Conversations 2.0: A Future of Predictable Surprises | Jonathan Reichental

Hi everyone. I'm Dr. Jonathan Reichental. I'm thrilled to be here with my friend, colleague and partner, a Gil friend. He is one of the founding members of the eco, or sustainability business movement and an incredible person. We're going to be talking about the intersection of the climate crisis and the pandemic. I've wanted to know a lot more about this topic for a long time and it's an important subject for all of us to know more about and talk about. And frankly, as Gil's going to tell us, I imagine things we need to do, we have to take action. So lovely to see you, Gil. Tell us a little bit about yourself.

Quick background. I'm a business strategist. Fundamentally, that's my bread and butter. I've been working for the past 20 or so years with some of the world's biggest corporations, helping them integrate the, what, 3.8 billion years of R and D, of Earth's living systems into their business practices. Not as a do gooder thing, not as a nice to do thing, but as something that's critical value to their business that drives innovation and profit and brand value and relationships with customers and employees. And important to the topic at hand today is how do they orient themselves to a deeply uncertain future and the risks that are coming at us. Risks that we can see and risks that we can't see that in fact we are, by design blind to. Yeah, so that's my current work. Previously, you know, we met, of course, when we were working for the city of Palo Alto, where I led the development of probably the most aggressive municipal climate action plan in the United States.

Yes.

Before that, worked in Jerry Brown's governor's office in his first term as governor in California and a number of other things along the way.

Yes, Quite a few things in your past there. You and I have spoken about having a series of discussions for a long time. So I'm really happy that finally we're doing this. Perhaps the pandemic forced us into it and we have this new platform now. So I thought, you know, we could sort of go dark and deep real quick, but I thought we'd start with the positive side of what's going on. Tell me from your perspective, does anything make you optimistic about where we're at with the pandemic and with climate change? Maybe you could talk about that.

Well, short answer, yes, let me start with the pandemic because that's the more shocking of the two to answer that way. You know, clearly this is hugely disruptive and very dangerous and we're seeing, you know, and the level of human casualty and economic casualty is huge. To minimize that in any way. But the pandemic has broken things open an unusual. At a historic scale. You know, when we talk about change, we're all stuck in being reasonable people, you know, moving carefully in measured ways, making sure that we know exactly what we're doing, what's going to happen, being able to predict and so forth. That's busted. You know, we're in a world of unpredictability and uncertainty. And the joke, of course, is that we always have been. We just know that deeply now. We've never known what's on, going, going to happen next. People think they do, but, you know, six months ago, who knew there was going to be a pandemic that would shut down the global economy.

Right.

You know, four months ago, who knew that that yet another murder of a black man by police in the United States would break open the conversation about racial justice and systemic racism in the country? You couldn't predict that. And I will assert that we're in a world of surprise. And there will be other unpredictable things that show up in front of us. We can. We can prepare ourselves for that to some extent through scenario processes and other kinds of tricks and tools of the trade. But it also challenges us to live as humans in the world in a very different way. I mean, if I live as though I know what's coming, fine, that's one way to live. If I live as though I don't, that's another. And how do I cultivate a way to do that? With some serenity. Not panic at every turn, but a recognition that this is how life is. Things change, things emerge. How do I move with power and grace and serenity in the face of that? So Covid has broken that open in a way. It's exposed. I'm not going to take the time here because everybody knows it. It's exposed a series of breakdowns in our society, particularly in the United States, but to some degree around the world. And it's exposed a hunger for something else. There was a poll in Great Britain a few months ago that asked people. This was like three months in, I guess, or two months, and asked people if they wanted to go back to pre Covid. 9% said yes.

Wow.

In other words, there's a recognition that there's something different, something feels different now that in some ways is that in New Delhi, people said they could see the Himalayas for the first time in 30 years. Now, what that raises is the question of if your choice is see the Himalayas in a broken economy, or have an economy that's working but not be able to see the Himalayas, which also means you're breathing that crap all the time, right? Yes, you're stuck. But what opens up now as well? What if we could rebuild in a way that still let us have clear air, that still let us have the sense of collaboration and cooperation and mutual care that we see now? What if we can have an economy that was nurturing of human possibility and well being, but didn't make the compromises that we have assumed for decades were unescapable? So I think that's where my optimism lives. It's a mixed bag. On the one hand, we have moved globally at a speed and a scale and a scope and a level of coordination that we never thought was possible. And we have proven now that it's possible despite variations in different countries and breakdowns. But we've seen we can do that. So the question arises, what if we could do more of that? What if we could approach the climate crisis with that level of speed and coordination? What if we could address the public health issues that really underlie the COVID crisis with that level of speed and scope and commitment and coordination? And with that in mind, a number of us, a dozen leading sustainable business consultants have consulted something called the COVID Covenant.

Yes.

Inviting and challenging companies to pledge to do just that, to bring the level of their pandemic response to the other issues that we're confronting.

And how can people find the COVID Covenant?

They can find it at valutous v a l u t u s.com Covid covenant great.

Great. And I'll try. I'll also include it in some of the posting notes that I do on this webinar. Thank you. Thanks, Veda. Yeah, I've read through that and I was very impressed. It's tremendous work. Thank you for that. I love that you said we're in an era of surprise or a period of surprise. I think that's really very characteristic. And also we've been exposed to a view of the possibilities. It's like we're in a giant experiment. If you had said to me, we've had all our coffees and lunches and you'd say, jonathan, what would happen if we told everybody to stay, to stay at home for a few weeks? We just. It would be a hypothetical, it would be a thought experiment.

Right, right.

We got to do it. We got. And, and now we're seeing the possibilities. As you, as you rightly said, you

know, Jonathan, when I started with you at City of Palo Alto, one of her colleagues was fond of saying in the midst of meetings, when things felt stuck, she would say what might be possible.

Yes.

And he's kind of invited us to step out of the obvious and step out of the familiar and speculate a little bit about, well, what could happen here. And with that, you maybe surface some possibilities that are interesting and start to move on and then experiment in ways that you would not have done otherwise.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, that's a very nice way of looking at a difficult situation that we're given this window, and it exposes, of course, to where our weaknesses are. And I think that's a big thrust of your point. There is everything that was fragile in society, that was kind of hidden when times were good, was totally exposed, and much of it collapsed. I mean, even the supply chain quickly collapsed in the early days of the crisis.

Now, not just the early days, here we are, what, six or seven months in, in the United States, the, you know, arguably the greatest economy in the world, the economy that transformed itself in what, six to nine months in 1942 into the world's biggest fighting machine. Still can't get personal protective equipment handled.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

So the pandemic has really exposed the very best and the very worst.

Yes.

Of who we are now. Yeah.

So thanks for that setup. In terms of where we're at overall, and you kind of. We looked at the positives. Now, in order for us to drive the change and kind of think about what we need to do, where are your concerns? I mean, I know you have many, but in terms of where we're at, I guess both in the pandemic and then sort of what I would say is almost like a pandemic in slow motion, which is the climate crisis, where are your major concerns right now?

Well, you know, front and center is dealing with the pandemic and building the social capacity to deal with it well and consistently recognizing that this is not the COVID 19 pandemic, we are entering into what Fernando Flores calls the pandemic era. There's, you know, there's a more than small chance that we will see more of these. If you look at the conditions from which the COVID pandemic arises, odds are this will happen again and perhaps again and perhaps again. And so how do we develop the, you know, the societal and public health and personal capacity to both work to minimize those risks, but also deal with them as they come? Number one, we can talk more if you like about why I assert that?

I'm going to come back to that.

Okay. And then at the same time we have what you call the slow motion crisis of the climate crisis. Not so slow, but certainly slower than Covid. You know, people talk a lot about 2050 targets for reducing emissions. We really need 2030 targets. Copenhagen is placed to be carbon neutral by 2025. So there's a challenge of speed here. A few months ago, in rapid succession, Amazon introduced their long awaited climate pledge of I think it was carbon neutral by 2040, the next day or two, certainly that week ikea said by 2030 and the next day or two, Microsoft said by 2030 and we will neutralize all of our historic emissions since forever. So the bar keeps rising and the challenge of leadership keeps rising. And what seemed like bold initiatives are getting washed away week by week as people start to grapple with the urgency. Not as visible, you know, slowly moving. You don't see ICUs being, you know, being filled to capacity. You're not seeing a lot of refugee movement. But we know that in our lifetimes, hundreds of millions of people will be on the move. We know that economies and cities will be disrupted. We know that there will be massive public health implications from the heat. We know that there will be parts of the world in which people won't be able to go outside because it's so hot. How do you do agriculture in that situation? So these things are looming and it's not the sort of thing where you can wait till 2050 and then get into motion. We need to be in motion. I was at a conference last, last year, Saul Griffith, the MacArthur fellow and mad genius inventor, was raising this point. He said, you know, he quoted a lot of people who say we have 10 years to turn the climate thing around. He said, no, we actually don't have 10 years. We have 10 seconds, actually, we have zero. We need to be doing every everything right from right now. And you know, having led, you know, led organizations and departments that, that turning on a dime is tough. Implementing change, not just technically, but culturally in an organization. Stuff that usually has to happen over time. But if we put to ourselves the challenge of what if we had to do everything right starting now, not phase it in, not phase out natural gas every 10 years. But as city of Berkeley, dozens of other cities have done, say no more natural gas hookups, period, starting today. This sounds draconian. It will generate resistance. But those are the kinds of questions we need to be asking ourselves. How do we move at the speed of urgency? Again, like the US did after the Pearl harbor attack at the end of 1941. President Roosevelt gathered the executives of the auto industry in the White house in early 1942. And they came. They knew what was going to be asked of them. They came with their conversion plans. They said, Mr. President, we're going to be out of automobile production, civilian automobile production, within nine months. And we'll make these other transitions because we know we need to produce tanks and planes and armaments and so forth. And Roosevelt, as the story goes, looked at his watch and said, you guys don't understand. You're out of car production now. Now, very different kind of planning. And of course, it's driven by the urgency. Otherwise, we're the frog in the pot and we move slowly. How do we build that kind of urgency in with groundedness and rigor and care and inclusion? And if I could just say one more thing, one of the things that's really notable about the pandemic response is that nobody said, wait a minute, how are we going to pay for this? Everybody just snapped into action, and governments produced programs and support and some who can printed money and made that possible. You know, usually initiatives are stopped by that question, how are you going to pay for this? It's not stopped for military. We always seem to have enough money for military, and it was not stopped for pandemic. Now, lately in the US It's a bit more complicated, but the immediate response is, let's get into Kier, let's make it happen. We'll figure out the economics later. And this opened up an experience of that for everybody in the world. First question is, what do we have to do? That's where we have to start. Right.

So we're going to get to sort of actions in just a moment. I want to take us back a little bit to something that intrigued me when you and I were first talking about this a few weeks ago is there's two parts to this question. One is that there's a connection between the emergence of the pandemic and sustainability,

and

that you said that because of that, too, we would have more pandemics. They may happen more frequently because in my. This is the first of my lifetime, for sure, never experienced anything like this. So the notion that we could have more and more frequent is, to a degree, terrifying. So one of the. I think we all want to understand that. So maybe you could take us through that where you see the connection between the environment, the pandemic, and then the frequency.

Yeah. Let me be clear. I'm not predicting. I don't have a crystal ball. Sure. Excuse me. I can't tell you exactly what will happen, but if I look at the conditions that have given rise to this pandemic, it's not the virus. The virus isn't the enemy. We are awash in viruses. The world is filled with viruses. These are bits of genetic code. They're in every organism. We have tens of thousands of viruses in our bodies all the time. That's not a bad thing. Most of them are benign. Some of them are beneficial, Some of them are not. So that's kind of the context we live in. Then you have. Well, in the case of the genesis of this one, you have the change in the human wild land interface. Cities are moving out into wild territory. There's more interaction between humans and wildlife, if you will. In China, we had the phenomenon of the wet markets, where people are buying and selling and slaughtering and eating animals from outside the human biome, if you will. So we're being exposed to more and more organisms that we are not habitually have not habitually been exposed to biological insults that we may not have antibodies or responses built in for. So there's that challenge that is happening more and will happen more the way we've got our society organized. We're getting hotter, the planet's getting hotter. It's well established in biology that rising temperatures accelerate biological activity. So there's that risk factor there. There's the impact of climate change on public health. There's the question of public health. The pandemic makes it clear that there is no such thing as personal health. There is public health. So I can't be healthy by myself or in my household with my wife if society around us is a mess.

Well, now we've learned that, yes, we all know that.

Well, we at least see that. Have we dealt with it well enough? Don't know. Next is that while there's no personal health without public health, personal health actually matters. Because with virus and with virus and personal health, as with agriculture, the problem is multiple. It's the organism which is disrupting the system. It's also the capacity of the system to respond to the organism. So the healthier I am, the better I'm likely to do with the virus. And we see that in some ways, we see greater impact on elderly, greater people with comorbidities who already have vulnerabilities in their system and weaknesses in their immune system that limit their ability to respond. Flip that around. What you want to do is build a population that's Healthy, that has vibrant immune systems, that has resilience, that can handle insults. And we see this in our daily lives. You work together with what's called pre Covid. You work together with people in an office. It's flu season, it's winter season. Some people get cold, some people don't. That's not only exposure to the virus. That has to do with the bodily resilience they bring forward. So that's part of the public health game, is how do we nurture and build personal health? It's harder to do when you're stressed. You're going to be more stressed when systems are breaking down. We've seen the tip of the iceberg of the impacts of climate change. We consider it far in the future. And back to your earlier question. One of the things I'm concerned about is that with the understandable, extreme focus on the pandemic, right now, the attention on climate change has taken a bit of a backseat. Not completely. There's still corporate initiatives like we described before. There's still the Green New Deal on the table in the United States and Europe and New Zealand and to varying degrees in China and other places. But it doesn't have the front of mind urgency. I'm not criticizing anybody for that. That's completely understandable. But it's challenging for organizations to deal with multiple problems at the same time. We need to develop the capacity to do that, because the world is not going to be polite and say, I'm going to hold off this other crisis until you've solved this one. They're going to come as they come, and we have to build muscle, institutional muscle, emotional muscle. I don't know that they'll be more frequent. I don't have a crystal ball. I can't predict the biological incidents. But what I can say is that the conditions that have given rise to this pandemic are widespread throughout the world and they continue. So there's at least a chance that we will have exposures of unfamiliar organisms in systems that are not prepared to respond to them, either at the level of my personal biology or the public health system around me, or the government policy system around that, with global supply chains around that. I see ongoing perturbation, which means risk. And the question is, how do you anticipate and deal with risk? How do you prevent it? How do you build the capacity to respond to it? How do you redesign systems to reduce the systemic risk that we are living in?

Yeah, yeah. And maybe that's a good segue to sort of our kind of third and last part of this talk today or this discussion is, you know, if you, as you said earlier, if you think of climate crisis, the climate crisis is something that's too far forward that I shouldn't be concerned. You're. First of all, that's wrong. We need to be concerned right now.

I don't think that.

Not you. Others, others, others. No, no, I know you don't think that. I'm saying there's many people who are of the belief this is a big issue, but it's going to take a long time. I'm not worried about it right now. But now you see that, you know, the visible and the actual impacts of that broader change that you've well described is enabling other things that we didn't anticipate and now understand, such as pandemic. It potentially creates more urgency. And so I have kind of a two parter again. But I'll start with the first part and then I'll ask you the second part after which is now that we're in this position, you know, we're better informed, many of us. What should society be doing? What are some important things that in a summary list, what do you think society should be doing?

How much time we got? Jonathan?

Right.

Well. And you're asking the context of climate particularly.

Yes, yes. Because I think, I think to your point, if we, if we're able to, if we're able to really get a handle on mitigation and reduction and prevention, that should also help us with the, you know, lowering the likelihood of more pandemics.

Yeah, well, let me. It's a great question and it deserves an organized answer. Mine might be a little disorganized.

Sure.

First and foremost we should face reality, pay attention to what's actually so pay attention to the science, look around data, not just the numbers data, but observe with your own eyes what's happening to the glaciers, the ice shelves and so forth. I was in Iceland a few years ago leading a company on a multi day retreat. And in the middle of the retreat we went out and spent the day on the glaciers and we were marching out across the glacier and at one point one of the guides stood there, took out unfurled pole, one of those linked together poles from his bag, stood it up. It was 10ft high. He said 10 years ago that's where the glacier, we would have been standing there 10 years ago. Number two is to face reality on our economic system and to stop lying about things and how we price and account for resources. We are, you know, we are fundamentally Subsidizing the things that are destroying us. We do this by direct subsidies of government payments and indirect subsidies of not charging the real costs of the things that we do. Emory Lovins at Rocky Mountain Institute determined some years ago that the true cost of a gallon of gasoline in the United States, when you take into account all the production impacts, the ecological and pollution impacts, and the cost of the military required to keep open the supply lanes to the Persian Gulf, came in at about 15 to $20 a gallon while people were yelling about is it two or three or four. So, you know, the question I often ask people is if you had to pay $15 or $20 a gallon for gasoline, would you be driving the car you're driving today? And of course you wouldn't be. And the backup question is, would anybody be making the car you're driving today? And of course they wouldn't to be. So, you know, free markets are a beautiful thing, but free markets, the way we do them now, they lie and they give the wrong signals. So let's get real about that. Number two, number three, and really related to that is, well, most directly is put a price on carbon so that, so that it becomes uneconomic, or put it another way, becomes more economic to drive down carbon emissions. To a great extent this is happening in the market through other mechanisms, through technological improvements. You look at the price of solar and solar electricity compared to fossil based and it's dramatic changes in the last decade. Next is to embed a low carbon strategy in every aspect of our lives from what do I eat and how do I wash my clothes, to what kind of car do I buy, to how my city designs land use. Because transportation is one of our biggest emissions impacts and transportation is a function of where we put our buildings, where we put our homes and our workplaces and so forth. We've been talking about this for many years, you and I. So the design, the form, the physical form of cities becomes critical. This can be enhanced with the smart city technologies and practices that are coming forward. But that the digital is not enough. It has to show up. Digital has to show up in the physical.

Yeah, bits and atoms.

Bits and atoms, exactly. So because, you know, a lot of the decisions about our lives and our infrastructure happens at the municipal level, not at the national level.

Right? Yes.

That's also where we live, it's where we feel impacts directly, it's where we have direct relationships with other people and actually on a good day talk to each other and listen to each other and work things out together. It's ultimately where that happened.

I like it. I love it.

That's a starting list.

It's a start. Totally. People need to recognize that. I think if you and I had four hours, you would certainly have a very, very, very long list. You've thought about this for many decades.

I'll add one other thing to that, if I may. You know, it's bits and atoms, but it's also culture and mindset, how we live and how we think and what we care about. And this is nurtured in the home, in the schools, in the media, you know, on the web. What do we take for normal? What do we expect? What's the world that we want? Can we talk about the world that we want? Because there's a huge difference between saying, you know, this is how it is, and maybe I can make a tiny improvement in one area or another area that's realistic in terms of today's society.

Yeah.

Alternately, and this is one of the things I learned from my work with Buckminster Fuller, is we can be very clear on the world that we want. What would it look like? What should it look like? What could it look like? A world that works for 100% of humanity and the living systems of the planet with inclusion and justice and equity. And then, like NASA did with the Apollo mission, reverse engineer the strategy. Think backwards. What, you know, if we're talking about a 2050 goal, what had to happen between 2045, 2050, for that goal to be reached?

Yes.

What happened in 2040 for the 2045 steps to be possible? And reverse engineering that way opens up a realm of possibility that you literally cannot see. Starting where we are today with what we know today and is realistic. And if you've ever, you know, if you've ever played a maze in a newspaper, you have the experience, you know, sometimes you're stuck trying to follow a maze. You go to the end and work it back backwards. You see different things. So I think, you know, having a conversation at every level that's possible about what's the world we want, what might be possible, what might be, the steps that would make that possible. And thinking both forward from now forward, but also normatively backwards from success opens up enormous innovation and enthusiasm and concrete results.

I think that's. That's wise advice there. And the second part of my question I'm going to ask it let you have a moment to think about it while I give you my two cents. The question is, what can I do tomorrow? You know, what can I do tomorrow that I'M not doing right now to help with this. You know, what you have spoken about today is big, important and urgent.

And.

But for many of us, many of my network and yours feel that we don't. We're not empowered. There's nothing I can do. I have to wait for Microsoft or Ikea, as you said, and others to act, not me. But really, we have to all act. And my answer to this question is always the one area that you're probably not thinking about is your consumption of meat. And I do, you know, I don't say tomorrow, stop eating meat because that's

hard,

but maybe it's a goal. But what you can do is eat less. And the science is pretty clear on this, that if we can reduce our consumption of meat, we don't have to raise so much cattle, which in turn is consuming good land and producing carbon emissions we don't want. And it's a whole downstream effect of that. So I always say if you, tomorrow you were going to have, you know, some level of meat, maybe you have less and less over time. What's the one thing that you would say that people, an individual like myself could do tomorrow that I'm not doing?

Well, you know me, Jonathan. I'll say three things.

Okay, okay.

And let me, let me just say on the question of meat, I agree with you. Less, less meat is good, is a good idea. But even more importantly is less meat from industrial meat operations, from CAFOs, Confined animal feeding operations, and so forth. Meat in smaller amounts from rangeland raised or pasture raised animals has less impact than industrially produced. So you can both eat less meat, but also choose where you get your meat from so it's less impactful and frankly, healthier to you. But to your question of what is the one thing I can do right now, personally, my three answers to the one thing, number one, is vote. And this is particularly important in the United States at the time that we're recording this interview. Vote register to vote, Register other people to vote, support voter protection efforts and ensure that we have a functioning democracy, number one. Number two, and in line with your comment about meat, is that elections don't just happen every two years or four years or six years. Elections happen every day. Every time I slap a dollar on the counter of a store or, you know, click a button on a website, I am voting. I'm voting for a future. I'm making. I'm sending economic signals about where companies should invest to build the kind of future that I and future generations are going to live in. So Number two is vote every day. Number three is be in conversation with other people, not just people who agree with you. It's comfortable to talk with folks who share ideas and values and that's great. But we have a. We. We've developed a highly fragmented society where we, all of us, live in our own bubbles. I live in Berkeley, California. It's a notable bubble. It's also a bubble that has influenced many others. But it's time for us to not to be. A lot of people say it's time for us to be talking with other people who are different than us. And I agree with that. It's also time to be listening to other people who are different than us, because I have found that across all the differences, we pretty generally share common concerns about our lives, our family, our community, our sense of well being. We have very different ideas about how to get there. But listening at that level, we can actually find some common bonds and an opening for working together. I've developed a remarkable friendship over the past couple years with a gentleman who is not only a Trump supporter. I am not. He's an economist. I am not. He's a Republican. I am not. He's a supply side economist. I am not. We disagree on all sorts of stuff, but we have the most because we have been able to open up a respectful personal relationship. We have the most delicious conversations. We are, both of us, surprised again and again. We have learned stuff from each other. You know, I kind of went thinking, I kind of went in thinking that I'm going to teach him stuff about climate change that he's wrong on. And, you know, he's moved in his understanding on that, but I've moved in my understanding about economics in ways I didn't expect. So for these conversations with the other to work, we have to go into it not just as evangelists, but as people willing to be changed by the encounter. And that's a lot softer than saying vote or put your money where your mouth is and so forth. But that's where our lives live, in conversations with each other. It's in conversations that we bring forth worlds. We create our experiences, we create our relationships, we create our futures in how we speak and listen with each other. So I would say that's the third thing.

Well, I'm glad you did three, because all three of those are tremendous and great wisdom there. I'm very privileged to talk and share with you and I'm so glad that my audience, my network, my connections, and yours too, can hear more from you and how you think about these things. And we are going to. We're going to chat some more about some different topics in the future. But for now, Gil, thank you so much. This was really great, a great privilege for me.

Thank you, Jonathan. It's a real pleasure. And in our future conversations, maybe we can bring some of your thinking to my audiences and networks as well.

Oh, I'd be delighted.

Okay, great.

Thank you.

Thank you.