Pascal Finette argues that converging global crises like food insecurity and climate change will intensify as the world hits 9 billion people by 2050. He profiles Nithya's Nextleaf ColdTrace, a device that monitors vaccine storage and eliminated spoilage in multiple countries. Personal growth, he says, comes from tackling the world's hardest problems.
Chapters
The big question becomes, why does it matter? So by now you have understood, hopefully, there's a really interesting dramatic change happening. You have a bunch of models to make sense of this change, but why does it actually matter? And I'll tell you why it matters. It matters because there's a big picture here to look at. And the big picture is— Albert Einstein once said that we shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if mankind is to survive. That's right. Survive. Survive is a really important piece here. So you take something like our big blue planet. In 2050, there will be 9 billion people on this planet. This is data from the United Nations. Today, food is a distribution problem. There's enough food on this planet to feed everyone, it's just in the wrong places. And don't get me wrong, that's a super hard problem to tackle. If we want to feed 9 billion people, we need to increase our agricultural output by 2% every year. We're currently growing at 1%, half the rate. In 2050, we will not have physically enough food on this planet if we want to feed everyone on this planet, if we're not changing something. You take something like employment. Anyone from Europe here? Okay. Anyone from Spain here? Or Southern Europe generally? Italy? Okay. So you will know this. Employment. Employment is a massive problem. So the World Bank came out with a report saying that in the next 15 years, We need to create 600 million new jobs globally to sustain our current employment rate. You go to Italy, Spain particularly, youth unemployment rate is in Spain is like north of 50%. Italy is like in some regions isn't much better, right? Yeah. It's a real problem. Here's the thing. Technology will accelerate this, at least in the short term. I fundamentally believe we need to redesign our society to be okay with this, to live in a world where like 30% unemployment is OK. You take global warming. Global warming is an interesting problem. It's like people misunderstand this often because what they see with global warming is they look at the changing weather patterns, and they're terrible, don't get me wrong, like, you know, like more tsunamis and more hurricanes, etc. The real problem is this: sea levels rise by 2 meters by the end of this century, If that happens, all of Bangladesh is flooded, all of New York City is flooded. What this results in is mass displacement, people moving. If you want to get a taste of how that looks like, you go to Europe where you've got the Syrian refugee crisis. There's a million people currently on the road in Europe moving from Syria into mainland Europe. Manhattan itself, which is flooded by 2 meters by the way, has 8 million people living on it. Bangladesh is hundreds of millions. of millions of people. You take something like poverty, you can't buy a cup of coffee for less than $2.50 a day, which is less than half of this planet's population has in total capital every day as an access. You take something like sanitation, there's 2.5 billion people living on this planet who don't have access to proper sanitation, making diarrhea the number one cause of death in the world. You take water, 800 million people don't have access to clean drinking water. Lastly, You take malnutrition, a child dies every 6 seconds because it doesn't have enough food, while we have an obesity crisis. This is all absolutely unacceptable to me. What I believe is we have to think and act big. Here's the thing, I don't want to leave you on a downer, and I'm probably the most optimistic person on the planet, and I'll show you why. I want to introduce you to a friend. This is Nithya. Hi. founder of a company called Nextleaf. What they're tackling is a really interesting problem. They're tackling a vaccination problem. 20 to 30% of vaccines in the developing countries are spoiling because of a break in the cold chain. So they get too warm or too cold. So the vaccines spoil. In the best cases, the vaccines have little markers on the vials, and you actually see it. In the good cases, you administer a vaccine which is ineffective. In the worst cases, you make a child sick. That's right. This affects millions and millions of people. So what Nithya decided to do is she built a little device called ColdTrace. What's in this little box is nothing else but a cheap Chinese-manufactured cell phone, a little piece of hardware they designed which cost them about 25 cents. The phone is about $25. And then there's a temperature sensor. What you do is you put it into this little box, the box attaches to the fridge and travels with the fridge. Now, this is a connected device, so it does 2 things. The first is it sends a text message to the nurse in the field telling the nurse in the field if the vaccines inside of that fridge are good or not. Secondly, because it's connected, it sends the data up to the cloud. Now you can see where these breaks happen because they typically happen at the same places, and then you can create countermeasures. I'm incredibly proud and happy to say that Nithya is now in 7 countries. By the end of the year, she will be in pretty much every fridge in India. She's currently deploying 25,000 of those devices in India. In every single country where she is, the problem has gone away. It doesn't exist anymore. It's gone. Now, here's the reason why I'm telling you this. Every single one of you can build this. This is not magic. This is not something which is really hard to build. Every single one of you can build this device, and if you can't build this device, you know someone who can build this device. This is the reason why I'm so optimistic about the future, because I see people like yourself, and I know that we can fix every single problem which is standing in our way. And technology is not the hail-all solution, but technology is a vector for us to solve those problems. Thank you. So here's your third takeaway. Ask yourself— by the way, this is a good takeaway for business as well. Ask yourself, what does it take to make the problem go away? Even in a business, if you solve a problem for a customer and you're making that problem go away, it doesn't exist anymore, you're golden. I have the great privilege to work with the US Navy SEALs. Which is, I'm a pacifist, so I'm really not into like the war thing, but the Navy SEALs is the most badass military unit probably in the world, but surely the US has. On the first page of the Navy SEALs training manual, you'll find this formula, and the formula is very simple. Your rate of growth, your personal rate of growth, and as an entrepreneur, as a human being, but surely as an entrepreneur, Why do you exist? What do you want to do? You want to grow, right? That's the only reason. It's the reason why you're here. You want to grow. This is the most important thing for you. So, your personal rate of growth is the magnitude of the challenge multiplied by the intensity of the attack. Personal rate of growth is the magnitude of the challenge times the intensity of your attack. Now, if you believe that, And if you want to grow, why wouldn't you take the biggest, hardest, most gnarly problem in the world and attack it as hard as you possibly can? Because that's the way you grow. And why else do you want to exist as a human being if you're not growing? George Bernard Shaw once said that the reasonable man adopts himself to the world, the unreasonable one persists in adopting the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man and woman. So you have to be unreasonable in this world.
