Mark Stevenson is a self-proclaimed ‘reluctant futurist’ and author of the bestsellers An Optimist’s Tour of the Future and We Do Things Differently. One of the world’s most respected thinkers, Mark supports a diverse mix of clients including government agencies, NGOs, corporations and arts organizations in becoming future literate and adapting their cultures and strategy to face questions around climate change and gender inequality, among other issues.
Full Transcript
Alexsandra Guerra: You’re listening to the Reversing Climate Change podcast by Nori, the world’s first carbon removal marketplace. Here are your hosts, Ross Kenyon and Christophe Jospe.
Ross Kenyon: Hello, welcome to the Reversing Climate Change podcast with Nori. I’m Ross Kenyon here with Christophe Jaspé and Paul Gamble. We are in foggy London town, as they say, drinking English breakfast tea. I feel a little out of practice here with the podcast. It’s been a month, five weeks, six weeks since we last recorded.
Unknown speaker: Yeah, we kind of batch these up and then have them produced. You’re giving us away.
Ross Kenyon: I don’t think it’s that uncommon or unethical or you can write to the podcasting bureau and report us for unethical behavior. Christophe, why don’t you tell the audience what we’re up to today?
Christophe Jospe: As you said, drinking English breakfast tea and we’re sitting across the table from... Mark Stevenson in his very nice kitchen in London. Mark is a reluctant futurist, also an author, and he referred to himself as a deletante at one point. And Mark, you’re on the Reversing Climate Change podcast, and we like to start with people’s story. And you asked us, well, why am I on this? So maybe you don’t know, but I think you do.
Ross Kenyon: Justify yourself right now.
Christophe Jospe: Justify yourself and take us from the beginning. Do you even care about Reversing Climate Change?
Mark Stevenson: Well, yeah, of course. Because if we don’t, we’re all fucked.
Unknown speaker: That was your one. He told you to get one nodding word. I get one fuck. Oh, no. Oh, no. It’s a trap. Starting over. Paul, kill it. No, I’m just kidding. That’s banter. What’s the expression you guys have? They all joke the Archbishop of Banterbury. Right. Yeah. No, I don’t know that. Oh, you’ve never heard that? No. Okay. So what was... You were dropping all the words. We told you not to. I was justifying myself. Yeah, please. We like to start adversarial, you know? Okay. Fight your way out.
Mark Stevenson: Who am I? I am a reluctant futurist. In that people call me a futurist, but I never called myself a futurist. I am, of course, interested in the future. As Charles Kettering said, my interest is in the future because I’m going to spend the rest of my life there. And as Martin Seligman, the father of positive psychology, says, you know, we shouldn’t What about a young man like Paul?
Unknown speaker: Well, actually, he’s not. He’s actually 804. Oh, no.
Paul Gambill: It’s all the supplements I take.
Unknown speaker: Oh, you’re like an antediluvian man over here.
Mark Stevenson: A few years ago, I guess 10 or 15 years ago, I decided I was asking myself what I wanted to do the rest of my life after my band had disappeared into obscurity and the drummer went to jail and various other things. And I’d also been a crypto kind of technology geek sort of to pay for the guitars. I’d set up sitting on myself saying, what do I want to do the rest of my life? And I realized I wanted to do two things. And the first was make people more literate about music.
You know, it seemed to me that the level of discourse on anything from climate change to the Human Genome Project to gender inequality to the retreat of democracy was pretty crappy and often uninformed. And also I wanted to battle cynicism. I’m a kind of an anti-cynic. You know, cynicism to me is just obedience to the status quo. So I wanted to try and find ways to go, look, there are these problems and there are these solutions and all this stuff out there. And, you know, let’s be pragmatically optimistic about that.
But you can’t do that unless you’re literate about it. And so my first thing I did was become a stand-up comedian to go and talk to.
Unknown speaker: Very practical way to go about it.
Mark Stevenson: Well, you see, most content about these topics is written and performed by geeks for geeks. That’s not a criticism because I’m a geek, right? But it strikes me that I don’t care what your background is. I don’t care in which room you’re sitting, we have sequenced the human genome. Climate change is happening. This is important for you. And I also believe that the more diverse the group that are informed about and involved in battling those things, the better the answers we’ll come up with collectively. Leave it to the people who’ve made decisions so far, which is usually all white rich people.
Well, guess where we are? So doing stand-up was my way of saying, I’m going to teach myself to talk to everybody. You go into a stand-up club and you’re doing a gag about climate change. You’ve got everybody from the bar staff to the local plumber to the CEO of a company, whatever. So it’s a really good way of teaching yourself communication. So I did that. And then because of that, I got asked to write a book. And I wrote a book. Which was a comedy travelogue around the world going, hey, what’s happening?
Basic primer on climate change. But, you know, rather than talk about climate change, I’d go diving with the president of the Maldives at an underwater cabinet meeting. And rather than talk about, you know, soil carbon, you know, from my desk, I’d go to the Australian Outback and meet some cows. And, you know, rather than talk about the human genome, I’d go off to Boston and meet George Church and then I’d have my genome sequence and all that kind of stuff. So it was a comedy travelogue around ideas as well as places.
And then people said, wow, you can really communicate this stuff. Change the way I think. Will you come work with my business? Will you come work with our employees? Will you help us with strategy? And so then slowly I morphed into this futurist guy. And I wrote a second book a few years ago, which is about systems change and how to do it. And that was very popular. I’m writing a third one, The Future of Fairness. Just waiting on a big American broadcaster for a TV series, we hope. My life splits into three things.
The third of it is research, constant going around the world trying to find stuff that’s cool and is making the world better. The second third is consultancy, advisory work, working with organizations, investors, schools, whoever, and trying to get them to be literate about those questions and then answer them well. The last bit is the public-facing stuff, the writing the books, the doing public talks, the bits and bobs of TV, that kind of stuff. And then on top of that, I keep up an artistic practice as well. It’s because I can’t be a good communicator unless you’re also an artist.
So I have a play coming out in the UK next year and an album coming out in January. I still do bits of stand up and write comedy to keep those communications and muscles sort of up to speed.
Unknown speaker: So there are things that you don’t do though, right?
Mark Stevenson: Yeah, hard drugs, gay sex. Not that I have anything against both of those things. It’s just not my bag.
Ross Kenyon: It’s not for you. It’s not your bag. Bits and Bobs, not my bag. We’re in England, ladies and gentlemen.
Christophe Jospe: So you said so much there, and there are many stories. We could do the whole podcast on what you just said. But at Maldives underwater meeting, how did it happen? What were the circumstances?
Mark Stevenson: Well, I wanted to talk about climate change. I thought a really good way to talk about that would be to go to a low-lying island with a really bad emissions problem because that whole economy is pretty much run on tourism. And also the president at the time, the president of the Maldives, had committed the nation to becoming carbon neutral and he was holding an underwater cabinet meeting. To bring attention to this, where they were all going to sign a declaration and take it to some big event. And I thought that’d be a good place to go.
So I phoned them up. And the great thing about the Maldives is, you know, the whole population of the Maldives is about 300,000. So it’s not like phoning up, you know, the White House going, hey, can I chat to Obama? It’s kind of like phoning up Des Moines and saying, you know, can I chat to the mayor? So it’s much easier to get to the president of the Maldives than to get to say, you know, the president of India or Canada. Yeah, I phoned up and I said, yeah, can I come in to be the president?
They said, yeah, why don’t you come to the underwater cabinet meeting? It’d be really cool. You’ll love it. I was like, yeah, okay. And so I ended up there and it was one of the most bizarre experiences of my life. But it was great.
Unknown speaker: What depth were you at?
Mark Stevenson: Like 10 meters or something like that. Because I had to get all the cameras down there. So it was underwater, but it wasn’t like dangerously underwater.
Unknown speaker: And are you kind of all radioed in? Or do you just communicate in bubbles?
Mark Stevenson: Oh, no. Well, the actual meeting itself is all done via sign language. I actually went and interviewed the president later at the presidential palace. But I was at the meeting. I was one of only four people that wasn’t in the government that was in the water. So it was fairly bizarre.
Ross Kenyon: Wow. The only British sign language I know is two fingers. That’s all I’ve got.
Mark Stevenson: And that’s actually French sign language.
Ross Kenyon: Oh, my God. Is that Agincourt? Yeah.
Christophe Jospe: Of course, the Maldives are particularly relevant because I think the tallest point is less than 10 or 20 feet. It’s sort of a foregone conclusion that... The people living in the Maldives will be climate refugees.
Mark Stevenson: It depends because they’re on an atoll. And the great thing about atolls is because they’re kind of based on coral, they can raise with the water. So it depends how fast the water is raising. And in fact, one of the interesting things about the Maldives is that the land mass has been known to increase even with the current level of sea rise we have. It’s more problematic for New York because New York can go anywhere. It can’t raise up. So depending on the speed of the sea level rise, depends on whether they go down or up.
Ross Kenyon: Is it pretty easy for New York to just build up its seawalls or have some sort of system to take care of that? Or is that?
Mark Stevenson: Well, I mean, you know, New York could do that. It’s a very expensive way. You know, the cheapest way to solve all these problems is to start dealing with climate change properly now rather than deal with it later. You know, it’s a bit like a drug addiction. You know, you start off and you spend a small amount on drugs and then you get more and more drugs. And before you know it, yeah, you’ve lost your wife, your house, your family. And you’re going, I wish I’d stopped taking drugs earlier. Yeah.
So, you know, you can go into rehab later and it’ll cost you a fortune and you’ve lost, you know, everything that’s precious to you in the meantime, or you can stop now. So I think the cheapest way to do a climate change, whether you’re in New York or the Moldeese, is to stop emitting carbon.
Ross Kenyon: And we like Reversing Climate Change. That’s kind of what we’re into and what got us really motivated. Just convenient. We’re talking about this then. I think it’s the name of the podcast. Is that right, Paul? That’s the most convenient part.
Christophe Jospe: Yeah. We’re throwing around terms. So... One of them is adaptation, which is New York building seawalls. And the other term is mitigation, which is deal with the root cause of the problem. And ultimately, that comes down to two things. It’s not putting CO2 in the atmosphere and pulling out the excess CO2. And if we can get that right, then it’s solved. Game over. Let’s go solve some other problem. Yeah. But how do you see it, since you have a crystal ball and all? How’s it going to go down, Mike?
Ross Kenyon: Are you talking about his glass eye or what are you mentioning?
Mark Stevenson: No, you’re talking about my testicular surgery, I guess. Oh. You hope to see my crystal balls banging together.
Christophe Jospe: That would be rude to ask. I only think we’re going to lose 25% of our podcast listeners from this episode.
Ross Kenyon: You guys wanted us to interview a comedian. This is what you got. You got to deal with it. All the bits we cut out were really funny.
Paul Gambill: The chaff is left over.
Mark Stevenson: Yeah. So I don’t know how it’s going to go. I have no idea. If we carry on the way we’re going, it’s going to go very, very badly. You know, my job, and I guess your job, is to try and get as much carbon not going into the atmosphere and pull as much back as quickly as possible. And depending on how quickly we bend that curve depends on whether we head for a disaster or a more sustainable world or something in between. So I don’t know how it’s going to play out.
I know that the reason I do what I do is because I believe it’s the biggest game in town. And if we don’t do something about it, Then it’s going to be very bad. So what are you going to do with your life? I talk about the good, the bad and the ugly. So the bad news is everything is broken, including the climate. The good news is it’s all fixable. It’s not like we need any new tools or techniques to do this. You know, all the technology is there, all the talent is there.
And we’re just not organizing ourselves properly at the moment. And the ugly news is, as we are forced to organize ourselves differently and change from extractive economies to regenerative ones, as we move from hierarchies to networks, you know, All that kind of stuff. It’s going to be a bit of a bloodbath for business models, for existing ways of doing governance, for lots of money. And that’s going to be hard. But my job, I feel, is to make that bloodbath slightly shorter and slightly less painful. And if I managed through my efforts to shorten it by one month, I may have saved a million lives.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, we love the approach that’s optimistic. We tend to be pretty optimistic or use the word anti-cynical. Yeah. Which is quite good. Is this similar to like Matt Ridley’s rational optimism? Is it somehow different? I know the lukewarmism thing maybe isn’t your bag either.
Mark Stevenson: Well, I know Matt met him a few times. The optimism for me is optimism of ambition. And then pragmatism of approach. And quite a lot of what passes for future optimists is don’t worry, technology will save us. And that’s not good enough. So for me, it’s much more about having a really bold dream and then working your ass off to go and fix it. But that often means going and talking to people that don’t want to hear it. So I spend a lot of my time sitting with investment houses, talking to them or talking to investors of companies.
Because if the money doesn’t think progressively, if the money doesn’t take climate change seriously, if the money prioritizes short term... economic or financial gain over the top of the long time survival of the species were all dead.
Ross Kenyon: That’s why we love what we’re doing too. We’re trying to make it really easy for that signal to be seen so people can make money off of helping to reverse climate change. And hopefully that draws them into this whole space.
Mark Stevenson: And the good news is, and the research is on this, that companies that think about sustainability outperform the market, both in terms of accounting performance and stock market performance. And the reason they do that is for two reasons. The first is if you’re starting to think about the bigger picture, you’re thinking systemically. So guess what? You’re an outward facing organization. You’re looking at all sorts of different things rather than your current little silo. Therefore, you’re managing yourself better because you’re thinking in systems already.
Ross Kenyon: You’re worried about strategic risk and how to- Yeah, and all that.
Mark Stevenson: So, you know, and climate change is a shareholder value risk, for sure. If you don’t get that right, people like BlackRock are saying now you have to, you know, which is one of the biggest investment houses in the world, $6 trillion under investment. They’re saying, unless you have a climate competent board, we’re going to be on your ass. A, you’re kind of thinking more sustainably. And second, all the best talent wants to work for companies that are sustainable. So you start to attract all the best staff. And those two things over the long term mean, guess what?
Your company is making more money.
Christophe Jospe: There’s a third piece, too. I guess it’s probably more cynical, but consumers reward brands that align with their values. And so if I see a company doing certain things that say, hey, I’m trying to reverse climate change, well, I’m more likely to buy from that brand and it’ll make you more money.
Mark Stevenson: That’s not cynical. That’s incredibly optimistic.
Christophe Jospe: Well, sure. But it just means that your underlying motivation is to sort of pull on the chumps like me who are willing to pay more.
Mark Stevenson: Again, that’s not cynical. Yeah. And actually doing things sustainably actually ends up often being cheaper. So if you’re a company that thinks about sustainability, guess what? You’re reducing your water waste, you’re reducing your electricity bill. That’s actually good for your bottom line too. So that makes a perfect amount of sense. Smart businesses get this. Investment funds, I’m really happy about this because me and lots of other people have been banging on the investors for years. Just seen in the last three or four months, three large investment houses launch investment funds where the criteria that they use for investment are...
Does this investment move the sustainable development goals forward? So that’s the investment criteria, is this SDG friendly? And that’s great. And I think that’s the thin end of a much bigger wedge that’s coming. It’s all moving that way because people have realized that climate change and other things like income inequality are starting to cost serious money. And if we don’t solve them, we’ll have mass civil unrest. I mean, Gaylord Nelson said that great thing, didn’t he? The economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment, not the other way around.
So you can short term, you know, get a bit more money. But if long term, you’re destroying the underlying operating system of humanity, then there is no market view to make money from. And the smart guys are getting that now. And I think it’s also because we’ve been talking about climate change and sustainability for 30, 40 years now. And there’s people getting into positions of power in large organizations that grew up with that sort of awareness. And some of them are smart enough and brave enough to battle against the world funded status quo that they’ve inherited.
Christophe Jospe: I want to throw a wrench in it.
Mark Stevenson: Go on then. Mm-hmm.
Christophe Jospe: Similarly, I mean, I like the SDGs, the Sustainable Development Goals. There are 17 of them. United Nations. This is the United Nations. I think Jeff Sachs is, does he want to take credit for sort of coming up with some of these original thoughts? I don’t know.
Mark Stevenson: He did the Millennium Villages, right? I don’t know. I know. But I mean, you know, you’re absolutely right that in the short term, doing the right thing often costs more money. And therefore your competitors can kind of go, great, well, you go and do the good thing and we’ll eat your market because we can sell at a better margin. We’re not going to take that cost. As I say, long term, that doesn’t pan out. Short term, it does. Long term, it doesn’t. So short term, you can definitely make some more money by being the bad guy.
Long term, and there are stacks of research that backs this up, you will lose.
Unknown speaker: Producer Paul, you desperately.
Paul Gambill: Well, to what Christophe just said, I think there are some other factors at play, which is that when you look at the cap and trade schemes that have been implemented, they’re often only targeting specific industries. So like you look at California, that’s mostly say energy utility. I don’t know, I’m sort of guessing here, but I wonder if... If there is a difference between the way that these energy utilities look at investment in more sustainable infrastructure and the idea of a major global multinational brand investing in sustainability air quotes as a sort of practice.
Mark Stevenson: But there are stacks of companies out there that have been carbon neutral for a long time now. I mean, Microsoft’s been carbon neutral since 2012, doesn’t make a big noise about it. There are 411 companies that have signed up to moving to science-based targets, of which over 100 of them now had their targets ratified and saying, this is what you have to do in order to do your bit to do with climate change. And you can criticize all these things, but we’re definitely moving in the right direction 10 years ago.
And the idea of even suggesting that would have been considered madness. It’s a cultural battle where doing the right thing becomes so normal that doing the wrong thing becomes a cost. And we have to go through that transition over the next 20 years.
Paul Gambill: I’ll give you another example. I was talking to a sustainability director at an auto manufacturer about a week ago. I won’t name because she said that they actually specifically don’t want to advertise that they are carbon neutral because that would go against their brand. But they are. They care about it. But they care deeply about it and they invest deeply in it, but they don’t really see the marketing advantage from that.
Mark Stevenson: Wow, I think that’s really weak of them.
Paul Gambill: The reasons she gave were interesting. I was impressed at the way that she laid out her case. But I just think it’s fascinating and interesting that like, I mean, when we talk about the demand that’s going to exist for the carbon removal certificates in our marketplace, it’s often driven by corporations wanting to be able to report in their corporate social responsibility reports and so on to like make this public case. It’s a PR thing. And so to have a company say, yeah, we’re doing all this, but we don’t really want to talk about it is like it’s turning the whole thing on its head.
Ross Kenyon: They’re so cool they don’t even have to.
Mark Stevenson: Yeah, it is an interesting story. I still think that was them. I mean, I guess it’s probably Harley Davidson and I guess they should probably just say it’s cool to be carbon neutral. It’s as cool as wearing leather and riding a Harley, you know, and if you want to be even cooler and harder, you’re a carbon neutral biker.
Ross Kenyon: I’m picturing this. It doesn’t sound very, very hard. I think it’s mostly like wealthy old guys who ride around on it. I don’t know if it would be as good.
Christophe Jospe: So speaking of not talking about things or not being allowed to talk about things, Mark, you’ve signed a number of non-disclosure agreements.
Mark Stevenson: No, I haven’t.
Christophe Jospe: Let’s break them all on the podcast.
Mark Stevenson: I haven’t signed anything. What are you talking about?
Christophe Jospe: Let’s talk in wide abstractions. We as a globe emit 52 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent each year. That needs to go to zero. It actually should go negative by some point as soon as possible. And that means lots of things need to scale quickly. Yeah. And we need to do things differently. Wasn’t that the name of your book?
Mark Stevenson: It was, yeah.
Christophe Jospe: Yeah. The second book, We Do Things Differently.
Mark Stevenson: That’s right, yeah.
Christophe Jospe: Good book.
Mark Stevenson: I thought so.
Christophe Jospe: We’ll put a link, an affiliate link in our show notes so we can make some money off of you.
Mark Stevenson: Well, yeah. That’s what other people are, so you might as well join the party. We can do that.
Christophe Jospe: But here’s the question. I kind of want to do some hand waves and talk about these sorts of solutions that you see scaling rapidly that have certain attributes that you really like.
Mark Stevenson: Well, there’s a number. The first thing, if you’re talking about not putting stuff into the atmosphere, renewables are going crazy and people don’t realise quite how crazy they’re going. They’re moving very fast. If you go back and look at every prediction for network technologies, all the predictions are wrong. If you go back and look at the predictions for mobile phones, all the McKinsey’s and the KPMG’s saying, oh, it’ll be 10% growth this year. And it was like 70%. And the next year, it’ll be 12% growth. And it was like 100%.
Well, it’ll still only be 14%. That’s another 100%. They just keep getting it wrong. And the same has been happening with solar and wind. People keep saying, oh, well, you know, blah. And BP just said last week, you know, yeah, we got our solar predictions wrong six years in a row. It’s supposed to be an energy gun. Because it’s a cultural thing. They just can’t see... That stuff and how it works, how it multiplies, the battery technology is getting really cheap, all that kind of stuff. So I’m really happy about that.
There is some stuff that I can’t talk about in the liquid fuel space that is extraordinarily exciting because if you can replace the existing fuels which are made out of carbon taken from millions of years ago and replace it with carbon taken from another source that is renewed every day, And I only say that much. Then you have a very interesting way of doing things. Because it can fit an existing infrastructure, can very quickly disintermediate the old player.
Ross Kenyon: It’s still liquid fuel.
Paul Gambill: Yeah. We’re never going to get rid of liquid fuels. We’ll always need those.
Mark Stevenson: Liquid fuels are great. I mean, they’ve got such energy density. Exactly. So the question is, can we make them from carbon sources that are old carbon sources?
Ross Kenyon: You’re so careful.
Mark Stevenson: I am careful.
Christophe Jospe: Yeah. And it packs about 100 times the punch per weight of a battery, which is a big deal. And that’s why we fly airplanes with liquid fuels. The way it works is you can take carbon dioxide and water and zap both of them with electricity. That’ll split the C’s, O’s, and H’s into the building blocks to make methanol or certain variants of jet fuel. And if your source of carbon comes from the atmosphere, it’s carbon neutral. If it is a waste that would have gone into the atmosphere anyway, well, it’s carbon reductive, which is...
Unknown speaker: Sounds like an insult.
Christophe Jospe: Yeah, well, I think it’s better than not because I don’t know. If you’re a gigawatt coal-fired power plant, just to kind of put this in scale, you’re emitting 20,000 tonnes of CO2 a day, which is a lot of CO2. And now the question is, are you going to not emit that 20,000 tonnes, which is probably a good option because then you don’t need the coal. Are you going to store it, which then makes you a carbon neutral source of energy, which is also good. Or are you going to give that carbon dioxide a second life and let it ultimately end up in the atmosphere?
And is there a value of tacking on a technology which can help defray the capture costs and get you along the way and advance toward carbon reductive liquid fuels? For my money, if... I’m king of the world and am able to say, let’s mitigate as much as possible. We need to get to getting that source of carbon out of the atmosphere as soon as possible, even if it doesn’t make economic sense.
Mark Stevenson: This is all depending on timing, because if renewables are going at the speed they are, if they carry on doubling the rate they are, that coal-fired power station will be shutting down in five or six years. I mean, eons... For instance, they’d just refit all their carbon coal-fired power plants, you know, a few years ago.
Unknown speaker: With capture technology?
Mark Stevenson: No, no, just to refit them to go for the next 20 years and update the technology. And I had an inside man inside Eon and he said, we looked at the figures and we realized we’ll never make a profit out of these things. Because removals are moving so fast. So Eon’s now split itself into two companies, one which is the Bad Bank, which has got all the fossil fuel stuff, and another company which is all renewables. Because they’re looking at the fossil fuels and going, this is a liability, this stuff is getting less and less profitable, we have to do, you know, Do we spend a lot of time saying, let’s develop technologies to capture the carbon from a coal-fired power plant?
Or do we say, no, let’s take that money and invest it in renewables harder and faster so that thing makes no economic sense? And depending on where in the world, there are different arguments for doing one or the other.
Paul Gambill: This is the term stranded assets that we hear thrown around a lot.
Ross Kenyon: You’re depreciating this asset over 40 years or whatever the life of this plant is. And then what do you do if the tech changes on you in that time or you get a carbon tax or something happens that ruins your business model? What happens to those? But now you’re saying companies just through market signals are realizing that they can’t compete with renewables and that’s just happening through the market. That’s a beautiful thing when that happens. It’s bad for those companies, at least temporarily.
Mark Stevenson: It’s a beautiful thing because then you don’t have to have the argument about climate change. So towns like Georgetown, Central Texas, 60,000 Trump voters, one of the most conservative, reddest towns in America. So I’m guessing this is not a place where climate change is big on the agenda and that’s not a thing that they’re particularly concerned about. The whole town has gone over to renewables. They’re right next to the oil fields because it’s cheaper. And the other great thing about renewables that nobody talks about Is that the cost is stable.
Dale Ross, who’s the mayor of the town, says, I know what my electricity bill is going to be 20 years from now, which means that I can invest in confidence for things that previously I wouldn’t have been able to. Because one of the problems of the world economy is the oil price keeps going up and down, which makes it hard to predict whether you’re an investor or a government or a company doing strategy. If you don’t know what the energy price is going to be five years from now, it’s hard to think more than five years ahead.
And with the oil price, you don’t know what it’s going to be a month from now, potentially. With renewables, you go, I know exactly what the energy price is going to be. I mean, economists don’t agree on much. The collective noun for economists is a disagreement, right? Yeah. But there’s a few things they agree on. The one thing they seem to agree on is trade is good. The more we trade with each other, the less we kill each other. This is a good thing. Low energy prices are good because if you reduce the cost of energy, you reduce the cost of everything else, which is good for the economy.
We can afford all sorts of things we couldn’t afford previously. And stable energy prices are good. These are the three things they agree on because if you have stability, you’ve got the ability to plan long term. All economists agree on those three things, which is about the only three things they do agree on. And renewables bring that stuff.
Ross Kenyon: The joke I’ve always heard is if you get five economists in a room, you’ll get six opinions. Say your line from Bastiat.
Unknown speaker: When goods cross borders, soldiers don’t.
Mark Stevenson: It’s hard to attack your trading partner without hurting yourself.
Ross Kenyon: It seems like we’re doing that right now as Americans, these tariffs.
Mark Stevenson: You’re going through a little moment. But actually, I mean, this is a more general point in my work about, you know, lots of liberals up in arms about, you know, Trump and over here, lots of liberals up in arms about Brexit. And it’s kind of like, well, there’s been a fundamental failure of the government system because what you’ve been offering the people for the last 200 years is one of two buttons. More of the same or more of the same slightly differently. And for a lot of people, it isn’t working for them anymore.
Their house prices are going up. They’re getting less and less money. They’re seeing their education or their health insurance go through the roof. Their kids’ jobs don’t look as secure as they’d like them to be. The education system is still treating them like it’s the 1950s. You know, so if something like Trump comes along or Brexit vote comes along, and even if you don’t like Trump, you might go, well, if the option is more the same or break the system, this guy looks like he’s going to give it a good old kicking.
So we have to rethink it properly. You know, a lot of people will pick that. And this is one of these other fundamental problems. You know, we’re moving from worlds of... An economy of scale, which is what a political party is, to one which must be governed in a much more networked way. And so if Trump and Brexit and what’s happening in Catalonia and various other places at the moment are finally a signal that gets the progressive liberals to go, actually, you know, we dicked around with democracy. We had the World Wide Web since 1989, and our version of democracy is to vote once every four years for two assholes, both of whom we disagree with, from a selection of two or three families.
That’s not democracy. Democracy should be democratizing things, health, wealth, education, opportunity. It doesn’t do that. So it’s not democracy. So when you, as the land and the free go, we’re protecting democracy. No, you’re protecting a facsimile of democracy from the 19th century. The only thing that Trump does is come along and kick that over and make you think more serious about what a democracy should look like. Maybe that’s a good thing. Sorry, that’s a bit of a rant.
Unknown speaker: I just want to slow clap that.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, we get nervous when more like the mainstream institutions that Americans have lost some degree of legitimacy. And I imagine probably the same in the UK, especially when you have like Corbyn or Nigel Farage, who are like, you know, pretty big outsiders, I guess you could say to like more conventional like the Torah.
Paul Gambill: In the US, I think Gallup has been tracking this for like 40 years or so, and we’re at an all-time low for Americans’ trust in large-scale institutions.
Mark Stevenson: It’s the same. Evaporation of trust across all institutions that govern society, and for good reason, and for very good reason, because for a large percentage of the population, those institutions aren’t delivering. And this doesn’t go along left or right lines. This goes along the lines of, are you one of the 10% that kind of works in the system and profits from it? Or are you the others? So it’s not left or right. This is, am I poor or am I getting rich? And now it’s just getting worse and worse. So it’s time for a readjustment.
And climate change will be all part of that.
Ross Kenyon: Have you read now Ferguson’s latest?
Mark Stevenson: No. I don’t count time to read anything. I’m too busy trying to write books and I have a two-year-old.
Ross Kenyon: Oh, God. I mean, you could have just said the second one and we would have understood. Yeah. His book is The Tower and the Square, I believe, but it’s about hierarchy versus networks. Yeah.
Mark Stevenson: I mean, it’s inevitable. I mean, renewables, again, it’s a network solution. It can now, because of the technology, again, it’s good, outperform the hierarchies. It used to make sense to get a whole bunch of stuff, stick it in a big power station and burn it. Now it makes no sense. And from a national security sense, it makes no sense because, you know, you want to take out the eastern seaboard. Well, you only have three or four targets at the moment. You can effectively do that. With a renewables-based system, America is much more secure from the energy perspective.
Paul Gambill: In college, I worked at a sustainability think-take research center. Sort of as a joke, one day, one of the professors gave me an assignment to figure out how to take out the Phoenix power grid or like what would be the biggest fear from like a terror attack or something like that. And after doing a little bit of research, what we found was that the simplest and most effective method is to take mylar balloons and let them go underneath power lines in a few strategic locations and boom, the whole grid’s taken down.
You don’t have to go after the heavily fortified and protected power plants. You just break the lines in a few places with cheap materials and it’s gone.
Unknown speaker: That’s the weak link, huh?
Paul Gambill: Yeah, this actually happens all the time in California. Like people will be having a birthday party or something like that and they let these balloons go.
Ross Kenyon: People always blame Enron, but the balloon company is looking at you. You know, those balloon companies are owned by ISIS, right? Oh, no. It’s a long con. How about that long game? Strategic investments, I’d say.
Christophe Jospe: So, you don’t have time to read books, but you do have time to calculate your lifetime carbon emissions and then pay to offset it. And actually, that was when The first time we spoke, I think it was in September when Paul and I and Ross and a few others on our team were competing in a hackathon and talking to customers, quote unquote, who might use the Nori product. And it turns out that you fit a category of one certain type, which is an individual buyer who wants to calculate all of his emissions and then do something about it.
We call them suckers.
Ross Kenyon: Right.
Christophe Jospe: It’s because I suck the air.
Ross Kenyon: That’s what I meant to say.
Christophe Jospe: Can you talk to us about that experience? What went well with it? What motivated you to do it? And what, as one of the things that I remember you saying, is you tried to get others to want to do it too. Yeah. With limited success.
Mark Stevenson: Actually, I’m doing a lot better now. I did it because it’s the right thing to do. If I’m going to predicate my career on trying to make the world a more sustainable place, then how can my life be something that isn’t sustainable? How can I have made more of a Problem than what I’ve solved. So, you know, and I’m just looking at this technique now for going plastic neutral as well and all this kind of thing. I think it’s just, I would have no credibility. If I’m going to walk into an investment house and say, you’ve got to take climate change seriously and here’s a way to do it and I’m going to help you.
If they turn around and I haven’t offset my carbon emissions, I haven’t offset my family’s carbon emissions. If I’m not practicing what I’m preaching, then I’m basically your average consultant, which is saying one thing and doing another. I don’t want to be that guy. It’s just a personal thing. I don’t think I could be a coherent individual talking about the need to deal with climate change if I wasn’t doing the bare minimum, as far as I can see, which is offset my own emissions. It’s to be an untenable moral position.
Christophe Jospe: So how does that work? You plug some numbers into a calculator, you figure out where you...
Mark Stevenson: Yeah, yeah, I worked. I mean, the way I did, I mean, because it’s very hard to do. So what I do is the World Bank has a fairly good methodology for per capita emissions. So what I do is I go and look at those historically, and they were higher in the past, and they’re slowly dropping. So I think, okay, let’s go and add all those up for all the years I’ve been alive. Okay. That’s an average citizen. Okay. I’m not an average citizen because the work I do took quite a lot of travel.
I’m all over the place. So I then go and find the most stringent calculator, which includes, for instance, radiative forces and stuff of all the travel I do. I add that in every year as well. And I then add those two figures together and I stick an extra 20% to make sure that I haven’t forgotten anything or whatever. And then I offset that amount.
Christophe Jospe: Just for our listeners, you threw out a really important term, which is radiative forcing. And that’s because that’s basically, that’s the greenhouse effect when you have more carbon in the atmosphere. And when you’re flying, the planes are emitting carbon dioxide closer to the atmosphere where it stays there.
Mark Stevenson: So basically- Yeah, depending on what the gas is, where it’s released at what time and how long it’s been there, you have to add these multipliers to account for it. Because the more, for instance, greenhouse gas there is in the atmosphere, it can encourage more greenhouse gas into the atmosphere, so it has this doubling effect.
Christophe Jospe: Great. And so you came up with a number for your lifetime emissions and your family’s lifetime emissions. And then you said, okay, now I’m going to go pay for something. What did you pay for? How was that experience?
Mark Stevenson: How was the experience? Well, it was really simple. I, you know, made a payment and the money left my bank account and then I, you know, Was instantly smug at every party I went to from that point on.
Unknown speaker: It’s the main benefit, right?
Mark Stevenson: Yeah, it’s instant smugness. But one of the things I do with my clients is kind of, let’s go and look at the average emissions, say, you know, we’re here in the UK, average emissions by the World Bank’s method. And again, you can argue with that and you might not say it’s hard, but let’s just stick with their figure. I think it’s about seven tonnes now per capita. You can offset seven tonnes per capita using Stanford trees, which is my preferred offsetter because they’re the You know, UN mandated. It’s all accounted for very well.
They invest in really good projects with the money. You can offset seven tonnes for 55 pounds, I think. That’s 15 pence a day for instant smugness. And bragging rights, you know, it’s like, you know, if you want to date somebody, you know, it’s like, well, you should date me. I’m carbon neutral.
Paul Gambill: I’ll add that to my Tinder profile.
Mark Stevenson: So one of the things we’ve done with quite a lot of my clients is what they’ve done now is they now offer a better benefit to all their employees. And the benefit is carbon emissions as an average citizen offset. And I’ve got loads of companies to do that. So now there are literally tens of thousands of employees out there who are having their average emissions offset. And the companies, there’s four things they’re going to say, as an employee, I see that as real benefits. I feel good about that. I feel good that my company takes this seriously and is helping me offset my emissions.
And now you want to expand that. Well, how many family members have you got? And you want to add that as an extra benefit. If every company offset the average emissions of all their employees, that go a long way to dealing with some of the problems.
Christophe Jospe: Absolutely. And what you’re describing is a voluntary market, which is the exact market that we’re trying to enter into. We’re distinguishing ourselves by saying many of the offset projects that are sold, Stanford Trees, and obviously part of the clean development mechanism with the UI. And so that brings up a question is if we’re really just talking about canceling out the emission. In the most efficient way possible. And this is kind of on the air feedback to Nori that we’d like. Because that’s all we’re doing. We’re able to track co-benefits and we obviously want them to happen and we’re picking things that will naturally evolve good co-benefits.
But all you’re getting paid for is putting the carbon away.
Mark Stevenson: If you want to sell anything, you’ve got to sell a good story. Just offsetting the emissions is not something you can talk about very well. But if you say, by the way, as well as doing this, this conservation project is going through the roof. You’ve lifted this village out of poverty because now I’ll be able to help them invest in agroecology with proven soil carbon benefits or whatever. You know, people do not move because they’ve been convinced intellectually. Unless you move the heart, the rest of you won’t move at all.
And so all storytelling is about moving the heart. And then when you’ve moved the heart, the brain will follow.
Paul Gambill: Ross and I are big fans of Jonathan Haidt. Do you know him?
Mark Stevenson: No, I’ve not met him. I know his brother, Jonathan Shallow.
Ross Kenyon: Man, you had to try so hard for that joke.
Mark Stevenson: Too hard. I was waiting patiently. Did you hear me for reaching for you?
Ross Kenyon: I’m sorry about that. Is it of height? Depth? Jonathan, depth, what is it? Missed opportunity. We’re better comics. That’s just how it goes.
Paul Gambill: We crowdsourced it. Yeah. He’s a moral psychology researcher. He has a book that came out in 2014 called The Righteous Mind, Why Good People Are Divided on Issues of Politics and Religion. And he has something like 25, 30 years of empirical research behind this. And what he’s found is that there tend to be six different categories of values that all people across all cultures believe in some level. And from an American political perspective, at least, there are six of them. So they are caring, fairness, liberty, authority. Sanctity. And every single time I tell this story, I forget what the sixth one is.
Forgetting is this. I never lived in the first place. Right, right. Conservatives in America tend to care about all six of these roughly equally. They hold them in equal esteem. Liberals tend to care about caring and fairness. And libertarians tend to care about liberty and fairness. Basically, all of our disagreements boil down to these things. It’s actually also one of the reasons why we see Republicans who are the party of conservatives in the US, they tend to dominate all levels of government, state and local levels, as well as controlling Congress and Mm-hmm.
We oftentimes make moral decisions before we’ve even had enough time neurologically to consider them. Haidt uses the metaphor of a rider on an elephant in that the elephant is our values and our brain is the rider. And you can sort of steer the elephant, but it’s also a very large animal and it’s going to do what it wants to do. I think it’s a David Hume idea.
Mark Stevenson: You know, if you want to see somebody who’s completely prejudiced, look in the mirror. That’s what I always say. You know, it’s kind of like... No, we’re evolved. We’re like way above that.
Ross Kenyon: We have a podcast. Yeah, we have a podcast. We’re smart.
Mark Stevenson: But it’s true. And we’re all governed by our emotions first. And the brain does the PR for what the heart has already decided. That’s not me saying that we shouldn’t have the facts. Once the heart has decided, you want all the facts to back it up, especially if you’re going to a room full of investors, because you want to feel I’m uncomfortable. But unless you can tell a compelling story about the truth, which is what I’ve spent my life to doing, as I believe the truth to be, and I believe these to be truths about climate change and equality and whatever.
Anyway, one of the things about politics, when you say that about the difference between conservatives and liberals, is the thing I find in my work all the time is that people divided by politics, divided by whether they see themselves as left or right or whatever, are soon united around a project. You give them something to build together and they stop arguing about whether they like Trump or Clinton and they start building a school. And guess what? They find out they agree on all those six things and actually they have almost zero disagreements about where the streetlight needs to be or how many kids need to be in this class or where they should cite the waterhole or whatever it is.
Paul Gambill: I often like to say that if you describe it accurately enough, we all more or less want the same outcomes. And the disagreements are around the means of achieving those outcomes. But we don’t discuss them that way.
Mark Stevenson: We have these rather ridiculous things called political parties whose jobs just divide us around the things we agree on.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. It’s so funny to get into a team and yell at people though. That I think is the most human thing of all.
Mark Stevenson: Yeah. But do that, you know, on the sports field. Don’t do it with your legislature. Don’t do it when you’re running the government. Okay, fucking grow up.
Paul Gambill: Yeah. That is the point of sports. When I was younger in college, I thought I was sort of more intellectually evolved and I stopped following sports. I had been an athlete growing up and really liked following my different sports teams and so on. And then I realized that there was this like hole missing in me. And in my later 20s, I went back to and I sort of religiously follow hockey now. And it serves that purpose for me. It’s a very low stakes competition and tribalism. That’s just good fun.
Mark Stevenson: Yeah. You know, you need to release that. But, you know, the idea that we still run our government based on the idea of whether, you know, if one team gets slightly more people in one room than another, and then they decide what happens and one team wins and one team loses. It’s not a grown up way of doing stuff. It’s just ridiculous. And this is why, you know, liberals complaining about, you know, as I said, Trump and Brexit or whatever, it’s like, well, when you were in government, when the hell did you get around to creating a proper, inclusive, networked system of government that’s fit for this century and speaks to everybody’s values rather than the ones that you particularly like?
Gauntlet, Throne.
Christophe Jospe: Yeah, so you’ve now used the word networked twice.
Mark Stevenson: I’m sorry.
Christophe Jospe: No, that’s okay.
Mark Stevenson: If I use it three times, I’ll be able to link them all together.
Christophe Jospe: Yeah. It’s like Beetlejuice. It’s obviously important. What does it mean? What does it mean to be a networked society?
Mark Stevenson: All these terms of caveats. But in the past, what happened was we ran things on hierarchies. Somebody got enough power or we moved enough stuff into one place. Teaching is a hierarchy. You get all the students into one room, you stick a teacher in front of them and you teach at them. It’s a great way to teach. It’s a very inefficient way to learn.
Unknown speaker: And to control a population.
Mark Stevenson: Yeah. Power is a great example. The most efficient way to do things was get a bunch of coal or oil or whatever and burn it in one central place and then send that out to people. Now a network approach goes actually using new technologies or new ways of thinking. We can now outperform that old system. So it’s not like saying we’re doing it differently for the I’m sure there’ll be a good few industries. 20 years time, actually, this is probably the best way to do this. It’s probably, yeah, straight on hierarchy.
You need somebody to tell you what to do. Brain surgery. I’m not suggesting that’s going to be a networked kind of solution. I think you probably need a surgeon who knows what he’s doing, for instance. But, you know, marketing, running the government, education, these, I think, will be network solutions. Just because the technology is now allowing the networks to outperform the previous technology, which was all based around centralized power.
Ross Kenyon: Preston Pyshenko And then assembly lines became a thing. And then just now the technology is coming around where production could become decentralized again with 3D printers and things such as that. And Etsy stores. And Etsy and stuff like that. And we might be seeing decentralization just through the way the material economy actually works.
Mark Stevenson: Okay, well, anyway. But what it can do is it’s a networked way of doing proof, essentially. And we used to do proof actually via a hierarchical system called trust, which is I give it to a third party, like a lawyer or a bank, and I trust them enough that when they do this transaction for me, they’re verifying all that stuff. That’s a hierarchy. Okay. Whereas the blockchain, because of the way it works, is a network solution. And in many cases, if we get it right, we use the right technology, it may turn out that’s a much more efficient, transparent, quicker way of doing stuff and removes a lot of friction from the transactions we do with each other.
In some cases, it just won’t work. It just won’t work because it won’t be the solution we need. You’ll find out in lots of applications, actually, it’s the trust that’s a really important thing. The fact I do trust this person and do know this person is the key thing. I need to keep that. But say in transactional stuff, cryptocurrency, whatever, blah, blah. I don’t need the bank. But I still have to trust the software. That’s the thing that people don’t talk about. I still have to trust the software. And I’m a pretty good judge.
I would like to think of, you know, if I hire a lawyer and I work with them for a while, I like to think, I trust this girl. Okay, she’s good. I know what she’s doing. I’m not a great software auditor. I don’t know whether that blockchain system is any good or not, because I don’t know.
Paul Gambill: That is a sort of weird result of open source software movements. I mean, ultimately, blockchains, especially proof of work blockchains come down to do you trust that math works? And the answer should be yes. But in practice, not. Yeah. Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: There’s still a trusted element. The term for this is trustless, but of course you have to trust the software too.
Unknown speaker: It’s referring to- I hate that term. It’s trustful.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, but you don’t have to trust a centralized institution or a person. But of course there are applications where you probably want that as well, but there’s a tendency now to Well, I think you still want to trust institutions, but again, it’s what I was saying.
Paul Gambill: You want to trust these proxies, but you can have multiple proxies, whereas right now we’re dependent on single centralized institutions. We hope. Yes. But there’s a pretty long track record of this way of operating being around. Like blockchains are new since 2008, but open source software has been around since the beginning of computing.
Mark Stevenson: Yeah. And there are certain things that, as I say, it will become, yeah, of course, this is a blockchain open source solution. And this one over here? No, actually, I still need my lawyer. Yeah. And we’ll find that out over the next 20 years.
Ross Kenyon: You should have barristers on the blockchain. I got to go to the patent office. Okay.
Christophe Jospe: Yeah, I think we’re kind of getting to bring this back to Nori and a question that you asked before we started recording, which is central to Nori, which is, well, how do you verify carbon removal activity?
Mark Stevenson: Let me ask that again. How do you verify carbon removal activity?
Christophe Jospe: I put the words in your mouth, didn’t I?
Mark Stevenson: I’m actually tied to a chair listener and I’m being thrown cards. My wife is held at gunpoint in the room next door. Help.
Christophe Jospe: So we’ve brought this up.
Mark Stevenson: No, tell me, how do you verify?
Christophe Jospe: Well, now I won’t answer. We have brought this up on past podcasts, but it keeps evolving. And what it comes down to is it depends by methodology by methodology. So when I say methodology, that’s what are the accounting practices that relate to the specific way we’re taking CO2 out of the atmosphere. And when you do certain things, it is possible to create a model that creates dynamic carbon removal processes. Mm-hmm. If we know where that farmer is and we know a soil reference core, and so basically we know what type of soil that is, it’s possible to create a model to say, do these things and I know you’ll have X amount of carbon put into the soil.
And these are models that are getting improved frequently with better and better data.
Mark Stevenson: You’re working with Peter Bick at ASU then on that, I’m guessing. Because there’s a lot of argument about how much carbon goes into which source at which point, and the science is not in on that.
Christophe Jospe: It’s not in on that. And actually, what that generates for this methodology are carbon removal certificates. Which then need to be ground truthed with real data. So we use practices that are verified by performances. So how does that work? You now have done these practices as a farmer and you get a whole bunch of carbon removal certificates and then you take those carbon removal certificates to the Nori marketplace and you sell them. When you sell them, you will get paid with Nori tokens when they reach the top of the queue, at which point those carbon removal certificates are immediately retired and the Nori tokens are transferred to your account.
They go in two flavors. One are Nori tokens, which are immediately tradable. And the second is in a restricted account, which is released in a tiered structure as more data comes through the system and we have more certainty that there’s carbon in the soil and then they get released. And that kind of is a very high level. What it enables is the measurement devices, the internet of things like Waze to basically drive down the cost of verification. We start very much like what the traditional carbon offset markets do in order to have a verifier basically operate.
But as quickly as possible, we’re moving to relying on machines and not humans to do a lot of these transactions.
Mark Stevenson: Yeah. And, you know, we’d hope that 20 years from now, every farm knows exactly what its soil carbon is because it’s reporting back to some sort of dashboard and we know where, I mean, moving the grasslands back to proper grazing is one the biggest opportunities we have for taking carbon out of the atmosphere. It’s five billion acres of that stuff that’s been badly managed at the moment.
Christophe Jospe: And it’s better meat too.
Mark Stevenson: Yeah. It tastes better. Yeah. I mean, half the carbon in the atmosphere has come from the soil. People don’t realize that. It’s healthier for you too. Yeah. And also if we carry on the level of soil erosion we’ve got, we’ve got 60 harvests left. So this is where we have to get the soil turned back on ASAP.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I just read Dirt, The Erosion of Civilizations by Dave Montgomery. Yeah, we’ve had him on the podcast too. I never realized how important soil was to the civilizational sine wave. I guess that’s what I meant earlier instead of escrow. That’s a good time to correct myself there. It was a sine wave.
Mark Stevenson: It comes back down. There’s a Chinese proverb, which is something like, man for all his pretensions of sophistication, it only survives due to the fact that we have six inches of topsoil and it rains. Yeah. And we’re eroding the soil like crazy at the moment. So, you know, I mean, it costs the US economy $44 billion a year in soil erosion costs because the soil gets less fertile. You know, it’s 17 tonnes per hectare per year at the moment.
Ross Kenyon: That’s why we’re so excited about regenerative agriculture And what you’re talking about with renewables becoming cheaper, the conflict over climate change in the economy, it basically disappears too. If you can make money on it or it’s cheaper as a consumer, people don’t need to fight, oh, I want to drive my Hummer around or whatever. They’re hitting the pocketbook and they’re happy about it. And I think that same thing is going to happen with agriculture here too. We’re hoping to speed it along, but it’s already happening. Do we have any idea how many people are practicing right now in the US?
Yeah.
Mark Stevenson: It’s about 1% of farmland.
Ross Kenyon: So there’s a lot to do still.
Mark Stevenson: And there’s an equivalence of moving over to agroecology and crops as well. That’s been proven massively to move people out of poverty because now they can use a technology that doesn’t cost anything to double or triple It’s great. It’s all carrot. It’s no stick. It’s a good way to go. Yeah, unless, of course, you’re a person who sells fertilizer. Or you’re a person who’s been selling the machinery that supports monocultures. And those are very powerful interests. And the status quo is very well funded. And it’s very difficult to get somebody to understand something when their salary depends on them not understanding it.
And unfortunately, those are the people with all the money at the moment, which is why moving the investors to start thinking about, okay, will we be investing in agroecology rather than fertilizer sales is really important. I’ve just been working with a private bank in the UK, which is, you know, it’s where the super rich go. And we’re starting to work with them on going, you know, they’re talking about philanthropy and we’re going, philanthropy is really very well and nice, but actually philanthropy doesn’t mean shit unless you start to invest your money properly.
Unknown speaker: And how did the Rothschilds take that?
Mark Stevenson: Well, it wasn’t the Rothschilds. It’s not, I’m dead now. It wasn’t them, but they’re taking it surprisingly well. I think we’re reaching a tippy point, certain the way that these stories are getting across now, they’ve reached the money. And when you reach the money, everything else follows. There’s a great line in Game of Thrones. I think Tyrion says it’s, oh, you want to have a revolution without the rich? Good luck. So when the rich get it, and they are slowly, not enough of them, but enough that they are the cool ones, the leaders now.
I think we’ve got a rapid transition over the next 10 or 15 years where the money starts to get it.
Ross Kenyon: What should we cover? This has felt a bit like we all had a pint together down at the pub, but if only we had, that would have been so much more fun than this. Yeah, tea? You should have just gone right for the lager.
Mark Stevenson: I should have got the scotch out.
Ross Kenyon: Is there something else that we really should cover you want to tell us about or we wanted to ask about? No, he’s saying no. And it just killed the whole vibe? All the natural organic progression of the conversation?
Mark Stevenson: No, I think that was quite nice.
Unknown speaker: Yeah. Don’t you? I enjoyed it. Yeah, I enjoyed it too.
Ross Kenyon: So many dovetails. We just went all over the place with all of our interests.
Mark Stevenson: Can I put my clothes back on now?
Christophe Jospe: I think we all should on that note.
Ross Kenyon: Thanks, Mike. Thank you.
