The 12 Paradigm Shifts That Are Changing Our World- Futurists Peter Leyden And Gerd Leonhard

Hello world. It's great to be back. This is Gerd Leonhardt, futurist in Zurich, Switzerland. Thanks to Sylvain and my whole crew at the Futures Agency for producing this event. It's going to be super special tonight. I have an old friend, Peter Layden from Berkeley, California, not far away from the Cheese Board and Pete's Coffee, where I'm sure he went this morning to tank up on energy for this. It's great to have all of you here. We have over 1000 signups for this event, which is really great. Must be all because Peter is such an interesting guy. I've done this before. But anyway, we're going to talk about the paradigm shift and it's an interesting story. I've been talking about the global shifts, I call them the meta shifts and mega shifts for quite some time. And then one day I run across this article by Peter, which we'll talk about in a second, and I was thinking like, God, this guy is exactly like me. And I remember that we knew each other from, you know, the old.com days and we reconnected and here we are, sort of like two piece in the pod, you could say, with this topic of the paradigm shifts. So Peter Leiden, I'm going to hand it over to Peter. He will do an introduction as to what the whole thing is and then he'll do the first one presenting transportation as a paradigm shift. And after that I'll speak for three hours. No, just kidding, the fourth, 14 minutes and Peter will round it off and then we have questions. You can post questions and comments here. And our producers, Sylvain, he will bring in the questions later. If you post a question, be aware, everything is recorded. Google is watching you. ChatGPT will not save you. These comments will come in here with your icon and your name. So whatever you say, be careful. Over to Peter.

Gerd, it is wonderful to be here with you and with like you say, up to a thousand people have signed up for this. I hope many of them are in the door here watching this because it's going to be a fast paced and really kind of fun conversation here. I mean, when you talk about paradigm shifts, I just want to make sure you kind of ground this in a little bigger picture what's happening here. But paradigm shifts are really at root about system change, fundamental system change and people who are thinking in the old system, that's where their paradigm essentially of thinking how the old system works, they get caught off guard when it essentially the system changes and the system, the fundamental roots of the system change. And then they have to wrap their heads around how that system works. And that's the next paradigm. And there's been many of these. Now, I was working with the founders of Wired magazine basically over 25 years ago. I was working with the founders of Wired magazine back in the day. And that was the beginning of another huge paradigm shift in the opening up of the Internet and the kind of what. How the digital economy was going to change so fundamentally from those kind of mid-90s days and also the beginning of globalization. And at that period of time back then, people didn't understand how that was going to work. How was this digital economy going to work? How was this globalized kind of new market economy going to actually work? And so they asked myself and one of the leading futurists of the world, Peter Schwartz at the time, to kind of talk about what was going to happen in the next 25 years that would take us to the year 2020, how would it fill out? We did that in a cover story later, went into a book, went into multiple languages, and it largely played out. And it actually was, we called it essentially of how that was going to largely work. And so around 2020, I was asked to actually think through the next 25 years and think about what are the fundamental system changes that we're going to be moving into and how can we prepare people now for this. And with that, I came up with a second kind of big piece which Gerd kind of referred to. It was called the Great Progression that you can find. It's a magazine piece, came out last fall. And actually you can kind of lay out this whole thing a lot. Some of that we'll be talking about today. Now, one of the things are basically at the core of what's happening here with the great progression is to talk about there has been a system, a mega system, that for the last 40 years has largely worked, and it's been made up of subsystems that also are kind of integrated and worked as a whole. So we kind of people got used to, okay, at the time, the last 40 years, you could say the mega challenge, at least through the eyes of the West, America and the west has been kind of the terrorism. Basically. Our energy system was carbon energy. Our transportation system was, you know, absolutely internal combustion engine. The culture was essentially dominated by the baby boom generation, the biggest generation in kind of Western history, all over the world. The politics actually, partly because of that, was largely conservative, regardless of who your party was. The general temperament was that the economics was liberating the Private sector and kind of tax cutting and cutting, rid of regulations. Basically the capitalism was really geared to the shareholder capitalism and the lion's share, the kind of the wealth was actually going to the shareholders. Production work was basically physical. There was no kind of thoughts of virtual work. Our production was clearly industrial, kind of rooted in kind of the systems we'd had for many years. And our politics, geopolitics, again from the Western point of view, was geared to the Middle east because you had to keep the oil going and you had to keep this whole system, the whole flywheel working. What I'm arguing is that that system essentially is over. It's running into all these problems, it's causing all these problems. And so what we're seeing is we're seeing a whole old system over on that other side of like this chasm here. Now, what's absolutely remarkable is that if you take every one of these same categories that we just went through, there are nascent systems, new systems that are actually starting to happen here. And so you're watching the beginnings. Our meta challenge, for example, now is clearly becoming climate change. Our energy system is actually now shifting to clean rapidly, to clean from carbon. Our transportation system is moving to electric faster than many people kind of predicted. And we're going to talk a little bit about that in a minute here. The culture is now being dominated by the millennial generation, which is essentially the children of the boomers, the big generation. We're watching and we're going to talk more about that a little bit later. Today, politics is increasingly, I would argue, going to be more progressive. I'm going to talk a little bit about that later in the show. And economics is having a bigger role for the public sector. We're seeing, particularly around after the pandemic and all going on, capitalism is being concerned with more share all stakeholders. We're starting to see that shift happening. Work is increasingly becoming virtual, which we saw through the pandemic. Production is becoming biological. This is a longer story about how synthetic biology and others will kind of supersede industrial work here. And ultimately our geopolitics is centered more on Asia because of the huge populations to deal with climate change. The other way to think about this is this is essentially now on the other side. This is the new systems that are essentially being emerging here. So the way to kind of think about this is we have, we now are the privilege, you could say, or the crazy opportunity here that we are in the middle of this fundamental system change and the people who are kind of trapped in the old system, of course, I have a gloom and doom and think, oh, my God, the world's going to hell. People who are exposed to the new system are excited and see all the opportunities. And so this is the system. This is the system I've been thinking about, that GERD also has been thinking about. And this is kind of the genesis of essentially this paradigm shift concept that GERD has evolved. And now we're actually moving in different ways here. But that's one way to think about this. And this is really at the core of what we're talking about today, because the mindsets are caught in the past. Now, I wanted to say a couple last things here about tipping points on this. This isn't a theoretical conversation. This is. This is tipped. This is happening. And one of the things we've learned here, I'm in Silicon Valley, in the Bay Area here, San Francisco Bay Area, for the last 25 years. And basically we know, we know over time how these technologies, all successful technologies, go through this. They get into this kind of place where you get a tipping point, and it's that tipping point. Once that happens, you see exponential growth. And so a lot of times there's a kind of disappointment until you hit this exponential growth. The other thing about paradigm shifts, I just want to say this last thing is people will stick with the old paradigm. This is the way they know it, they like it, it's whatever. Then you get a new kind of something new that comes along that starts to say, that's interesting. And if you get enough people seeing how superior that system is, then you essentially get this boom, this big paradigm shift where it shifts across. And this happens with technologies. It also happens with social trends. Now, I'm going to give you just one example here before we go to GERD about how this is clearly happen in electric transportation. And you can see actually that the data on around this, that actually does it and how this is tipped. And if you would have gone back 10 years and said, hey, will the world's kind of transportation, will we move from the internal combustion engine, which we hadn't done for 100 years, to electric, you'd have to say no. But in fact, what happened in the course of that decade with Elon Musk and Tesla particularly kind of blaving the way on that this is now tipped, this thing is tipped. The entire auto industry of the planet is now charging headlong into essentially electric vehicles. And so that paradigm shift is starting to wrap. We're wrapping our heads around this now. Why did it happen? It happened for why all these technologies happened. The cost of batteries, lithium ion batteries, came down dramatically in that last decade, as you can see here in this chart. We expect this to continue to go down in the coming decade here. And so it's going to be, and this is the point to make electric cars will be cheaper than internal combustion engines here in America. It's basically gonna happen the next couple of years. In China, it's already happened. So this is like the market will take over from now and we're going to start then this exponential growth which you've already seen now we're about at 10% of all new car sales in the world are hitting this, our electric vehicles. Now you're watching United States, which is quite a little bit of a laggard here. It's hitting 5%, which is often the sweet point of the tipping point of new technologies. You get 5% market penetration, boom, it takes off. And that's when you start seeing it's exposed enough. And so what we're watching now across the whole world, well, actually we're also seeing fundamental finance. Global finance is now moving clearly into clean tech and electric vehicles. Well, it actually this, these aren't quite updated right here because last year we basically went $1.2 trillion went into clean energy or electric vehicles. $350 billion alone went into electric vehicles vehicles. And so we're watching global finances shifted. We're also watching the projected growth here in China and Europe. Already 20% of all new cars are electric. And we're starting to see how that'll probably continue out until we get full penetration by 2040 or so. And we're watching how, if you look how we're going to be throttling back again till 2040 there, you can't see it behind my image there, but basically 2040, you'll see the internal combustion being won back as we build out the electric batteries. And so with that, actually you can hold that there. That's the end of this section. I'm going to come back to some paradigm shifts coming in generations later. But I just want to stop here in a minute here just to get a second to give it to Gerd, but to just say this. What you can see with that, what's happening now with the shift in auto industry is like something that was almost preposterous five years ago is now the entire global auto industry is going headlong into it. And you'll look at the super bowl ads now in America here where the biggest ads are all about, you know, Electric trucks and everything else that at everybody in the. In the culture is going to be adapting. This is how fast these things going. It's happening all over. And with that, we're going to start to go through some of these other ones that are tipping in this next decade. And for that, you're going to move. We're going to move to gerd and I'll come back later with some other ones that even touch on politics.

Wow, smoking stuff there, Peter. Thanks very much. Reminds me of a proverb by Einstein. If first an idea does not sound absurd, then there is no hope for it. Right. That's what Einstein said already. And I think it's so true. You know, I really believe, you know, people are really down on the future right now and they're looking negatively at their world and especially even my own kids, right, who should know better about the good future. They say that it's all going to end badly. I think it's really important to realize we are today in 2023. Like 1968, when I was seven, when the whole world changed from 68 to 73. The music revolution, which was a big part of my past. The sexual revolution, also part of my past. Just kidding. All of those revolutions coming together and just basically creating a new world. And now we are here, 2023 to 2025, we're going to see all those paradigm changes play out in a big way. It makes me very hopeful. I believe that humans are in principle, good. So that's why I think we can actually take advantage of it. So let me go through my key shifts here. I'll start with the very first one, the mega challenge. Economy becoming the planet. The focus of this idea that it's primarily about economics is. Is the past now. Now everybody knows it's primarily about the planet now. And economics are there to help us fix the planet. Right? And that goes with the shift from on policy, you know, from profit and growth to the four P's, as I call it, and John Ellington and others call it people, Planet profit. It's been around for a while. This is the most fundamental shift. Everything is going to be subordinate to this shift from economy to planet. In other words, it won't matter how much money you make if the planet won't be there to help us and to where we can live. What's the point? If your kids are going to live in a world that's 5 degrees hotter than today, then most of the money will not help us. Unless, of course, you're Elon Musk. When you can go to Mars and just kind of get away from it all. So this is a fundamental shift that's happening here away from this obsession with income and the stock market and growth and GDP, which Bobby Kennedy already said 1968, GDP measures everything except that which makes our lives worthwhile. And this is what makes our lives worthwhile is of course what we do on the planet. The rewilding thing, the E.O. wilson concept that's coming back, the collaborative approach, measuring our footprint, all of these things are now becoming the new normal in a very first time. I tell you one thing, this year, when the Ukraine, Russia war winds down, which I think we will see that happening, even if it's a bit of a constructed solution, a ceasefire or so, then all hell is going to break loose on this topic, right? Because our energy is plugged up with this here in Europe on this whole discussion about the Ukraine Russia affair. So there's going to be a huge unleashing of this. And that's driven by those three revolutions that I've put together in the last couple of months. The digital revolution, which is an old hat, all of you are familiar with that. The sustainability revolution, which is 100x of digital green, is the new digital, 100 million new jobs. And that's followed by what I call the purpose revolution. The idea of saying it's all great, but in the end the purpose is not just to make more money. The purpose is to have a happy life, self realization, move towards the future in a collective way. 10 billion people by 2030, we're going to need to really integrate those revolutions. And here's the interesting part, you know, it gets progressively larger. Digital revolution is large, no doubt, but sustainable revolution, $150 trillion shift in economics, America taken the lead, which is really interesting considering its past. Right now we have with the IRA Act, a huge shift towards this new future. And then the purpose of pollution, that's the biggest of all of it, leading us to kind of the Star Trek economy, you could say, as I call it the good future. And that is so important, especially when you look at these stats here, aligning time with purpose. After the COVID crisis around the world, everybody is pursuing more purposeful goals. That's why we are here, because we're not pursuing a speaking gig here. We're pursuing a purposeful goal of the good future. And that is happening across. And the biggest part is happening with the millennials, the Gen Y, let's say roughly 25 to 40, even 45, asking for purpose, asking for a more Fruitful future. And this is really our mega challenge here. When we look at the World Economic Forum statistics, which are really good, some people are down on the World Economic Forum. I'm not one of them, but I certainly won't jump at their defense all the time either. But this slide shows us the primary thing today is cost of living, the war, migration and so on. But in 10 years, it's all about climate. All of these boxes are green. So if you look at this, you can safely say this is the focus. If you're missing the turn from economy to planet, you're going to miss the boat completely. People will hate your company if you're not totally sustainable and circular by 2030. And before that, this is really like going into a massive movement. Kevin Kelly was mentioned earlier. Kevin talked a lot about this idea of the good future. He didn't call it the good future, but I'm just kind of putting that on him. So he talked about utopia and dystopia, and I really think what's happening, his world of protopia, the stepwise approach into the future, that's where we are right now. And we're leaping into that future. We're not going to solve every problem. And Kevin has said many times, which I agree with, we shouldn't be optimistic because there's less problems, there's nothing, but we have more capacity to solve them. This is the holy Grail. Protopia gives us the capacity to solve. That's why I'm hopeful about the future. Look at what people saying about sustainable travel. Most people are extremely concerned, very concerned and moderately concerned about sustainable travel. I just did a gig for the airline industry. This should tell you something. This is a huge shift. If you ask that. Ten years ago we'd have been a tiny slice for people who are interested in sort of sustainable travel and so on. And now Lufthansa, the airline that I fly most, of course, given that I'm German and also live in Switzerland, just three weeks ago, they come up with a business, Green Ticket, where you can give money to green organizations and you get more miles so you can fly more, which is kind of a weird thing, right? But I mean, this is where we're seeing this surfacing very, very quickly. We're seeing cruise ship ports in Norway, barring cruise ships from entering that don't have an electric engine. And we're seeing all of this in a major way. For example, here we see the fossil fuel recruiters are banned from universities, so you can't do any more recruiting if you work For a fossil fuel company. This has happened in England, in the US and Indonesia, and the insurance industry, Swiss re here, for example, in Switzerland, walking away from insuring coal plants that makes it basically impossible to build one. These are all science, very slow science, albeit probably too slow, that are happening. The cruise ship industry is a great example. You know, it's basically, I would say, kind of mission impossible to fix the cruise ship industry as sustainable. And, you know, do we really need to have more cruise ships and more, you know, 10,000 people per day entering Santorini in Greece, flooding the world with cheap copies of, you know, Swiss watches and stuff? But basically, this is the bottom line. Business as usual is dead or dying. We're not going to go on like this. If you think we're going back to 2019 just with more vigor and revenge, that's not going to happen. We're going back to restaurants, we're going back to traveling, we're going back to all these things. But the world has changed. Look at this. Like we're already in 1971, right? It's a little bit too late to go back and wrap up the ideas from that time. They're everywhere from McKinsey to the beef industry to COP28, that's coming right now. The world is changing at dramatic pace and that is what we are seeing in the future. We're going to see very hopefully, of course here, the decoupling of climate emissions, CO2 and GDP. It is actually possible to grow sensibly, of course, by putting out less CO2 at the same time. It is, technically speaking, entirely possible. But here's the bottom line. It's not enough to have great technology, great science and technology. We must have good policy. We need good politicians. Well, that's kind of an oxymoron in many ways. The best one just quit in New Zealand, but Jacinda Adorn. But we need good policy making, not just good technology. And we need both really for that to happen. And I think quite clearly we need a different stock market. I think we should do away with nasdaq. Well, that's going to continue, of course, for a while. And we should build what I call a Susdaq, right, the sustainable stock market. I think the first country to bring that stock market into fruition. I'm trying to pitch Switzerland for this. They will clean up. There's already one like this in San Francisco, of all places, of course, called the Long Term Stock Exchange. Same thing. But we're going to need a different stock market to support that transition to New Capitalism from the mega challenge towards the planet. Right? And we're seeing all that stuff playing out. The next 100 unicorns, says BlackRock Partners, the biggest investor in the world. They're all going to be in climate technology. And this curve is happening now. This is not just pie in the sky as Peter was saying earlier. This is actually happening at this very moment. And the same goes here. And similar chart than Peter's earlier $1 trillion energy transition investments, including nuclear. Big debate on that we're going to have later. But generally speaking, this is really, really powerful stuff. And you have the other chart here shown that people expect climate change, public health and technology governance to be the number one topics. Anybody ignoring that sticks with the old agenda. Basically it's all in the junkyard. This is the last couple of years. You're going to see the biggest company in the world, Aramco, the Saudi Arabian oil company, to be the richest company in the world, followed by Apple. That is a luxury you can afford for another year or two and then it's off to oblivion. And not Apple of course, of course, hopefully not Apple, but the other companies that I just mentioned. So also about esg, right? What is happening? ESG is basically as a vehicle of sustainability, it's just totally weak. So now we have BlackRock Partners coming forward, Larry Fink saying we have to completely reinvent ESG and really pushing the agenda. And he's getting whacked all the time about this. You know how he wants to change the business model of capitalism and they've created a new unit called Transition Capital just to do that. And down here we have gfans. This is the Glasgow Financial alliance for Net Zero run by Mark Carney at the ex bank of England governor, right? And he's also catching a lot of flag for doing this, for basically stepping out in front of a new ESG wave. Make no mistake about this, this is happening right now. ESG is being reinvented as actually useful. Now we have science fiction writers, Kim Stanley Robinson, my favorite writer, talk about how we have to create a mechanism that he calls the carbon coin to fund a shift of $150 trillion. You've got to read his book all this article for Mashable, how carbon kind could save the planet and of course his book the Ministry for the Future kind of describes what is actually possible in a science fiction by really, really powerful stuff. So bottom line of the first part here is yeah, we're not going back to normal. The old way of doing things is breaking the mega challenge is to make that shift. And anybody who doesn't go there will find themselves out of an audience, out of consumers and out of money sooner or later. So number two is how the world is changing by basically rewriting capitalism. And I'll tell you one thing before I get into this. The whole idea of capitalism, socialism, communism is an old hat. We should throw away those words, really. They're utterly useless now. What matters is that we have a future fit economy, that we can build a world that is fit and that works for most of us, for all of us, not just for 10% of us. And it won't be the traditional way of capitalism. And that has been said many, many times. And I'm not proposing socialism here or anything, being here with Mark Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce, who've been saying this for years. Capitalism as we know it is not a good recipe for the future, right? And you see all this stuff coming around with the paradigm shifts towards the four Ps and the sustainable capitalism of Al Gore and good old Milton Friedman making a guest appearance here on our event from the 70s. There's only one responsibility and that is to make more money. That kind of idea is over and it will kill us. And everybody's realizing that this is a new force coming in, right? Capitalism as we know it now. You should not play again. So we have this change of paradigm on a global level, going from this old story of profit and growth and GDP that has given us a darkening, worsening planet to a new paradigm of the 4Ps, right? People, planet, purpose and prosperity that cannot just save the planet, but also our very existence. And this is becoming imminent everywhere. There's a major discussion point, whether you're in tourism or technology, whatever you're in. Green is the new digital, right? Remember that. That's one of my key lines that I keep telling people. That's where the new money is moving towards purpose. The purpose economy. This is just absolutely crucial. So we have a gallery of purpose companies, Time magazine, running these kind of headlines. We have purposeful brands coming up everywhere. We have, of course, the likes of Patagonia, which is an old hat on purpose, but good example, Salesforce, as I mentioned earlier, Ikea, and of course Unilever, that has been making dense into this concept of doing business in a bad way for a long time and really trying to change this. This is happening all around us, the shift towards purpose, right? And basically what's happening here is one of the consequences is that the fossil fuel industry will become kind of criminalized in Fact, I think anybody working in oil or gas in the next couple of years will feel the pinch that this is becoming almost a criminal scene. And I think we're going to see that a lot after this conflict dies down and moving into a really a future that's moving very quickly into this new paradigm extinction rebellion. If you live in the uk, you know what I'm talking about, we're going to see this times 100. Unless we start satisfying what these people are asking for and actually making real change, we're going to see a lot more of this. People are spray painting the Ferrari store and stuff. I mean this is just a tiny tip of the iceberg. I think we're going to see a global shift on this look like the Gandhi revolution in India where all of a sudden this is the major threat of change that we're going to see in the next couple of days. That would be nice. And finally, of course the healthcare situation, right, we're here in a way saying where most of our healthcare, this is why it's so expensive. It's basically sick carrier, we wait on, people get sick and then we give them pills and very expensive pills. None of that is working any longer. I mean the healthcare costs are just mushrooming all over the world and now we're moving into something like the car economy. Very similar. Henry Miller once said, one's destination is never a place. But a new way of seeing things. The car industry has realized this is the new way of seeing things, right? The black box is ice, the internal combustion engine that is declining, just like selling records in the music business. And the new business is digital, it's electric vehicles, it's software, right? The new car industry is a software industry. And the same is going to happen with healthcare. Huge opportunity, a little bit later than everything else because again, there's government involved, which makes it much, much less faster. But global digital health care market will explode. I mean, no wonder all the companies are after this. This is the next big thing, after media and everything that we've seen change, you know, from the oil industry to renewable. And now we have this new way of seeing things going away from the pill economy, moving beyond pills into analytics, smart digital therapeutics and so on. It's just mind boggling all the stuff that's happening there. I think I'm very excited about that. It's for my friend the medical futurist, which you got to check out Bertie Bertolan, who's Putting this up medicalfuturist.com this is a device that scans you for melanoma and then you can look it up and all these things are coming. That's Digital Therapeutics, 3D printing of medication that you can print remotely or even at your house, nanobots in your bloodstream. All that science fiction stuff that's becoming reality. Smart food, customizable food, food, customizable medicine. You know, all that stuff is very, very close. Love this chart from Bertolan here. The guide to the future of medicine. Print this out if you're in the medical business. All the stuff that's happening with patients and with healthcare professionals, revolution pretty much across the entire spectrum here that we can expect to happen in the next couple years. And of course, you know, the biggest thing are all the game changers. I call these the healthcare game changers. You know, cloud computing, artificial intelligence, the Internet of things, 3D printing and all of those things. I mean, this is the biggest shift, you know, right after this, of course, it's over to education, really. That is the next thing that's going to happen after healthcare. So convergent industries, technology and healthcare is converging exponential leaps. Very exciting times. Within a decade, we'll see a complete reboot here. And again, the millennials, the Gen Z, also the Zillennials, as some people call it, they want health care. They don't just want sick care, they want healing, not just treating. And that is where everything is going. A more holistic approach on the future of health care. So that summarizes my part of the contribution. I know I rambled on a little bit too long, but here's the four key points. We're going to share the slides later so you can download them and don't have to memorize absolutely everything. So I want to end with a sentence by Buckmin Ceffola on this, my part of the presentation. As we see the future, so we act. And as we act, so we become. That's actually Barbara Hubbard, rest in peace. She died last year riffing off Buckminsterfula. We have to see the future differently. And this is how we can make the future differently. So thanks for listening to this. Now we're going to go back to Peter and then we'll have a debate and questions. Good.

Loved it. A lot of energy there. Here's where I'm going to take it though, is he mentioned the generational changes. And so I'm going to talk about really go beyond the technology. So we talked a little bit about technology changes that I kind of alluded to. Gerd's been talking a lot about economic changes. But one of the things that people get hung up about the future is, oh my God, but politics. Politics is just so screwed up. It's screwed up in America, it's good in Europe. It's all this polarization, it's all these extremes around politics. And so most people who really do have a bleak view of the near term future, if not the long term future, is really gets rooted down in politics. And I'm going to talk to you now about two, two kind of paradigm shifts that kind of relate to that one, and starting with a demographic shift, which is essentially generational shift. Now I'm going to basically talk because this really is affecting essentially the culture first. Then let's get into this and then I'm going to actually make some predictions here, you could say on the politics too. And in ways that I think it's going to evolve in very positive ways and it's going to make a big difference and it's going to be very different from what we've just seen in the past. One way to understand this, and again, I'm going to use data from the United States here, where I'm rooted, I'm rooted here in San Francisco Bay Area. But also this is, it's comparable in all Western Europe. And you know, in some ways it actually plays all over the world. This is essentially the American population in 2020 by generation. And if you really get into it, the one way to think about what really matters to an economy and a political area essentially is the people within those borders, if you who are kind of really the guts of the economy, the workers, the consumers, and also the bulk of the voters. Now what you're watching here, the one thing to here, by 2020 already half of the baby boom was, was in, was retiring. And then the second thing was they're dying off. I mean, those numbers are coming down. Every one of those is a year. And, and every one of you can see over there like the top level is 4 million basically baby boomers. Front end baby boomers are down to about 2 million folks from those beginning years. So they're losing people and they're retiring bulk. The other thing to note is that the millennial generation, which is roughly their kids, or Gen Y some people call them, is essentially the biggest generation in American history and kind of European history as well. And they are totally in the game. They are the guts of the economy right now and really going strong. Now if you push this out just 2030 here, any good kind of futures kind of, you can kind of actually Use demographics, just push out the numbers to 2030. We're watching that all baby boomers will roughly be retired and they will, you know, continue to be dying off. And then you're going to have this essentially double barrel generation of Gen Z and the millennials, both of which are very aligned on values. For example, their commitment to the climate change and GERD was referencing the young people kind of extinction rebellion that, but really unified on their values. They're really unified in their values around div and issues like that. And so you just see they're the dominant thing in, in the, in the country here. And again, this is playing out globally as well. If you just push out to 2040, which is this again, we're looking out the next 25 years. Really, it is the game. I mean, whatever Gen Z and the Millennials want to do is what we're going to do. Because this will be fully kind of working its way through politics. And again, you won't have that same kind of generational polarization that's we've happened so far. And ultimately by 2050, when we've got to be cresting in this kind of effort to basically solve the climate change and others, we don't know exactly what their kids are going to be like. But anyhow, this is kind of the future here. Now one way to think about that is culture always moves before politics. And the culture in America and the west has shifted and because of that, corporate America has basically and corporate global capitalism has evolved to this. Why? Because they know the consumers and people actually buying things now are these generations. And the people that are working are essentially these generations. So you're watching issues that are of great concern to this millennial generation. Gen Z taking coming to the forefront. And you're watching policies like he was just watching global capitalism and investors and you know, global corporations and the World Economic Forum, they're evolving in that direction. And it's actually causing a backlash in politics, which we'll get to in a minute here where kind of more conservative kind of red states in the United States. But essentially the more conservative politics is actually having a really difficult time with what they call woke capitalists who are now kind of evolving to where essentially the younger generations want to go. But from a kind of pure economic sense, it's absolutely the way to go. In fact, so the culture shifted and the corporations are shifting as well now. And you see it here, all kinds of things. Why did MeToo happen? Well, me too happened because the boomer generations of men and women had worked out enough kind of issues in the last 40 years, but when the millennials kind of came of kind of age in the workplace, hey, boom, this is not the way we're going to do things. And actually you watched a paradigm shift essentially how you treat women. Same thing about the focus on equity, which we're going to get into a little bit more right this second here. Because here's one thing to actually understand is that we're really getting into the politics, essentially new majorities which are going to form not just in culture, which is kind of working its way through the economy, but basically in politics. Now, the two things you got to know about the American, at least in this case, it's not quite as clear at other places of the world, but basically both the millennial generation and Gen z are roughly 50, 50 people of color and white people. And so and they're inter marrying their all the kind. They're basically now this is the first time in American history, by the way, it's ever come close to this. The boomer generation, it was 80% white and the only other folks were African Americans at that point. And since what. Because what's happened in this case of the millennials and Gen Z's is you've watched essentially there. There's been two great booms of immigration in American history. And this kind of chart shows that first boom in the late 19th century, early 20th century, that's the classic boom, brought a lot of European immigration in. But the second boom really started in the 80s again, even with Ronald Reagan and others here, we watched a kind of another great boom of immigration. But it was a worldwide immigration. It was coming from Latin America and also Asia. And so that's kind of accounted for this situation in America, which is now just playing out not with illegal immigration or anything else. We're watching the percentage of white people is coming down as a percentage of population and people of color is building up. This is what it was in 2020. It's on track to about 2045. You will have white people will be a minority in the United States. This is, by the way, what happened in California 15 years ago. I'm here in California. It's about 35% white people now in California. This is making a huge impact on our politics. And so I want to just play this out. So you're watching a kind of generational change, you're watching a kind of racial changes. And so you're watching a political paradigm shift which is not understood by the mainstream media or mainstream politics. And so we're in this lag time. We're in the kind of old paradigm of how polit politics works and people are not just playing the numbers out. One thing to think about, and I'm going to give dwell a little bit here because America is the 800 pound grill out there in the world and a lot of people are distraught with the rise of Donald Trump and all kinds of things and the polarization in this country here. But I want to say that we're basically on the verge of a tipping point into a new kind of political era. American history has always been built and actually Western history has always had essentially a pendulum swing between two kinds of politics. One is kind of conservative politics and one is progressive, or some people call that liberal. And you can just see in the words essentially what you're talking about conserving. Conservatives are about conserving and hanging out of the old ways of doing things. Progressives are trying to try new things and do that. You know, progress and, you know, both have their values. You know, we need to renew into kind of the old ways of doing things. Occasionally we need to reinvent things and move forward. So what's happened over American history is you see this kind of pendulum swing where sometimes they swing to the right and hold for a while. There's. And sometimes they kind of get in these kind of 50, 50 splits, which is what's happened in America in the last 10 years where nothing can get done. And it's these kind of 50, 50 kind of situations. And then it actually, then there's these periods where it goes into progressive eras. And I wanted to say, I'm making an argument that essentially we're going into that. And here's the thing that people don't think about these 50, 50 splits. All you need to do is take 10%. If a 5050 split in America is like this, all one side has to do is take 10% of the country into their coalition and essentially you have a 60, 40 majority where you can basically do whatever kind of you want to do. And so we've watched that happen with conservatives. We've watched these periods where it kind of edges back and you get 50, 50 paralysis, which is what we've been having. And I say we're on the work here to kind of build essentially a coalition, a progressive coalition which is coming together on these kind of demographic changes. I just said that with that in mind. We should be thinking that the closer, the last time we saw a progressive era in America and also in the west. And this is a Phenomena by the way, it goes through all through Europe and Western politics was essentially the great post war boom. A lot of the mechanism to that progressive era of strong use of government, the push on equality, the distribution of wealth, public investment, high taxation, frankly of the wealthy. That is essentially well known. Understood how that worked. It ended up in a great economic boom. I would argue the last 40 years. Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, others in kind of Europe. Essentially you watched essentially this conservative era. People, other people would call it a neoliberal era. But anyhow it was a set which is a different way of thinking about liberal. But essentially it's kind of was more of a free market, entrepreneurial kind of period. I would argue Donald Trump was the last gasp of that in America and is actually going to again prefacing what's happening in Europe as well. So what you got to be thinking about is the next regardless of your own politics or what you ought to do and talk to a lot of I do a lot of advising to senior execs and boards and all over the world. And I'm just kind of giving them the straight, which is, I think this is actually, actually whether you like it or not, this is the kind of era we're going back into, which is a much more progressive era. And the last kind of just way to play this out because people not in this country, but also all over the world, people are familiar with the red state, blue state situation. I want to just point out to you, despite our kind of sense that it's a 50, 50 country, blue America has basically won seven of the last eight popular votes of presidential, the presidential elections. The last eight presidential elections, the blue America has won it, the popular vote 7 of those 8 times. The only time red America won the popular vote was with George Bush's second election, which is right here, which is the high water mark. You look at also how that Electoral College, for those that we understand, was still quite tight. That was the high water mark. And basically this last election, if you want to see it, essentially this was how Biden beat Trump. But also you're watching the politics of the coast now going to the southwest United States. You're even seeing the Deep south kind of shifting blue. I would make an argument with the migration of young people into the cheaper housing of the South. You're watching this happening that basically the battlegrounds of politics are going to be pushing into Texas even and into the Carolinas there for those that know the nuance of that. And there's no push of red America going into California or let's say New York. And so I just want to point to people that despite the gloom and doom of oh, politics will never get moving in America. America is kind of this crazy place that was going to be going on for the next 10, 20 years. I don't believe that we're actually moving into a sense where you're going to have a very much a coalition, 60, 40 coalition, at least that's going to be able to run through with a lot of these pro climate, pro kind of more progressive policies. And so you should get ready for that paradigm shift too. So with that I'm going to basically bring back gerd and we want to have a little discussion with folks out there. I know there's been a lot of, we've said a lot of controversial things, including maybe the politics, but we'd love to hear people basically give us some feedback on these. And those are some of the ideas that I think is worth thinking about one way or the other. We're in for a hell of a decade here.

Thanks. Okay, that was powerful stuff. A lot of information coming down the pike here. I am also very optimistic about America and the United States and I think you're totally spot on there. It's a painful transition also because it requires unity and collaboration which is coming now. And all the signs are pointing in this one direction. For example, what we've seen right now in South America is that all of the votes are bringing in women and different kinds of people and of course more left leaning governments. But let's hope they don't do what Cesar Chavez did in Venezuela. But I think I have high hopes for Brazil finally getting around to the agenda of progressive politics and contributing to the world economy. So we're going to take some questions before we do that. Silvan, can you bring in some of the icons, just the QR code so that people can see what they can find out more about Peter's stuff, especially the progressive thing. So that's Peter's website and the Re Invent Futures and also the other one, I think the article the Progressive. Exactly right. So this is a must read, right? A lot of people keep sending me this article. I've read it 50 times. They keep sending it to me. Anyway, so it's very powerful stuff. Thank you so much.

Thanks for that. I would just say I've been really surprised by actually the pickup of that as well. It's coming from all over the world. People are reading it months after it was published. It's getting passed all over the place and if people want to do it, just simple Google the great progression or my name, basically, boom, you can get it. It's a really good 10,000 word piece. Read it'll lay out a lot of these big ideas. But, you know, yeah, thanks.

We're going to bring the QR code back again later. So let's get some questions. Please do ask the tough questions. And I think Anton is there. My future was colleague from Cape Town, South Africa. And maybe we can bring him in. Thanks, Anton. Thanks for sticking around. So I do a lot of work with Anton in the future. And so his question how can we trigger or expedite the shift to the good future? Can we wait for governments to drive this? Okay, I'm going to hop on this one, then Peter can take over. I think really what's happening here is that as always, politicians, governments and CEOs they go behind something that they perceive as a major movement when it's going. This is the Gandhi effect. What that means is we're going to need a momentum of roughly 5% of the population to get into very big paradigm shifts. And we are reaching that here in Europe on climate. We have that. And this is about to explode. Going back to India and Gandhi as an example, 5% that he got initially and then it became 10% all of a sudden was like, boom, India is independent. And it's like it's a groundswell like this. And I think the good future is such a meme, such a strong mean where we are going to go from a groundswell to a major movement to a larger thing where politicians and CEOs will get behind this very, very quickly. I think as soon as we have the resolution of Ukraine, Russia in some way, this is just going to explode. That's my take on, you know, what's going to happen with politics here, Peter?

Well, I kind of gave up my little political thing there, but so I won't really add to it, but I would say what there's a lack is a paradigm. The paradigm is people are political people in Washington in this case. But I would ask, I would say in the capitals of all kind of Western Europe. And again, I'm not as familiar with some of the politics globally, so I would be hesitant about that. But essentially they're always in lag time. They're always fighting the last battle. They're always giving the policies that, you know, hey, let's do tax cuts to kind of solve the problem and stuff that's just so old. You know, that was the idea for the last 40 years, whatever. But, but when, when you do see these paradigm shifts, they happen extremely fast. And what's really interesting what's happening is particularly around climate, how that has shifted the United States. If you would have gone back even five years and just kind of people were wringing their hands here like we would never have the kind of shifting that we're starting to have here. And we're doing it on tiny margins. But essentially once you get a bigger margins on this and once you really start building a big coalition to this, you're just going to watch the kind of floodgates happen. And I think that's how politics works. It's just, it's always these, these moments, these kind of, these kind of where kind of political people or leaders try to catch up, like you say, to where.

The triggers are coming. I mean, climate change, especially in Europe here, the disasters that we've had, the migration issues caused by climate change, we're pulling a trigger every other week. You know, that is pointing us toward this way. And I think now we have the tech to create energy in different ways. There is a crisis here right now. We don't have enough to cover demand. Yeah, that's because of a past policy. But I mean, if we're looking at this, it's basically, I think we're at a trigger point every other week. And humans learn by pain and love, basically, right? So we're going to have pain, things go wrong and then we fall in love with an idea and then before you know it, things are different. And this is really what we're up until 2030. It's one of those things after the other. Some of them will be very painful, like stranded assets in the oil economy and huge shifts of who has the power like us, you know, our age, we're fading out of power in a way and that new people are coming in with different, you know, different ways of doing things. And I predict we're going to see a lot more women, female politicians, a lot more minorities, a lot more young people, and parties will never be the same. This is why I kept saying, you know, capitalism, socialism, communism doesn't matter. The only thing that matters for us is to find a recipe for the future. You know, these, these words are outdated.

There's, there are so many good questions. I'm actually starting to see these popping up here. So we should, may move to a couple. But I will say there's one in here that was saying, hey, you're, you're quite US centric in your forecast. You know, what do you think about development. China, India, Pakistan, Indonesia, and of course, Russia, the majority of Earth's population. I, I just do. I do want to just jump on that quickly here, which is. And again, you know, only so much you can do and you can tee it up. And if we do this again, we will broaden these paradigm shifts into all kinds of spaces. But I will say this is, I would argue, the world is going through literally a world historic juncture right now. The closest thing we can kind of come to it was essentially what happened after World War II in terms of a remaking of the international order, kind of rebuilding of kind of domestic economies, new institutions being made. You know, the World bank, the imf, the United nations, all kind of stuff happened. I mean, it took a giant war and it was, you know, all the tragedy that happened to that. But I think it's the closest thing we can see to actually the fundamental kind of nature of the shift going on here. And so I think. And one of the ways we've been talking about all these paradigm shifts, but one lens, absolutely, to put it through, is the shift in the fundamental energy source of the planet from carbon to clean is going to actually reorder all kinds of things. Geopolitics, it's going to countries that are very rooted in kind of oil, are going to get potentially go through some really difficult transitions. We're also going to watch maybe get quite dangerous. It's like we're seeing from Russia, which is very. An old kind of an oil country that's essentially lunging out, I think, partly through the lens of they're seeing that kind of world fading away. And so I think we actually really have to all kind of think about this in these junctures like this, these times, the, the old way of doing things, or. Oh, it never works that way or at all. We've always done it this way. Those things go out the window. Garretsman saying the right thing, in which these junctures, things that you once thought were never possible are possible, and things really do shift fast. And I think you've got to get in that mentality, no matter what country you are, no matter what region you are, we're watching this kind of amazing juncture that frankly, people in 100 or 500 years from now, they're gonna look back and say the middle of the 20th century was like when humans, you know, when it's sustainable, they went, you know, digital, they went kind of global. They had to work on a planetary scale. These are huge, huge shifts.

And so you Know, I always say impossible is a new normal, right? And when I look at the global situation, it's quite clear. We, the developing countries in Europe, US and other places like that, we are going to have to pay the developing countries, right, to not do what we have done. We're going to have to pay them to leave the carbon in the ground. Because we can do. We can do perfectly well in Europe and Germany and Switzerland and in the US and Canada to do all these things, right? But if we don't get the other countries and Africa, Indonesia, India and Brazil aboard, right, we're going to be nowhere. We're still going to be at 5 degree warming. So basically that forces us into a sort of a global consciousness. You know, I know it sounds bizarre when you're looking at the current situation, but this is the ticket to our future. And do you think that's impossible? I don't think so. I think we're going to see that as the ticket and we're going to see lots of new politics moving in that direction. And part of that will be what I call the United States of Europe. Having Europe come together in a completely new way, in a much deeper way, while retaining our differences and languages and food and whatever we have as national identities. But this is happening. And it sounded impossible, but look what we see now. I think it's very well possible. Let's take another question, okay?

There's all kinds of. By the way, I'm looking at these questions. They're fantastic questions. I wish we had all data to go out this thing. Go ahead.

So, JILL Friend from LinkedIn, can you address the tension between what should happen, what we want to happen, and what is actually happening? Okay, that's a good one. I think really we have to get to a pivot point with what we want to happen. I always say in my speeches that the future is not something that we can say, okay? This is what's going to happen, and we prepare for it. No, we actually make the future. We determine by action or by inaction what it's going to be. And it's our choice. We either can be architects of the future, as Buckminster Fuller said, or victims. And that's what it boils down to. And so really what we see right now is this debate that that is becoming very loud and very global as to what we want. And when that debate becomes a forefront of things, it becomes completely normal to be part of it. Just like it's completely normal to talk about the end of all now. Ten years ago, the end of all would have meant you never get another speaking gig again and now it's like it. So I think this is what's happening in Societal shift and I see great hope in this. But we have to make a better narrative. And this is what I'm doing with the Good Future project. Right? We need urgently a better narrative for the future. We can't use the tech companies narrative, we can't use Hollywood's narrative, which is dystopian. Right. We need a good narrative. That's hence the good future, I would say.

I also know Gil here and I know he's been doing the good fight here in sustainability for a long time. And also I see other colleagues out here, David Banks, among others, in putting out great questions here. But I do think what's it's different now. I do think what's happening is this is tipping and you got to think about it as more of an inflection point in a way that so much of the change has been so difficult and slow and frustrating and not enough. And all of people are kind of trapped in that. And I think what's going to be wild is, and you can see it with the auto industry was a great example, but I think it's happening all over. It's just this crazy, crazy kind of shifting that's happening. And I think we'll look back at it and go, okay, that's what happened. But I do think we're getting new energy now fast. And it's going to the winds and the sails and it's going to boom, go. Some of it we laid out there with the numbers and all that. But I would say even those have been in trenches for as long. In fact, probably because of that, I do think we're in a new kind of period here that's starting to really take off. I'll do one last thing. I also do a lot of speaking to kind of business groups. I take a lot of senior execs, I talk a lot of boards and stuff like that. And literally things you could not talk about half this stuff five years ago, as you mentioned, you couldn't even really bring up climate change, honestly, in one of the places I was at. And they're all over it now. And it's just like they know that's the future. They know where it's going, they know that's how to make money. That's nowhere. There's no stopping it. And so once you start doing that, then the north stars go up, the new north stars and people start going, okay, that's where we're going. Boom. And it's starting to happen. It's really exciting.

I often compare this to therapy. I don't know if you've ever been to therapy, but probably everybody has, especially in America. But I live in Berkeley.

I live in Berkeley.

Is there anybody in Berkeley that didn't go to therapy? But anyway, just kidding. Berkeley is a fantastic place. I love Berkeley therapy. Or not in any case, if you ever been to therapy, you know, you go to therapy because nothing else is working. The shit is hitting the fan and it's cards on the table or die. That's why you go. And I think we're now at the, at the place where we all go into a kind of a therapy, you know, about economics, about capitalism, about flying, about sustainability. And the shit is hitting the fan. And we're going to go there and the therapist, you know, maybe Gucci, errors from the un, whatever, he will tell us, collaborate or die. And all of a sudden we realize, you know what? We can actually, I found the key to, you know, making things. I'm gonna change my assumptions. This is really what therapy is all about, right? And I think we are, we are at that point where we're challenging our assumptions, saying, you know, things don't have to be that way just because they have always been that way. And the other important thing, you know, if you're looking at literature about humanity and stuff, read Rutger. Not Rutger Hauer, that's the actor Rutger Bregman book called I think Humankind. Right, it's called. Where he describes that we are basically capable of kind things. We're not incapable. And I really believe that we have it in us to make this shift. And this is why I'm hopeful a little bit of pressure is going to help to actually realize it. Anyway, next question. Let's bring it up here. We're going to ping pong for another five minutes or so and otherwise, you know, my, my martinis will get warm and I don't want that. And your coffee is going to get cold over there. So, Meliosa, Moran, how do you think the upcoming economic, environmental, social, migrant waves will impact these paradigm shifts? Political and particularly. Yeah, Peter, over to you.

Well, in some ways we're seeing it already in the United States here. I mean, a lot of the migration coming up from Central America and all kinds of stuff, and also refugees now from the war and various things. I will say this, which is going to be a double reverse a little bit on this. Again, it's a paradigm shift in how we thought of migrants in the last 40 years. There was one way to think about it. I would say in the next 40 years we're going to actually see, particularly in the developed economies, labor shortages, severe labor shortages. We're in one now. I mean it's as tight as a drum here in the labor right now and there's not enough people to work all kinds of jobs. I mean everybody's looking for people here. And there's two ways it's going to be solved. You're going to see it through AI and robotics is going to take some of the pressure off that. But also you're going to see a different attitude towards migrants. And I think you're already seeing it in the United States here. This idea that, you know, Donald Trump and the kind of, the, the kind of conservative red stake thing about anti immigrant that is not the majority of people in the United States. In fact it's clear the vast majority now it's up to 60% welcome, see migrants as a good thing. Immigrants is a good thing. And I think this is going to happen increasingly even in Europe and all kinds of places because they're going to need people. These aging populations, these economies aren't going to grow unless you do it. And so I think weirdly, again, I'm a positive spin on this is that we're going to need those migrants. And so there's going to be a different attitude shifting on this. And also, again, because of the diversity of these younger generations and the intermarriage between the races and these younger people, it's like, you know, people of color are coming into your thing. It's just, it's not the same kind of problem that we used to see. We saw with the last 40 years and the boomer generation, all that kind of stuff going on there. So I think actually that's going to play itself out. It's going to be traumatic and the climate is going to push all kinds of people all differently over the planet. But in a way that resource of raw labor and talent is essentially going to be welcomed weirdly then rebuffed.

Well, you know, I think outside of the U.S. the biggest factor is by the end of the century, 40% of the world's population will be from Africa. Looking at all these overcoming India. So Africa is the next big thing that's coming. And I think migration is clearly going to be until we have actually reversed climate change, which we can probably do in 20, 25 years, we can start working on that. But until that, we're going to see 2 or 3 degrees of warming, which is going to be disastrous for migration. Basically everybody in the middle of the globe, especially in Northern Africa, Middle east and so it will just get too hot to even live there. Pakistan, India, we're looking at hundreds of millions of people migrating. Hundreds of millions. We better be ready for that, right? And I think this is happening. This is not a bad thing. I think it's a good thing. I mean, I'm living a fairly safe life here in Switzerland. It's kind of ironic that we don't see it the same as we do in Germany, but I think Germany has done the right thing by welcoming the immigrants as they have. And I have no doubt that America will find their way back to that because America has always been a country of migration and everybody's from somewhere else, right? And it doesn't matter as much. So I think that is a huge shift. The other shift that's going to happen here is a shift of labor, of course, as we're going to be more working in the cloud more remotely. So you can live in Nigeria and you can work in Los Angeles. That's already the case. But that's going to be the new normal. Most of the growth of new jobs will be jobs that, that don't even exist today. And many of them will be virtual and digital and that's going to spread the wealth. The primary thing, as I was saying earlier, this is not about tools and tools and science and technology. This is about policy. We have to be smart with what we've got to put it back together. That's why I think Kim Stanley Robertson's climate current carbon coin idea is just fantastic, letting radical solutions to radical problems. And I think we're going to see a lot more of that. Another question, please. Well, well, I'll just.

Can I just say one thing because I know we're at the top of the hour here and I know some people are going to have to leave here, but I will say just a riff on that last thing you say is I always say this. People always underestimate human ingenuity. And I would say never bet against humans are incredible problem solvers. We have been for our entire existence. We are getting extremely good at innovation and progress. And I would say the idea that we can't take on these challenges, particularly with these insane tools, you know, artificial intelligence, just what we're seeing here, generative AI among others, is just like we have the tools, we have the knowledge, we have the capability to solve These challenges. And I would say you'd really be foolish to actually bet against it. And that is something that everyone always, they say just because we don't have the idea now or just because we don't know how to solve it now is like, okay, it's over now, it's just begun. It's really good.

We have, we have seven pinned messages. I suggest that we just do 30 seconds on each and just get them because, you know, people have been waiting for their questions. Let's put them in there and we'll just try to, to go through it. So let's, let's put one up. Okay. Eckhart to beat automation, auto autonomous driving have a future or is it a fantasy? Well, my quick take on this is if we can have level three or four assisted driving, that's going to solve most of our practical problems. We don't need to car machines to drive like humans. That shouldn't be the ultimate objective. And yes, it has a future. But you know, as Paul Sappho likes to say, you know, we should not mistake a clear view for a short distance. It's going to take longer than we had thought. Look at the Tesla self driving thing. My 30 seconds. Yours.

My 30 seconds is, I actually do think this is going to happen. In fact in San Francisco here you can actually get a kind of autonomous taxi right now cruise. And although it's, you know, limited and it's a long way to go. But I will say this, I think the key thing is going to, we have to fundamentally remake all cities. Essentially all through the world right now housing prices are out of the roof going through the roof. And to do that we need to take back what is a third of all cities is devoted to parking spaces for individual autos. And I think what we're going to see that replace them will be autonomous vehicles that will be shared and you'll just call them up when you need them, you can drive them, you don't have to be driven around. But essentially we're going to get claw back a third of all cities, build housing, build a kind of environment that we want and that's actually why it's going to drive it. And also long haul trucking is going to basically need it because nobody wants to be a trucker anymore.

From a European perspective. You know, my, my bet is on public transportation being vastly improved by technology. That's where I would put my money. I don't really think that private driving, whether it's electric or self driving, is the great solution in many Countries, it may be in Las Vegas or in Los Angeles, I don't know. But anyway, so next question. Thanks for the question, Eckhart. BT let's bring the next one. James. In the U.S. some of the generational, locational, political shifts are being countered, some cases neutralized by things like aggressive gerrymandering. How can this be addressed? Well, that's.

Let me jump into this because I know Jim Daly and appreciate the, the pushback there, Jim. This is, to me, the death throws of basic. This, this is what happens when you know you've lost and, and you're basically on the end game. And every other period of America, every one of these pendulum swing periods that I've talked about is actually had the same initially polarization and then aggressive, aggressive countering and desperation essentially, as you hang on to what you got. And this is not the sign of a winning combo. This is not a crew that's like confident they got the future. The hearts and minds of, of the future of American, you know, America's generations is like, no, they're basically hanging on but with skin of their teeth. And it's just going to lose. I mean, that's just, it can't hold up. But that is the sign of it. That's a sign of desperation and that is, in fact. Yeah. Okay, go ahead.

Let's move on to the next question. Thank you. Thanks, Jim. Next question. We're running down the questions here. How do we fix extreme inequality? Well, how do we fix extreme equality? I think this is a reboot that we're going through right now by changing our objective. If our objective is profit and growth, it means inequality and technology has amplified that. It makes it even more perfect. Inequality through social media and technology. So if we want to fix that, we have to start with the bottom line of the construct, which is the stock market concept. If we have people plan a purpose, prosperity, you have to take all four boxes. You're not going to get a dividend until you take them. That's how we're going to eventually change inequality. And I would also say it's not true that inequality has increased everywhere. That is just, generally speaking, not entirely true. We have millions of Brazilians moved out of poverty for a while until Covid. So a lot of good things have been happening there too. But I think inequality is a consequence of concentration on this obsession of what is the purpose of money. That's my take on this.

My quick take is basically this progressive politics, which is always a function of essentially pushing back on inequality, is going to start with more higher taxation and distribution, that kind of stuff in the classic sense. But essentially the real evolution in this next 25 years, and I would say certainly this century, is going to be an evolution of capitalism itself into a kind of moving wealth earlier in the process, not at the end redistributing, but essentially moving it through the system earlier and distributing it to all the stakeholders. That hasn't been figured out yet, but it's on its way. And there's a lot of interesting economic thinking around that, how to do that.

Yeah, key point on that, Peter. I think this is really the thing is we have enough science, we have enough tech and we have enough money, but we're not distributing it. Right. That's what it comes down to. Once we do that, then we have more quality, more access. And now we're going to be forced, if we take the move, the view of the US and Europe, we're going to be forced to consider what developing countries want because they hold the key to our future in economic and in climate terms. Right. And this is what happened at COP27. Important decision. And that's going to really occupy us. That's why I think the global. The key to all of that is to shift money radically in new ways that will allow us to fix the problem and bring everybody in. Next question, please. Rapidly growing defense budgets around the globe suggest less collaboration of countries than you would like to see. How soon would China, the us, Russia and the EU work together? Yeah, great question. I think it's depressing that we're seeing a return to military like we have in Germany for the practical reasons of having neglected further energy sources before for that. But at the same time, I think it's temporary. I think as war is going digital, which is happening, right. We can expect the costs to go down for that and maybe also the numbers of casualties. And also as we're becoming more globally connected, a lot of the conflicts will be of economic, social, technological nature. And that to me means we're probably going to end up spending less on traditional things like tanks or nuclear. Nuclear weapons and so on. So that's, that's my hope, how we can fix this. But yes, it's a. It seems right now like we're going in the wrong direction.

My quick hit on this, basically, and again, thanks for those who are hanging on to over the time here, but there's so much great stuff here, why not keep chatting? My quick hit on this is I would absolutely much rather have a world of kind of, you know, everyone's kind of working together and ultimately coordinating at a global level and basically solving the climate change as it is. That would be my preferred route. I don't know, I'm getting increasingly less, I would say I'm getting really worried essentially that we're actually heading closer, more to a Cold War ish kind of situation with China, at least the US And China, west and China. And that's not necessarily driven by the west per se. I think a lot of it is driven by Xi and the leadership there that's now entrenched in power. And same thing with Putin. So I would say two things I, I could actually imagine and my piece actually lays this out with that same reluctance that it is possible that we could solve climate change in a kind of situation of a kind of a Cold war competition, as long as it didn't go to hot war. And you could imagine both sides kind of investing in huge ways to kind of build up their side of the coalition to kind of solve climate in ways and lead the world. I don't, I wish we don't have to do that, but that will be it. The second thing about it is I would say at these junctures of these world historic junctures in history, you usually do have conflict and military conflict because some powers are going to go and they have a lot to lose and they're going to basically fade. And you got a lot of rising powers that are going to threaten a lot of people anyhow. This is classic what happens at these junctures. This is not something to say, oh my God, how does this happen? Russia is kind of doing what they're doing because they see the futures, they're fading and they, China is doing what they're doing because they're rising in ways. And anyhow, this is what happens at these junctures. So we got to kind of live with what we got.

We're going to really have a hard stop in a couple of minutes. Let's take the two questions, 30 second answers each. And so we can't get to all of the questions, but you know, there, there are a lot of them here. Wade Lanbury, what potential backlash do you see as this emerges as we saw with Trump? You know, I, like I said, I think what we're heading into is a chaotic period of lots and lots of change that could end up being sort of a bizarre belle apo. You know, like on the one hand really positive, on the other one totally painful to get there. And some people say, I would say, for example, about American politics probably gets worse before we get, before it gets better. And this is the year 2023 where we're going to see all that coming to a head. And so some of that would be very painful. We have to really keep up a positive view of the future to have a little bit longer vision as to be immediately threatened by everything that pops up in the news.

Yeah, I mean to be fair and again, I don't, this is something I don't wish but you know, there's a lot of talk about, you know, armed resistance and civil war even kind of talk in the United States, particularly on the extreme right. And I don't think that's out of the question but kind of, kind of desperate, kind of, kind of holdouts and stuff will happen. And I think we're just going to have to keep our eye on the long term and the bigger picture here and not get distracted by what is going to be essentially, you know, desperate kind of craziness that's going to happen around the edges here and not just domestically, internally, domestically. But I'll say with kind of, I would say the real dangers, right wing kind of folks. But I would also think nations that are really going to see their, their particularly oil nations, oil states are going to really going to go through a tough time here and some of them are transitioning in the Middle east and the wealthy countries and Norway and things like that. But boy, some of them that are just really dependent, super dependent on oil is going to be difficult now. And so anyhow, yes, we're going to have some, we're going to have reactions and it's going to get crazy and some of it will get violent and that's what happens. And we just cannot let that distract from the bigger picture which is, you know, the long term changer.

Great final question and final answer. And then we're going to do a little bit of a pitch and then we're out. So the CEO of Shell pointed to Jon Stewart. Until demand shifts, Shell needs to continue to provide supply. Okay, I've heard that argument before. It makes sense to a certain degree. But it's not a black or white question. Right. For example, I mean you can see Saudi Arabia for example is seriously getting ready to put money into completely or putting money into completely renewable city called NEOM that is completely not using fossil fuel at the same time they're sending 100 people to cop events to make sure that the end of fossil fuel does not mention. So these things are happening all the time. I think we're going to see a Criminalization of companies that are primarily in the business of fossil fuels. And that is not far away. And no matter what the argument is, we can and we will do better. We have the tech, we have the science, now let's just have the will. That's what would be my comment for the CEO of Shell.

Yeah, my quick thing here is basically human beings need, we're going to need, need carbon energy or oil essentially for things like ammonia. And there's a bunch of kind of industrial reasons why you're going to have this. There's going to be money be made essentially in fossil fuels for a while and there will be a long term tail on this essentially. So I would just say that I think we probably hit peak oil or close to it in the next couple years here and I think now it's going to be cresting and then it's just a matter of these energy companies becoming energy companies, not just oil companies or carbon companies, but essentially transitioning down the best they can from outside pressure, which is government, social pressure, you know, these movements and also stockholders and stuff. And anyhow it's going to do it. But it's a messy, I mean change like this is messy. It's crazy. It's kind of, it's not clear. That's why you got to keep the big picture long term, see the through lights. This is what you're not kind of trying to do here is say keep, keep your sense of what's really going on, what's probably coming, what's possible to achieve and what we should be doing now. Those are the four issues that I'm always grappling with and trying to advise people on. And I think we're in a good space here. I'm positive about the future. I think we're really moving into a great area of progress and I am, I think it's a time, it's going to be a great decade ahead here.

Great. So some resources. Thanks very much everybody for tuning in. We have some great resources online. We have a micro site I put together newparadigms worldwide where we're going to put lots and lots of links. We're going to put this video, we're going to do some edits. All of that stuff will be on YouTube, PeterLighton.com with a Y. Maybe we can bring that in here for the website for Peter futurewithgurt.com for me. We also have of course the Good Future project which you can bring in if you have a link to that. The goodfutureproject.com that we're trying to tell a better narrative about the future. Also, have a look at my film, the good futurefilm.com trying to sort of explain how that all could look like. And of course, this show is available for your booking as individually, Peter or me or both of us together, of course, the ultimate power package. You could say online or offline. And of course, you know, sustainable travel. Only if you're going to invite us to come anywhere. So it's been a great pleasure to be with you, Peter, and also thanks to everybody in the audience. Please do spread the word. We're going to have an added version of this later, but this archive will stay intact and stay in touch. We have a newsletter. Gerd Digital is my newsletter. You have a newsletter, I think, on your website, Peter, Also I think the other website that we've already linked to earlier. Anything else you want to say at the end, Peter?

Well, thanks for everybody. I mean, I recognize a lot of folks here who came out of my network as well, and a lot of great people from all over the world. It sounds. It's. It's fantastic. We're starting a new conversation. It's possible we'll do another one of these. Good night. So let's keep the conversation going and stay positive. We're. It's gonna be a. It's gonna be a good 25 years.

Live long and prosper. Thank you.

All right.