Sustainability Symposium 2024: Existential Solutions - Jeremy Rifkin

00:00:04:05 - 00:00:30:19
Mike Collignon: All right. Our final speaker of the day is a familiar face for those who have been dedicated green builder media fans. Jeremy Rifkin spoke at the sustainability symposium that was held in Orlando in 2017. And then we did a webinar together a couple of years after that. Now, for those of you who aren't familiar with his work, Jeremy Rifkin is an economist, social theorist, writer, public speaker, political advisor, and activist.

00:00:30:20 - 00:01:00:11
Mike Collignon: He's the author of 21 bestselling books about the impact of scientific and technological changes on the economy, the workforce, society, and the environment. He's been an advisor to the leadership of the European Union since the turn of the century. In fact, Rifkin New York Times bestselling book The Third Industrial Revolution provided the blueprint for the economic transition to a post carbon ecological society across the European Union.

00:01:00:17 - 00:01:19:20
Mike Collignon: Now, Jeremy is going to show us how the age of progress is on a death spiral, and a nascent age of resilience is going to fundamentally transform the way that humans will live and flourish on a rewilding Earth. So without further ado, let's have Jeremy join us here.

00:01:19:22 - 00:01:25:15
Jeremy Rifkin: Good afternoon, sir. It's a pleasure to be with you again. Time flies.

00:01:25:17 - 00:01:28:21
Mike Collignon: Well, it's good to see you, though, sir. Thanks for joining us.

00:01:28:23 - 00:01:36:09
Jeremy Rifkin: As well. It's always it's always my pleasure to be here. And I enjoyed the earlier speakers. Very enlightening.

00:01:36:11 - 00:01:39:06
Mike Collignon: Awesome.

00:01:39:09 - 00:01:42:02
Mike Collignon: Take it away, sir. It's all the floor is yours.

00:01:42:05 - 00:02:10:10
Jeremy Rifkin: All right, well, I'd like to start with a little bit of an overview and context for where we're heading. There are two phenomena that all of us are scared to death about around the world. I mean, really frightened to the point of almost being paralyzed. One is future pandemics. Two climate change. They go together. They're interrelated. We're going to have more pandemics, for sure.

00:02:10:15 - 00:02:41:25
Jeremy Rifkin: And there's a reason for this. When my dad was born in 1908. 85% of this entire planet was still wild. No human development. Today, only 19% of this planet is still wild. And projections are that it may be going down to near zero in the next 20 years. That's not viable. It's not livable. But here's what's happening. The viruses are becoming climate migrants as the wilderness disappears.

00:02:41:26 - 00:03:09:15
Jeremy Rifkin: Those viruses are hitching rides onto animals, wild animals, and getting closer to our huddled urban masses in these giant megalopolis around the world. So we need to address that issue, and the way we construct our infrastructure and buildings will be actually consequential. I'll get back to them in the pandemics and the. The elimination of the wild is totally related to climate change.

00:03:09:18 - 00:03:40:02
Jeremy Rifkin: We're in real time climate change. When I first began working on this issue back in 1980. It was still theoretical. Now, obviously, it's here in real time. I want to what this is all about because if it's explained in 2 or 3 minutes, most people would really understand the dilemma we're in. We have dug up the burial grounds of a previous period of history, the Carboniferous era, 350 million years ago.

00:03:40:05 - 00:04:07:10
Jeremy Rifkin: We took the dead remains of that animal and plant life, and they morphed into coal, oil and gas. We dug them up, we examined them, and we literally took these dead remains to create an industrial, fossil fuel based, food based civilization in the 19th and 20th century. And here's what climate change is all about. We massive amounts, as all of you know, of global warming gases into the atmosphere.

00:04:07:11 - 00:04:31:07
Jeremy Rifkin: And that is CO2 and methane and nitrous oxide. And the simple answer to this is those gases are blocking the sun's heat from getting back off the Earth. Here's the rub, which everyone should know. Please pass it on to your children and grandchildren. For every one degree Celsius that the temperature goes up on this planet from global warming emissions.

00:04:31:09 - 00:05:05:07
Jeremy Rifkin: The atmosphere is actually sucking up 7% more precipitation from the oceans, the lakes, the seas, and the land into the clouds. So we're getting more concentrated precipitation in the clouds and wild exponential water events, these great atmospheric rivers in the winter spewing snow falls. Massive snow falls in regions that have never seen snow. The spring. We're getting flooding across every ecosystem, every continent, for months at a time, destroying infrastructure, loss of wildlife and human life.

00:05:05:08 - 00:05:35:11
Jeremy Rifkin: In the summer, we're getting the droughts for months at a time, and then we're getting heat waves. We're getting temperatures of 105 to 123 Fahrenheit not livable. And then we get these massive wildfires over millions of acres of land burning CO2. And the atmosphere is turning orange in places like New York and Chicago and Washington, D.C. in the fall, we get the hurricanes and the typhoons.

00:05:35:15 - 00:05:59:26
Jeremy Rifkin: What's happening here is this the hydrosphere is now rewilding. That's what's going on. And that's why we are in the sixth extinction of life on this planet in the lifetime of today's children. And we may see the loss of half the species on Earth in the coming 80 years. These are species that have been here for millions of years, will never see them or hear them again.

00:05:59:28 - 00:06:24:18
Jeremy Rifkin: And so our scientists are telling us we are at an inflection point. And the issue is this it's all about the hydrosphere. For so long, we have misunderstood the planet we live on. It isn't just the fossil fuel age, it's taking us there. What we have failed to realize is we are not a land planet, but we've organized our whole approach to life based on that for 6000 years.

00:06:24:18 - 00:06:51:17
Jeremy Rifkin: We are a water planet and the hydrosphere is the animator of all life. On this planet. The hydrosphere determines the lithosphere, the soil of plants, trees, and animals. The hydrosphere determines the atmosphere, the oxygen. The hydrosphere determines the biosphere. It's the living, animating force. And what's happening now is a great hubris has come to a turning point. What was that hubris for?

00:06:51:17 - 00:07:16:00
Jeremy Rifkin: Most of the time we were on this planet. We adapted to the hydrosphere, the waters of the planet. Like every other species, our internal biological clocks are circadian rhythms and our seasonal rhythms. As we moved across the sun and rotated every 24 hours, adapted moment to moment to a very animated, alive planet the hydrosphere, the sphere, the atmosphere, the biosphere.

00:07:16:02 - 00:07:46:25
Jeremy Rifkin: About 11,000 years ago, the last ice age receded. Nice weather came in the Holocene. We settled down for nomadic to to sedentary life. We developed agriculture. And then we created the first great hydraulic urban civilizations, first in the Middle East, in Anatolia, and then later in in Egypt and Rome and the Yangzi Valley River valley in China, the Indus River valley in India, much later Mesoamerica, the Inca culture and South America.

00:07:46:25 - 00:08:14:07
Jeremy Rifkin: And what was our what do we why do we do this? This was the ultimate hubris, the belief that we could actually harness the entire waters of this planet for the advantage of one species, utilitarian interest. And it peaked with the fossil fuel base. Industrial Revolution and the great hydropower electric dams of the 20th and 21st century. Now the hydrosphere is broken loose.

00:08:14:10 - 00:08:41:19
Jeremy Rifkin: The floods, the droughts, the wildfires, the heatwaves. What does this have to do with buildings? Everything, the entire infrastructure of this planet right now is a stranded asset, all of it. And that means that because the Hudson River is rewilding, we have built our urban based hydraulic civilizations on a different model that we could create a secure model and still sequester the waters.

00:08:41:19 - 00:09:07:17
Jeremy Rifkin: Well, now the ground underneath our our feet is now heating up and it's collapsing. As you know, you've seen all the new studies around the world. So all of our buildings and the underground utilities and the piping systems, they're all stranded assets over the next 30 or 40 years. And then beside from that, we've got all these other related issues that come to bear.

00:09:07:21 - 00:09:30:22
Jeremy Rifkin: So let me let me turn to this point. This might sound like bad news that everybody's getting to aware and being frightened to death all over the world, and either don't want to address this or don't want to hear about it or think it's all over. But there's some other news here, and that is, we're beginning to realize our species.

00:09:30:22 - 00:09:56:25
Jeremy Rifkin: And this is a big, big leap forward, that this planet is totally animated, this water planet. It's much more powerful than we ever thought in our little species. Homo sapiens is much smaller and not very significant in the future evolution of this planet in the Milky Way. That's a real big eye opening change in how we think, with a lot of possibilities in front of it.

00:09:56:27 - 00:10:24:18
Jeremy Rifkin: The problem we're facing is, is, is the playbook. We are using the same playbook that gave rise to global warming, to try to address it and to move beyond. And it's it's a worldview that originated with the enlightenment, the Age of Progress, the industrial age, the capitalist system, and many other things. So it's it's the way we think of nature and how we relate to it.

00:10:24:19 - 00:10:45:29
Jeremy Rifkin: It's caused this crisis. We see nature as a resource, when in fact it's the life source. We think we can sequester it while it needs to run free, and allow us to be able to be in line with where the hydrosphere is going rather than the other way. It's the way we educate our children. It's how we organize our governance.

00:10:45:29 - 00:11:09:23
Jeremy Rifkin: It's how we manage our economy. All of these features that we're so comfortable with is what's actually taking us to the crisis. And this is what the OECD and the world Bank and the UN and all the powers that be, God bless them, are stuck. We're stuck. So where does this take us? I'm guardedly I'm actually guardedly hopeful.

00:11:09:25 - 00:11:36:05
Jeremy Rifkin: I was looking back for the last few years on these Fridays for future demonstrations where millions of young people, Gen Z, left their schools every Friday from they get is 7 or 8 times in 140 countries. And they went out on the streets peacefully and they said, we're in a global climate emergency. I didn't recognize the importance of this until I met a few of these young Gen Z in Milan during these protests.

00:11:36:11 - 00:12:01:08
Jeremy Rifkin: We're protesting creature and we love to protest. There have been protests all through history. This one was different. This is the first time an entire generation all over the world came together and they saw themselves. And when they protested as a species, they see themselves as an endangered species. They see their fellow creatures as part of their revolutionary family.

00:12:01:10 - 00:12:23:19
Jeremy Rifkin: All the other divisions through history, they're still there. Our political affiliations, our religious identities, our tribal blood identities, all of these others are here, and they're not going to go away. But imagine a younger generation thinking of the cells as a species. They've eliminated the other. So there's hope here that we're beginning to see in the death throes of the age of progress, the industrial age.

00:12:23:26 - 00:12:41:28
Jeremy Rifkin: We're beginning to see a new gestalt emerge, a new worldview, a new narrative. But now we have to figure out how does this all come together in ways that we can count on, to move us into a new period of history?

00:12:42:01 - 00:13:07:08
Jeremy Rifkin: One of the things back in the year 2000, Romano Prodi was president of European Commission, at that point former Prime Minister of Italy. He came to Washington. We spent an afternoon together at the embassy and he said, look, come to Europe. He spent 25 years in the US. We're going to move much quicker. Let's get you're moving. I took him up on it and we began to an anthropological experiment.

00:13:07:11 - 00:13:50:03
Jeremy Rifkin: We just threw out all the playbook and we said, how do the great paradigm shifts in history occur? It's an anthropological look, a nontraditional look. And when we look back at history, we found something quite interesting that all the great changes, paradigm changes in history were infrastructure transformations. Every single one of them had the same common denominator that at a moment in time for technology, revolutions emerge kind of serendipitously, and they converged to create a completely new infrastructure that fundamentally changed our temporal spatial orientation, how we organize our relationship to nature, how we educate our kids, our notions of selfhood on and on.

00:13:50:05 - 00:14:21:22
Jeremy Rifkin: What are they? This is crucial to buildings. Number one, new energy revolutions. Number two. I'm sorry. Number one, new communication revolutions. Number two, new energy regimes. Number three, new modes and mobility and logistics. Number four. And the most important one, new ways to address the waters of the planet. When these four technology revolutions emerge, they change the kind of governance we can have.

00:14:21:24 - 00:14:43:14
Jeremy Rifkin: You can have various forms, but you can't go outside of the infrastructure. They change our temporal spatial orientation. They change the way we organize economic life and educate our kids, etc. you can have variation, but you can't go out of that infrastructure and they change the built environment. Absolutely. They change the built environment. And so let me give you an example.

00:14:43:15 - 00:15:16:22
Jeremy Rifkin: First industrial revolution, the 19th century in Britain, the built environment, the new communication was steam power printing. No more manual print presses, the new energy regime, coal. We'd already depleted the forest. We had to move to coal. The new mobility revolution was railroads and locomotives, and the new mobility and the new water revolution was. We were the first modern society since the fall of Rome to put in a rate hydro power and sewer systems and purification of water.

00:15:16:28 - 00:15:46:24
Jeremy Rifkin: This took us to a new kind of habitat urban habitats, surrounding railroads, urban avatars, where you built dense and up. This took us to national governments. It took us to a national markets. It took us to capitalists, shareholding corporations, etc.. Second industrial revolution 20th century US communication revolution, the telephone of big deal, instant communication across the continent, the energy revolution.

00:15:46:24 - 00:16:13:24
Jeremy Rifkin: We struck all in Texas. We didn't have to rely primarily on coal. The mobility revolution. Henry Ford put everyone in an internal combustion automobile. Later rail, inland water, ocean air traffic, the water revolution, the great hydroelectric power dams. The ultimate, if you will, hubris of believing we sequestered all the rivers of the lakes of the world for one species.

00:16:13:27 - 00:16:45:22
Jeremy Rifkin: This took us from urban buildings to suburban buildout because of highway systems, suburban buildup. It took us from national markets to globalization, because we can now move across ocean and air traffic with much smaller cost. It took us to global institutions in some ways, bypassing national governments like the OECD, the IMF, the United Nations, the world Bank. That second industrial revolution, I think I mentioned some of it to you the last time we talked, peaked in July 2008.

00:16:45:24 - 00:17:12:28
Jeremy Rifkin: Well, hit 147 a barrel, the whole global economy shut down and the the collapse of the financial market with subprime mortgages 60 days later, that was just an aftershock because as you know and I know, everything depends on fossil fuels, our cosmetics, our our pharmaceutical products, our synthetic fiber for clothing, our packaging. It's the works. So when all goes over 80 or 90 a barrel, everything goes up.

00:17:12:29 - 00:17:37:00
Jeremy Rifkin: We're now in inflation again, partially because of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and other things. But it's over. It's a death knell. And I don't think anyone here in this virtual meeting today thinks that we're going to go back to fossil fuels. In the earlier talks today. We're quite enlightening on all of that. We are on the cusp of the third Industrial Revolution infrastructure, and it's quite interesting.

00:17:37:01 - 00:18:07:21
Jeremy Rifkin: The communication internet is here. We got 4.5 billion people connected with a little smartphone in their hand. And that distributed power, that little phone has more power, computing wise than center astronauts to the moon. Amazing. Now it's converging with a second internet distributed energy. We now have millions and soon hundreds of millions. And probably in 30 years, a billion or more places where we're going to have solar and wind and green hydrogen distributed locally.

00:18:07:24 - 00:18:45:15
Jeremy Rifkin: It distributed and then managed across distributed grids with the same big data analytics and algorithms that we use with the communication internet. They're converging. The two internets are now converging with a third internet, and that is a mobility and logistics internet made up of electric and fuel cell transport, road, rail, water and air powered by solar and wind from the energy internet and using big data and analytics and algorithms on autonomous transport, which allows it to converge with the communication or the energy internet and now the mobility internet.

00:18:45:17 - 00:19:12:12
Jeremy Rifkin: All of this is big data infrastructure, but it's all distributed and it's moving with a fourth internet, a water internet. Right now we're about to scale. There are thousands, pretty soon millions. And within 20 years, hundreds of millions and even billions of local water microgrids. In the next 20 years, already, the national laboratories here in the US have developed the first programmatic approaches to this.

00:19:12:19 - 00:19:34:13
Jeremy Rifkin: Water is not disappearing. People get confused. They hear about floods and they hear about droughts, and they hear about floods, and they hear about droughts. They don't put it together. The water molecules don't disappear. They're here from a long time ago, a year ago. They'll be here far after. The question is when the rain comes and how much and where is shifting?

00:19:34:13 - 00:19:59:18
Jeremy Rifkin: Because the hydrosphere is determining now the future of how our species and other species will live on this planet. So we're going to be harvesting in microgrids, on our roofs, on our properties, and then securing underground and very sophisticated microgrids, just like electricity and distributing. And when we need them for our use for industry, for homes, for agriculture.

00:19:59:20 - 00:20:10:26
Jeremy Rifkin: So that takes us into a completely new building. Stop all of this. So we had urban, we had suburban. What's the new building stop.

00:20:10:28 - 00:20:39:21
Jeremy Rifkin: We are beginning to see that there's as we move into this new era, I think we need to be realistic and not hide from the fact that there will be lots of migration. For the last 10,000 years, we went from a nomadic life to a sedentary life. Different ways of dealing with habitat where we live. Right? And now what's happening with climate change is there are places in the world that will see mass migration in the next 23 years.

00:20:39:21 - 00:21:13:24
Jeremy Rifkin: We don't want to talk about it, but I work with the European Union, the People's Republic of China, and we advise Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer on their infrastructure plan. We tell them and we and I think a lot of folks are learning about this, that the bottom line here is there's going to be migration on a massive scale for every one degree Celsius rise in temperature, 1 billion people, we're going to have to move a new approach to buildings, which will be longer periods of migratory, shorter periods of sedentary.

00:21:13:24 - 00:21:31:12
Jeremy Rifkin: And this means we will need to have ephemeral societies. We will need to have pop up cities. We will need to be able to recycle and move to new areas and regions as we move north. Not for everybody, but for some regions of the world. There has to be climate passports. All of this people don't want to talk about.

00:21:31:14 - 00:21:59:07
Jeremy Rifkin: But in my discussions with governments and companies, we know this has to happen. So let's take a look at how it's going to affect the building. The buildings. Last year I had the privilege of keynote, the annual of Global Housing Building conference in Paris. It's held each year. And I said something that I think will be resonate with everybody on this call.

00:21:59:09 - 00:22:25:07
Jeremy Rifkin: This entire infrastructure is a stranded asset, and the biggest stranded asset is buildings. They weren't prepared for climate change, as you know, because you're all the folks that are at the front end of moving this forward. The when you look at the stranded asset, the buildings are $320 trillion. Our buildings about 320 trillion. All stranded. Not designed. Everyone on this call.

00:22:25:10 - 00:22:50:24
Jeremy Rifkin: You're all the ones at the front end moving us toward a new approach. And that is how do we develop our habitats that are able to be not only ephemeral, but are able to be able to go with the change of the water cycle, are able to be emission, are able to address droughts and floods and wildfires and hurricanes and typhoons.

00:22:50:27 - 00:23:25:26
Jeremy Rifkin: I think we're at the early end of a new revolution, which you're at the front engine with low and moderate income housing and up in industrial parks and everything else. We're moving to additive manufacturing. We're moving to 3D printed structures, not just for build homes, but offices, factories and tech parks. The first and second industrial revolutions were subtractive manufacturing revolutions, all the way from the first pin factories that Adam Smith talks about with, with, with subtractive manufacturing.

00:23:25:26 - 00:23:43:08
Jeremy Rifkin: You start off with a lot of material and you know better than I do. You have to winnow it down. Some of it you lose, some of it can't be put into the final product, and then you get your final product can be all can be a machine, it can be an automobile, etc. it's called subtractive manufacturing. You lose a lot.

00:23:43:11 - 00:24:07:27
Jeremy Rifkin: 3D printing, as you know, is additive. You you develop layer after layer of a structure with very little loss. So you can do it much cheaper as it scales than with traditional subtractive manufacturing. Well, let me give you an example right now. And they're using 3D printing for not just buildings. They're using it now for wind turbine bases.

00:24:07:27 - 00:24:33:03
Jeremy Rifkin: General electric has the biggest operation right now for 3D printer in the world. They're doing wind turbines, they're doing machine parts, they're doing bridges, you name it. But let's look at the buildings. I'll give you an example of an architect, Cuccinelli, some of you know, in Italy. So he just poured out a building. You can do it in 24 hours.

00:24:33:03 - 00:24:57:28
Jeremy Rifkin: Just took a little longer, about 72 hours with no waste, zero emission. And he's using clay as his feedstock because on the first folks in this we're using cement. But that's a lot of CO2. Got to get off of it. We're now moving to renewable resources and we're moving to resources that we can use that psychopath. So he did Clay.

00:24:57:29 - 00:25:21:21
Jeremy Rifkin: So they put the 3D printer up. They create the software, they heat up the clay. And then the software instructs the clay to build out layer by layer, the entire building. It took a little longer, about 72 hours. Many of these buildings take 24 zero mission less expensive because they're additive. They don't lose the materials they can produce in one fourth of the time of regular buildings.

00:25:21:21 - 00:26:03:22
Jeremy Rifkin: And you can move from homes to offices to tech parks, whatever. Now here's where it really becomes interesting. The model this can take us from a seller buyer market controlled lots by big global institutions that kind of monopolize, if you will. The building industry. This can take us from globalization to glow Calpine and from a handful of big players to small on digitally sensitive, high tech SMEs in cooperatives and provider user networks.

00:26:03:25 - 00:26:35:24
Jeremy Rifkin: From globalization to globalization. Here's how it works. Cuccinelli in Italy, if he wants, can take the software that he developed for that building and his provider user network, not a seller buyer market. He can transform that data to a developer in the Philippines at near zero marginal cost on his smartphone. And that developer, she can build out as many buildings as she likes on a licensing fee and a per buildout.

00:26:35:26 - 00:27:03:01
Jeremy Rifkin: So in an era where we're moving to climates that endanger ocean traffic and air traffic in there, and they're much more costly, we can begin to move toward a globalized world favoring high tech SMEs in cooperatives. Some of the big companies will continue, but they'll have to be aggregators working with high tech SMEs. So the kinds of approaches that are here listening today to all the speakers, you're already at the cusp of this.

00:27:03:07 - 00:27:16:12
Jeremy Rifkin: The issue now is how do we begin to move this so that we can scale it. So let me go into a few other issues here. The.

00:27:16:14 - 00:27:38:12
Jeremy Rifkin: We're going to move in terms of housing. I think we're going to be seeing seeing more of a movement to what we call bio regional governance, which affects where you're going to build. All right. The issue here is that climate disasters do not give a damn about political boundaries. The floods, the droughts, the heatwaves, the wildfires, the hurricanes, the atmospheric rivers.

00:27:38:12 - 00:28:11:00
Jeremy Rifkin: They don't care about political boundaries, national sovereignty. They affect ecosystems. They affect specific bioregions. So we're beginning to see a movement around the world toward not eliminating national governments, but extending it to bio regional governance across political boundaries. Most of you, I'm sure, know what I'm talking about already. You've been engaged in this. And the reason is if you have a climate disaster, you have to share that common ecosystem to prepare, rescue, restore and rebuild.

00:28:11:03 - 00:28:42:19
Jeremy Rifkin: Right? You have no choice. So this is the one place America's kind of ahead, which is quite interesting because neither is really ahead. China is moving very quickly where we were at. The US is the first one, as you know, to have two bio regional governance in place for 30 years. There's the Pacific Northwest by regional governance between Washington State, Oregon, Montana, Idaho, etc., and British Columbia, Saskatchewan, Yukon, Manitoba.

00:28:42:19 - 00:29:09:24
Jeremy Rifkin: And they actually share that commons together because they realize, as Eleanor Hodgson would say, you have to preserve the comments. They do it and they would be around the fifth, fourth or fifth largest economy in the world right up there. Then you've got the Great Lakes biological governments in place for 25, 30 years, the Great Lakes governors and premiers of the provinces, eight US governors abutting the Great Lakes, two provinces.

00:29:09:25 - 00:29:40:00
Jeremy Rifkin: They share a commons. They would be around the fourth or fifth largest economy in the world. And you know those Great Lakes to show you the issue we're facing with water, those Great Lakes, those those five lakes are 20% of all the remaining fresh water on the entire planet. And today's figures, the the amount of water available to each human being today is one half the amount that was available 50 years ago.

00:29:40:02 - 00:30:08:24
Jeremy Rifkin: We've got to move with the waters. We've got to adapt to the hydrosphere rather than the hydrosphere. Drought. Adapting to our short term utilitarian needs. The buildings will play a crucial role in this, and every building is part of a completely new infrastructure shift from centralized to distributed. Remember I said that the great industrial revolutions. I'm sorry. The great revolutions in history all share a common denominator.

00:30:08:24 - 00:30:42:22
Jeremy Rifkin: When I said it's all about communication, revolutions, energy revolutions, mobility and logistics, revolutions and water. And all of that changes the building stock. If that sounds familiar, that's what every organism has to have. This isn't rocket science. It's not in any textbooks. I put it in my my current book page of resilience. But this you won't see this in this curriculum yet, but every social or every organism on this planet has to have a means to communicate some source of energy thermodynamically to survive and flourish.

00:30:42:29 - 00:31:12:27
Jeremy Rifkin: Number three, it has to have access to mobility and even motility with plants. Number four, it has to have water. So our infrastructure revolutions are giant social organisms that allow us to bring large numbers of people together in differentiated skills, to act as a social organism and hopefully as a commons. But what's happened in the modern age, in the industrial age, and it's happened through hydraulic civilizations, is centralized power, centralized power.

00:31:12:29 - 00:31:36:23
Jeremy Rifkin: We're now moving to distributed power. Everyone has their solar where they live and work. You have wind that you can capture. No big corporation and no government in the world can capture the sun and the wind of the world. It's too spatially oriented. Same with the wind. Same with the wind. So everyone that has solar or wind is part of the infrastructure.

00:31:36:29 - 00:31:56:26
Jeremy Rifkin: Everyone that has an edge data center as part of the infrastructure. I'll come back to that. Everyone that has an electric vehicle and can send power back to the grid is the infrastructure. So what we're seeing is now and everyone that has water microgrids in the future will be the infrastructure. So it's quite distributed. It's not decentralized, it's distributed.

00:31:56:26 - 00:32:20:07
Jeremy Rifkin: It can go decentralized, but it's really distributed because this is inevitable. So I think we're going to see a national governments more and more extending to bio regional governance, and there's more distributed power. And here's the reason why. Too much data, you got too much data. So we put in a brain in a nervous system for the planet.

00:32:20:07 - 00:32:45:02
Jeremy Rifkin: The brain has Galileo GPS, the Russians have theirs, the Chinese, the nervous system are iets, internet of things sensors. We're putting billions of sensors out there. And the wild environment that's left checking our ecosystems. We have sensors in the agricultural fields with precision agriculture sensors in our factory floors and our homes, our offices, our tech parks and endless.

00:32:45:04 - 00:33:14:20
Jeremy Rifkin: There's so much data that the big centralized data centers can't handle it. It is true that the first generation of these companies that are involved with this revolution I'm talking about were centralized Dell, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Apple. They're not going to be here in 40 years from now, at least in their present form. There's too much data. I'll give you an example.

00:33:14:22 - 00:33:35:27
Jeremy Rifkin: If you have an autonomous vehicle about to crash, you send that data back to a remote data center. It may sound quick. It's not quick enough. The crash happens. Edge data centers are coming in. We're going to have edge data centers all over the world in bioregions in the next 20 years. None of this is theoretical. All of it is starting to scale.

00:33:36:01 - 00:34:00:23
Jeremy Rifkin: So it means that we will be able, with edge data centers, to be able to manage this. Distributed infrastructures, communication, internet mobility, internet energy, internet, water, internet. And the buildings become, if you will, the points that bring it all together. So it isn't just about zero emission buildings and passive emissions and being able to recycle and all that.

00:34:00:23 - 00:34:24:28
Jeremy Rifkin: It's also the buildings become part of a regionally distributed world where it acts more like Gandhi had in mind. Or the EU. The EU goes on the basis of this of the subsidiary principle, the European Union. All development must start local and then concentric circles. And what you need, you can move out to larger circles, but it's distributed.

00:34:25:00 - 00:35:01:10
Jeremy Rifkin: This is very promising. But getting there is a big is a big a big problem. Let me turn attention to something that's completely necessary for everything of this to happen. We think that we are separate from nature. I mean, that's the Western tradition. The eastern religions, the eastern philosophies are believe that humans are nature, the Western philosophy. No, we are the masters of the creation of the Lord, gave Adam mastery over all that lives on the planet.

00:35:01:11 - 00:35:25:29
Jeremy Rifkin: So we believe we're separate from nature. But there's an amazing program happening, and I want you to share this with all of your friends, because every few people know about it. It's called the Human Microbiome Project of the National Institutes of Health, which is two blocks from my window. The NIH has come up with a new scientific exploration that is going to change our species completely.

00:35:25:29 - 00:35:50:24
Jeremy Rifkin: Fundamentally, reading them for a new ontology and new worldview they have about I think it's about six years from now. Six years ago, they came together with the Human Microbiome Project. Now Europe's in EU, Japan, Korea, some other places. And you know what they're telling us? Everyone on this call today is an ecosystem, not a metaphor, literally an ecosystem.

00:35:50:26 - 00:36:15:29
Jeremy Rifkin: What we're learning is we're not just this autonomous agent at maturity. For example, the skeleton, my human skeleton, it's replaced every ten years. Totally new bones, totally new skeleton. The liver is replaced every year. The stomach cells are replaced. Every month it's on and on and on. We are a semi-permeable membrane, just like our buildings. Our buildings are a semi-permeable membrane that takes nature in.

00:36:16:00 - 00:36:40:09
Jeremy Rifkin: So, for example, we're in a building to semi-permeable membrane. We take water into our bodies through our buildings. Right. Those molecules then are meshed in ourselves, our tissues, our organs. They animate the whole body, the whole process. Without water, we don't live. Then they go somewhere else. They don't disappear. The elements in the lithosphere, they come into our body.

00:36:40:14 - 00:37:12:18
Jeremy Rifkin: For example, let's take the phosphorus. Phosphorus came from the mountains, right? Those mountains are degraded by the water. Think Grand Canyon. They degrade the mountains into water and sediment. And the sediment with those those elements in those metals, they go into the soil. Then the plants take up those metals and the animals eat the plants. Then those metals come into us, and then they go somewhere else, and it even gets more interesting.

00:37:12:20 - 00:37:55:01
Jeremy Rifkin: And of course, the atmosphere again, the, the, the, the oxygen comes from the hydrosphere, phytoplankton. Then it comes into us, the oxygen. And then those atoms go somewhere else. Then it gets a little bit more to the point of the buildings. What happens then when we think of ourselves as an ecosystem? If that were taught to every young kid at first grade that each of us is an ecosystem, instead of being afraid of nature, seeing it as the enemy, seeing as now something that's trying to destroy us, seeing ourselves as enclosed behind walls, we open it up.

00:37:55:03 - 00:38:19:23
Jeremy Rifkin: Asian architecture may be a little ahead of this. They've always kind of had more of a trend toward architecture that blended with nature that was more ambitious, not as strong, but more able to bend with the wind. But now with these new buildings, we have to build them so they work with the hydrosphere and not against it. That means they have to be distributed in places where they can still be able to be sound.

00:38:19:25 - 00:38:43:26
Jeremy Rifkin: This is very promising future. If every kid grows up knowing that we are an ecosystem, here's where it gets really weird. You ready? We're not alone in our little bodies. It turns out the NIH says there's all. There's millions of creatures in our bodies that we're just beginning to learn how they orchestrate each of our bodies the Proteus, the fungi, the the bacteria, the viruses.

00:38:44:01 - 00:39:07:27
Jeremy Rifkin: It's on and on and on. Only 44% of the cells in our body belong to humans. The others belong to these other creatures. Only 20,000 genes in the body belongs to these other creatures. We're an ecosystem and we are semi-permeable membrane. And we are each unique, like every other creature. And. But we flow with the change in our hydrosphere.

00:39:08:00 - 00:39:34:05
Jeremy Rifkin: This is good news. And the other thing I would say that I think is encouraging here. The Smithsonian Institute did a really interesting study. They joined up with NYU researchers and they asked, how did human beings survive? How do we survive over history, this kind of spindly little creature with two little legs? No, no, no fur, not much physical strength.

00:39:34:07 - 00:40:04:02
Jeremy Rifkin: The old story you and I learned in school was 10,000 years ago. 11,000 years ago, the last ice age receded. Nice weather. We got out of the Rift Valley of Africa and we moved across the world. But when the researchers look back at the 800,000 years of hominids, they found something that's shocking. But also, you will tell your kids what they found is, you know, this planet, you know, the planet tilts occasionally.

00:40:04:02 - 00:40:34:06
Jeremy Rifkin: It can tell closer to the sun. It can tilt further right now, because we've taken up all the groundwater and the ice from the Arctic and Antarctic is melting. The whole distribution of the planet is shifting. And so it's starting to tilt. But 800,000 years ago, there was a tilt. And this was the time hominids emerged. Then 350,000 years ago, Neanderthals, 250,000 years ago, almost sapiens during that 800,000 year cycle.

00:40:34:06 - 00:41:06:23
Jeremy Rifkin: What they see in the geological record is the most extreme changes in whether you can ever imagine, as hominids evolve 100,000 years, ice age, 10,000 years, warming another 100,000 years, ice age 10,000 years, warming another 100,000 times age 10,000 years of warming. This went on for 800,000 years. So the the anthropologists and the researchers at NYU and the folks over at the Smithsonian, how did they said, how did we survive their conclusion?

00:41:06:26 - 00:41:35:16
Jeremy Rifkin: We're probably the most adaptive mammalian species on the planet. Maybe viruses are more adaptive, but we're why big brain, neural cortex, the ability for language so we can share everything we discover, learn from it, and pass it on to future generations. Number three, that nice opposable thumb in the most exterior limbs on our hands of any creature. For tools, for technology.

00:41:35:18 - 00:41:59:21
Jeremy Rifkin: Number four, I would add, we have the empathic impulse in our neural circuitry. I wrote a book on it many years ago called the Epithet civilization. The empathic impulse is there. We learned about in the 1990s when Italian scientists discovered mirror neurons. They actually exist, so we can experience the other literally as if we're experiencing our own bodies.

00:41:59:24 - 00:42:21:18
Jeremy Rifkin: It's not up here. It's through our bodies, as if we experience ourselves, the grief, their fear, even their happiness. So we are the most cooperative species. We believe that some other creatures have this, these neurons. We're not sure about elephants, dolphins, whales and dogs. We're more sure about elephants because they can see themselves in a mirror as they mature.

00:42:21:20 - 00:42:43:26
Jeremy Rifkin: That's a big deal. So these are ways of saying for everyone that's given up or I don't want to hear about it, or it's all over and I'm not going to have kids. The technologies there, your other speakers were, you're wrapping it all down. The concept that we are an ecosystem, each of us is here. It's always been there.

00:42:43:28 - 00:43:12:02
Jeremy Rifkin: We are the most adaptive species. Why isn't it going faster? Old industries that are bound up with governments that do their bidding. And so the permits, the codes, the standards and the rules are blocking us from moving from pilots to scales. $11 trillion has flooded out of fossil fuels. It's a stranded asset led by pension funds and insurance funds.

00:43:12:05 - 00:43:37:28
Jeremy Rifkin: They are the big movers. Pension funds are 42 trillion. It's the workers money. Marx Karl Marx would never have understood this. It's the workers who have the big pool of capital. They now are starting to own it. And then it's the insurance funds, their vested interest. The whole infrastructure is collapsing. So if they're looking for scale projects and I'm on with them every week with banks and government stuff, they say, where are the scale projects?

00:43:38:00 - 00:44:02:17
Jeremy Rifkin: So if you go visit the local 11,000 mayors around the world, there are nice folks. They'll show you their ten electric busses, their 30 lead buildings. They'll show you a few, other projects, like bike paths. They're all pilots. We need to scale the money is there, the markets there, the technology is there, and the buildings will play a critical role.

00:44:02:17 - 00:44:31:26
Jeremy Rifkin: So we need to think of the buildings not only as as zero emission and not only as 3D printed, but allowing us to be agile enough to work in environments where we can let the hydrosphere determine how we build, rather than forcing the hydrosphere to our needs. That's all. So no matter what, that's over. So I think that the the movement that you have here is the critical part of this function.

00:44:31:26 - 00:44:56:29
Jeremy Rifkin: It's how do we have that semi-permeable membrane that allow us to create a more distributed approach to our future living environments, so that we can adjust when we need to? Sometimes we'll have to move, sometimes not. Look, the average American moves nine times during their lifetime. We now have multiple citizenships with passports. It's all starting, but we have to put all of it together in a new narrative, a new ontology.

00:44:57:00 - 00:45:21:04
Jeremy Rifkin: We have to shift the way we think of things. And I want to end with this thought. When we began this process in the EU, we we honestly had no idea where we were going when we developed this and what we found over a period of the last 23 years now, is this infrastructure morphed in ways that we didn't see coming.

00:45:21:05 - 00:45:42:07
Jeremy Rifkin: It got a life of its own. It did. I think the third Industrial Revolution is the last of the industrial infrastructures and the first of the age of resilience infrastructures. It's clear the age of progress is over. No business leader I work with ever mentions at work. But look at here's some of the things we found. As the infrastructure was coming in.

00:45:42:08 - 00:46:09:02
Jeremy Rifkin: We saw a shift from efficiency as a time value to adapt. There's no such thing as efficiency in nature. Efficiency is a human temple construct where we take the four spheres of the planet hydrosphere, lithosphere, atmosphere and biosphere. We extract them quickly, then at higher speeds and shorter intervals, so we can use them for our utilitarian purposes. That's what efficiency is.

00:46:09:05 - 00:46:33:26
Jeremy Rifkin: Then we wonder why we're in extinction event. Nature isn't about efficiency, it's about adaptivity. In nature. There's no such thing as growth. We learned through this process. In nature, it's about flourishing. You either flourish or you don't. In nature, there's no such thing as GDP in nature. It's all about being able to have a photosynthesis and net primary production.

00:46:33:27 - 00:47:02:12
Jeremy Rifkin: Ecological capital is the capital. Yeah, intellectual property rights and all that. It's just derivative in nature. We see a shift now to hype from hyper consumption. Now with the younger people getting into eco stewardship just starting, we're seeing a shift from negative externalities, which you all deal with in the housing and negative externalities to circularity. We're moving from seller buyer markets to provider user networks.

00:47:02:12 - 00:47:27:22
Jeremy Rifkin: We didn't see that at the beginning. We're moving from corporate conglomerates to high tech SMEs and distributed. We're moving from intellectual property rights to open source sharing of knowledge, moving from zero sum game. That's geopolitics to the network effect. The more in the network, the more we all benefit. And from biosphere politics to bio regional governance, we didn't see this 21 years ago.

00:47:27:23 - 00:47:50:14
Jeremy Rifkin: The infrastructure actually took on this life. So I will end there with saying, all of you that are in this call today are at the cutting edge. It's about how we we think our habitats, our semi-permeable membranes, how do we create a more distributed approach to the future, how we let the hydrosphere determine where we live and how we live, rather than trying to force the waters?

00:47:50:14 - 00:48:15:28
Jeremy Rifkin: That's the ultimate hubris for our own personal use. So the movement you've started has to be embedded within this larger context. How do we move to low and moderate income housing and all of our habitats so that they bend with the hydrosphere and so that we can flourish in new ways in the in the coming decades? Thank you.

00:48:16:00 - 00:48:54:04
Sara Gutterman: Jeremy. Thank you so much. Again, another just thought provoking, incredible session. Really appreciate your insights. I have one question for you. And then I know Mike has a few as well. You talk about a new model of bio regional governance that will bring people and leaders together, which I think is absolutely spot on. And I totally agree with, particularly because as you said, climate events don't respect geographical boundaries or state lines or even country territories.

00:48:54:06 - 00:49:29:18
Sara Gutterman: But at the same time, there are political forces and century old social religious dynamics at play that are dividing us as much as ever. And so how do we reconcile the need to come together to create fundamental, systemic and structural or infrastructural change, if you will, with this, you know, divisive kind of approach to politics and leadership that, you know, we've seen a rise in lately across the globe, not just here in the US.

00:49:29:21 - 00:49:47:08
Sara Gutterman: And, you know, which I kind of contribute to a certain level of ego. And then the work hubris that you mentioned, I think that plays into that approach to dividing us. So talk about how we can again reconcile those two dynamics.

00:49:47:11 - 00:50:07:23
Jeremy Rifkin: As you know, I spend quite a bit of time with that in the age of resilience in the book and as kind of some interesting stuff in there, because I'll give you an example of what we found. We did the plan many years ago. Our global team of industry companies, we did the plan for CPS, you know, utility and San Antonio, the sixth largest city.

00:50:07:24 - 00:50:28:03
Jeremy Rifkin: And they were looking at nuclear versus wind. And they they had just commissioned the first two nuclear power plants in Three Mile Island. Right. So our team and these are all the folks in the industry know how to do this. Say, look, nuclear is an option, but you could be overrun because all of them have been overrun. And it's one third of the revenue of the city is from your public utility.

00:50:28:05 - 00:50:45:07
Jeremy Rifkin: You're the largest one in the country and you go bankrupt. We showed them wind. That wind on the UPS doesn't have that issue. All right. They went with, well, what happened? They found out they were 4 billion overrun. And then shit hit the fan. Excuse me? They took a billion loss to probably remember this. We took them in wind.

00:50:45:07 - 00:51:16:10
Jeremy Rifkin: Now, here's where it's interesting. Six of the ten largest wind states are all red, red, red. Five of the ten solar are red. And they're going to be more. They're all red. General electric, General Motors two years ago they they stunned everybody saying, we're opening up our F150 truck plants in Kentucky in Tennessee red. Now that's interesting. Why would Kentucky and Tennessee below this?

00:51:16:14 - 00:51:41:11
Jeremy Rifkin: They gave away massive amounts of funds to General Motors to build those plants for those 11,000 jobs that then will move them into the top tier. What we're seeing is once people get into these new technologies, it takes a while, but they begin to say, you know, that F-150, that's the recognition of the Trump supporters F-150. The trucks go to every rural area.

00:51:41:13 - 00:52:06:22
Jeremy Rifkin: We have a little we know about this. These F-150 trucks that are electric. What's interesting is their the second biggest consumer product after iPhones. So what we're seeing is the process in the rural areas. If you get $100,000 a year to lease for a wind farm that's keeping you on the farm, if you have distributed power, you don't have to be in a megalopolis.

00:52:06:22 - 00:52:38:01
Jeremy Rifkin: You can be in these new tracks that are more bio regional. Fascinating. So I think that nothing is more important than people at the regional level looking at what their best interests are, solar and wind. It's all going to be in those states, the prairie states. I won't tell you the company, but one of the companies in our group got all upset because they wanted to clip off all the farmers in the prairie states in the northern prairie states one by one to lease out their farm.

00:52:38:01 - 00:53:00:08
Jeremy Rifkin: So you know what they all did? They created cooperatives across all the prairie states, the farmer's cooperatives, right, so that they could deal with this company and other companies as a group. They got there. A lot of that's in the Age of Resilience book. But it's it's by way of saying that crisis creates opportunities. This is the biggest crisis in history.

00:53:00:08 - 00:53:16:26
Jeremy Rifkin: And I you know, I taught the advanced management program at Wharton for a long time, our corporate CEO program. You know what I would say to them the first day, these are presidents have come in for five weeks of advanced training from companies. I say, go back to your dorm tonight and think of the worst crisis that could face your country, on your company, on your watch.

00:53:16:27 - 00:53:37:29
Jeremy Rifkin: Come back and tell the group the second day. I say, go back to your dorm tonight and think of the worst crisis that could face your company and how that's your biggest opportunity. You know better than anyone with this crisis. Infrastructure crisis. It's the buildings right to center this. It's $350 trillion in stranded assets. It all has to be redone in three generations.

00:53:37:29 - 00:53:59:09
Jeremy Rifkin: It's the biggest opportunity ever. And the plan we did for Schumer, it was a $17 trillion plan. I spent a year and a half personally with him. Some of it got into the final out better. But what's interesting about the plan is we know in the business community, every $1 in infrastructure automatically gives you $3 back in returns.

00:53:59:10 - 00:54:10:29
Jeremy Rifkin: It's the safest deal you can ever make. That's true across the world. $1 introduction for infrastructure $3 return.

00:54:11:02 - 00:54:19:04
Mike Collignon: You know, Jeremy, I wanted to ask you a couple more questions if we've got the time for it.

00:54:19:06 - 00:54:38:22
Mike Collignon: Stay on the political theme for just a moment. We had a question come in from Mary Elizabeth. Now, understanding Jeremy, the word progress can mean a lot of different things, but she was curious about what is the relationship between progress and democratic governments.

00:54:38:25 - 00:55:03:06
Jeremy Rifkin: It's a good question. No one's actually asked it in that way before this, this national government. The reason national governments emerge is that when we went to coal and the telegraph system and railroads, it was so damn expensive. No monarchy or big family could afford it. They had to create the shareholding corporation then. So you had lots of small investors, right?

00:55:03:07 - 00:55:26:05
Jeremy Rifkin: But then what happened at that point in time is that fossil fuels are so expensive to extract, purify and then install, and you have to have huge military investments to keep secure the whole military investments in the modern age, secure fossil fuels. We fought World War Two over the river valley because the French took it from the Germans, all the coal.

00:55:26:05 - 00:55:50:24
Jeremy Rifkin: And then we stopped the shipments of all to Japan in July of 41. They they went after Pearl Harbor four months later. So we've got these this first and second industrial revolution. We're really tied to very expensive infrastructure development and very centralized. And so what we end up with 200 years later, and I taught many of these CEOs, they're nice folks.

00:55:50:24 - 00:56:21:02
Jeremy Rifkin: We got 500 global companies out there, 500. They represent one third of the GDP of the entire world. You know how many workers they have? 70 million out of a workforce of 3.5 billion workers. And the eight richest people on that pyramid, their combined wealth equals the accumulated wealth. Eight guys of one half the human race, the three wishes in my country, their combined wealth equals the accumulated wealth of the lower half of the population of the US.

00:56:21:04 - 00:56:46:26
Jeremy Rifkin: There's something wrong here. This distributed revolution is going to happen. It's going to happen because the sun shines everywhere, the winds there, the waters are going to be local. And I think that there are many ways that AI will not be done, even though people think it will. AI will be used for infrastructure. Mostly. It's going to be problematic for chatting and all that.

00:56:46:28 - 00:57:12:13
Jeremy Rifkin: You know, for every ten to 10 to 40 responses you get on chat, one bottle of water. So think about millions and billions of people. They're out on millions. They're chatting all day long, every few minutes, 10 or 12, one bottle of water, a computer chip, one chip, eight gallons of water, 1.5 trillion chips. Last year we will use AI, but we're going to use it in a much more reasonable way.

00:57:12:13 - 00:57:41:12
Jeremy Rifkin: And we're also going to be much more into what we call a science. And that's if you study pragmatism. When you in school Dewey and meet and Peirce. They had it right. Inductive and deductive is all about exploiting nature. Abductive is you listen to nature and then adapt. Listen to adapt. You don't do abductive, inductive and deductive where you primates your secrets sequester and use.

00:57:41:14 - 00:58:01:05
Jeremy Rifkin: It's a simple shift, but it's a fundamental transformation. And I would say that we're ready to do it. And that's why what you're doing with the buildings is key. Gotta have habitats that are in line with this narrative everywhere quickly, and that can be recycled and moved.

00:58:01:08 - 00:58:10:21
Mike Collignon: This next question, Jeremy, it kind of hearkens back a little bit to the Zero Cost Society book that you wrote.

00:58:10:23 - 00:58:29:26
Jeremy Rifkin: You shouldn't say zero cost. I'll tell you a quick story. So I was with the the I was with the, the vice premier of China, who I got to know. We're chatting at one point and I said, I want to thank you. He said, what are you taking me for? He said, well, in Europe we did the 20 2020 formula.

00:58:29:26 - 00:58:47:11
Jeremy Rifkin: We got the price of solar and wind down. It became real. And then you got it down even further because we started it. And then we want to thank you because you're exporting it to America so we can build out our solar and wind. They weren't doing it in China yet. He smiled. He got it. They're doing it in China now.

00:58:47:14 - 00:58:55:08
Mike Collignon: All right, so I apologize for the incorrect reference on the book, but it was the one you talked about at your first when you came to the symposium, the first time.

00:58:55:11 - 00:58:57:09
Jeremy Rifkin: On Marginal Cost Society. Yeah.

00:58:57:11 - 00:59:18:10
Mike Collignon: There we go, there we go. So we're seeing this a four day workweek take hold in some of the European countries that you've, you've advised. Just a couple weeks back, Senator Bernie Sanders said something about it that he thought that it might be eventually something here. What is your stance on that topic?

00:59:18:13 - 00:59:42:04
Jeremy Rifkin: I wrote a book called The End of Work, which kind of started this debate back in 1995, and we introduced the book was saying, look, we're going to have to you have two opportunities. When you have an increase in your ability to produce the age of Resilience book. The new one goes into this in detail. Here's a contradiction in the capitalist system, and socialism is just part of that system.

00:59:42:05 - 01:00:04:22
Jeremy Rifkin: It's one of the same. So what happened in the 1920s is they were automating, and they began to realize the major auto companies, other companies, that they didn't need the workers. The machines were just cheaper and more efficient, and they began to let workers go. This was in the 1920s. And then Henry Ford got it. He said, wait a minute, guys, we got a problem here.

01:00:04:25 - 01:00:25:06
Jeremy Rifkin: If we let all the workers go, who the hell is going to buy my cars? All right. And so he went to an eight hour workweek. Others followed it. All right. But what happened is this, this this development continued all the way until the 1990s when I wrote the book. And the problem is that it's it's not a winning game for the for the system.

01:00:25:06 - 01:00:51:03
Jeremy Rifkin: Because what happens is the way we kept the system going is on debt. First it was, you know, buying on installment paying, then it was credit cards. And here's the rub. You know, when the when the crisis happened in 2008, the whole economy shut down. You know, what the the consumer debt was at that point, it was equal to the GDP because everybody was getting cheap credit.

01:00:51:04 - 01:01:12:13
Jeremy Rifkin: They were buying on the future. There was always going to crash. You know what it is today right back where it was. It's so there has to be a completely new system. That's why the what we're talking about in the Age of Resilience and that book is more distributed. It's coming. You're doing it in a distributed system. You don't have you you have everyone's a player.

01:01:12:17 - 01:01:31:08
Jeremy Rifkin: Everyone is an owner and a worker. But you have to work as a comments. It has to be cooperative in order to be able to manage and to five. So it's a completely different approach. And none of this is theory. The companies and industries that are in our group that have been worked in regions. I'll give you an example of France.

01:01:31:12 - 01:01:57:20
Jeremy Rifkin: Let me show why it doesn't work. Many times a heads of a government will come and say, Will you do a plan for us? And I always say, no, and I mean it. And they say, why wouldn't you? I mean, other consulting companies. We're not a consulting company. If we do a plan for you. It'll sit on a shelf and you'll have one pilot project, and then they will think that they've won the public over for 24 hours.

01:01:57:22 - 01:02:22:08
Jeremy Rifkin: All right. However, I said to him, if you want to go back to the region, this was industrial France, hockey France. It's the major industrial region of France, 10% of the population. It's all the railroads, the automobile. It's all there, right? So I said, I'll tell you what, you go back and you get Ahold of the every, every mayor in this entire industrial region, which is the home of Macron and Marine Le Pen.

01:02:22:10 - 01:02:45:03
Jeremy Rifkin: That's their legislative home. Those two said you get all the mayors, the entire chamber of commerce, all 26 universities, all 250 high schools. You get the entire region engaged because you'll do the plan will help you, but you'll do it. And they never come back. Generally, they never come back. This guy came back. I was shocked, he came back six months later.

01:02:45:03 - 01:03:05:20
Jeremy Rifkin: So we're ready. I said, you got to be casing no. Ten years in. There's some good films on it. They created thousands and thousands of projects. There's a whole film on it. Number one in tech parks, number one in electric vehicles. Number one, it's on and on in biochemistry. They've done it. Is there anything special about them? They prepared the grandchildren of coal miners.

01:03:05:20 - 01:03:26:14
Jeremy Rifkin: There's a coal mining region. They're retrofitting building. Well, you know this and they're doing solar. There's no magic to any of this. If they could do this, every region in America and around the world can do this, but they have to come together. You have to have the political will. It's not rocket science. It's what it's about. Well, you know, I know you're nodding.

01:03:26:15 - 01:03:45:29
Jeremy Rifkin: I mean, you've seen it in doing low and moderate income housing. You're working on the ground in the localities with the folks that count, trying to get the city councils involved. I know what you're doing, but you have to get the whole community wanting it. Otherwise you build one little building here and one little building there, and then you have to be smart on when you build and where you build.

01:03:46:01 - 01:04:05:20
Jeremy Rifkin: You don't want to build in a flood zone. We're paying the government's paying for people to completely redo their buildings over and over in flood zones. Nuts. I hope that's helpful, but it shows there's promise that human beings are capable of this. If France could do it, the industrial France, everybody could do it.

01:04:05:22 - 01:04:25:28
Mike Collignon: Well, I could I could sit and ask you questions for an hour. Jeremy. It would be a blast, but I, I need to respect everyone's time. So we're going to stop there for today. But it really was a pleasure talking to you again. I enjoyed the webinar we did together years ago. I enjoyed the supposing the first time around.

01:04:25:29 - 01:04:28:13
Mike Collignon: Thank you so much for coming back again. I really appreciate it.

01:04:28:15 - 01:04:44:05
Jeremy Rifkin: Well, because I know everybody listening is already doing much of this. So you're at the front line so you know you're the ones out there doing it. So anytime we can get together I would love to do it. All right. Because we're we're hoping that you can move this forward with the housing and building stock and commercial building everything else.

01:04:44:07 - 01:04:45:11
Jeremy Rifkin: Okay.

01:04:45:14 - 01:04:47:04
Mike Collignon: All right. Well thank you, sir. Good to see you.

01:04:47:04 - 01:04:50:03
Jeremy Rifkin: But yeah take care.

01:04:50:05 - 01:05:11:23
Mike Collignon: That that concludes day one of the 2024 Sustainability symposium Existential Solutions. I want to thank all of our speakers, as well as our audience for an incredible first day. And again, thank you to Train Technologies and Rural Pool for helping to make this all happen. Please make sure to join us tomorrow at 12 p.m. Eastern Time. Same start time.

01:05:11:24 - 01:05:35:18
Mike Collignon: That's going to be our second and final day. Our featured speakers will be Shia Bastida, Ashley Piper and Sarah Gutman who you see on your screen. Now we want to make sure that, you know, to use the same link that you use today to access tomorrow's event. Okay, so don't lose that. And and we're going to be sure to try and get to your questions as well as best we can.

01:05:35:19 - 01:05:46:20
Mike Collignon: Obviously time constraints aside, we're going to try and get to as many as we can. So on behalf of Green Builder Media I'm Mike Collignon. Thank you for attending today and we'll see you all tomorrow. Take care everyone.