Transcription

• Speaker #0

  Welcome to Remarkable, a podcast proposed by Thomas Gauthier, professor at EM Lyon Business School. In each episode, he questions those who explore the future and remembers history to build a habitable world from today. Medar Gabel is an entrepreneur, author and activist. Next to Buckminster Fuller, he is at the origin of the World Game. A project imagined in the 60s that aimed, no more no less, to simulate the functioning of all human activities on Earth. In the next interview, Medard returns to this intellectual and pedagogical adventure out of the ordinary. Can you please tell us what would be your first question for the Oracle?

• Speaker #1

  That's a great framework to ask a question like that. What is the future going to look like? The first question that I would ask the Oracle, somebody, something that will know the answer, is the first question would be... When will 100% of humanity, everybody on this planet, have their basic human needs met? When will we eliminate poverty, not just the inequality of inequity of the distribution of the world's resources, but more fundamentally, when will the one to two and a half to three billion people, depending how you define poverty or lack of basic human needs being met, When will we achieve 100% of humanity having their needs met? That would be my first question. I mean, the world has been trending in that direction slowly. We've been increasing the population from, you know, 1 billion to 2 to 4 to now 8 billion people. But we've also been increasing the percentage of the whole who have progressively had their basic human needs met. And we might be up to 40, we might be up to 50, 51, 52, 60% maybe, depending on how you're defining basic human needs and that, but we're a long way from 100%. So that's my first question. When will we get there? Or will we get there? I'm assuming we will. the historical trends are inching forward in that direction, but it's possible we might not make it because like a lot of things, the last percentage, like the speed of light, if you're trying to go the speed of light, you can get halfway there with current technology, an outer space and a vacuum, but that last 10%, you're going to have to expend as much energy as it took you to get almost all the way up to, you know, the 90%. And so it might be similar at the last five, six, 1% of humanity, it might be a big challenge. But whatever it is, I want to know when.

• Speaker #0

  Well, to go a little beyond this initial thought of yours on the topic of poverty, one question that comes to mind that I'd like to ask back at you concerns the current way that humanity... has organized itself. So we've got strong organizations that are shaping multiple transactions among people and among organizations. We've got nation states that are transacting with one another through the United Nations and other multilateral arrangements. We've got companies that are doing business with one another and establish among themselves other kinds of transactions. We've got civil society representative organizations that are trying to voice the concerns of communities and trying to promote the public good. Do you see that the current organizing mechanisms that are in place today have the potential to get us much further on this path towards eliminating poverty? How much do you think Is there a need? for reconsidering the way that we've, as humanity, organized ourselves?

• Speaker #1

  I think the current setup is inching forward very slowly. It is adequate for keeping the current power structure in power, and they're reticent to give up what it is they think they own or control. The answer to your question from my perspective is that the current setup has to do with speed. I don't think we have the luxury of inching forward, of a slow progression, you know, and, you know, 100 years we might get there. I don't think we have 100 years to make the world work or 200 or, you know, 60 or even 50. I think we need mechanisms, societal organizations that can move quicker than governments. international organizations and the current, quote, problem solvers out there. I think we need like a lot of processes are being democratized, meaning they're getting under the control of central authorities out to the people. And I think we need a decentralization or a democratization of global problem solving. of eliminating poverty from this planet, and not just poverty, one word, but getting people adequate, nutritious food, abundant supplies of delicious food, clean water, clean energy, healthcare, education, you know, eliminate not just illiteracy, but get everybody, you know, a college level or beyond level, a continuing education. And as well as dealing with the environment, climate change, and allowing the environment to regenerate itself, in my world, that all comes under the umbrella of the eradication of poverty. So I think we do need some radical changes. Buckminster Fuller used to describe the nation state as blood clots in the circulatory system of the planet. he would see the nation state commanders in chief, el presidente, prime ministers and stuff, as all imagining themselves captains of spaceship Earth. And they're all trying to steer the ship in different directions for their particular interests, for their nation states, what well-being. And until we get to a point where... We have a management of the big system or problem-solving approach that encompasses the whole world, 100% of humanity, rather than the 4% in the United States or the 20% in China, East Asia. We've got to figure out how to make the transition from a local, national species to a global species. That is not to say, I hasten to add that we... want to lose our respect for or love of our hometown, our state, our country, but we just need to enlarge our ability to feel compassion and empathy and respect for everybody.

• Speaker #0

  You've brought up the name of Buckminster Fuller, and then you also made reference to this notion of Spaceship Earth. I trust that many of our listeners are not familiar with Spaceship earth. What is it?

• Speaker #1

  Well, Buckminster Fuller coined that term to describe a perspective, you know, that we need to look at the Earth as analogous to a spaceship where it doesn't matter if you punch a hole in the, you know, the side of the ship, the starboard side. It doesn't matter whether you're living on the other side. The whole ship is going to sink. It's a metaphor that allows us to see our shared humanity. our shared, what, platform for living on. You know, it's a very delicate spacecraft. It's very big, but it's nevertheless, if you dump your garbage into the ocean, it's going to get to my shore pretty soon. And it could be the air ocean, you know, dumping carbon dioxide into it is going to impact the whole planet with climate change, or it could poison the liquid oceans with with our industrial waste. So we're all interconnected. That's what the spaceship metaphor is all about. And we need to all be responsible. And there's another piece of the metaphor having to do with, you know, passengers, crew, and, you know, the commanders or the captain of the ship. And I think we all need to start looking at ourselves not as passive passengers. You know, Fuller used to also say, we're here to be the architects of the future, not its victims. And I think we need to, you know... pushing that into the metaphor of Spaceship Earth, I think we all need to see ourselves as captains and crew. Not that we're all fighting for absolute control, but we all have the responsibility to the whole spaceship. That's pretty much where Fuller was coming from with that metaphor.

• Speaker #0

  And I trust that we'll come back to the work that you've done with Buckminster later in the interview. Now is a chance for you, Medar, to be back with the Oracle and ask the Oracle a second question. What would you like to know now?

• Speaker #1

  I think the second question was, you know, now that we have AI, artificial intelligence, when are we going to meet ET? When is, now that we've met... Some people are saying, you know, we've already got the extraterrestrial. It's in the form of, you know, extraterrestrial intelligence is in the form of artificial intelligence. But the logic of the way the universe is set up with, you know, billions, over a billion galaxies, each with, you know, 100 million to a billion stars in each one. And they have discovered so many... Earth-like planets out there, out there meaning in the cosmos, that the logic dictates that there are other life forms and other intelligent life forms. And when are we going to meet one of them? I would like, you know, I'm curious about that. So yeah, that's my second question. When will ET show up to shake hands with our AI, artificial intelligence, the Never mind. I think those two entities, by the time we meet, unless an ET shows up next week, our artificial intelligence will, maybe they'll help us locate our friends from far away.

• Speaker #0

  And now, without trying to answer this question that you are asking to the Oracle, what do you think would change if... such an encounter with an ET ever took place? What could be the consequences for our spaceship Earth, for our humanity, for our life? What could be most impacted?

• Speaker #1

  I think we're seeing it right now. I think we're seeing the start of the impact of the latest step-up, big jump in AI, the latest things to show up. On the internet, the chat GPT and DALI, and there's half a dozen, actually a dozen more different platforms that allow us to learn about artificial intelligence, to interact with it, to learn some interesting things from it and how to use it in a way that will advance us. And I think that... It's the forerunner of ET. I think the changes that we're going through now, the transformations, the way of thinking about the world with this new presence, this new capability, this new reasoning capacity that it seems to be embodied in artificial intelligence, as well as there'll be other issues that show up as we go down this road, moral issues, ethical issues. having to do with the use of this intelligence. I think, and also, this is an aside, but one of the nice things about artificial intelligence is it's a resource, it's a value that isn't under the control of the power structure yet. They may try to get it, you know, it has another capability of decentralizing, getting some of that power away from the super wealthy. and the ones that are, you know, seemingly they think they're running the show. It would, anyhow, back to artificial intelligence, I think the changes that we're going through as a species. As some of us have played with AI, most of us haven't. You know, just like not everybody has internet access yet on this planet. That would be another part of the poverty issue. You know, access to the internet and AI and everything that the internet represents in terms of its capacity to bring information to people. All right. So I think what will happen when we... bump into ET will be something analogous, similar to what happened when we bumped into AI. There will be some, oh my goodness, you know, look at this. This is really interesting capacity here. You know, people who have played with, typed in questions or explored the intelligence that AI is, that's online right now, have raised their eyebrows, you know, like, wow, this is pretty interesting. I think we'll have a similar reaction to something from, you know, extraterrestrial, which may also be an AI. I mean, it makes a lot more sense to send a sophisticated AI that can live in an environment that doesn't need what we would need, what this biological organism needs in terms of, you know, food, water, heat, etc. Anyhow, I think that this is training. for ET. AI is training for ET. And somebody sometime may probably already have, what should we type in to chat? What should we say when we meet an extraterrestrial? Where are they? Anyhow, I don't want to go on with that, but that would be my second question for the oracle. When are we going to meet our friends?

• Speaker #0

  And I think that among the many things that you've said already, I'll put on the side of my brain this idea that meeting with artificial intelligence is training for meeting with ET. That phrase is going to last. Third and final chance for you to ask a question to the Oracle. You have one final take at the future through the question you can ask. to the oracle? What would you like to know now?

• Speaker #1

  So, this is, I have always, even as a child, always tried to not always obey the structures that I was given, you know, whether it was the good nuns in grade school or the high school teacher or whatever. So, this is a slight stretch of your instructions, perhaps. And I thought... the third question. I would like to know what the oracle wants to know. That was my first impulse, you know, to ask the oracle who knows the future, what is she interested in? I'm assuming I'm speaking with a conscious entity who has got some superpower to see the future, but what does she want to know? I'd be curious to know what she doesn't know, what somebody who can see the future knows and what they don't know. I'd like to engage in a conversation with her about that. But then I thought of another question, which is also violating your rules about three, and it was related to this one. I would like to know, when will all of us have the ability to see the future? When will that be democratized? Instead of it concentrated in... you know, a very singular spot, the oracle, when will we be able to better grasp the future? And the reason for that question is, is I think it's essential to our survival on this planet for us to see the consequences to our actions. You know, let's say we've got three different ways of solving the energy problem, you know, getting adequate energy supplies to every world. One is coal, oil, fossil fuels, you know, and we... already know the consequences of that path. Well, so what are the consequences of the other paths going forward into the future? And I think the prognostication or the ability to see, have a long range frame of reference, and then to have a long range set of consequences. You know, there's an American Indian whose name escapes me, but He had a philosophy that he stated that, you know, we're here for, you know, seven generations. Whatever we do now ought to be safe for the next seven generations into the future. And that clearly had a... long-range perspective. So the democratization of the ability to see the future, I would like to know when... And between you and me and everybody else, we already do see the future. I mean, we know that the sun is going to come up tomorrow, and there are certain regularities that define a stable future, but... There are other things associated with our actions into the social sphere that have ramifications that are so complicated we can't see. It's not as simple as throwing a pebble into a pond and knowing that it'll splash and there'll be ripples out. It's much more complicated, probably related to our computational powers to model the society we're living in and seeing what some of the consequences might be. be. So those are my three or four questions.

• Speaker #0

  In line with that question you're asking to the Oracle regarding when will be a time when the whole humanity has an ability to see the future, has an ability to anticipate the consequences of decisions and actions, it brings to mind this novel which was published in 2020, if I'm not mistaken, by... Kim Stanley Robinson, the Ministry for the Future, which is telling this fictional story about an organization that is responsible for the generations to come and is responsible for assessing the, let's say, viability and legitimacy of decisions and actions that are being taken today. This is fiction. Going back to reality, according to you, what... could be ways in which this appreciation and consideration for the long term could be you know institutionalized how could we proceed as human communities to institutionalize the care for the long term and and maybe as a complementary question are we already equipped with institutions that attempt at caring for the long term that you seem to be preoccupied with.

• Speaker #1

  Or they're frustrated by the current power structure, which has got a short term, meaning next quarter's profit margins or next election or vacation, whichever comes first. So the answer to your question, a quick aside, Ministry of Future is a wonderful, great book. I'd recommend it to everybody on this planet. But that's one answer, is to have an institution whose function it is to be responsible for the future, the long term, looking at what's out there and identifying danger points, whether it's climate change or pandemics or other, you know, or meteors, you know, that are coming our way. But that's one. But the real answer... From my perspective, I'm writing a book on it, in fact, at the moment, has to do with our economic system. An economic system is an externalized morality, ethical system. And the decisions we make, if they involve money, are based on the accounting system. What's valuable, what isn't, you know, the payback period for you. Am I going to make a $100 or $100 million investment? It's the accounting system that is going to determine whether I spend that money or not, because it will determine the return on investment or how valuable it is. And so if you are making a decision out there on this planet, the economic accounting system, which structures the economy, is the real power source. And it's been manipulated over the years so that we have billionaires. billionaires and poverty are two sides of the same coin. You don't have one without the other. And I think changing the accounting system so that it values the services of nature, the things, the long-term perspective, that you build in the long-term perspective into the way people make decisions for the allocation of scarce resources, i.e. their money. And by building in the services that... that nature provides us for free into the system so that they cost money. You degrade the ability of the... rainforest to recycle our carbon dioxide to fix nitrogen. Well, you need to pay for that. You need to, you know, what would it cost nature to replace that? Also, you know, fossil fuels are pulled out of the ground for free. You know, they're worthless, you know, that you get the right to mine it, but you don't pay nature back. It took nature hundreds of millions of years to make that complex hydrocarbon we call coal, oil, or gas. Buckminster Fuller had a fairly well-known geologist. He asked him, how much would it cost us if we had to replace the oil? And this guy, he was one of the people that unfortunately discovered the oil in Alaska. He wasn't so proud of that. But anyhow, he came back, and this was, geez, 30, 40 years ago, said it cost, you know, his calculations, a million dollars a gallon. for gasoline. So that's what it would cost to replace it. So if gasoline, right now, the fossil fuel industry is, because of the accounting system and stuff, it's subsidized. The latest figures out there are like $1.6 to $1.7 trillion a year, global subsidies. Well, you pull that plug, you pull those subsidies out, fossil fuels are already barely competitive with the renewables, the solar and the wind, you pull that subsidy out and the whole system collapses and you're going to go on a much cleaner way. So the accounting system that encourages us, definitely, it leads us down the path to destruction of the environment, because the environment, who cares? It doesn't show up on my accounting sheet. In my balance sheet, it's just non-entity. I don't have to pay for all the services I get from... All right, so that's one. There's about eight more adjustments. Actually, the book has got 27 now, adjustments to the accounting system that would make our species, us human beings, make more informed, intelligent decisions about... what we do. There's been a moral case for eons that nobody should be hungry on this planet, but there's not an economic case for it. We can make the moral case like that, but if you can make an economic case that it is ridiculously expensive to have anybody hungry on this planet, or undereducated, or uneducated, or having lacking healthcare. or abundant, clean, reliable, affordable energy supplies, if the accounting system was set up in accordance with an ethical sensibilities, it'd be a no-brainer to do the right thing. You know, right now you have to be a, quote, bleeding heart liberal or a somebody who ignores economics to care about the people who are hungry in the world or living in abject poverty. without adequate health or education or shelter, clean water, et cetera. So that's the real answer. We need to change the economics, the accounting system. Now, that may sound impossible. Well, how are you going to do that? The folks who, the billionaires and the ones with all... Billionaires is synonymous with having large... If you have large amounts of money, you have large amounts of power, and they're not interested in... giving that away, most of them, 99% of them. I think that there are ways of changing the system and the system is changing, but it's slow. I mean, the way the accounting system is set up, there are various commissions that are in charge of just like every professional society, whether you're a doctor or an engineer, there are changes that occur in there. And so anyhow, it's inching forward but uh I don't think inching forward, as I mentioned earlier, is a viable strategy given the emergency we're in.

• Speaker #0

  So anyhow, that's a fairly long-winded response to your question, but that's what I think we need to be doing. That'll change the system if we can change the criteria that people are using to make their decisions.

• Speaker #1

  Well, I think now is the time for the oracle to take a well-deserved rest. I'd like now, Medar, that we please look together in the rearview mirror. please bring back one first event from history that you think could help us orient ourselves in the present and possibly also project ourselves in the future?

• Speaker #0

  All right. So I took your question as, you know, what are the key events in history? And also with the addendum that you've just put out there, but I would start off by saying And the most important event... in all of history, the entire time since we've been conscious enough to have historians, is my birth. And obviously, that's somewhat of a joke, but it's also your birth and the birth of every human being who is out there right now. And the reason I'm saying that is that's the one thing we know the one thing that we're the only thing. that we're sure of. I'm alive. I'm conscious. Everything else is really, is that really trees I'm looking at out the window there? Or what's going on with the one thing I can be sure of has to do with my existence? And so that's a rather pivotal key event. We're here on this planet. We exist. All right. So that... When I was thinking about what's in a key event in history, what's a key event in my history? Well, when I showed up. And so that's a key event for everybody. You're here now. And it comes with certain prerogatives and responsibilities. And I think we need to be aware of those and act accordingly. Now, key event, though, in the framework that you actually asked that question, One of them has to do with, it's not a precise state, although I will get to that in a second, has to do with us folks externalizing the functions that are internal, like, you know, these fingers, you know, are, you know, if I have a fist, it could be a hammer or something, or my fingernail could be a little screwdriver or something, but a real screwdriver is much more effective than my fingernail, stronger. And so... We've externalized a lot of these functions. If I cup my hands like this, I can put them into a creek or a pond, and hopefully it's clean, and drink the water. But I can also make a cup out of clay. And so one of the pivotal events in our history is when we started externalizing the internal functions of our body. And once we did that, something really important happens. Like once I make a cup out of clay, let's say, I can now give my hands to you. You know, you can use the function that this performed in getting water so I could drink it. I could now make 10 of them and give them to everybody in my surroundings or 100 of them. I could make it big so it can hold, you know, this year's grain crop or something. I can, you know, make a big... round container. I could make it so big that I can get in it and row it across the lake to the other side. I can also put it, something I can't do with my hands, in the fire and heat up stuff, you know, or I could hold acid with it or whatever, you know. So once you've externalized something, you can generalize the use of it. And we started doing that a long time ago with our tools, you know, which were all externalizations of something we could do with our hands if we could run after that animal fast enough and catch it, but with a bow and arrow or a spear or something. Anyhow, we've externalized these. So that's a pivotal event, as was us folks being conscious, being self-aware, which I think was a huge pivotal event, not just conscious, but... conscious of consciousness, and then externalizing these functions, because it's continued on up to today. You know, like when we've, you could say that we've externalized our muscles and our digestive system with the industrial system, industrial revolution, you know, with engines, whether it's the steam engine or gas powered engines, you know, those are muscles, strength and power. The digestive system is our materials processing of, you know, taking iron ore and making it into steel or bronze, aluminum, copper, et cetera. And so I think those were really important. And now with the telegraph, the telephone, the computer, the internet, we've externalized our nervous system. And, you know, our sensors are out there, whether it's the, you know, the internet as it is, or the internet of things, or now the internet of the body. where they've got all the sensors that you can now currently buy, whether it's your watch that will monitor your heartbeat and 12 other things. So the nervous system is getting extended all over the planet. Those are huge developments, pivotal events, key events in history. But getting to dates, I used to work with a mentor, employer, good friend, best friend. Buckminster Fuller, who was born in 1895. When he was born in the United States, the life expectancy was 42. When he died, 1983, the life expectancy was almost twice that. It was getting up to close to 80. It was 78. It's now closer in the US to that, to 80. So, no species in the entire history of this planet. has ever increased their life expectancy so dramatically. Nobody has ever been able to double or add to five years, 10 years, 20 years, 30, 40, 50 years to their life expectancy. That's an amazing accomplishment. But back, I started this off with saying dates. Fuller talks about his history. When he was born, the first automobile came into the Boston area, which is where he was from. So he says between 1914 and 1918, the world went from wire type of electricity being wired and communications being wired, phones and stuff, from wire to wireless. You know, it was when we had. radio communications on shore to ships at sea. So there's now from wire to wireless, also from roads to roadless, from the ground to airplanes showed up. You had all sorts of things showing up at this point in time that were in the early part of the you know, the last century from, let's say, 1900 to 1925, you had these incredible shifts, you know, not just the automobile and the truck and the, you know, the roadway, but also the communications facilities, the radio, and not just shortwave between ships, but and then, you know, television shows up. All of these ways of us communicating with each other and learning from each other, coordinating, you know, things, I think was a uh, pivotal event in our history, but so was yesterday. There's nothing I can point to that happened yesterday that was pivotal, but in a few years, I probably will be able to. You know, that Joe Smith at the University of whatever, Prague or Chicago or wherever, made a discovery. that is shaping the future. And whether it's thin film graphite that is going to be changing all sorts of things out there to the next development in AI, whatever it might be, the world is changing rapidly and in fundamental ways. So I think there's ancient history going back to... us being born to contemporary pivotal events that, and who the heck said this? Martin Rees. astronomer from England, the royal astronomer in the UK, says, you know, this is the most important time to be alive in the, you know, the history of the planet. You know, meaning the 13 billion year history of this planet right now is the most important time. So I think that, and we have, he said that, I'll say the following, and we all have a responsibility to that importance. what we've inherited, and not just the resources of the current planet, but the capacities of it and ourselves, the collective intelligence. We have a responsibility to use it in not just ethical, sensible ways that benefit all of humanity, but also to use it creatively. Let's see what it can do, where it will take us. Which is another question for the Oracle, you know, when are we going to leave this place? Not all of us, but when will we establish, you know, extraterrestrial voyages, colonies, and other parts of the solar system and the universe? So those are some of the, what, key events in our history that I've been curious about.

• Speaker #1

  And I think the transition is, you know... happening now nicely with the third and final part of our discussion. So we've questioned together the futures, we've questioned together the past. Now is the time, of course, of reconnecting with the present and getting to know from you how are you, in very different ways, intervening in the world. And before you provide some elements of answer to this question, I'd like you to please tell us a bit about the world game because you've been talking about your work, about your relationship with Buckminster Fuller, about Spaceship Earth. You've been talking also about our individual and collective responsibility, the need for finding creative ways in which we may address a number of concerns or risks and also the ways in which we may seize new opportunities for humanity. And I think that the work that you've been conducting for many years originating with the World Game is one attempt at bringing all these questions and concerns together. What is the World Game?

• Speaker #0

  Thank you for that question. It's theoretically possible we could have ended this without me touching it. And it's the most important issue right now in my life. Part of this question was what the heck are you doing to walk your talk, to live the way you feel strongly about. The work that I'm doing, the way I'm spending my life, one primary way is this thing that you referred to as the world game. And it is a tool for recognizing, defining, and solving global problems. Right now, we're creating a computer version of it that... anybody with access to the internet will be able to play. It's a platform for what? It's a license for anybody to tackle a global problem, not just the, quote, experts that are out there, whether they're in the Pentagon or Kremlin or in Beijing, who think they control the world, but it's to open the doors, sophisticated doors, empowered doors, with all the information you'd need to create a compelling case. for the eradication of what, hunger or illiteracy or getting clean energy to everybody, to open the doors to the high school student, as well as the policy analysts, the people who have been graduated from wherever, MIT or University of California or wherever the institutions of higher learning are, but anybody with the values and concerns and perspective that says, we need to do something. And we can do something. The technology's there, the resources are there, even the money's there to make the world work for everybody. There's enough to go around. It's just currently not going in the right directions, or it's under the control of people who want to get more and more for themselves. So the world game. Buckminster Fuller originally envisioned it as a place, as the exhibits, if you will, or located in the World's Fair Dome that he designed. in Montreal, 1967. Talk about ancient history. It was a 250-foot geodesic dome. And people would come from around the world to play either, you know, from Moscow, from, you know... San Francisco, from Paris, wherever, to either compete or play together on teams or alone to develop strategies for solving global problems. First week, maybe you're going to say, oh, we're going to focus on the global food problem. And the team that came up with, or the individual came up with the best solution, here's how we could do it for X amount of money using these kinds of resources, and we could do it in 10 years. They win round one. Round two is won by the team that can say, well, we can do the same thing, maybe even more, but we can do it in seven years. Next round, somebody else could do it in five, but maybe also get water and energy or something. You keep developing it so you create ever more compelling strategies that are so doable, so cost-effective that they get implemented. He saw this not as an academic exercise, but as a tool for undermining the power structure. How do you take away from them the option of defining the future? You know, we're supposed to be the architects, not the victims. So let's empower the architects with the tools that they need to make informed, intelligent decisions about the future, about creating the future, rather than just sitting back and watching it on. TV or the internet screen. That evolved over time. When Fuller proposed that there was supposed to be a supercomputer in the basement of that dome, well, the computational power of that supercomputer is now in your smartphone. And so what we're building is an online platform that is simple on the surface, but it's connected to all of the data that the planet has about itself, all the statistics about every country in the world. thousands of different variables on everything from, you know, food and energy, water, healthcare, et cetera, as well as strategies, possible solutions that have been proposed in the past that you as a player could use, but the idea is you would refine them, make it better, or combine them with three others, and the real, not hidden agenda, but the important part is, you know, the other, you know. You add your own. You come to this with an idea that you think would work. And this is a tool to also help us see a little bit into the future, you know, in the sense that, well, if we implemented this strategy in this way, you could eliminate the problem that you're dealing with. Last summer, the World Game has a sidekick, if you will. You know, every summer we do this thing called the Global Solutions Lab. The Global Solutions Lab this year is going to be in June, and anybody who hears this wants June, what, 18th to the 30th. It's two weeks long. It's going to be at Drexel University in Philadelphia. It'll also be online. It's in person and online. And here, in a sense, you play the world game longhand. It's not all of that stuff gathered. It's gathered, but it's not as... quick and as fast because the world game that we're building is going to be AI-assisted. It's going to have three or four artificial intelligences, tools that will allow a much more rapid gameplay, if you will. Instead of it being two weeks, it might be two hours, two days. It'll be a much more rapid development. There will be prizes as well for the best strategy. Well, here's the prize. It doesn't go to you to go buy yourself a vacation, a month-long vacation in Bali. It goes to, or pay off your college loans or whatever. It's to go to fund the development of your strategy. Take it to the next stage. And it'll depend on how much money there is in the awards, the prizes, to see how far that goes. But the idea is to... Develop solutions, test them at prototype, test them, and then scale them. Make it so that it now has an impact. Last summer, there was 34 people from Africa in the lab who were developing alternate strategies, options, solutions to the problem, one of the biggest problems Africa faces. There's 600 million people in Africa without access to electricity who've never switched on a light. light switch in their life. So that was what they were working on. How do you get clean, meaning renewable energy sourced, clean, reliable, abundant, and affordable energy to everybody in Africa? All right. Well, in the world game, the idea would be to take the best one of those strategies they came up with and run with it and test it out in a village. The Global Sluicense Lab brings in people from all over the world, puts them on teams that are multidisciplinary, cross-cultural, even intergenerational, because there's some younger people and older people. And those teams are... incredibly exciting and successful in coming up with wonderful, interesting, exciting, viable strategies for solving real-world problems, coming up with real-world solutions. All right. So the world game is to be a tool for all of that, for developing viable strategies for solving real-world problems. And then... moving them forward into the world. And that's how I spend a good deal of my life on that. Before we end, there's one other thing. I thought about this question a little bit, and I thought there's another piece of it having to do with, I try to live close to nature so I can learn from it. And another thing is going internally here from my work out there to where I live. to this is a more internal gratitude. I try to live my life being thankful for, A, that I'm here, you know, I did show up on this planet, but there's so many things to be grateful for. I think it's a powerful tool. It's not just, you know, gee, I'm grateful, but it's a useful tool for both self-exploration. I've added, you know, after I say, well, I'm grateful for this or that, my kids, you know, this other thing. I started saying to myself, you got to add a new thing every single time. I spend every day I meditate. And after the meditation, I spend a little bit of time being grateful. And I had to add a new thing. So, geez, okay, what am I grateful for? Well, trees, okay. Oh, flowing water. And then the color green, you know, my fingers, whatever. You could come up with all sorts of... But once I named something, if I named the color purple, green, blue, I didn't... have the option of going on and naming Azure or, you know, Chartreuse or anything. I had color, colors, period, had to move on. So, it forced me, you know, to think about new things, stars, you know, the sun, you know, the electromagnetic spectrum, Einstein, you know, this, that, you know. And once I named one thing Einstein, okay, well, I can't name any other scientist. because that's an open-ended thing. And so it forced me to extend my gratitude into the further reaches of the universe, instead of just being grateful for that good meal I just had or whatever, it allowed me to explore the world. So it was a useful self-exploratory universe exploring tool. One incident, one side thing, and then I should shut up. When I was teaching courses in college, I used to ask the students on the first day to write down, because it was private, what they're grateful for. And I learned a lot from that. It was a useful tool for getting to know somebody. What they're grateful for discloses a heck of a lot about who they are, what their values are, what their worldview is. They're grateful for the new car that mommy and daddy gave them, or they're grateful for the fact that they're healthy. I mean, it's better than asking somebody what their astrological sign is. What they're grateful for will tell you an awful lot about who they are and their worldview. Anyhow, those are some of the things that I'm trying to do with my life. The major one being for this conversation, the world game. And anybody who wants to play the world game or participate in what we're doing, come to the Global Solutions Lab and they can, you know, there's a website that'll tell them where to go, what to do. It's, you know, they can look up on Google Global Solutions Lab. Anyhow, the one of the things I'm grateful for is you. So thank you for this interesting conversation. I mean, you probe some wonderfully different ways of thinking about stuff. So I thank you for that.

• Speaker #1

  And I'm of course grateful for the insights you shared with us. I'd like, Medar, if you will, just to ask one final quiet... Pragmatic question connecting us back to the world game that I'm going to be sharing all the links that our listeners will need access to so that they can find you more easily and also enroll in the Global Solutions Lab in June if they so desire. I was wondering, have you had a chance to ever run the world game methodology or world game protocol by, you know, folks that are... in leadership positions, like in companies or in various government agencies. Because the way that I think about the world game that I came to discover, and this is, by the way, the way that I learned about your work and the work of Buckminster Fuller, is that it is a possible seed of a global decision-making process and problem-designing protocol also. And It sounds or it looks like one of the closest protocols that we could hope for to be broadly adopted by those that are through their decisions having deep impact on the way that we live and the sustainability also of life on Earth. Just coming back to your point on the generations to come. So how much of a distance is there between the world game to be a world, you know... protocol or a world commons that can help any decision makers be a bit more wise, perhaps.

• Speaker #0

  Thank you. The World Game has got various incarnations, various forms. Fuller proposed something for this big dome in Montreal. What we did after that, because the United States Information Agency, which was in charge of... that dome and the exhibits and rejected Fuller's idea. It was a little bit too radical. Fuller, being the kind of guy he was, decided, well, that's no reason. In fact, that's probably a good reason to go on if some agency of the US government rejected it. So that's when I started working with him. And one format that we did, part of the challenge is to get people to see the Earth as one interconnected unit. It's like information visualization. How do you make the tons of data? You know, you take a dump truck full of numbers and dump it on somebody, they're just overwhelmed and lost. How do you make it so that it's understandable? All right, that's context for this. The next version of the world game was a world game, it was a workshop. It was like three and a half hours long. It took place on a giant map of the world. The map, by giant, I mean the size of a... basketball court. It was like 70 feet long, 34 feet wide. It was incredibly detailed. They were made out of the US Defense Department jet navigation charts. Every town in the world, over 5,000 population was on it. It was gorgeous. People were stunned by it. You could sell admission to it. Buzz Aldrin, the second man on the moon, told me he was at a couple of our workshops that it was Walking around on this map was the best experience of the Earth he's had since coming back from the moon. When you're standing on the map, you're 2,000 feet tall, 2,000 miles tall. What's that, like, you know, maybe 4,000 kilometers or something. The space shuttle went into orbit at your ankle. The moon was about 10 stories, 10-story building above you. Here's the key statistic. We'd take a U.S. coin. a nickel and drop it on the map and push it with our foot over onto the Himalayas. And that was the height of the tallest mountains to the world, the height of this nickel coming up above this map that was, you know, 70 feet long. We'd push it into the ocean. That was about the average depth of the ocean. And between the two nickels, one going into the, you know, the floor of the oceans and one coming up above, was where 99.9% of all life... the biosphere is on this planet, all life and everything that supports life. But here's the punchline. All of 94 to 95% of all life was in the thickness of the ink that the map was printed with. So in other words, our planet has got this incredibly thin, delicate veneer that is covering the planet and has turned it from a lifeless rock into this home where you and I are. All right, that may up. was the basis of this world game. And we would put a hundred people on the map, each one playing 1% of humanity, you know, 20. 22 of them will be squashed into China and East Asia, four or five spread out rather leisurely in North America. Africa had 10 or 11. And then we empowered them with, here's the food that you produce, the energy you produce, here's the financial resources, and you're in charge. And here you have a game card, here's the rest of what you've got to work with. You've got a bunch of problems, some of which are global problems, some are local. So... The global ones, you got to work with the rest of the world. And they became global problem solvers and local problem solvers as the game went on. There were other teams representing the World Bank, multinational corporations, the media. After each round, the media would make a report of what happened. It was fun, exciting, fast-paced. You learned a huge amount in a short period of time about the world, its resources, problems, and options. Most importantly, what you could do. All right. All of which is prefaced to that got out there. I mean, we did 100, 120 of these a year around the world. The multinational corporations picked up on it. So we did workshops for the likes of a whole bunch for General Motors, Motorola, IBM, Novartis, British Airways, lots of companies around the world, and even some government agencies in the Netherlands, in Spain. U.S., one of the key parts of this information visualization was this was at a time when we had 50,000 nuclear weapons on the planet. And we wanted to show the insanity of it at the scale of this. So we figured out, or I figured out, if you took the average size nuclear weapon, the one megaton bomb, what would be the area destroyed on this map? destroyed through the blast and radiation and all of that. It was the size of a US dime, the size of a bingo chip. And we bought 50,000 phosphorescent orange of these little plastic chips. And at the appropriate time, we dumped them on the map. And just to visualize what it would look like if we were systematically insane and used all of these weapons. By the way, mathematically, they cover all the land masses of the world. You could literally pay if you put them down one at a time. The first time we did it was in Washington, D.C., and much to my horror, some people started crying. I was really shocked. Oh, my God, I didn't intend to do that. We wanted to demonstrate this, not to upset them to tears. And somebody else, when I was expressing my regret at this? He said, These people responding rationally. I mean, this is a rational response. You want to get this response. You want tears when they see their home blown up, you know, everything on this planet blown up. And so we left it in and we used it all over the place. So we did versions, not with those chips, not always. The one we did for Motorola was modified where... The last first three rounds, the players were in charge of the world. The last round, they were in charge of Motorola. They were the boss. And their job was, what can Motorola do to deal with all the problems of the world that you just dealt with as the leaders of different regions? How can you eliminate hunger, illiteracy, lack of health? Using the vast resources of your multinational. And assuming you're in charge, not the stockholder or the board of directors, what could we do? So that was fairly limited. It was just, we didn't do it for 20 years with every member of Motorola, but it did get there. And the reason I went into some detail on that is the next version of the world game, this online one, we want to make more powerful. and more pervasive, and more useful so that corporate folks, as well as government folks, will be able to use it to tackle the problems that they've got to deal with. Not just the ones I would like them to deal with, like hunger and illiteracy, lack of healthcare, poverty, etc. But anyhow, we want to have a tool that gets out there. to the high school student, the college student, the educated professional policy analyst, advisor to the government, as well as the officials out there that are actually with their hands on some of the levers in terms of allocating money and developing policies and programs that can accelerate the change in the world. We're looking for additional people to work on the World Game. I mean, it's a small team, programmers and graphics people, and we're a small nonprofit. that is moving forward with the creation of this and we'll continue doing it, but it wouldn't hurt to have that accelerated too. And so one of the things I'm trying to do is raise some funds in addition to the other things, write a few grant proposals so that we can bring in more people and get it done quicker.

• Speaker #1

  Well, I think we're getting to the end of this. discussion. Thank you very much, Medar, for all the insights you've shared. And I trust that our path will cross again in the future. Thank you so much.

• Speaker #0

  Thank you. It was a pleasure.