S5. E3: James Arbib: Rethinking Humanity
"We are on the cusp of the fastest, deepest, most consequential transformation of human civilization in history, a transformation every bit as significant as the move from foraging to cities and agriculture 10,000 years ago."
- James Arbib and Tony Seba, Rethinking Humanity
James Arbib is co-founder of RethinkX, a nonprofit think tank that explores how technology will shape the future and disrupt all levels of society, including information, energy, materials, transportation, and my favorite: food – food that will not come from slaughtered animals.
Jamie and RethinkX co-founder, Tony Seba are the authors of Rethinking Humanity: Five Foundational Sector Disruptions, the Lifecycle of Civilizations, and the Coming Age of Freedom. They predict that new technologies could wipe out poverty and solve climate change in the next 10-15 years, and bring in a new "Age of Freedom." Which sounds pretty phenomenal, but they also warn that it could pose huge challenges for a world that still clings to outdated concepts such as democracy, capitalism and the nation state.
This conversation gave me a lot of hope for a future that is looking pretty bleak at the moment. I hope that you learn as much as I did, and are as excited as I am about what Jamie has to say.
Visit RethinkX
Read Rethinking Humanity
Follow Jamie Arbib on Twitter
Transcript:
James: [00:00:00] We might actually see, 10, 20, 30 years out, it just becomes unacceptable to be eating animals. Why would you when you don't need to, you could take a single cell and produce the same thing? I think if you lose the social license, we might see a ban on animal agriculture at some point, in the same way we'd expect to see a ban on gasoline vehicles pretty soon.
Elizabeth : [00:00:26] Hi, I'm Elizabeth Novogratz, this is Species Unite. We have a favor to ask, if you like today's episode and you have a spare minute, could you please rate and review Species Unite on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts? It really helps people to find the show. If you haven't signed up for the Species Unite 30 day vegan challenge, you should. It is really good. It's 30 days of information, tips, recipes, articles, all things plant based. Even if you're vegan, you should do it too, because the information is great. If you don't think you can do 30 days of plant based living, do it for 10. It’s Speciesunite.com/challenge. Today's conversation is with James Arbib. Jamie is the co-founder of RethinkX, a non-profit think tank that explores how technology will shape the future and disrupt all levels of society, including information, energy, materials, transportation and my favorite food. He and his co-founder, Tony Seba, are the authors of Rethinking Humanity, Five Foundational Sector Disruptions, The Life Cycle of Civilisations and the Coming Age of Freedom. They predict that new technologies and information, energy, transportation, food and materials could wipe out poverty and solve climate change.
Elizabeth: [00:02:07] Hey, Jamie, thank you so much for being here today, it is such a wonderful honor to have you on the show.
James: [00:02:13] It's a pleasure, Beth. Thank you.
Elizabeth: [00:02:15] I would love to hear about how RethinkX started, how you and Tony met and what was the idea behind it all?
James: [00:02:23] I guess about five years ago now, I got invited along to a US military think tank in Washington. They were looking at a scenario of a rapid energy transition. They were really asking the question: What would it mean for geopolitics if we got off fossil fuels very quickly? They invited along a bunch of experts, I think 10 of us and and most of these experts were from kind of big corporations, oil companies, departments of government, big NGOs, consultancies, those kinds of things. I was there with this other guy, Tony Seba, who was an independent tech entrepreneur. He's written a number of books and he teaches as well, but he's very independent. I remember sitting through these presentations that day and there were literally eight identical presentations. They were looking at the adoption of solar PV and electric vehicles and these straight line forecasts out to 20-40 and actually, in some cases 20-50, very low levels of penetration, maybe 10, 20 percent. Tony got up when it was his turn and said look, that's not how disruption happens. It's not low and linear. It's always rapid and non-linear. That's a technology curve. We get these very rapid nonlinear disruptions and these disruptions are going to be over by the 2030s. If you're planning your geopolitics or your military strategies on the back of these low forecasts, you're going to make some horrible errors, because it's going to have profound consequences.
James: [00:03:50] That sort of mirrored my view entirely. I said kind of the same thing. I remember going for coffee with Tony afterwards, we were like holy cow. We always knew these forecasts were completely flawed based on very simplistic methodologies, but hadn't realized we are planning geopolitics and our military capabilities on the back of them. We talked for months afterwards, and we talked about every sector of the economy, everything from health care, to food to transportation and information and so on. Our feeling both of us at that point was every sector of the economy is going to be disrupted and a cascading process of disruption over the course of the 2020s. It's going to have profound impacts on society. Yet we're totally blind to it. People just don't see this coming. We're using these flawed methodologies or we just extrapolate current trends into the future, and that's potentially disastrous. So, we ended up deciding we had no choice because no one else was providing the kind of data and the analysis required to set up on our own. We decided to set up Rethink X. We're set up deliberately as a not for profit research group, not in this to make money, but we think it's a huge problem with mainstream analysis that we're trying to correct.
Elizabeth: [00:04:59] Is there a lot of push back to what you're saying, in terms of how fast this is?
James: [00:05:04] Yes, there always is. Our analysis is very different. We're using a completely different methodology and our research looks very different to the mainstream. Typically what mainstream research does is that it looks just at the data, just at the surface. The outcome of these much deeper processes that drive change in the economy or a sector of the economy. In any kind of complex system, you get the same processes at work. It's about the kind of the balance of forces, feedback loops that either act to constrain change or to accelerate change. That's really what we're looking at. Unfortunately, most mainstream analysis is. It's a simple systems research rather than a complex systems research methodology. What they do is they look back into the past, draw a straight line for today and then extrapolate it forward into the future. That's fine when you're in a kind of equilibrium state, when you're in a period like we are and say we have been in transportation. The system of transportation has been stable for about 100 hundred years. Henry Ford recognized the system we have today. When you come up towards one of these periods of disruption, that kind of extrapolation gets you to the wrong place. We're using a completely different methodology, and a lot of businesses don't like the research we do because it sees far greater disruption than they would like to see.
Elizabeth: [00:06:21] In your book, you're saying that everything is at the brink of disruption or has started the process. We're in a revolution already from looking at history, that this is happening and you give examples of historical analogies. Will you talk a little bit about the history first and then where we are now?
James: [00:06:40] So, the same patterns and same processes that drive disruption in a sector of the economy also drive the events of history. It's the same process and patterns of change, in terms of the progress of human civilization, we look back over 1000 years of history, the history of human civilization, and we see over time exactly that same pattern where you get these long periods of incremental change, followed by these periods of very rapid change. You can see that reflected in city size, so city size is actually a really good proxy for societal capabilities. What a society can achieve, you need both the technology to supply that city, to produce the food and energy and the transportation to move things around and access lands and resources and so on. But you also need the organizational capabilities, the ability to organize your society, to maintain stability, to incentivize people to work and actually to progress. So we look at what we call the organizing system, and that's our ways of thinking or ways of organizing our political, social and economic systems and so on. We see that they could evolve with technology, the two work in tandem and occasionally in history. You get this breakthrough. We saw one with the Sumerians, where the maximum city size was a few thousand people for several thousand years after the Neolithic Revolution, after we settled down and started farming.
James: [00:08:08] Suddenly, you know, the largest city in the world goes from a few thousand, up into the tens of thousands and then up to hundreds of thousands within literally a couple of centuries. So it's this rapid breakthrough. Then sadly, the Sumerian society broke down. They reached their limits, they degraded their soils, they invented irrigation, they salivated the soils and so on. Their society began to break down and very quickly they collapsed. Then you see other cities bang up against that same limit, but none of them can break through. Eventually the Romans, a few thousand years later following on from the Greeks and the Carthaginians and so on, break through and get up to a million, an order of magnitude higher, you get that pattern. Then, there's the industrial revolution. We get up to cities of tens of millions. You get these order of magnitude improvements. What's interesting is it's always people on the edge of the old civilizations who break through because they don't have the baggage of kind of incumbent mindsets and an interest that allow them to kind of think outside the box and try new things.
Elizabeth: [00:09:08] You're saying now that with this new technology is kind of across the board food, energy, transportation, that what's happening now, in the next 15 years could even be the end of poverty and solve the climate issue? Can you explain? Can we go through some of the sectors and talk a little bit about how this is actually happening or what's going to happen?
James: [00:09:30] Certainly, can we go back a bit, first of all, to look at a civilization again quickly? Because there’s just a couple of things I want to add. So, when we settled down to farm, we started building settlements ten thousand years ago. What happened was we kind of entered a new paradigm, a new system of production. We moved from hunting and gathering and a paradigm of survival where we were literally struggling to get by to one where we began to create the surplus. The model of production was completely transformed. It's a model that we call an extraction based model. We call this age of civilization, the age of extraction. What we were doing was harnessing and exploiting scarce resources from around the world. That scarcity, that zero sum competition, that world that we found ourselves in drove what we call a growth imperative. Societies had to progress or they got taken over by others. It was a world of exploit or be exploited, dominate or be dominated. That extraction based system and that growth imperative means that societies, that exploitation of the planet and that people are hardwired into the system because the environmental problems that you create in this problem don't occur for decades later. Societies could over exploit their environment and still sort of stay alive, at least for a few decades or centuries. So they would take over those that were living more sustainably and the same with people. If societies tried to live equitably, they wouldn't incentivize enough progress.It was a balance where progress is a key imperative. Societies weren't aware of this, they were driven by that imperative because if they didn't, someone else would overtake them. That's the problem we have in this system, where growth and progress are in conflict with the environment and with social outcomes. It's a zero sum game where there are trade offs. They're intractable problems. We can't solve climate change without having negative impacts on prosperity and growth. Likewise, socially we try to solve climate change, for instance, through behavior change. Then we actually end up creating poverty and worse conditions. But what we see with the new technologies that are coming through in the major sectors, in the food sector and in materials and information in transportation and energy. We see a completely different model beginning to emerge. It's a model we call a model of creation where the building blocks of that system, the resources required, are available everywhere in the world in abundance. There is no scarcity here. Individual communities can become entirely self-sufficient. That changes everything. It's a different paradigm because no longer is growth and progress now in conflict with environment and social outcomes, that tension just melts away in the system, like cutting the Gordian knot. It's an entirely different system, and that's really why we're optimistic about the potential we can talk about in detail, if you want to talk about the individual sectors, and talk about how those must be disrupted.
Elizabeth: [00:12:28] I would like to and I think so many people hear this when they're looking around the world, in a global pandemic and on fire and melting. It almost seems crazy to many people, because we're in such a bad space right now across the board, across the globe, right?
James: [00:12:45] We can talk about the collapse cycle of civilizations because it's repeating now, right?
Elizabeth: [00:12:50] Let's talk about each sector, starting with transportation.
James: [00:12:54] What we're seeing in transportation, obviously is huge improvements in costs in electric vehicles. Its battery costs are coming rapidly down at Costco and electric vehicles are becoming ever more affordable. That's the first stage of this disruption where electric vehicles replace gasoline, that in some ways is just the aperitif or however you might refer to it. The much bigger disruption comes when you combine electric vehicles with autonomous vehicles and a new business model, ride hailing, and you enable essentially robo taxis. That's what we call transport as a service, and transport as a service is a whole different world. You have a whole different model, so you don't own a car anymore, you just access it when you need it. What's going to really drive this disruption is the cost, because the cost of transport as a service is going to be so low, that it becomes inevitable it would be a disruption and it might even be free in certain instances. The reason it's going to be so cheap? Well, two fold. Electric vehicles are far, far simpler than gasoline vehicles, there's just nothing to go wrong. So you have about 20 moving parts instead of two thousand moving parts. Maintenance costs are far lower. We know that fuel costs Apollo. The really interesting thing is that they last far longer. When we wrote this report back in 2017, we did a lot of research and we found electric vehicles were lasting up to about five hundred thousand miles, and we projected that soon we'd get towards a million miles plus. In the ownership model, you'd never build a car that lasts a million miles. There's no point, we do 10000 miles a year. It would last you one hundred years ago, it's insane. When you're in a high utilization model, when the cars are being used, one hundred plus thousand miles a year, it's really important. If you have a car that does a million miles, then you can spread the cost over that million miles. Each mile traveled costs one millionth of the cost of the car. You get a super low cost form of transportation. If you want to use gasoline cars to go a million miles, you need about seven gasoline cars, that's the right comparison. One electric autonomous vehicle does seven gasoline cars, it's a far lower cost of transport you just can't get to with gasoline cars. There's an inevitability because it costs so low, we think in certain instances, through advertising or through offering products, we'll see transport offer it essentially for free by businesses who are creating value in other ways. Certainly in cities and other areas. So the value chain just gets turned on its head, car manufacturing just becomes commoditized. Oil's just no longer required. The cascading effects of this disruption are enormous. It just transforms everything, including our cities. We don't need any parking anymore, we're going to have huge amounts of parking space freed up. We don't need half the road space, so we'll have much greater micro mobility scooters and bikes. That's the thing about disruption, it's not a one for one substitution. You don't just swap out an electric vehicle for a gasoline vehicle or a novel protein burger for a cow burger. Actually, everything changes in the system. We call it a phase change. You go through that curve, you're in a new system state and the metrics and the business model and the value chains and the knock on consequences on every other part of society are enormous. That's what we're going to see happen very quickly because not only is the cost much lower, the capability is obviously better, but it's better on every other parameter, right? There will be no accidents, no environmental degradation and so on. So, there are all kinds of reasons why this will happen.
Elizabeth: [00:16:19] What about the people who say, I'd never do that? I love my car, you know, this attachment to cars?
James: [00:16:25] Yeah, people used to love their horses. We always start our presentations with some quotes along those lines. People love their horses, until they don't, until they look sort of obsolete and outdated, and it's always the way. It's like horse riding today, it's a fun hobby that some people still do. It's pretty damn expensive. You've got to be pretty rich to indulge your horse riding hobby. I think that'll be the same with driving. You'll be able to drive in certain areas, there won't be gas stations to fill up there, and it's going to be pretty damn expensive to get them serviced and to look after them, but you'll certainly be able to do it.
Elizabeth: [00:16:59] In the 2030s, can you see people just giving up their cars?
James: [00:17:03] Let me think, it could happen extremely quickly. Our forecast is that by 2030, ninety five percent of the miles traveled on American roads will be in autonomous electric vehicles in this transport as a service model. That's because of the power of these feedback loops we think of autonomy, the uncertainties around the start date, I have more confidence about 2030 than I do over the start date of autonomy. We've got pilots running in certain cities now and those will expand over time. Then suddenly we hit a tipping point where these things just take off and they'll spread. They will start in cities and they will start on the trunk roads between cities and pretty quickly they'll spread out. I can see a situation in a city like London, where I live or New York overnight. They'll run pilots and overnight decide that this will go. I think what will happen is probably a city in China or somewhere in Asia will do this first. They will just clear out all the cars from the city, it will be so abundantly clear that this new system is better that everyone will kind of race to catch up and run their own pilots and then transform. In terms of individual cities, this could happen literally overnight, once we've proven the model.
Elizabeth: [00:18:09] Is that kind of the rate of speed for a lot of these other sectors too?
James: [00:18:12] Yeah, they all become interlinked. The series of disruptions we're seeing now started in the information sector with just huge improvements. We talked earlier about this kind of extraction based model in this creation based model, and it's kind of useful to use information to think about that because the information industries of the industrial age were kind of book publishing newspapers, TV and radio, right? These were centralized, with high barriers to entry, high cost type industries. Whereas the new one is much more distributed, it's zero cost, zero barrier to entry. We've got billions of people communicating and exchanging information directly with each other. Totally different sort of network distributed structure compared to this top-down, hierarchical scale structure. Part of that information disruption was the smartphone, which transformed our lives, that's sort of given, and Uber and all kinds of other industries being created on the back of that. The lithium-ion batteries that we use to power those smartphones, came down the cost curve until they became competitive in the vehicle market. They were cheap enough now that an electric vehicle became viable. As electric vehicles have kind of been adapted and expanded, the other costs come down even further. We're now seeing these same batteries being used to disrupt electric power. This is a cascading, self-reinforcing process, where each sector kind of disrupts the other sectors and also feeds back and helps lower the cost of the underlying technologies that improve the capabilities. It's kind of catalytic in some ways. That process is underway and it's just going to cascade through the next decade, and that's why we think that every sector of the economy will be fundamentally disrupted over the next decade or so.
Elizabeth: [00:20:01] So they're all interlinked and they're all kind of pushing each other forward?
James: [00:20:05] The reason we look at the sectors we read, we look at our technological capabilities or technological progress is really about an improvement in our ability to manipulate matter energy information. Those are the foundations of the physical world. What's happening in food and materials is just fascinating. One of the key technologies in this space is what we call precision fermentation.
Elizabeth: [00:20:28] Which is cell based meat, right?
James: [00:20:30] That's a slightly different technology. Precision fermentation is a combination of fermentation that we use to make beer and bread and so on, with precision biology. So, what we're doing in precision fermentation is taking the microbes that we find in our stomachs and in the cows stomachs and so on, and that produces a protein within the cow stomach. We're taking them out of the cow and putting them into a bioreactor, and we're producing complex organic molecules. So we're producing proteins and lipids or whatever we want. It's the microbes that produce those. We can now program microbes essentially to produce any molecule that we want. This is a technology that was developed back in the early 80s. The first time we used this was to produce insulin. We used to get insulin from the pancreas of a pig or a cow, and a kilogram of insulin took 50,000 animals, the pancreas from 50,000 animals and the demand was just so high we couldn't produce enough from animals. There weren't enough pancreas as a byproduct of our food system, and we just didn't have enough. So scientists developed precision fermentation to essentially produce insulin outside of the animal in a bioreactor and back in the early 80s, it cost about a billion dollars to produce a first kilo. Unfortunately, you only needed tiny quantities of it, but it was a billion dollars for the first kilo. By 2000, the price had come down to about a million dollars. By this year, we're down well below $100. As you come down the cost curve, as we talked about with batteries, you open up new market opportunities. So, it started in health care where you had very scarce and difficult to produce molecules. As we've gone down that cost curve, it's opened up kinds of cosmetics. We see human collagen used in cosmetics and now we're getting into the food market. We're seeing it already in the food market. As the cost comes down by about $10 per kilo, which we think will get to sort of by 2024/2025, sometime around the mid-decade, it becomes competitive with bolt proteins, essentially. Then the cost doesn't stop right? They continue to get better. There isn't really a floor here, so we think by the 2030s it will be a couple of dollars per kilo. Producing food in this way will be substantially cheaper than getting it from the animal. That makes sense because raising cows is just hugely inefficient. You grow it for the meat, you've got to grow everything else. You get a 30 to one ratio of what you put into what you get out. These new forms of production are just much, much more efficient, far less waste, less energy and less water. You can produce exactly what you want and you're not really constrained in what you produce by biology, by evolution. We don't have to have the things we eat today. We can produce things that are better, that are better for our bodies, better tolerated and so on. I'm going on a bit here, but one of the things we're producing is human breast milk to give to our babies through this way. Obviously, for ethical reasons, it's difficult to get in vast quantities. We feed them essentially milk proteins from other animals. You can actually now produce something that's much better for them, much better tolerated and so on and so on. There are all kinds of different products that we can produce which are better on every parameter, eventually better on cost, better on environmental impact, better on water use. Ultimately, when we fully understand how they work, it is better for our health as well.
Elizabeth: [00:23:54] Couple of questions about that. One is, because meat's not healthy to begin with? How is this healthier?
James: [00:24:02] You're right, you're competing against a pretty low bar here, right? This is really where we call the model, a food or software model because what we're doing is really decoding food. We're working out the molecular structures and the molecular composition and then rearranging the molecules to mimic this. At the moment, we're doing it on a relatively basic level, producing the kind of single molecules that we're adding as an ingredient to food or producing things of a single molecule. As we want to produce more complex foods, we'll have to understand the micronutrient makeup of these foods and all the other things that come with food, the bacteria that are healthy for us and good for us. I think it'll take a little while before we fully decode the food structure, but ultimately we should be able to design foods to personalize, to fit our own bodies where we'll be able to essentially decode exactly what we each need. So ultimately it could be far, far healthier.
Elizabeth: [00:24:59] This will completely wipe out animal agriculture.
James: [00:25:02] Yeah, I think initially in industrial animal agriculture, most disruptions are driven by cost and capability. That's a primary driver. When you've got something that's 10 times cheaper and better on every parameter, it's unlikely the old system survives, particularly when that old system has ugly consequences as well. You'll see some people still listen to vinyl records and ride horses and so on. I'm sure there'll be a space for organic pastoral farming and animal consumption and so on. But we think over time that that will degrade. One of these feedback loops is what we term a social license. It's acceptable now to eat meat because there is no real alternative, when you can actually have the same thing identically that doesn't come from an animal. You do have a viable alternative and a lower cost alternative. We might actually see this in 10, 20, 30 years. It just becomes unacceptable to be eating animals. Why would you, when you don't need to, you could take a single cell and produce the same thing? And I think if you lose the social license, we might see a ban on animal agriculture at some point in the same way we would expect to see a ban on gasoline vehicles pretty soon.
Elizabeth: [00:26:12] Well, it's funny how many people say to me, how many meat eaters say to me, “Oh, I would never eat that. That sounds gross, the cellular meat”. But those were the same people that would never eat a veggie burger and then Beyond Meat came around and Impossible. Now they're eating them.
James: [00:26:28] I think that's how it happens. Consumer opinions are kind of fickle, right? I think we take surveys today of people's opinion on a cell cultured burger and an autonomous vehicle. Not surprisingly, a lot of people say, “I'd never do that”, but it's just not the case. We see that all the time. We always see these things go down that way. But this is actually, in some ways, an easier disruption at some levels because it's not like buying a car where you have to go the whole hog and go straight from gasoline to electric. You can do it bit by bit. You can try an Impossible Burger, you can try a Beyond Burger or whatever it is. Over time you go along your own curve. You might start by eating five percent of your calories that are reduced in this manner and gradually go along. I think that's what will happen for most of us, we just won't see it happening. This is not this is not really food in the way you might think of GMOs or something, literally what we're doing with taking the processes that happen inside the animal and putting them into the bioreactor.
Elizabeth: [00:27:27] Right, and then in the grocery store, does it look the same?
James: [00:27:29] Yeah, it depends how you dress it up, right? I think we'll see a lot of resistance, you're already seeing the livestock industry challenging the use of the word meat or sausage or whatever for these types of foods. That's a natural push back. I think you're going to see that part of the process of disruption, that resistance is never is never enough.
Elizabeth: [00:27:50] Are they aware that this is the end?
James: [00:27:52] I don't think so, well, certainly not in terms of the speed of the transition. You do have a lot of people like Tyson Foods and others who are investing in these new companies. I think that's the way it needs to be. I don't think they're going to set up the labs and develop these things themselves, but they're making investments. So actually, in terms of food, some of the incumbent businesses seem to be further ahead than certainly the vehicle manufacturer as well with electric and autonomous vehicles. They were much later onto the bandwagon. They're now playing catch up, that's always the case, right? We see that time and time again.
Elizabeth: [00:28:26] We'll talk about some of the materials and what this means going forward.
James: [00:28:31] So we're seeing our ability to produce all kinds of things through the same technologies. So people are making bricks, people are making spider silk to make fabrics and to make all kinds of other things like ropes and string. Other than the metals, we can produce most things now through biology. I think that's going to be a massive disruptor, and transform sector after sector of the economy.
Elizabeth: [00:28:59] What will it mean for the workers?
James: [00:29:01] Well, this is the concern we had and was one of the reasons we set up RethinkX in the first place because what tends to happen is we just stumble into these disruptions. We don't see how fast they're going to happen and we end up having to clear up the mess afterwards, the job losses, destruction of businesses, livelihoods and whole communities. It can be hugely ugly. The jobs that are created in the new industries are often in entirely different locations that require entirely different skills. It's just a messy process. We can absolutely see what's coming down the track. When you forecast out, you're always going to be wrong, you can at least directionally understand what's possible and you can prepare to mitigate. There will be job losses, you can't shy away from that fact. The correct answer, I don't think it's to protect the old industries and stop them from collapsing. It's to protect the person. So, I think we need to take care of people and plan for the people who are going to lose their jobs. We need to let the industries and businesses go bankrupt. But we need to protect the people. That's the challenge for society, really. By the time we get to the 2030s, there will be a whole different world where once we've built out that infrastructure, we're just increasing it incrementally each year, once that system sort of fully rolls out, we think a lot of jobs will disappear. But that doesn't have to be a bad thing because the cost of the things we need; the cost of food, the cost of energy, the cost of transport, the cost of water and whatever else we need, it's going to be so cheap that concepts like a universal basic income, which we're kind of experimenting with in parts of the world, are unaffordable today in our current context. At any reasonable level in 10-15 years time, it will be entirely affordable. We talk in the report about people having a right to the things they need for energy, transport, education, health care and so on as it will be so affordable. Meaning we'll have to reconceive how we think of work and rethink how we conceive of reward and incentives and so on, because there will be an entirely different world where we're no longer part of that system of production. We just have a sort of more automated system of production and where we're focused on other things.
Elizabeth: [00:31:09] How does this all go wrong? Talk about if it doesn't go this way, what happens?
James: [00:31:13] Yeah, there are sort of two directions that this goes, there is either this breakthrough path, where we get to this world where we can live within our environmental limits or we solve poverty and inequality. However, it doesn't have to be a utopian outcome, it could be dystopian. We might still have the technological breakthroughs and roll out this new system of production. If we continue to manage it within parts of our old organizing system, for instance, our ownership model. If we continue to have the sort of ownership model we have now, it could be the most unequal world we've ever seen. The information networks and the information system is going to be at the heart of everything. We'll have a globally networked information system, connecting a bunch of self-sufficient communities. In that world, the people who own the information networks and the platforms that are built on them, will own the world. So, it could be dystopian. But the other way it goes, which is the pattern of history and what every previous civilization has done, is breaking down, is collapsing. That collapse cycle, you can see it happening, and what happens is societies kind of breakthrough, expand and grow to their limits. They get as far as they can reach. That's where we are now. The industrialized system sort of spread around the world and you reach a geographic limit and then you reach your environmental limits. We're clearly breaching a lot of our environmental limits, and we're also getting more and more unequal. We are seeing inequality, growing dramatically. So, we're reaching our kind of social limits and that just makes society much more fragile. We have buffers in the system, as you begin to reach your limits, those buffers diminish and you become more brittle and fragile and more exposed to shocks. So the financial crisis that you might have just bumped over in the past becomes a much more existential threat. We've seen societies in the past where they are called the horsemen of the apocalypse, so you get pandemics and drought and famine and barbarian invasion. You get trapped in this vicious cycle where you try and patch up the system to keep it running and pump more money in and patch up the problem to try and solve climate change, for instance, by carbon capture and storage or carbon taxes or behavior change. What you're trying to do when you're doing that, you're patching up the old system, you're trying to make it last a bit longer. That's a sticking plaster. It's not a Band-Aid solution. It's not a fundamental cure. I think the issue is that we do have this new system available. We're so focused on patching up the old system and that's on both sides of the debate on the left. We talk about kind of behavior change and redistribution, and on the right you've got the kind of the mager and the kind of trickle down economics and so on to solve inequality. Both of them are trying to solve yesterday's problem. We're trying to patch up our old industrial system and not realizing that we've got this extraordinary new system coming in. So, collapse is a very real possibility. I think we're headed down that cycle, unless we can kind of see where we are and I think that's what we're trying to do. That's why we set up, it was to try and provide a different framework, a different lens through which to see the world. So we can see where we are today and where we might go, because we think that the problems in society that need solving are entirely different to the ones we're trying to solve.
Elizabeth: [00:34:27] Yeah.
James: [00:34:28] There is light at the end of the tunnel and there are extraordinary opportunities. We have opportunities that no previous civilization has had. The most extraordinary world, but we just don't see it and by not seeing it, we end up in the cycle of trying to patch up this old system that's going to die anyway.
Elizabeth: [00:34:41] If you had to put money on it, which way do you think will end up going? Do you really think that systems will change in time?
James: [00:34:49] I do.
Elizabeth: [00:34:50] To catch up with technology?
James: [00:34:51] I do, I'm an optimist. I have a great belief in human ingenuity as soon as we see what the problem is we will work out how to solve it. The problem is we don't see it yet. But once we identify it, I have no doubt. We have to remember that change comes from the edge. It's not going to be America who leads it. It's not going to be China who leads this. It's not going to be Europe who leads it. It might be a small part, a San Francisco or a Texas or a Singapore or an Israel or even a city within those states and countries. It always comes from the edge. It's people who don't have that kind of baggage of incumbency to fight against. I think we just need to get experimenting. We need to be decentralizing, decision making and just experimenting with what works as these new systems emerge. But yeah, I'm hugely optimistic we will get there. I think there is no other choice really.
Elizabeth: [00:35:40] Is this how it's been throughout history? That there's a very small group of people who are really paying attention to the future and everyone else is kind of not in denial, but not really paying attention, then the big shift happens. Or is it different?
James: [00:35:56] No, I think it's different. Previously, what happens in history is you do get the breakthrough and then you get the collapse, always. You don't get a breakthrough and then have another breakthrough. It's because people are blind. So, what happens is in the early stages, you have a really adaptive civilization. That's why they break through. They're rethinking everything, they're trying and suddenly everything fits together. The last piece of the jigsaw is there and they suddenly get these sort of runaway capabilities that allows them this adaptability and this flexibility kind of enables you to get there. But then the essence, the elements of the organizing system, whether it's sort of a monarchy or just your religious beliefs or whatever the package is that's made them break through, it becomes kind of embedded and it becomes within a few generations later, they become the fundamental truths, right? They're always man made constructs. You're governing structures, but they get perceived to be kind of fundamental truths which leads you to think of them as a constant and they're untouchable. That's why we end up trying to patch up the old system because you just can't think out of the box of your current system. That's where we are now. You can't think outside the box of our kind of industrial package of democracy, free market capitalism, Nation-State Scientific thought, a belief in the rights of individuals that kind of underpin all those things, it's never enough. We've got this whole new system that's emerging, and that's the solution, but we can't see it in our own kind of old obsolete mindsets. So, that's kind of how it happens.
Elizabeth: [00:37:23] Well, I'm glad you see it. We need people who are seeing it and who are shouting about it from the rooftops in terms of change that needs to come. So thank you.
James: [00:37:36] No, my pleasure. It was fun.
Elizabeth : [00:37:47] To learn more about Jamie and RethinkX , go to RethinkX.com. We will also have links on our website, SpeciesUnite.com. While you're there, go ahead and sign up for the Species Unite 30 day vegan challenge. Like I said, it's really good. We are on Facebook and Instagram, @SpeciesUnite, and if you like today's episode, please do us a favor and rate and review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. It helps people to find the show. If you would like to support the podcast, we greatly appreciate it. We're on Patreon, its patron.com/speciesunite. I would like to thank everyone at Species Unite, including Gary Knutson, Natalie Martin, Caitlin Pierce, Amy Jones, Paul Healey, Santana Poky and Gabriela Sobotka. Thank you so much for listening. Have a wonderful day!
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