly impacted, um, like the, the, the only thing that gives me any hope at all is the fact that when you talk to really young kids, you know, in their, in their late teens, early 20, uh, not even in their late teens, like, you know, like mid-teens, like no, their twenties, they are far more aware and skeptical about like, you know, like what YouTube and the algorithms actually feeding them. Um, but that also explains why basically, you know, like Zuckerberg and, um, uh, you know, like elongated rodent and you know, the rest of these, am I allowed to square on this thing?

So it's the internet. We can say anything you like, the Rest of these f*****g pricks are so absolutely terrified of this generational change, because that generation coming up has far less tolerance for their f*****g b******t than ours does. And the boomers do.

I mean, every billionaire is an institutional failure. And giving billionaires effectively personal rights to shape our informational environment is a catastrophe because they don't serve our interests. They're not even interested in keeping the planet livable.

Because, you know, like if you ask Elon, it's like, I wanna f**k off to Mars. And it's like, well, enjoy cancer buddy. You know?

And, and so because we've handed that over to them, you know, certainly here in the west, we've handed that over to them. They're, it's their interest that shape that in that information environment. And they're all about low taxes, wanna f**k off to Mars.

And if they wanna live on some, like compound out in the South Pacific and the rest of, well, the rest of us drown, they don't care. But if you talk to these much younger people, they are riven with everything from climate. I mean, like one of the saddest things recently, actually, as I was talking to a friend of mine has a 14-year-old daughter, and that daughter has a self-harm problem.

And when asked about or so, like self-harm problems more often than not have to do with, uh, feelings of loss of control, right? And terrifyingly, it is actually climate anxiety that actually dry in her case, that actually drives some of that behavior because they feel that the world around them is outta control. And the adults who should be in charge and looking after interest are not, Well, I have three kids in their twenties.

Right. You know, so I feel this one very, very deeply. Right?

And I, I, you know, for anybody out there, you know, listening to us old guys talk about this, you're gonna have it tomorrow. You just are right. You'll have challenges to deal with, maybe really bad ones, probably really bad ones.

And then, you know, there's mortality at the end of it. So I don't think that, uh, and I know we could talk about this stuff forever, we had to end at some point. But I think this is the sort of thing, you know, my work with folks like you and Rakesh and the, the whole, you know, security world, networking world, emergency response, humanitarian stuff, is that we will just continue to continue to get better at this stuff.

You know, we'll continue to have existential crises. There's always going to be a vo on battle fleet coming to destroy earth, but we'll work it through. And I, I couldn't agree with you more that I think a lot of this is generational.

I don't think I am wired correctly in the head to, you know, fully understand how, how we're gonna do some of this stuff. But I can see a generation growing up that is, We need to be much more okay with the idea of like, you know what, uh, I don't have all the answers. These old f*****g guys certainly don't have all the answers.

And the rest of me, you know what, why don't we ask a bunch of why, why don't we ask the young people? Why don't we ask the ones who actually have like, like a real, like stake in it. A stake in it.

Yeah. Yeah. And you know, like, like the wiser wa the wiser wise leaders listen to listen to listen to all of their stakeholders to use like corporate horse boic speech.

But in this particular case, like, like the stakeholders actually in this particular case are a bunch of like 13 and 14 and 15 and 16 year olds, right? And actually, you know, because ultimately, especially when you're talking about things like the climate and the rest of it, the decisions that we make are irreversible on, on the 20 to 30 to 50 year thousand year time timeframe, right? So in other words, if we are, as it looks like committed just with the amount of CO2 that's in the air right now to somewhere in the region of two degrees of warming, right?

That's enough to tip us out of the environment that contemporary human homo sapiens grew up in, that is enough to tip us out of the environment that all of our principal food species grew up in, that evolved in, right? And what that means is, is that actually, like, we now need to start thinking in terms of like, it's not like the world winks out of existence where I pop my clogs. 'cause I can do that, just go crossing the road here quite easily.

I just didn't stand out in the middle of Road Island Avenue and just say, come get me, right? Like we, we actually, we, we, we need to actually really start thinking about this in terms of like, okay, well what's the effect for the next generation and the generation after that? And then actually start, and you know what, they're right in front of us when that 14-year-old like shows up with a bleeding arm and the rest of it.

And like when you ask them, well, why do you cut yourself? And they say, well, the world is spiral. You know, the world is spiraling over control.

Literally everything's on fire. And you know, like, I can't see a funeral. We should actually listen.

We shouldn't just go, oh, you know what? It's all right. We're just gonna put you some antidepressants.

Uh, uh, you know, like everything will be fine. And um, you know, like, let's go back to like counting all the zeros in my f*****g bank account because you know what, that is brutally synthetic and those wounds and those scars remain, right? You know, we, we should we, you know, like we need to start doing a lot better by these folks.

And like, so the way that I think about things is that we should be building for a much deeper set of resilience. We should not be saying, well, you know, what if we just build the house of cards just higher and higher and higher and higher and higher, you know, like, and if I'm just the guy building like the house, the, like the last couple of steps on the house of cards, everything's gonna be fine. You know, it's like, well actually, you know, we actually do run risks of kind of like base collapses.

And so what we need to actually do is say, well, okay, if we're gonna start, if we're gonna think about engineering, well, you know, like do we always engineer, for example, for an always online environment, then I would answer, that's actually a really stupid idea. Don't do that because, you know, like human agency will ensure that you will not always have an always online route. I mean, starlink is a brilliant example of this, right?

Starlink is like, it's a universal, always online environment. You know what, half a dozen ASAP missiles and the rest of it and that's it, it's game over the whole system. Well, Yeah, I, I'm gonna end on a, on a positive note because I think that it is the whole point.

And uh, you know, I think that, you know, a lot of the answers that, that we'll find that, again, these may be outside my, you know, survivable age range may take, you know, another 50 years or so forth to work through it. But I see it in the, I see it in the hands in the mouths of my kids' generation, which is mental. Absolutely Right.

We have so much room to improve so that we ourselves individually can enjoy this world. And I think a mentally healthy world will come up with solutions to all these issues so much faster than we muddle through right now. That, that may be the key by itself just maybe 50 to a hundred years from now.

People are just way better in their heads. So they're not going through all the agony of, well think actually Ing honestly, I honestly think that actually like a good, like a really good start would be simply getting it into people's heads that the endless pursuit of like nine or 10 or have 12 zeros or have mentioned, you know, in, you know, of, of some fictitious value in the rest of it actually isn't the be all, end all of existence. No.

Yeah. As, as the great, uh, uh, great philosopher, uh, John Paul join. John and Ringo told us, you know, money can't buy mean love, but, uh, and er will.

So at that point, we're gonna take another green room 'cause we're gonna getting into the, the, the, the length limits here. So thank you ton I, No problem. Thank you everyone for coming along and uh, we will catch you with the robotic camera next time.

Alright, very good.