An EV company CEO argues humans change fast when they understand the threat. He points to COVID lockdowns and the iPhone's rise as proof: societies shifted habits overnight. The same speed could tackle climate change if we treated it with matching urgency.
we were out of balance in a massive way as a global culture. We were on a train wreck, just in slow motion with the climate. And what you would hear constantly is that, oh, people can't change. People can't, you know, they can't adjust to big scale problems. It's impossible to solve. And then in a week, everybody radically changed their behavior patterns because they're like, oh, we're in trouble. And so I think that we should, we should, one, put to rest the notion that humans are incapable of change. Humans can change very quickly. They can adapt new behavior patterns almost on the turn of a dime. And if, if the awareness of the problem is, is sufficiently present. And so I look at COVID in some ways as sort of a mini global warming, global climate change exercise. That is to say that if the awareness of the problem suddenly becomes on the level of the pandemic, if the awareness of the impacts to human health and safety and the world are really clear, that we actually can change and we can change very fast.
And so, so to me, this technology also helps, but you know, right? I mean, it's not just a pandemic. Now we've learned we can change, but we've seen that type of speed of change with technology.
Yeah. Oh, totally. Well, mobile phones in Africa, you know, changed everything. It's like, you know, the, the, yeah, the, the, the iPhone and how rapidly that shifted. Every, you know, each of these— Well, Nokia went out of business. And we're living in this era now where all of those sort of convergent communication technologies have matured to this point where, again, we can, you know, we can maintain a lot of the form or the substance of our previous plans. I can still meet with you, but we just do it in a very different way.
