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Change Beyond Limits

• Michele McAloon • Season 3 • Episode 131

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James Arbib and I explore how humanity stands at the threshold of a fundamental paradigm shift from an extractive to a stellar world, and how technological change could transform our civilization for the better.

• Our current societal structures (governments, markets, property ownership) have persisted for 5,000 years because they confer advantages in an extractive production paradigm
• The extractive paradigm, requiring inputs from people and planet, inherently creates environmental degradation, inequality, and conflict
• "Stellar technologies" like solar panels and AI reach an ignition point where they require no further inputs but continue producing value
• Human nature isn't fixed but exists on a spectrum influenced by our production systems—extraction may tilt us toward greed while stellar systems could foster collaboration
• Change happens from the edges, not centers of power—cities and regions adopting stellar technologies will outcompete old systems through competitive advantage
• The transition will be like metamorphosis—painful but necessary—as we move from "caterpillar" to "butterfly"

If you like listening to my podcast, please like and subscribe, and check out my new YouTube channel called "Crossword Author Interviews Real, original."


Michele McAloon:

You're listening to Crossword, where cultural clues lead to the truth of the word, and my name is Michelle McAloon, your host. One of the great advantages of having a nonfiction book podcast is the different ideas that you get to run into, especially with theology, faith, society, science oh, you name it history, it is all out there. And you also get to engage with new ideas, and my podcast today with James Arbib is exactly that. It is a podcast about change and the options we have to navigate change. If you like listening to my podcast, please like and subscribe, and I've got a new YouTube channel. I am just experimenting with it and it is called Crossword.

Michele McAloon:

Author Interviews Real, original. Anyway, check it out. Thanks, happy to listening. Hello listeners, we have a very interesting conversation today and I think this conversation is very important at this point in time because it is about change. It's about technological change, energy change and, as we live in a world we are going through, some tremendous sea changes. I would like to welcome James Arbib. He is a chairman of a UK-based family investment office with diversified portfolios all across assets. He's the founder of Telus Matter and you may know him as the co-founder of a very unusual organization called RethinkX, and RethinkX, james, is about looking into the future and our possibilities of what change is going to be in the future. Is that correct, james?

James Arbib:

That is. That is yeah. I mean, I'm sure we're going to talk about it a little bit more in the conversation, but that's a good explanation.

Michele McAloon:

Yes, Okay, and he has written a book. It's called Stellar A World Beyond Limits and how to Get there, and he's actually a co-author with Tony Seba and Tony Seba is also part of the RethinkX team, is that correct?

James Arbib:

That's exactly right, yes.

Michele McAloon:

Let's talk about this and you know, as we look across the political, the social landscape today, one of the things that I think is happening is the institutions that we built on analog technology no longer support our digital technology, and we're seeing these institutions crumble as Europe became literate from the Gutenberg press and it blew apart the Catholic Church, who was the powerholder in the Middle Ages. But you start from a very interesting point. You look, you put America and Samaria in a single paragraph, so let's start there.

James Arbib:

I mean, really the book Stella came about because my co-author, Tony Seba, and I have been exploring in our work at RethinkX really kind of what's at the history of civilization to really the first great civilization, at least that we have records of, because clearly Sumer was where writing was invented. So history gets pretty sketchy beyond that point. But 5,000 years ago was the first great empire and Uruk was a city of maybe 80,000 people or so, I mean extraordinarily advanced for the time, you know, a thousand years before the Egyptian empire. But when you look at Sumerian society or you look at any great civilization, since it's basically the same as our societies today, right, so we have central government, right, we have hierarchies, we have markets and trade, we have money and debt, we have private ownership of property. You know we have the nuclear family and so in its essence, at the root, you know our societies are structured the same, and the reason that that's the case for at least in our analysis, is because we're essentially in the same paradigm of production today as we were back then. So if you think of the background, why are our societies structured this way? Why do these things keep winning out time and time again? Why do we see these, these elements of society, coming back time and time again. Why? Why don't other forms of organizing ourselves, you know, win out and work well? It's because they confer an advantage right within the context in which you're in. So I should say something a little bit about that context, because I think it's really important to kind of understanding where we are today.

James Arbib:

So go back in human history that there was a huge change with the neolithic revolution, right when we moved from hunting and gathering, you know, to farming and settlements, we, we settled down and and we fundamentally changed the way we provided for ourselves. So so for you know, tens of thousands of years before that point, you know, humanity had essentially the same capabilities. Right, we had these incredible brains, these, we were these incredible problem solvers. But because of the kind of climatic variability that we experienced, because we're in this period where essentially knowledge was getting obsoleted, we'd work out how to solve problems and then things would change and there wasn't this kind of cumulative effect of knowledge that we see. But with the kind of stable climate that came with the Holocene and the ability to kind of settle down and this new, I guess, model of production, you know, essentially farming and settlement. Knowledge became cumulative right, and so the knowledge we developed kind of began to mount up. So we began to develop tools in which to farm better, to provide for ourselves.

James Arbib:

And what we'd inadvertently done was created, this new production paradigm essentially, where we were providing for our needs, meeting our needs, by harnessing external inputs. And those external inputs to an economist would be called land, labor and capital. If you're a physicist you'd call it matter, energy and information. But it's really people and planet right. They're the inputs into our system. We need labor from people, we need resources and energy from the planet, and those things are external right. We have to go and get them and they're what we call excludable right. So either I have them or you have them.

James Arbib:

And so when you're in that world, in the very early days of civilization, communities begin to grow. The amount of people the earth could support had risen. Farming allowed us to support more people. So these populations began to grow and they began to come into conflict for each other to get control of the land, to get control of the kinds of inputs they needed into that system. And so we're in a world essentially defined by competition, by competitive advantage, and so you needed to grow, or you got outgrown, you needed to exploit or you got exploited, and so there was this sort of almost this arms race that developed, where we had to grow our technological capabilities, our scale, our reach, our military capacity and capabilities and so on, or else someone else you know, someone else outgrew us and we became a kind of input into their system In that world. That's the sort of evolutionary context in which human civilization has emerged.

Michele McAloon:

Can I ask you a question here at this point? What about the human being? Humans? They're composed of body and soul, correct? Have humans evolved? Because if you go back and you read the history, you see that the same problems they encountered are really not that much different from what we're encountering today. And I know you would probably say that's because of an extractive and how we're extract production. Could it also be on more of a I want to say, a soulful, spiritual, cellular level, of how we interact with things like power, with how we interact with you know greed, how we interact with envy, with selfishness, with violence? We haven't changed that much. And if we changed some of these what you call excludables, would that change us? Would that change our human nature? That's what I'm talking about.

James Arbib:

Yeah, yeah, so we're getting to the essence of human nature, which you know we actually begin to look at in the book, and it's a really interesting discussion. So, yes, we'd agree with you. You know, in our analysis, you know, human beings have the capacity for an extraordinary range of behaviors, of ways of thinking, of forming relationships and so on, and of emotions we might term kind of defined by love and openness and collaboration, all the way to the very dark side, and we've seen the very worst of humanity through history as well. But what we argue essentially is that context is key, that it depends on kinds of situations in which we find ourselves, and for us, the period of civilization has been defined by the system that we call extraction, the system where we're harnessing these external inputs, and that system prefers essentially certain ways of thinking. So it's an advantage, for instance, to understand in a kind of mechanistic, for instance, to understand in a kind of mechanistic, linear way, to understand that I take this resource, I do this to it, I get this outcome, that I dig a trench, I get more water on my field, I get, you know, my crops grow more. But you don't want to be thinking too much in terms of the kind of holistic, complex aspects of that. If I do that 50 or 100 years down the line, you know I'm going to salinate my soils and I'm not going to be able to grow anymore.

James Arbib:

So we've preferred kind of the linear and mechanistic mindset you know, scientific mindset, as opposed to the more holistic kind of complex analysis, because it confers an advantage within extraction. The same with some of our you, some of our emotions or our ways of behaving. Essentially that greed essentially confers an advantage. There's aggression and so on. So we can see individuals who don't take that way and there'll be plenty of societies that have been much more egalitarian, built much more sustainable communities, but they've just been trampled by those that haven't right that those have been more extractive and I think it's that you know, it's a context that's key.

James Arbib:

You know we make the argument in the book that the problems we face and, as you just mentioned, that every civilization through history's face, of environmental degradation, of inequality and the coercion of human labor, of conflict, these things are hardwired into an extractive system. Right, they're features, not bugs, of that system. And by that I mean, you know, the exploitation of people gives you cheap labor and that's why we've seen slavery in every great civilization through history. The exploitation of the planet gives you cheap resources. You actually get an advantage within an extractive system. In the same way, you get an advantage from certain types of behavior and certain ways of organizing society. And that's really the argument we're making, is that it's the extractive context, extractive production system that's really at the root of society, and out of that root comes the way we organize society, the way we ourselves are as humans, and the type of problems that we face. And so, yeah, I would absolutely agree with you.

Michele McAloon:

You're right, your book does go into this. But if we were put in a different context and you're going to talk about the stellar, you think Our relationship with greed, with envy, with power? I mean power is absolutely poisonous to a human being. We cannot get enough of it. We seek it our whole lives. I mean you're talking the Tower of Babel in Samaria, where the actual incident or something came up that expressed the human being's longing for power and that our human nature in itself would change in a different context. Help me through that one.

James Arbib:

Yeah, so we see human nature as a spectrum right. I mean, you're sure we have some underlying kind of biological drivers, imperatives, right, the need to survive, the need to reproduce, right the background. We have this kind of hardware, the human body and so on, that we occupy. Beyond that, we're capable of a huge spectrum right Of behaviors, of emotions, of ways of thinking and so on. So, you know, greed is not necessarily inherent in humanity, but it's something that in certain contexts, you know, I guess, confers some kind of advantage.

James Arbib:

Right, extraction is really about the reliance on external factors, and that's not just, you know, the physical inputs into the system, you know land, labor, capital, but it's also our sort of measures of success, right, in terms of our status or our wealth.

James Arbib:

Or you know the relationships that we have, the people, we know the possessions that we have In an extractive world. That's kind of how we've always defined success and so on, but it's not necessarily inherent in us, right, there wasn't an advantage to those things, for instance, in hunter-gathering populations. There was no kind of real wealth in those much more egalitarian societies, because you just couldn't carry many possessions with you as you moved around. Much more collaborative structures and actually almost sort of anti-power mechanisms within many of those societies to stop individuals amassing too much power in a previous era, how humanity sort of manifested in a different way For us. There's nothing inherent necessarily about that, but it's just that within the context that we find ourselves, these are the sorts of behaviors and emotions that tend to be preferred. Essentially, it's very much a kind of evolutionary context that we're talking about here.

Michele McAloon:

Were you able to look at any instances in human history where human beings gathered together and were outside of a outside of an extractive community, outside of where they were able to cooperate and do all of these things? I'm just kind of thinking about the history of humanity, you know. Have there been incidents where human beings, when everything was equal, they acted better?

James Arbib:

You know, unfortunately, you know all of recorded history is within this extractive kind of paradigm, right. So we have to infer previously, and certainly in hunter-gatherer populations, we've seen that, but that's only one alternative, right, so I don't want to read. You know what we know about hunter-gatherer populations, we've seen that, but that's only one alternative, right, so I don't want to read. You know what we know about, about hunter-gatherers. But you know we see it in in individuals certainly, and we've seen it in, you know, most of the religions where there's a sort of concept of retreat right, which is is literally stepping outside, retreating essentially from extraction right where we're able to kind of think more holistically, maybe to occupy a sort of high, almost a higher level of consciousness, a conscious awareness of being maybe in that sort of more altruistic space. And we, you know we see it within individuals.

James Arbib:

But the problem is within. Extraction doesn't spread, right, because it doesn't confer an advantage, and that's kind of the point. I mean in some ways, you know evolution is really the. You know the mechanism is kind of variation point. I mean, in some ways, you know evolution is really the. You know the mechanism is kind of variation and selection, right, so you can try different things and do different things and it might narrowly confer an advantage at a kind of individual level, but at a population level it just hasn't spread Because within extraction it hasn't conferred an advantage.

Michele McAloon:

And it's always been those more aggressive, kind and greedier perspectives that have won out and we see reflected in our culture and so on, based on the technology that we have now and based on future technologies that we can develop. I really believe in the human being. We are innovative, we are creative innovative, we are adaptable, and we have seen these things time and time again, history and history. We still make the same mistakes, but humanity has some really good features about us because of our community. Tell us a little bit what you think about what you call a stellar world.

James Arbib:

So we think what's coming is a fundamentally different paradigm, and let me just explain that for a moment. And let me explain what we mean by technology actually. First of all because yeah, disruptive technology too. Absolutely.

Michele McAloon:

That's a word that I keep hearing, and hearing and hearing and hearing now, but I'm not really sure I completely understand what that is, so I kind of think maybe my listeners might not understand that too.

James Arbib:

Okay, for us technology essentially, you know, knowledge applied for useful purpose. So whether that's a hand axe, or you know, or a plow, or it's a computer, you're right, it's human creativity that imagines these things and essentially applies that knowledge to matter. Energy and information, land, labor, capital produce the things that we need. Technology is really just knowledge applied, and what we think is coming is a fundamentally different paradigm that we call a stellar world, and I'll explain that very quickly. So stellar technology is technology where no further inputs are required once the technology reaches a certain critical point. So let me explain it with reference to a solar panel, for instance. So a solar panel takes an enormous amount of intelligence, human labor, energy resources, materials to make, but once you've made it it just radiates energy, just produces energy, probably for 50 plus years. Once it's built, it doesn't require further inputs to function. It's very different to other ways of producing power, for instance. They require a constant flow of inputs. If you think also of, say, artificial intelligence, right, artificial intelligence requires a huge amount of data. It requires a huge amount of energy, a huge amount of materials to build these data centers and so on and so forth. But at a certain point in time, artificial intelligence will become self-improving. Essentially, the intelligence will become embodied within the technology, so it will become self-improving At that point in time. It's essentially an ignition point. It requires nothing else from us, right?

James Arbib:

And that intelligence that, you know, artificial intelligence, allied with with robotics, gives us what we call artificial labor or essentially, stellar labor. You can then, you know, you can rebuild your energy system, you can redesign your energy system, you can improve your energy system, you can manage your energy system. So you get is a system that at a certain point becomes like a star right. So a star requires certain materials, in certain conditions. It reaches essentially an ignition point where it can essentially in perpetuity just produce useful outputs light and heat, and, you know, whatever else we get from a star, and that's why we use a stellar analogy. It's a fundamentally different system where, at a certain point in time, you no longer need any further inputs in the form of land, labor, capital, but they're all essentially embodied within the technology. So that's a stellar technology and that's a fundamentally different system to the system we have today. So that's a stellar technology and that's a fundamentally different system to the system we have today. Is that clear?

James Arbib:

Yes absolutely Great, absolutely so. Okay, so if you have stellar technologies and you have, you know, at the core of this stellar world, you have energy and you have what we call artificial labor or stellar labor right, then you essentially have everything else right. You have your health care system, you have your, you have food and agriculture you have. You essentially can produce what you need without anything further coming from people or planet, don't need labor as an input into the system, you don't need any further material. So if you think that we build, say, a robotic workforce, you know, and, and artificial intelligence to essentially do the kinds of jobs that we do today to replace us, you'd need to build a huge robotic workforce essentially, but it will do it. It's disruptive because it can do the same labor cheaper and better than humans can. That's what causes a disruption something that can do, you know, essentially, you know, substitute for what we did before in a cheaper and better way. You get this workforce, but over time, as the software improves, as the intelligence improves, those molecules and atoms embodied in your essentially artificial labor force will be able to do ever more work of ever better quality, right, just a kind of software update or, you know, rebuilding itself in terms of the hardware, the same molecules and atoms embodied in that workforce will do, you know, more and more labor, essentially up to the limits of physics, whatever that might be, and so you really don't need any further inputs from outside that system at that point in time. Right? So suddenly you're moving from this extraction paradigm into what we call the stellar paradigm. Right, and we think that that changes everything. Right, because in it you know essentially and this is you know what we were talking about before every part of our society has been optimized around that old system. We've built our forms of government, our economic, political, social structures around that paradigm, and the things that we see petered time and again in those political, economic and social structures are the things that have an advantage within an extractive paradigm. There's nothing that says that those things have an advantage within a stellar paradigm.

James Arbib:

When land, labor, capital are embodied within the production system, in a much more distributed production system, because that's what these energy technologies essentially give us, and artificial intelligence will as well you're in a paradigm where you might be at a disadvantage if you're operating from a central government. You might be at a disadvantage if you're operating in a model of private ownership of this property right, you might be at a disadvantage with some of the same cultures and social structures and some of those behaviors, if we go back to the human that gave us an advantage within that extractive paradigm, might no longer give us an advantage. For instance, it's always been an advantage to kind of control and own knowledge as well as physical assets in the extractive paradigm. But actually in this world where humanity and people and planet are no longer essentially an input into that system, actually collaboration will give you an advantage.

James Arbib:

Sharing learning will give you an advantage. There's no advantage to hoarding. You're no longer competing for those scarce external resources. Actually you want to accelerate learning as quickly as possible. So there's no advantage to hoarding knowledge either. It's a fundamentally different paradigm which might affect everything, including the problems we face, right Including, you know, the problems, the social problems we face, the environmental problems we face and indeed conflict. It's a fundamentally different world.

Michele McAloon:

With everything that you're saying is I think we are on the very threshold of change and it's change that has to happen. We're watching our governments in the West, in Europe, in the United States, pretty much in China all over with YouTube. They are built on an old paradigm and the technology is not fitting this old paradigm anymore. So I absolutely agree with you that we are on the edge of change. I think we're on the edge of very positive change, although you talk about change in itself and change is destabilizing. How do you see from where we are now to maybe going to a stellar world? There is going to be a tremendous amount of change. There's going to be a tremendous amount of conflict as people have to let go. Where do you see that?

James Arbib:

Yeah, you're right. I think we have a very clear idea of where we are today and what's really driving extraction, and a view of where we can go. This stellar world, it is a possible future, but, as you say, the journey between the two spaces is incredibly difficult. We use the analogy of metamorphosis, about a caterpillar that tells you it's going to be a butterfly right. And if our current system is the caterpillar understanding, that doesn't really give us any idea of how that future system functions. And metamorphosis is an extremely painful process where the old system essentially, or the old organism essentially, breaks down to form the new. And I think that's what we're going to go through. But it is undoubtedly going to be difficult.

James Arbib:

But right now we're totally blind to that possible future In many ways. You know, extraction is our world. It's been our world for 10,000 years. We use the phrase in the book we are the fish and extraction is our water. We're kind of unaware that we're actually in extraction. It's just the way the world is. We can't even really see that well. So what we're seeing today we just go back to that for a second is within that box of extraction.

James Arbib:

Really, the argument we're seeing in America and elsewhere around the world is hatch those systems up and try and make them a bit less bad, which is kind of what's the argument on the liberal side of the debate, and it's what we've been trying to do for 20 or 30 years and it hasn't really worked anywhere in the world. Or do we tear those systems down, right, which is we're seeing Trump and other leaders around the world? But again, both of those approaches are within those extractive systems, right? You know, neither of them are solutions, just different ways of dealing with the problems of extraction. You know, in our view, really, they amount to Band-Aids, right? If you don't understand the root causes of the problems we face, then all you can do is treat the symptoms. Right, and that's what we're doing. We're racing around treating symptoms, and often those treatments that we give just cause other problems, right, and so you end up treating the symptoms of the symptoms and so on and so forth.

James Arbib:

And until we actually get to that root and transform, or allow that extractive production system to transform into the stellar system, we can't solve those problems, right, it? You know, extraction it's, it holds the seed of its own destruction, it's inherently unsustainable, and by that I mean from a from the perspective of physics, right, it's a high entropy system. Right, we're essentially, you know, we're essentially taking our inputs from people and planet, right, to create order within human civilization. And you can do that for a while, but over time, you know, it breaks down. We've seen every previous great civilization break down because essentially we reach the point where we can do, no longer do it. You know, unfortunately, this, you know, this version of extraction is now a global scale, right, um, you know, it's that much more destructive.

James Arbib:

A stellar system essentially, is taking its input, its energy, from outside the earth system, right, literally photons from the sun. Right, that's, that's what powers this system. It's no longer, once it gets to a certain point, taking any inputs really from the planet at any kind of scale. And so, you know, what you get is a system that is essentially at least at the earth system level. It can be essentially negative entropy. Right, it could be restorative. But because we get the super abundance of energy and of labor, as we talked about earlier, and we can use that to kind of almost repair the damage of extraction, it could be the most extraordinary kind of civilization we've ever seen, right, but ultimately only a stellar system is truly sustainable. Only a stellar system can endure in any kind of seriously long timescale. So unless we make that transition we're just doomed to the cycle of civilization, civilization of kind of growth and collapse and growth and collapse. That we've seen time and time again, and so I'm not sure that answered your question wholly.

Michele McAloon:

No, it does. That answers the question. But here's you know what, right now and I think you just hit the nail on the head it was putting Band-Aids on a system that was broken or it's tearing everything down we need leaders right now that can lead us through change, that can be change agents and guide people through the change, because people are not leaderless. They have to have leadership and they have to have strong leadership. Has RethinkX thought anything about how to build new leaders going into? Because that is really a vital tool, a vital tool that we're clearly missing at this point and you can see it across everywhere now but we need leaders who can think differently and lead people towards this goal.

James Arbib:

Yeah, we need what we call stellar humans, right? I think it's really important to understand how change happens here, right, because if we're reliant on the US federal government finding a leader to lead us to this world, if I can use a word, we're screwed. There's nothing we can do. But fortunately, change tends to happen from the edge, from the bottom. So very hard for a system that's kind of incumbent, that's doing well in today's world, to change, right, there's too much incumbent interest, the mindset's too difficult to shift. The incentives, the interests in the old system are too strong for something fundamentally different to break through. And that's what we're seeing with, for instance, this new energy system. Right, it's really hard in Europe or the US, you know, for this new clean energy system to break through, because what we're trying to do is shoehorn these new technologies into the old business model infrastructure and actually what we're seeing is higher energy costs, right, even though these technologies are getting cheaper by the day. Right, it's not translating because they don't fit with that old centralized structure right. Right, but if you build an energy system in a different way, right, you can kind of supersize the generating capacity. I want to go too far into the detail of this, but you built it in a different way. We've written extensively about this. What you get when you build it outside of our current energy system you do it at a city level or you do it locally you'll take advantage of those declining costs right and you'll build a system that functions entirely different. Right Is the butterfly to the caterpillar of today's energy system, but also has far, far, far lower cost than our current energy system, so just out-competes it right, and so it can happen at city level because you have a system that is lower cost and far more competitive than that old centralized system. Right, investment, you know, entrepreneurs, business flood into that region and those people are still building this kind of horrible hybrid system that we're generally building in the West, just get left behind and essentially have to adapt to keep up.

James Arbib:

So, really, if we want change to happen, what we need to concentrate on is supporting and enabling a handful of these regions and cities or places around the world to build, first of all, the energy system, but also AI, within the right kind of structures that essentially just out-compete that old extractive, centralized world. And so, basically, change is like a kind of boulder tumbling down a hill. You need to give it a push. You need a handful of these places to do it right and then the rest of the world kind of has to follow because they can't compete if they're trapped in the old system. And I think you know that for me gives us a huge amount of agency in this and a huge amount of hope that we can actually do it when those regions are.

James Arbib:

I'm not entirely sure, sure, but we've got a number of conversations going on and we can see places where it might happen right, ukraine, for instance, as it begins to rebuild, I think india, I actually think america at state or city level. Right, there's huge agency actually in the american system that might enable this to be these kinds of systems to emerge, I think, elsewhere in the world. You know africa, where you know places that don't have the kind of the baggage of incumbency that we often have in the world. You know Africa, where you know places that don't have the kind of baggage of incumbency that we often have in the West, certainly a kind of federal government level.

James Arbib:

I think you know what will drive people to go down this route is essentially competitive advantage. This kind of system. You have a huge advantage right, you develop technologies and the business models and so on that allow this, to build essentially this platform. We're talking this energy and intelligence platform. You get to build all the applications and use cases that come with it, that can be built on top of that platform. That will outcompete everything else.

James Arbib:

In the same way we saw with the internet the value was built on top of the internet with the applications and use cases of essentially super abundant communications. And so there is this sort of bottom-up emergent process at work in change and all you need are a few places to kind of get going with this. And so actually, the dysfunction at federal level in America or the dysfunction at central government level elsewhere in the world, you know it doesn't have to be a constraint on change because change was never going to come from the center, it was never going to be imposed top down, but it was always going to come essentially from the bottom, with, you know, regions and cities experimenting with new models. So actually, in some ways, you know, the dysfunction might make it easier for this to happen. You know the tear it down approach that we're seeing, the tear the old system down actually might create space.

James Arbib:

I mean, it's being done today without really a vision of what comes next, but actually it might create space for something fundamentally different to emerge.

James Arbib:

So it doesn't all have to be bad, and I think you different to emerge. So it doesn't all have to be bad. And and I think you know, undoubtedly you know places that resist this kind of change. They're going to experience the most pain, but but there are places that will lead and show the way and hopefully you know, allow you know the rest of the world to quickly transform themselves to this kind of new kind of model. So, yeah, I'm both optimistic but fearful of the kind of the short or medium term 10, 20 years of transformation, the period of metamorphosis that's undoubtedly going to be deeply unset, like but you know what you just said, something which I think is very interesting.

Michele McAloon:

You said people will want to move into these technologies, they'll want to compete in these technologies. But that kind of that competition goes back to what you're talking about. The thing that will build these systems is actually being taken from the extractive technology, the extractive mind. So it's kind of a two-loop there.

James Arbib:

Yeah, absolutely. So you need a caterpillar to get a butterfly right, there's no butterfly without a caterpillar. Right, and in many ways you need extraction to build this stellar system until you get to that ignition point where the system becomes essentially self-sufficient and self-sustaining and no longer needs to extract, you know, labor or resources. You need extraction so. So the rules of extraction apply. So in some ways you're kind of harnessing the incentives of extraction right, the need for competitive advantage and the advantage that comes from doing things more efficiently, right to build this system. Because these, these stellar technologies, will out-compete the old extractive technologies. They're just lower cost, more effective, more efficient than than the extractive ones.

James Arbib:

So, at least at a technological level, this transformation is kind of inevitable and we're seeing it. You know, we're seeing that happen and you know in the world today, but we're just not aware of really how profound this transformation is. So, absolutely, you need to feed the caterpillar. You know in the world today, but we're just not aware of really how profound this transformation is. So, absolutely, you need to feed the caterpillar, you know, for the butterfly to emerge. So, absolutely, there's no, I don't think there's any kind of conflict in doing that. We're not. We're not saying, you know, extraction is bad and a stellar world is good. There is no stellar world without extraction. Right, it's part of the journey essentially. Essentially humanity's had to go through to realize that potential.

Michele McAloon:

You are a technical visionary there's no question about that and about the Rethink X and we need people thinking about this. We need people who can lead the change that I think is inevitable. Whether we want it or not, it is an inevitable change. We've got to be able to formulate this change in a way that benefits more instead of less of our humanity, and I'm just not sure that we know how to do that right now. I think, with again our creativity, our humanity, we will find a way to do it. I don't know if it's going to change our human nature I'm not sure I can sign up on that one but I do think you've got a great vision for it, and we need more people like you to sit down to think of the technology we have and where we can go and how, and actually start trying to how to map out a plan to get there yeah, yeah, we'll take a job.

James Arbib:

Just very quickly, we, you know, we. We see the transformation almost at three levels the technological transformation from extractive technology to stellar technology, and that's happening anyway, that was. We're seeing artificial intelligence, robotics, right, it will out, yeah, it will outcompete human labor. We're seeing stellar energy technologies out, compete, you know, the old extractive ones, and so on. So, we will, we will see those technologies, you know, win out because they just have a competitive advantage, right, they're just better and cheaper. The question is then, you know, the second level of transformation is of the systems, the political, economic and social structures we've built around those extractive technologies, right, and there's a real question as to whether those transform, right, because if we continue to kind of shoehorn these stellar technologies into those old models, right, we're going to be in a sort of a kind of dystopia, what we call in the book, a chimera, right? A horrible hybrid of two things where, as you say, humanity doesn't get the benefit that could come with these technologies, that essentially they get captured. I mean, you might end up in a world where, essentially, silicon Valley, or a handful of people in Silicon Valley, essentially own the world's labor force, right, I mean it could be a deep dystopia, right? Because essentially, you know, labor becomes technology. So either, you know, we get the benefit of a sort of super abundant labor it works for us or it doesn't. That's the next level of challenge is making sure that we allow those systems to adapt, and I just want to come back to an example in a minute if we have time. And then the third level of change is the human we make. The argument we think of as human nature is merely human nature. Within the context of extraction, within the spectrum of what's possible for humans, extraction tilts us towards the kind of darker side of our world. The stellar world emerges, right, the types of attributes and traits, behaviors, emotions, relationships that confer advantage, saint, right that we're not tilted necessarily. It's not that we automatically transform, right, but it becomes possible for us to transform in a way that extraction, well, we free ourselves from the way that extraction kind of tilts us towards the darker side.

James Arbib:

So just imagine for a second, and we'll talk about energy only, you have three towns side by side, somewhere in America, let's say, or somewhere in Africa, it doesn't matter where it is. You have one city and we'll just deal with energy for a moment. One city that's doing what we're doing now. We're keeping our old kind of extractive model. You know, we've got these new technologies coming in, but it's just this horrible hybrid system. Right, and we've got this kind of very expensive energy system because we're needing all kinds of budgie fixes to deal with the problems that come when you, you know, you add a lot of solar and wind to a centralized system, then a lot of solar and wind to a centralized system, then you've got a second town right that builds the kind of energy system that we write about at rethink x right, supersizes the generating capacity, so you don't need a huge amount of storage. So you, you get this super abundant energy right. You, you're basically sizing the system for the darkest day of winter, right, so you know, even in the winter, obviously you get solar energy. You're just massively overbuilding and you can do this cheaply because you're you know you're on this incredible cost curve for these technologies. They're getting cheaper and cheaper and cheaper and so you have a much lower cost system, right, but it's still privately owned, right, so it's. It's essentially, once you've built it, it's zero marginal cost, but there's no cost for producing each extra unit of energy once you've built, it just produces energy. But you know whoever owns it's going to want to have a kind of return on capital. They need a profit, right, so you have. You know your first town has high cost, funky system that doesn't function very well. Your next town has, you know it has cost to the energy. And then you have a third town right and in that third time and I won't deal with, has cost to the energy. And then you have a third town right and in that third town and I won't deal with it.

James Arbib:

Go into the details of how this might happen, but just assume for a moment, or imagine for a moment, that this energy system just gets built. Right, you have a clean energy system. Solar, wind and batteries are the heart of it. Right, it gets built. Once it's built, there's no marginal cost. And if it's not owned in the old ownership models, let's just say that everyone in that town or city has a right to the output of the system. Right, there's some new ownership model. Somehow it's being paid for. And the people in that region, in the same way. We have a right to stand in the sun. Right, they have a right to the output of that system. So not only is it zero marginal cost, but it actually is zero cost right. There's just no cost to that energy it just produces.

James Arbib:

You've got three different systems Within the world we inhabit today. That third system will out-compete the other ones, it just will. Competitive advantage drives success in the world. Technologies get adopted because they have competitive advantage over alternatives. I mean sure there's some incumbency issues and resistance to change and all this kind of thing. But within the world we occupy today, that third town will outcompete and the others will be forced to adapt or adopt their models. And the reason we think we can get to this stellar world and we can adapt to that second level of change the human systems essentially, or the political, economic and social structures is because these new ways of doing things will confer an advantage, right, and others will be forced to adapt and ultimately that's what drives change. I don't know if that helped or hindered your understanding of what I'm talking about.

Michele McAloon:

No, it does. No, it does. And being a visionary is taking what is possible and making it real, correct, and making it real in a new and creative way, in a way that's not harmful, because there have also been other visionaries, like Karl Marx and you know. A whole loads of people have been visionaries and have not made it to the benefit of humankind or humanity. So I think your vision if you're keeping your vision on the betterment of humanity as a collective is probably a really good thing, and I hope there's more people like you. I hope we can get some leaders that are like you, that can lead us through this change. You're willing to think about it, and I think that's where we need to be right now.

James Arbib:

And Michelle, you know we don't have the answers here, right, we just don't know.

Michele McAloon:

But I think, I think, that's the best thing you could say. You know that, and I would love for a political leader to stand up and say you know what? I don't know, we don't know. Let's figure this out together. I don't know the answer. Let's use our technology, let's use our best human beings to figure out our smartest human beings, our neural networks, our artificial intelligence, to figure out the solution to the problem. And no one is saying that right now, and the fact that you said I don't know the answer speaks highly about you.

James Arbib:

Well, if you know, it's a journey we're all going to go on, whether we like it or not, right, and we're going to have to learn it. And at the outset of that journey we're not going to have the full roadmap, right, we're going to have to learn as we go along. And I think that's really important because you know, often when things get unstable and unsettled, right, we want to cling on to some kind of stability and we kind of look backwards and hold on tightly and I think you know that's not going to stand us in good stead. Somehow we've got to learn how to lean into change and welcome it and realize that we have to set out on this journey come what may. And we've got to learn as we go along. That for many people is terrifying, but for others it's hugely liberating.

Michele McAloon:

This is where leadership can really play a huge part in helping people navigate these changes. So it's not fearful, so it is positive impossible. James, I want to encourage my listeners to pick up this book. It's very easy read, it's not complex and it lays out a lot of what James and I have been talking about. But also go to your website, rethinkx. You've got some excellent little videos on there and you've got good articles and some discussion to see what innovative people who have great vision, the reason why it's great because they want to better humanity. It's positive, it's a good website.

James Arbib:

Well, thank you, michelle, thank you, and I appreciate your interest. And, as we say, the book was only ever designed to be the start of a conversation. Right, it doesn't have all the answers, but I think it frames a conversation in a very different way to the conversation that we're having across the world today.

Michele McAloon:

Absolutely, and this is what we need more than anything for us to sit down as adults and be able to talk about change, talk about differences, talk about unstable times, what our resources are and what our advantages are and what our disadvantages are. And we have not had that conversation. And you're right, this is the beginning of the conversation, so, james, keep talking, all right.

James Arbib:

Thank you.

Michele McAloon:

Okay, thank you.