Alexey : 0:00

So it's fine. We can go for long today.

Taliy: 0:01

Okay, okay, that's not a problem at all, we can go as long as needed for our dear listeners to pick up this idea, this actual great idea about the perspectives of our development, what exactly we are working on over here. I can tell you're in a different place today, you're somewhere else not that the usual location.

Alexey : 0:23

Sometimes life throws different stuff at you, had an urgent thing for work, had to drive to Nice, yeah. It's funny how your priorities, your preferences change, depending on what you need. I would never, never say that carpets on the floor and soft fabric padding on the walls are a great choice for a hotel room, and for many reasons. But when you're recording a podcast, this is actually a much better studio setup than what we have at homes, because we don't have that much sound dampening material anywhere. I think that it's just the ceiling that's not padded here. So let's see what kind of sound this produces. I was thinking about all these oldish things that are here in this historic hotel. And it's funny how old appliances like the old fridges or old cars, they can continue running for decades. We still had this old fridge, I think it's from the 60s or something like that, yeah, it makes noise, but it still runs. And that's not the case for what we have today for the appliances that are produced lately. If you think about it from the perspective that we require infinite growth, like our economies, our politics, they all are based on infinite growth, meaning that we need to consume always more, and how can we always make people consume more? Well, if you think about appliances, they need to break, everything has to break in order to be replaced with new things. And some might say that, yeah, this is a great thing that creates jobs, because otherwise, if you make something that lasts forever, you will not be able to sell another TV set to a person if it still works. Is it really great to have things that break all the time? This is not sustainable, and also for the reasons that there's evergrowing amount of waste that we don't know how to dispose of. This is a whole other topic about the waste and the ecology. But let's talk about how infinite growth is required in our today's world.

Taliy: 2:26

Yeah, like basically what you said right now about planned obsolescence. What does it mean for each one of us? We are forced to buy crappy products and do it as often as possible. As you said, fridges, cars, whatever built in late 80s, they work much longer. And technically, it's not a problem to make a car that doesn't break every 3000 miles or whatever, after a certain period. Yeah, after first three years. It's not a problem. The problem is how to build a sustainable economy that would last for decades and hundreds of years, and make it sustainable. What many visionaries have been talking about that eventually, sooner or later, we're going to come to a society, monetary free, where we're gonna live with no money, and today, it sounds surrealistic, but in fact, the production of goods becomes cheaper and cheaper with more and more automation and robotization involved. So basically, it is not a problem to create goods and do it super cheap. And within next couple of decades, we're going to witness it ourselves. But what it means for the society, like it's going to be such a huge change on the social level, and nobody's even thinking about it enough, except those people who are professionally involved into it, what would our life look like even today, if we simply remove such thing as planned obsolescence from our production? Yeah, just make goods, make them as good as possible. We would see a huge decrease in the amount of products people buy. And you know what, even today we're seeing it with cell phone companies, it's one of the biggest problems how do you force people to buy more cell phones even if they already have cell phones? So for a lot of times, you've seen that when a new model of an iPhone is coming out, your old iPhone starts working really slow. And then people who are saying they do it on purpose they were called conspiracy theorists for a while, because it's just a glitch in your imagination, they would say. And then when the programmers digged into the software and they proved that Apple is purposely slowing down the processor speeds then Apple had to come out with the explanation that yeah, we actually do it but we do it to save the battery life so we actually going to give you an option now to whether slow down your processor or like drain your battery more. So people like okay, that was super fishy. Didn't sound cool, but okay, we get it. But still even with that people don't want that many cell phones. This is not just Apple. But the main thing here is I think the mental state of people who are constantly pushed to buy new products, like what kind of conditions you have to create for people to actually be forced to buy new things like, what would it be the main factor? Do you want them to feel bad if they don't buy this new thing, not cool?

Alexey : 5:22

It's interesting that you talk about the planned obsolescence of things, I can only talk about my experience, for example, with what we have for recording this podcast, for example, because this is something I experienced myself. And once it becomes obvious to you, you cannot unsee it. I mean, you can see this pattern everywhere. Let's just explain this in simple terms. When you want to start a YouTube channel or a podcast, obviously you go to the second largest search engine - YouTube, and you start searching. The algorithm will create a carefully curated information bubble for you. You will have this viewpoint formed how things should be, you'll have a pretty lengthy wish list of the things you need to get started. Your favorite gurus, I mean, whoever the algorithm would show you in the videos, they first kind of become your friends, but it's only in your head, you know, they will tell you, Oh, here's what I'm using, and here are the results that I'm achieving. But you don't need all this, you can start with just your phone, and I have all this gear just because I need it, I earn money using this gear. So it's kind of a business expense. And I've accumulated it over many years. You don't need all this. Guys, I mean, let's be honest, no one wants to just get started, you want to be at least as good as the guy you're watching right now. So you end up buying all the things they recommend, at least the ones that you can afford. The problem is not about like getting things that you would use to create something, if you learn how to use them, of course. The problem is in the way that we are being sold things all the time on the internet everywhere. All social media is like a big advertisement platform to sell you all sorts of things you don't really need. And of course, it's up to you, if you decide if you really want these things, no problem. The thing is that you will not achieve the same results. I mean, in your head, you already imagine yourself as this guy who is I don't know going recording this podcast and you will get the same sound, the same guests, and everything. It's not going to happen right away. Because for the mastery, you know, you need to put in the time and the efforts. So your time and attention invested in this and we know about the 10,000 hours. You will not become great right away. The thing is that we don't know what to do with all the stuff that's being always produced. The problem here is not that this happens once. But the problem is, when a new model comes out, as you said with the new phone, or with new watch or anything else, the same started happening with audio and video equipment. Everyone wants to have these yearly release cycles. Now you have them for everything - for drones, for cameras, for lenses. How would you sell a new device for someone who already has that was the best thing last year? Well, you need a big army of influencers who will showcase this new thing and say, oh, you know, it is similar, it is similar. But you have these differences, these and they make all the difference. Well, you maybe don't need it, if you have just the last year's model, you don't need to upgrade. But if you really want the best, this is the way to go. And guys, of course, I want the best, and everyone should have the best of everything. Everyone should have the best of everything on this planet. But as we said, we need to also think about what do you do with the waste? How can you produce all the time every year new things? I mean, you do not have enough space to store all this stuff that was the very best and groundbreaking from the previous years. How can we even think about this infinite growth on a finite planet? This is something that I cannot understand.

Taliy: 9:07

Yeah, exactly. How can we have this infinite growth fueled by capital accumulation on a planet, which resources are limited? It is simply unsustainable, this kind of economical model. And of course, it leads to a crisis, crisis after crisis, and each crisis ends up with war. And we've seen it many times before. So let's do it different this time. Let's not make the same mistakes our parents and grand grandparents have been doing. And even like from waste and resources part, it's just not the recycling older versions of this very same product, but also imagine how much labor, how much resources are put into this thing that's not even necessary. How much simple would it be to actually make the model that would last for a while like you buy a thing and you use it? You use it, you enjoy it, and when it's time to replace it with something new, really, really groundbreaking, it has to be done, but it has to be done in a way that would be beneficial for the people, not just for the company. And I know today it's a very complicated cycle. Like we have these companies, they have their shareholders, they have employees, everything works in a way that we have to sell more, the more our stock has to go only up every day. And that's what everyone's waiting. If something collapses in one part, everyone starts selling stock, and then it's the collapse of the whole system. We've seen something similar happened to the real estate market in 2008. Most of the people, they lost their properties, or they ended up with upside down loans where their property was worth three times less than the money they owed to a bank and this situation stayed like that for over a decade. And imagine the amount of psychological stress it puts on those people who ended up in such a tragic situation, sometimes even without their job because many people lost their jobs. So something is terribly wrong, because this system is not taking care of, like mental health of the people. And then they ask, why do we have so many people with disorders? It's like, because the whole freaking system is working to create these disorders like nothing is working for you to be like happy and sure that tomorrow is going to be beautiful. Like, think about it. When was the last time you woke up really excited about the upcoming day? And yeah, I'm so excited to live this day, to do the best things! When I was a kid that was like a normal thing it was every day was waking up like this. But when you growing up and you are waiting, okay, something's gonna be exciting when I'm gonna go to the university or then when I'm gonna go to work. But then it becomes more stressful. And even the excitement is replaced more by fears. I wouldn't say there are too many people who live really, really comfortable. And they can be assured that tomorrow is going to be great. But even the rich people, they don't feel secure. Because there are so many other competitors who are constantly trying to destroy your company and steal your wealth in legal ways. And there are so many legal ways to destroy someone. And the question is not how we patch the situation with a bandaid. But how do we actually create a solution that would make it a really, really sustainable ecosystem for the people to exist. Animals got it figured out much better than us. Bees don't have to pay for the beehive 30 year loan on their cell for them to live in. Right. They just live there, they build it themselves, and they enjoy it for their own lives. But we people we create over complicated systems that benefit a few, but create unlivable conditions for the most of the population.

Alexey : 12:48

It's funnyhow you said about paying for your place your cell in the beehive. Well, more and more apartments in many densely populated cities, they resemble this beehive, you barely fit in. Capsule hotels and stuff like that.

Taliy: 13:04

They are normalizing it. And each year they keep pushing on us idea that smaller is better. Remember that movie"Downsizing" with Matt Damon when he had to shrink himself to fit into a smaller house? That's basically what they do with us, they are promoting these capsule hotels and everything. Like psychologically, it's terrible, a person has to have at least 700 square feet of living space for each person. Like if it's two persons that has to be 1400. Like most of the people, they live in much smaller apartments, especially in the big cities. This is simply not a healthy environment, because psychologically you have to feel comfortable, safe, secure, you need a certain amount of space for that. And this is not how we live right now and the fact that is promoted as normal. That's not cool at all.

Alexey : 13:51

We will link to the movies as always, so that you can have a look at these. If you look at the upgrade cycle from the point of view of economy, of politics, let's say, it is a good thing. Because if we produce nothing, then we don't create jobs, we don't maintain jobs. And we always come to this idea that we cannot sustain the development unless we find a different model of society that takes care of the people. We are be doing, and we've talked about it already, we are doing unnecessary stuff, two episodes back "Human Bitcoin mining rigs," that we are doing unnecessary stuff just to keep busy. And this is crazy. Guys, don't get us wrong. We are not against progress. We love new technologies being introduced, we are using all the great stuff we can afford. We talked about it already in the beginning that progress should be available to everyone - only then it is progress. Otherwise, it's a portion of the population that can use the best available things and everyone else uses second or third grade stuff. The most interesting and challenging thing is how do you keep progressing, but also at the same time keeping everyone living in the best possible conditions? How do you keep these things, new things coming out without destroying the planet with all the waste that you produce? I mean, it's not only about phones, but we have big kitchen appliances that really falling apart in two, three years. I can tell a story about when we moved in into new apartment, was already five, six years ago. The new kitchen appliances, I mean, the dishwasher, the fridge and stuff, three or four appliances, the three of great German brand, they literally broke within the first year, when we started using them. We put these appliances of this particular brand because we used them before. And we know that they were serving for 10s of years, I mean, 10-20 years, and they were put everywhere in Switzerland. So it was like a no-brainer. Things that work longer, especially things that don't need major or don't have major technological breakthroughs, like dishwashers or fridges should be working fine. And then I started thinking about these things. It was the same thing about the iron, one broke within the first year, two others broke, same model, broke just couple of months after the warranty period ended, the official warranty period in the country. But this brand has a longer warranty period, and they replaced the one. And I was thinking like guys, it cannot be possible that stupid thing like an iron breaks. And the same thing broke every time. It was the container where the water is boiling, it started leaking. How's it possible? Do you have an institute that is studying the thickness of the walls of this boiling chamber, that it needs to be of a certain thickness, so the rust eats it before or just after the warranty period ends? This is very interesting. And when you start thinking about all these things, the progress is needed. Everyone wants progress. But what do you do with the waste? I think we can have another episode about the waste in general and how it's not being recycled. But we need to find other ways of manipulating matter if we really want to solve this problem. Because until we come to this point where we have the possibility to really grow, but reuse what's not needed at the planetary level for everyone, then we will be able to tell Oh yeah, we are making progress. Because everyone has the best of everything. Otherwise, it's not progress, it's you know, just some people have improved life conditions.

Taliy: 17:40

Yeah, so one of the solutions that's being offered to make it more sustainable is to switch to service-based subscriptions for everything. And first we started with a software like that you don't have to buy CDs, but then instead of buying albums, you could actually just subscribe and pay the cost of an album each month, and basically get access to any songs so you don't own them, but you can use it as a service. Apple cell phones, you don't have to buy it, you can subscribe to it just for 50 bucks a month. So you're gonna have the best new phone and just subscribe. And the amount of subscriptions you have is constantly growing. One of the things that was offered at the World Economic Forum was that by 2030, you're gonna own nothing, and you gonna have no privacy at all and you're gonna be happy. Or they gonna be happy about you not having your privacy and not owning anything because those who are offering these systems, they are not gonna be the ones who's gonna be using them. They're not going to be ones who are living on subscription based stuff. Just exactly as John Kerry traveling around the world, talking about carbon neutral zero and he has like 12 houses, few jets, dozen of cars. Like those people who are promoting these ideas are not the ones who are actually using them. So that's the problem, problem of trust. And this is something we discussed in the previous one. I would be okay with not owning stuff when it's a new format of the society where everything is transparent, where people self govern themselves, where there is actual trust. But in this space where we live right now, all our freedoms are being abused and our money has been stolen just straight out of our pockets, give away all our freedoms and own nothing and be happy. You have to be insane. Although after the recent experiments done on the humanity itself, in informational field especially, wouldn't be surprised if anything works, because people are fear can give away their freedoms, but they wouldn't be happy with the society it is, and that's the problem. Unfortunately, there is only one country in the world Bhutan, which calculates the index of happiness instead of GDP. I think similar index will be put in place in many other countries just for us to actually change the goal from infinite growth of economy to actually thriving as a society and, of course, thriving economy is part of it. But it doesn't have to be infinitely growing to thrive. At the World Economic Forum, they offer us not to own anything, I would offer them not to own anything other than the stuff we can actually verify that it's been obtained in a legal way. Like that would be definitely the my counter offer to the World Economic Forum and Schwab and all these great thinkers of our humanity, who apparently cannot sleep at night until each one of us is happy, right, because that's what they care the most about.

Alexey : 20:47

Actually, if you think about it, we have this idea that we need to own things, whoever has the most toys wins. Maybe it's not the best example here, but I visited a startup accelerator hub in Dubai, it's not a subscription based or anything, it's, it's free from the government. You have like a video recording space, an audio recording space with a very good equipment, actually. So if you want to record your videos, there is a green room, there are great mics and stuff. So maybe for this kind of things, it is a great idea to have this sharing thing. And if you take a look at the cars - 98% of the time, if not more, the cars we own, they just sit in the garage, they do nothing, they are parked somewhere. If we go and have a look at how you pick a car. You know, a lot of people pick a truck just in case they will need to transport one day a refrigerator. And all the 10 years of the lifespan of a car, maybe it's even less now, they're driving a huge car with an enormous trunk just in case they one day would need to transport something big. I think it's familiar for many, but for most of the time, you don't need even a two-seater car, if you had a subscription to a car service, let's say, that just gives you like a self driving car just pulls into your driveway, the one that you need today, you have a family outing, well, then you maybe need like a minivan or something like that, to bring you where you want to go. Or another day you would like to explore in the wilderness. So you will have a 4x4, a specially dedicated vehicle suited for your needs. You use it and then it goes back to the garage or whatever there is. And the next day it will be really used for the same thing by another person. I don't mind this kind of subscriptions. But what you told about the World Economic Forum, and we touched upon the subscription to life in the second episode. It looks like we will be having this subscription, owning nothing and happy - it would be okay. The problem if you miss your payment for your life subscription, what will happen? And this is the thing we should think about, it's not about owning things on a subscription basis. I don't mind this. How will they manage to come to this, if we need constant growth, we need to produce things. Subscription-based economy doesn't work like this. And we come to the same thing that unless we have this lifecycle and recycling of the materials, we will not be able to do it. I like this quote by David Attenborough that "anyone who thinks that you can have infinite growth in a finite environment is either a madman or an economist." And we have this senior associate from Oxford University environmental change Institute, Kate Raworth, she gave a TED talk, we'll link to it. And she says that"healthy economy should be designed to thrive, not grow." You were talking about thriving. We want to be happy, we are here on this planet to be and live happily, not to work. I don't want to say like bees because bees are really they do seem like they're happy. But we have this idea that we need to own stuff to be happy. And when we cannot have stuff that we want, we are not happy. Even if we have subscriptions, this will not solve the problem. The problem is not in the subscriptions. But the problem is in the idea what is the most valuable thing. If the most valuable thing is profit, and we now see that profits are accumulated roughly in the hands of a couple of dozen people on this planet, most of the profits, then we will not achieve happiness. It's not possible profits and happiness in this combination that we are having right now there are not combinable, it is not possible to achieve global happiness or happiness on a global level while the main goal is profit of several people. When we change and put human life and human happiness as the most valuable thing, then we will be able to shift and find new ways how to produce things, how to fulfill this demand for new, beautiful technologies that we don't even, we can't even imagine what we can have. We can only hint at some of the technologies that are possible. But then it is up to the scientists to you know, unite and work together, not for their individual patent. Because what we have right now also is everyone is working to have the patent to earn money. But if we take the money out of the equation for a second and think, Okay, how would you do? What would you invent? And how would you work with your colleagues, if your ultimate goal, the thing that you aspire to, is to make your invention available to every single person on this planet, and this invention should improve the life of every single person on this planet? Yeah, then we will have something really to be proud of. And this is what we're talking about.

Taliy: 26:07

Yeah, this sounds more like bees in a beehive working for the benefit of all other bees, this is how it should be. Today, as you said, like this Bitcoin mining rigs, it feels more like hamsters in a wheel, they run in there just for the sake of running, you know, maybe that hamster wheel is producing some energy for somebody to enjoy over there, 0.0 point 0% of our population who are actually getting richer. And if you've seen the news lately, check who's buying, investing the money into the farmlands in the US, and they own a lot of land, a lot of farmland, these are the very same people who are suggesting that we shouldn't own anything. And this is kind of suspicious to me. Like, why would someone who doesn't believe in their idea themself, like, to me, it sounds like if you believe in your idea, be an example of actually living that life that you're trying to advocate for.

Alexey : 27:03

Do as I say, not as I do. This is the main thing.

Taliy: 27:10

Yeah! This is the main thing. I think when it comes to parenting, you as a parent, you know, your kids gonna take an example of you, from your deeds, from the way you behave not from the things you say. So yeah, that's a perfect example. It reminds me another movie, remember, there was a movie with Justin Timberlake, it was called In Time. So each person in the movie had that bracelet that was showing the time how much time you have, yeah, this is the amount of money, this is your subscription to life. When that clock shows zero, it means your subscription to live on this planet has ended. And then they found this clock at the very end of the movie with infinite number of hours, somebody was stealing their life. And this is basically what's happening today. Just instead of those timers, we still calculate life in money, we go to work like spending our hours, spending our attention, our energy at work to actually collect some money, while this resource has been accumulated in somebody else's hands in tremendous amounts that cannot be used. Like there is no math models for these people, this very small group of people to even use that money. Like this is so counterproductive. And when it comes to animal life, if some any monkey collects more food that they can actually eat, we think it's a pathology that should be cured, treated on the medical level. But in our society, we put those people who behave exactly like sick monkeys on the cover of Forbes magazine, and we praise them as the most successful people. Well, I have to ask you, what is success about? Success, it's about succeeding as a group of people, not a small group of people, as a global group of people that we are on this planet.

Alexey : 28:51

I really agree 100% on this that we should think holistically for everyone. And also in lifecycles of any product, that patents they should be granted only when the whole lifecycle of the product, including how it is going to be recycled or reused is being shown, the whole lifecycle should be invented. Because right now we are inventing only things that can be sold, not how they will be used after their lifetime has come to an end. And we don't think about how we will treat our planet afterwards. In the same way when we don't think in cycles, when we don't think of everything as one closed system, also society, humanity as one system, then we start having failures. And this is what we are observing right now. Until we think of our planet of humanity as one whole system. Every single object that we introduce in our lives, it has to have its life cycle thought through, calculated, and then we can decide, okay, should we use it or not? Because if it harms someone later down the line after you used your computer or phone and it's being traded-in, where does it go? Maybe a beautiful robot that disassembles your phone and the enclosure and everything is being reused. This is great. But we've seen whole ships that transport all the goods around the globe being disassembled by hand in poor countries. We can clearly see that the whole cycle was not thought through. No one was even thinking about how you can dispose of your invention when it's no longer needed. Yeah.

Taliy: 30:43

Absolutely agree with you. We need a holistic approach and maybe even more than that we can actually calculate through the economy that wouldn't have inflation, that economy that wouldn't have overproduction, because, in fact, we know how many people are out there in the world, we know how much they consume, how much food they need, how much anything - electricity, how many cars will have to be produced. Calculation in this modern day is not an issue, we can actually calculate through and make a sustainable economy in which overproduction will not be a problem. So is overconsumption. Everything is possible today, like with modern technologies, with modern artificial intelligence, with all the processing power of the computers we have in Silicon Valley and places around the world, we can calculate it through. So what would be great is for us as a people to create demand for transparency on economical level and to request more power so that we could actually use our power daily to increase the quality of life on this planet for every single individual. And the vision, the vision of this world we really want to live in is what we inspiring you guys to tell us what this world should actually look like and what kind of features are you personally excited about? That would be great to hear your voice as a feedback.