The Emergency Response Curve – The Inevitability Curve EP4

This is Textron tv. Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Inevitability Curve. My name is Chris Blak.

I'll be your host for this. And with me today is a good friend. Rakesh, how are you doing today?

I'm doing awesome. How are you doing, Chris? If I was any better, I'd be twins.

Right? So, as we were just talking about, that's amazing in the green room, right? We, you know, you've led, uh, a sort of fascinating life and you and I worked together at Cisco in the late nineties, right?

You were, they're just performing, I think, right? In 96. Yeah.

Yeah. I got, I I I, I came to Cisco in 96. I was brand new outta college, and I got into this thing called cybersecurity before we called it cybersecurity.

Right. Um, and yeah, no, it was, it was, it was good times though, the early firewalls, early hackers, early viruses, which seemed so quaint by, by, by our modern standards, but, but certainly seemed interesting and novel back then. It really was.

And as we're talking about in the green room, right. You know, there are these transitional times, and I think, you know, on our topic today, uh, you know, amusing, uh, emergency response, humanitarian efforts and so forth, um, we can get into your background as, uh, in context as it makes sense. But I think along with a lot of other things, like the late nineties, you know, like the turn of this entry for you and I, and cybersecurity and the internet as a whole, I think this period, I think the twenties, you know, going to the thirties is an extremely pivotal time.

And I think this topic is another example. Yeah. I think, I think we are, you know, there's the, the old saying about what may live in interesting times, I think we absolutely are living in interesting times and, but interesting manifests in many, many different ways.

There are, you know, so many challenges, so many challenges that seem very, very big. But there are also a lot of opportunities. And I think that one of the challenges of being a human in this time is being able to see both, to have the, the cognitive dissonance of saying, yeah, things are really, really hard and things are really, really challenging.

But at the same time, there's all these really amazing things that are also happening. And to recognize that one does not cancel out the other, but they kind of coexist simultaneously. And how do you walk and hold those things at the same time?

Right. And, you know, uh, we'll see how the conversation goes, but I'd like to, you know, put this in the context that you and I are parents, right? And your kids are, are maybe 10 years younger than mine.

My kids are in their twenties. And, uh, you, we get a lot of people our age, you know, gen x Boomer type of folks, you know, typical for our age class. We do a lot of this kids these days stuff.

And I look at my kids and your, you know, people, uh, people at your kids age. And I couldn't be happier, you know, like, Yeah, no, it, it, it's pretty amazing. And in fact, it, it, it was, it, it's something that's stunned me, and it's not just like my kids as an outlier, but what I've noticed is that all of my kids' friends, the entire cohort of children, uh, and you know, I have a sixth grader.

I have a fourth grader right now. And so in, in that age bracket, the emotional intelligence of these kids, uh, is just incredible. The the awareness and the empathy, um, the, the social emotional context that they are in right now is so much richer than what I recall having when I was that age.

And my friends. I think that there is something fundamentally different and, and honestly better about how they're engaging in the world and how they're, how they're going to be activated and like, and, and it shows up not in big ways, right? Like, I'm not talking about like how the kids will go off and make some big change in their community or what have you, but I'm talking about like how they interact with each other, how they call each other out when someone is being unkind, how they, uh, reach for each other when someone's having a hard day.

There's just some basic human empathy stuff going on, and it seems to be, at least in my view, like it, it, it seems to be very cross-cutting. It seems to be cross-cutting across gender and age and, and all of the little ways that we might, uh, put people into buckets or these kids into buckets. It seems to be very cross-cutting.

And, and I think there's something very fundamental going on, and I'm really, really excited to see who these kids are gonna be as adults and what sort of movement they're gonna make in the world. And, and I wanna put this out at the beginning because I think it's important to looking back and, you know, really understanding where we are and, and having a reasonable chance of, you know, forecasting some of the paths we may take. But it's, it, it is that I think it, you know, we, we, you know, one of the things is that's, uh, that seemed like a problem to me from earlier in my life was population overpopulation.

Right? You know, 1969, I'm four years old. 54 billion people.

52 billion people, that's why a hundred million Americans would starve to death in the 1970s. And I'm four, right? You know, when I was a smart little kid and I knew, you know, knew more about math than I should have, but that was just this horrible thing.

And we have somehow, despite all the problems we've had between now and then, uh, we make 30% more food per person with 8 billion people than we did with three. And I think that applies in many ways to the topic at hand. You know, the interconnectivity of all people, this whole internet thing that you and I and others have, have worked on, and the results of that, you know, leading to long-term potential, very, very positive outcomes.

Um, that may not always be obvious as we're struggling through, you know, the stages, but I think come out of a, as we consider the whole thing. So let's let, let me jump back to the beginning. Where would you like to start as we're discussing?

What's is a root Sure. Uh, worth, uh, digging up? Well, I think, I think one of the main themes that I wanted to, to, to kind of share with you is the, the role of adaptation, right?

So when you think about the, the example you just provided, the, uh, the challenge of feeding everybody. 'cause I remember a time when people worried about a population explosion. And, and obviously we have something north of like eight and a half billion people on the planet right now.

Um, what allows us to do that? And of course, we obviously know that there's sustainability challenges. We obviously know there's carbon challenges and there's, there's challenges with that population.

But what has allowed us to grow that population and keep people fed and seeing this extreme reduction in, in the worst kind of poverty, uh, especially since the year 2000 has been this notion of adaptation, right? So this notion of, hey, there are challenges that we are faced with, right? Like, like when we say that we are optimistic, it's not from a place of being naive, right?

Like, like we, we, we, we try and see with clear eyes what is ahead of us and what we are faced with, but then we say, what can we do about it? Right? And I think that one of the big challenges that people have is they go from no awareness of a problem to suddenly the problem is so big that they can't, um, do anything about it, right?

They can't do anything about it. And so what we wanna do is adapt. We need to encourage people to have this value of adaptation and basically stop in the middle of that, of that, of that freak out and say, look, you're now aware that X is a problem, but before you say it's too big of a problem and I can't do anything right?

Before you remove your own agency, you go from having no awareness to suddenly you have no agency. We gotta stop and say, what can I do about it? What can we do about it as an individual, as a community, as, as, as a tribe, whatever, whatever your, your slice and dice is gonna be.

And so I wanted to really spend some time and really dig into the notion of adaptation today, uh, with you and, and what it means for humanitarians, for public safety, for how we're going to deal with the inevitable crises that are going to emerge, uh, in, in this time, right? So we know that there's gonna be crises, but how do we respond to that, Right? And when we look back, I mean, you, you used the word tribe.

And I, when I say look back, I mean all the way, I mean, we're here for a lot of reasons, you know, a lot of them happened a million years ago with, among Homoerectus, you know, former cultures and so forth. And it is built into us. And in the last, you know, four or 500,000 years that, you know, we've been here homo sapiens, and there's a lot of repeating structures and, and social, you know, mimetics, you know, thoughts and, and social structures evolve just like genetics.

And we're actually wired to deal with this. You know, to your point, adaptability, you look back over human history, that is the defining trait. You know, that's what sets us apart from everything else, is that, you know, whatever the bloodies situation is, we end up figuring it out.

And one of the benefits of, of overpopulation, of, of population that occurred to me early in my life was that, you know, back in the day, you know, 400 years ago, there were a dozen people, um, in the world thinking about things and talking about it, and documenting. I mean, you know, maybe a little, little bit more of that, but not much. But one of the emergent benefits of the internet that I always, you know, thought was pretty fundamental, was sort of a cliche by the early nineties, is just imagine if every human being is communicating, connected, uh, able to communicate with every other one, you know?

And that one of the artifacts is you got 8 billion people with some possibility to contribute to an issue, whatever. It's, and just on aggregate, you know, is that more or less useful than having 10,000 dedicated people? Quite often it's, it's much more useful.

And this is taking, you know, historical heritage, cultural traits, you know, supporting each other and healing the communities and adapting to, you know, emergencies and disasters and climatic things. And we build infrastructure around it. Um, so it built into us.

And yeah, I, I think one of the really cool things about the internet, and, you know, I I come from that same time as you in the industry where we had a very sort of noble and almost utopian vision of what the internet was gonna be, where once we got everyone talking to each other, we would be able to solve so many of humanity's problems. And there is a truth to that. Like, we've been able to solve a lot of problems.

We've been able to connect, um, the, the, the gen genomic sequence for COVID-19 was sequenced and shared within 72 hours with research scientists around the world. And so literally, the mRNA vaccines from Moderna and from Pfizer were actually designed over a weekend. Um, and, and they were, you know, this was a very short timeframe from detection of a disease to actually having a proposed vaccine candidate for those diseases in, in just a matter of days.

And, and so, yes, the, the internet was fundamental in that, in, in enabling that kind of thing to happen. Um, you know, obviously I think where we might have missed a little bit was the idea that the harms wouldn't also be accelerated, but we have to take the good with the bad and, and try to hopefully make sure that there is more good than bad, right? And we gotta think about like, what are the harms?

How do we minimize the risks so that people can actually maximize the benefits? And I think that we have a much more nuanced and hopefully mature process or mature landscape thinking about this now. Um, and at least we're not approaching it with, with such a naive view.

But I think that it's absolutely essential that we recognize how the internet has been a catalyst for, for empathy too, right? So, um, you have things like, like the ice bucket challenge where people wanted to raise money for als. Yeah.

And suddenly it became this meme that people were raising tons of money off of. And that wouldn't have happened without this kind of instant visual rich communications of the internet provides, um, in, in disasters and emergencies. We see this from even like going all the way back to the Haiti earthquake in 2010, where we saw the emergence of crowdsource communities, people sitting at their home who saw the thing happening on television, and they really want, they, they, they had, you know, people naturally have empathy when they see something happening, when they see some crisis happening.

Many people will just have naturally have an empathetic response. But the next challenge has always been how do we get them to take meaningful, impactful action? And for most people who don't do what I do, who haven't done the things where they've been in disasters and emergencies, um, making meaningful action is, has been hard.

But the internet enabled thousands of people to actually make a meaningful impact on the ground in Haiti, even if they'd never been there before, uh, back in 2010. And that's where we saw this emergence, you know, what, roughly 14 years ago, and now that's only continued today where it's kind of a given that when something happens in the world, entire communities of like-minded people can get activated to go do something about it. And we see the decentralization of mutual aid, right?

Where, where people will say, oh, hey, look, let's, let's do a fundraiser, or let's get equipment to somebody who needs it in this time of, and they don't have to go through those 10,000 people you referred to. They don't have to go through some central authority. They have their own agency and they have empowerment to go do.

And so they do. And let me use that as a, as the pivot to the present because, and to throw the last bit of the past in there, you mentioned the, the Covid response, and I think it was the second or third, uh, company I sold with firewall to in 1992, it must have been, uh, was the Canadian, uh, cancer Society. And as the person was driving over, you know, to our little office, to, you know, talk to me, I did a little gopher search and I said, I'm a can.

I worked at a, a cancer agency. What, what's my day like? Well, I'm searching for something.

I put in a couple of keywords, drilled down to something, pulled up a a list of, of fresh papers on a certain type type of, uh, cancer. And the person got got there. And I said, uh, let me, I've, I've been thinking about who you are and how this matters to you.

And I explained, you know, my thoughts that someone who works there drives in, they park, they go in, they, you know, looks at their files, they find out that there's a paper in the University of Minnesota, for example. They contact the person there and ask it to be, you know, FedEx over or whatnot. And, and the, the net was that was about correct.

And I said, would it change anything if they could do this and click, click, click, and got to just that level. Right. And you touched on that, and as you and I know in epidemiology and dealing with a disaster like, like covid Yeah.

I mean, in 1991, the world would've been an ENT entire, the response would've been un, you know, not comparable. But here we are today where we have things like agency ability, you know, just as, just as well in, in this sort of thing. You know, we're creating content here that'll go on certain channels.

They get a certain amount of views. We're not making, I love Lucy, we're not getting 78% of the American population to watch anything. Right?

But, but we have thousands of of people who can take agency to make their own content for educational purpose, try to make a living out of it, whatever it is. And in the same way we can respond to the kind of kind of disasters you've been involved with, including covid over the, over your, you know, current phase of your career. So I don't think anybody else could give us a better view under where we are right now.

Sure. And, and just by, you know, way of setting background, I've been doing humanitarian response and public safety response for about 30 years. And so my very first emergency I ever responded to was a wildfire in Los Angeles called the Old Topanga Fire in 1993.

Uh, I used to have a lot more hair than I do now, uh, back in the day. And so certainly I've been able to see and witness and actually be a part of the transformation of modern emergency response, where it was very, very analog back in the day through sort of the nine 11 Hurricane Katrina timeframe, where people realized that without modern technology, they certainly couldn't scale to the level of these major emergencies, these catastrophes. And now we almost take it for a grant.

We almost take it for granted now that every crisis, now every emergency, every disaster has a digital component to it. Every, every emergency has some sort of connection to the internet. Now, in 2024, we take that as a given, but certainly when I first started seeing this transition happen around 2001, 2002, that was not yet, uh, a given.

That was not, that was an unproven statement. And people would say, why do you need to bring the internet into this emergency? Why do people need cat videos right now?

You know, things like that. But the, the fact that it made emergency response more responsive, more agile, and more efficient was not yet proven. And, and so we take these things for granted now, but, but certainly for those of us who were around for the transition, um, we remember what it was like beforehand.

And certainly what's happened afterwards. And to be fair, I can't imagine responding to a modern, uh, crisis without having these digital tools at our, at our fingertips. I mean, I can't, I I can't see how we would be anywhere near as effective by going back to the way things were.

It is, it is, uh, I'm thinking as you're talking there, I'm trying to map those two experiences because as you say, we both lived through it. But it's one of those things that, you know, even though we were there, I can't picture it, you know, what, what exactly What we do, no. And, and, and to be.

Yeah. And, and, you know, the way I got involved in this, the way I got involved in emergency response and the intersection of emergency response and technology was actually on nine 11, where I was at the Red Cross headquarters in San Jose, California. And I was, um, you know, we were as a Red Cross volunteer, I was basically given a telephone, a pad of paper and a pen, and I said, and they said, uh, people are going to call in with missing persons, take their information down so that we can try and reunite them later.

And this is like maybe two or three hours after the towers had fallen. So, um, people were still very much in the emergency and shock mode of, of that day. And my very first call was a woman whose adult daughter had worked, uh, in one of the offices in the Twin Towers, and she was calling to report her daughter missing.

Um, and I remember very distinctly this conversation where she was describing her daughter in the present tense, you know, like, she works in such and such a floor, she works at this organization. And then in the middle of this conversation and telling me about her daughter, she pauses and she started to cry. And she says, I guess she's never coming home now.

And suddenly she went from talking about her in the present tense to talking about her in the pa the past tense. So the realization that her daughter was likely dead and likely never coming home hit her on the phone with me. And I remember feeling really, really, really out of my depth in that moment, because I was just given a pad of paper and a pen, and I was being entrusted with this mother's hope.

And I knew that this late, this paper was likely gonna get lost. It was going to go nowhere. It was like, like this huge hope the of the worst moment of her life was being entrusted to me.

And I knew that it was, nothing was gonna come from it because we didn't have systems. We didn't have a way to make sure that there was closed loop communication or anything there. And that's just the system.

That's not even the human loss of losing her daughter. Right? Um, and so I felt a shift in myself in that moment where I, I wanted to really dive into this intersection of technology and emergencies, because this couldn't be the best that we could do.

Like, like, like this, the emotional burden of that moment. And even as I'm talking to you, I can still very distinctly remember this conversation. Imagine, um, Has really stuck with me and driven me.

You know, it's, it's, it's that stuff, and it's, it's individual human moments. We talk about disasters in the aggregate, but they're really, you know, you may have a thousand people affected by a disaster, an emergency, but what you actually have is a thousand emergencies. Each one unique, You know, and, and the, I know we're still talking about the past, you know, but, uh, but at that time, you know, the turn of the century, you know, folks may not quite understand.

Cisco was an interesting thing at the turn of the century. You know, we, you know, we built the, you know, huge chunks of the internet. There was a, you know, about that time you, you could say that there isn't anything on the internet that's not going across one of our boxes.

Our infrastructure is somewhere. And as you're saying, you know, the opportunity to do things with it, you know, the firewall team, we built this big massive thing, you know, so, you know, you know, myself and others are trotting around the world, and, and you get down to emergency response, uh, that I experienced at the time was more the cyber thing, right? You know, nine 11, you know, I, anyways, we, we had enough that, but on the, on the cyber thing, you know, you get a vulnerability.

You work, you know, put together an ad ho ad hoc team around the world and deal with it in real time and have it make a difference. And this is, I, I think, you know, why we can feel reasonably positive that, that the future is, is going to continue improving on this. We put these things together.

We've been talking about, we have a generation generations growing up now who've lived with this, you know, all of their lives, who understand the downsides that have the ability to, to capitalize on the upsides, including the agency we're talking about that have developed, I, I believe generationally better understanding and empathy. You really just can't, you know, it's like not traveling, right? You and I have traveled the world.

The old cliche, if you don't leave your little town ever, which three, four generations before us, no one literally ever did. It's kind of impossible to understand it all. Well, now we have ev most everyone on earth exposed to most everyone on earth.

And for all the, the problems we see the opportunities to not only address those problems, but to our topic today, to respond incrementally and holistically to emergencies large and small all of our lives. You know, there's, you know, the mental health, you know, crisis as, as a population, but as you say, every mental health crisis is an individual, uh, disaster. And getting support, that kind of score you need, that really can help and solve all the problems, lower, nearly eliminate suicide and so forth, is just so hard to logistically get.

But it, you know, where we are today and looking forward, you know, whether, you know, any one of the, the, the crises and, you know, uh, emergencies we wanna respond to, I think we have better opportunities to solve all of it. Yeah. And I think, I think one thing that you're, you're touching on here is really important.

We, we talk about this term, poly crisis, right? Multiple crises that kind of intersect and catalyze each other simultaneously, right? And this could be, uh, you, you can slice and dice us any way you want.

So if you're thinking about it locally, you might think about the intersection of the fentanyl crisis, homelessness, and, and some of these other social and economic challenges that are in our cities, for example, and how they actually intersect each other, and how it's impossible to pull on one thread without pulling on all the other threads in the fabric, right? And so we, or internationally, when you look at the intersection of things like climate change and modern conflicts, where the destabilization of the, the ecology also feeds into reasons why, uh, shooting wars break out, right? So, so again, you can't pull on one thread in those areas without pulling on all the other threads.

And I think that like, one of the, the, the elements that is really, really interesting here is that people say, well, if I can't pull on one thread without pulling on all the other threads, why should I pull on just the one thread? And it's because you are actually having the second order and third order effects on these other areas. Now, sometimes they can be good, and hopefully they are, sometimes they can be bad.

And you gotta think about like how to minimize that harm, right? But I think that we have, like, one of the amazing things is just our language. We talk about harm mitigation and harm minimization.

We talk about intersectionality. And I gotta admit, when I first heard the term intersectional, like 15 years ago, I hated that word. It sounded so academic.

But what really connected it for me was when I realized that we do have intersectionality all around us and how we work. So I was on the ground during Hurricane Katrina, and maybe for the first time, I really realized how how we dealt with race and class in the United States really had a massive impact on who got helped, who recovered from the crisis better than others, right? And, and all of these other factors.

And so, um, we moved from this language of like, natural disaster. We now say like, things like, well, there are no true natural disasters, right? The, the, the hazard may have been natural, right?

The, the storm may have been a natural occurrence, but the human impact and the human response to that impact are choices. They're there, they're the product of agency at one level or another, whether we choose to acknowledge it or not, right? So we might not realize we have agency, and so may neglect to take action, which has its own consequence, right?

So, so not acting is, is an action. Um, but, but I, I think that we certainly have a deeper language for describing these re relationships, both the challenges, but also the responses and the opportunities. And I think that it starts there.

And I think about the fact that my kids, for example, when I was, when I was a sixth grader, I would hear, why do I need to study for history? Why do I need to study science? Why do I need, I'm never going to use these things, right?

Something to that effect. And, and I don't hear that with these kids, right? They, they immediately connect why they need to learn science with, um, climate change.

They learn history and geography because they need to understand. I mean, like, I think they understand that they're gonna come into this world and they're gonna be need needing these skills to navigate it. And, and I think that for those of us who are older and who are in our careers and who've been through these transitions and these crises, um, the, the real challenge is actually a little bit different for us, which is how do we be, how are we informed by our past, but not encumbered to our past?

And what I mean by this, I have responded to more than 50 disasters and emergencies, everything from, you know, nine 11 and Katrina to more recently things like Ukraine and Gaza and, and all these other things in between. So I've, I've done the range of natural and, and, and conflicts and all sorts of emergencies, and very, very easy for me to just sit back and say, well, back in the day, we used to do blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But the trick of adaptation is to recognize that maybe what you did in Haiti in 20 20, 20 10 is not what Turkey needed in, you know, 2023, right?

Um, and that if you responded exactly in, you know, 2024, what you did in, in 2 0 0 9 or 2 0 0 5, or what have you, then even if it was an innovative back then it would be missing the mark now. So, so you wanna be informed by all your past and your experiences. But, but the start point is to realize that we are in new territory now.

We are in new territory that may looks like the old territory sometimes, but there's these other elements that are novel and that you are gonna have to feel and think and innovate your way into those spaces. And so, and I think that's a really hard thing to do because, um, you and I are both old enough to realize that there are a lot of grizzled old veterans of industry or of service who are very much locked into their, the good old days or the, you know, the big win back in the day, right? They're, their, their, their funda, their worldview is fundamentally locked in the past.

And so while they may have been a rockstar hero in that moment, and, and deserving of all honor and, and recognition for those things, that doesn't necessarily translate to being ready for what is going to happen tomorrow or three years from now. And so I think this notion of adaptation and having the plasticity of mindset to say, okay, challenge is fundamentally new. How do we think our way through it?

And how do we learn from the past, but like, don't just carbon copy and copy and paste from the past. Well, And I think we can look from the present into the future to in certain extents, you know, because, you know, my focus, you know, has stayed on cybersecurity all these years. You know, I'm very involved in supply chain and so forth.

And, you know, just to, you know, sort of last, you know, call out to, uh, intersectionality, you know, Douglas Adams is right, you know, you know, Dirk gently and everything is connected. The, uh, the the what we need to have, the automation, robotics and AI driven manufacturing and so forth that we all, you know, sort of see in the not too distant future, um, is, you know, at, among other things, a supply chain software, supply chain intelligence, you know, uh, uh, IOCS bum and so forth, uh, an intelligence artifact sharing system across entire supply chains that is accurate enough to actually be used, right? We need a, a attestation truth, you know, levels of, uh, um, lay layers of truth to just function, you know?

And I think that's sort of thing from that limited perspective has positive implications about the future. You know, in our sort of cognitive security disinformation influence campaign, uh, world we're in today, it's easy to get despondent about that set of emergencies, but you can see some structures, uh, that are, they're gonna go down this path. And you couple with that, with, as you're saying, you know, our experience in dealing with, you know, the myriad emergencies we're already dealing with and the agency and, and, and, and open thinking of these generations coming up, um, it's hard to imagine that we won't, you know, not only continue to do as well, dealing with all these issues, but get a lot better at it.

Yeah. And I think, I, I think that one of the challenges that we have is just that we, we, we have to recognize that the old models may not serve us currently, and they may, they certainly won't serve us well into the future. And so the, the question I think that we all have to struggle with is what are the models that, you know, there's a, there's a saying that all models are wrong, but some models are at least useful, right?

And so I think one of the challenges is how do we establish the models, the, the, the ways of thinking, the ways of acting that we know we're gonna miss things here and there. We know that we're gonna miss things because we're humans, right? We're, we're not gonna get everything right.

But how do we get the things that enable us to self-correct? How do we get us the, the ways of thinking that enable us to say, okay, we got 80% of the way there this time, let's figure out how we can adjust and optimize to get that last 20%, or as close to a hundred percent as we possibly can. And when I think about, um, the notion of adaptation, that takes many, many different forms.

So I live, um, in a small island in Washington state, we have about 25,000 people. We have a rural public safety community here. Now, historically in Western Washington, you've never had to really worry about forest fires before.

Um, you know, it's the evergreen state. It's wet up here. That's the cliche, right?

It's Seattle, it's, it's all of that, right? But the reality is that wildfire is increasing here, and it's not the same as it is in California and other parts of the United States just yet. Um, but it's certainly trending in that direction.

And so what it's been really interesting to see here is that people who've been here for decades, people who have, uh, lived here for many, many decades, and who remember how it was going forward, they're really struggling to understand that the nature of the threat is adapting. And so there's a lot of resistance to things like, uh, establishing defensible space perimeters. Like, why would I need to do this?

If this is, you know, it's, this is, this is silly, right? But the reality is, is that we have to start these conversations now because by the time that it's actually germane, if you, if you wait until the threat has fully manifested before you can actually deal with it, then you've already missed the key opportunity of, of mitigation, right? The, the key window of mitigation is seeing the harm as it's emerging and trying to get ahead of it, right?

Trying to get ahead of it. Um, and so this is a really key challenge for us as a local community, which is how do we respond to the challenges, the various challenges of climate change as a local community? Um, but I would say that it actually mirrors the challenges of, uh, you know, states and countries and, and as a humanity, how do we, how do we adapt to that?

And how do we do it in a way that's fundamentally empowering, right? Where we decentralize the power and we, we enable the lowest local action possible. And, and I think that this is a really interesting challenge we have to navigate, because every time we've ever had a big revolution, like the industrial revolution, or the information revolution, or these other revolutions, um, a lot of times it's been at the expense of the majority of people for the benefit of few, right?

It's been a transference of risk, it's been a transference of power from, from the many to the few, which really enables that elite. But some of our challenges are, they, they, they cross cut so horizontally that, that those models of, of, of transference just won't work. We, we have to enable local action, uh, because there just simply aren't enough elite people at the top to, to fundamentally deal with the scale that's necessary, right?

So, so, so the old models won't serve us. So how do we deal with these revolutions in our present and in our near future in a way that really empowers people to make change where they are and to make systemic change collectively? You know?

And I wish we had more time because we could unfold that all day long. And I, and I, I am trying to, you know, think, am I gonna resist saying this? 'cause you know, it lead to more convers conversation.

But honestly, the, the, uh, the, the, you know, the, what you mentioned at the end, you know, the whole thing about the elites and, uh, and the difference in, in out resource allocation, the very common topic, you know, as anybody in my, in my kids' generation, it's, it's kind of forgivable when you look back over history because you know, there have not been the resources, right. You know, for thousands of years to have any sort of, you know, the Victorians I think did a pretty good job, you know, where they exploited and sort of terrible as a culture. Oh, yeah.

Uh, but I think we're getting to that stage where just imagine if you can put those sort of resources on everyone that everyone had, you know, an an assistant who actually knew them well and had their best interests in heart. And if it was an ai, you know, that everybody gets, I think maybe in a couple decades or, or less. But how does that change everything?

You know, how much would it help if, you know, if every person out there had the kind of support that, that what we call the elite today had? Um, And I think that y you know, where this finds is, we find this in our, you know, I, I would just call 'em kindred spirits, right? So, uh, a friend of mine is very much, she, she's the CEO of the executive director of a homelessness organization in Salt Lake City, right?

And she and I talk, and she's super passionate about dealing with the unsheltered people in, in Salt Lake City. I work in disasters and emergencies, very different context, very different missions, very different geographies, and people that we're interacting with everything. But when we talk with each other, what we recognize in each other is that the mission may be different, but the mindset is very much aligned, right?

And so we, we, we, we, we refer to each other as sort of kindred spirits. Um, and, and, and what is really, really reassuring is to meet these people wherever you are, whether it's online, whether it's in your real life, however you may meet these individuals. But to just say, to just recognize that, look, there are other awesome people working on other awesome aspects of the problem.

Because if you, if you're able to understand the totality of the challenges that the world has, if you can actually just kind of, of hold some version of that in your head very quickly, you can recognize that, oh my gosh, everything is so big that I'm just one person. How can I possibly make an impact? Right?

Going back to that from a non awareness to being completely overwhelmed. But what keeps you stuck in the middle where you can have agency is to recognize that other people are out there too, who are just as passionate, just as smart as you are, and they are taking their slice of the pie, and they are running with it. And so you can draw inspiration from them, they can draw inspiration from you.

Um, we, we've joked, I've joked about to my friends, that it's sort of the mutual admiration society. Like, I love celebrating my friends as they would do their work in this world. Um, and they celebrate my work in this world, and that's how we keep ourselves going.

And so I think that for people who are trying to make that difference in the world, but who are trying not to be completely overwhelmed and depressed about it, um, I would, I would just say, look, look for the mutual admiration society. Look for the people who are in your life who are also working on aspects of the problem. Maybe they're just a preschool teacher, uh, working with the next generation, which is the most important thing in the world, right?

And I, and I, I mean, I use the word just very loosely here because it's actually an immensely important job, right? The people who are keeping libraries open, people who are getting healthcare, people, there are so many really important challenges. So you as a person who has game, you gotta recognize other folks who have game too, and use that to sustain yourself, to keep that fire going so that you can lean into these problems and, and do what you need to do so that we all do what we all need to do.

There's nothing I can say that's going to, uh, cap that all off better than exactly that. So I'd, let me just thank you for taking your slice of the pie, you know, for my opinion and anybody else, you know, out in the world who sees this. Yeah, take a little slice of the pie.

That's the best advice you're gonna get. You know, do one little thing in front of you. It'll make you feel better, it'll make somebody else feel better.

It might feed on itself. So, Yeah, no, it's, it, it's, it. That's how we do it is one just step at a time.

So thanks very much for the time. Thanks for letting me speak with you. And to the folks out there who are listening or watching, uh, thank you for spending some time with us.

Thank You, Rakesh. Thanks everyone. We'll see you again on one of these episodes.

Thanks for your time.