The Optimization Trap: Why Too Much Efficiency Makes Us Fragile with Olivier Hamant

Donc les résilience, je suis venu de utiliser le word, je ne fais pas de ça, parce que les résilience sont venus de vol et puis vous passez à la back. La ravence est que vous créez les conditions dans lesquelles vous ne voliez pas. C'est quelque chose que nous avons misé, parce que nous sommes en train de dire que c'est un problème de climat. C'est un problème de pollution, de la énergie de la probleme. Tout ce qui fait son vie est plus impréhensible. Et donc quand nous savons que les solutions ne sont pas à être formées sur les standards de vivation, et donc quand ça ne fait pas, vous ne le phrase. C'est un nétit, c'est-à-dire, parce que vous savez que vous vous le savez toujours finir la solution parce que vous avez fait tout ce que c'est possible pour changer le temps. [Musique] [Musique] [Musique] [Musique] Aujourd'hui, instead de vous abonner à notre YouTube, ou à notre substac, les channels, je vais faire une autre request. Si vous vous avez appris et vous avez appris à cette fabilité de la conversation fabuleuse, et à ce qui fait pour moi, j'ai toujours été l'un de mes amis et un homme de la personne convenie pour parler de cela. C'est toujours mon propre hoping avec cette podcast et c'est une de mes favorites conversations en la dernière année, ou encore, et c'est un autre temps pour vous le dire aux audiennes de la share avec elle. J'espère que vous vous aimez cette chose. J'espère que vous allez bien. J'espère que vous le dites. C'est une de nos bénéfiques de l'écran de la dernière podcast. Je n'ai jamais pu le dire. Et votre nome a été de la plupart des fois en section de la commentation sur mon travail, et je parle de robuste et nature, et donc ici, nous sommes notre première conversation et le programme. - Merci beaucoup. - Vous êtes un biologiste et biophysiciste, je vous ai dit et vous avez été en train de faire une des plus députés et des modérants de la société de maximiser une efficiencie qui est toujours la plus importante. Et vous êtes en train de faire une nature, les choses très différentes, et vous avez fait une autre question et votre researched a été en train de faire une idea de robuste et de la performance de la société de robuste, particulièrement par le monde de la situation de la situation humaine, par le système biologique, en termes de choses comme efficiencie, en spécialisation et redundancy et le like. Donc, pour ceux qui peuvent être le learnt de votre travail ou le learnt de vous, pour la première fois, peut-être que nous commenceons avec vous donner un overview de ce que vous avez dit par le système de robuste et de performance, et peut-être que vous pouvez aussi expliquer comment vous aillez de cette idea centrale à votre travail. - Bon, merci. Il faut dire que dans une sentence, il faut être que la simplification est une grande optimisation de la situation. - Oh, la solidarité de la solidarité de la solidarité est une résultée de la solidarité de la optimisation de la situation humaine. - Oui, c'est un course de course. - Donc, peut-être que je vais vous définir le monde pour faire ça sur la même page. Donc, quand je parle de performance, il faut être un système de efficiencie et efficiencie. - A l'éfficiencie, il faut être de riche, l'objectif et efficiencie avec le minimum de la manière de le dire. Oui. Mais tellement vraiment mình, vous avez été beaucoup pris au créatre. nant T remembrance eu packaged Je vous askingnerai kalau y a un hoocleading prendre badly et aussi rote. Une monnaie qui réunie mange me Auf cuestión du point HDR sur le Sky On a des maire une prede எому On a parlé à l'éthécologie, la efficiency et la robuste, la stabilité. Mais n'est-ce pas que le temps que ça peut se faire pendant un jour ou à 100 ans? Donc c'est vraiment une propriété de la même système. Donc ça peut être pour un seconde, pour un moment. C'est de la même système. Je pense que c'est le trait de l'autre. Et c'est le plus important. Nous avons été dans un pays de performance, nous sommes toujours dans un pays de performance obsessed avec les performances, avec KPI et Rollways. Mais si on a un peu d'appareil, ce type de performance peut être parce que nous avons des ressources abondones, ouai, pour dire, très simple. Donc on peut jouer à la surface, avec des performances, parce que c'est la saïf-t-net, qui est la ressource abondones. Quand vous n'avez pas de saïf-t-net, quand vous n'avez pas de saïf-t-net, quand vous avez des fluctuations, des turbulences, d'un certainité, mais vous n'avez pas de saïf-t-net, donc votre saïf-t-net est pas l'abondance de la matière. C'est l'abondance de l'interaction. Et quand vous avez des interactions avec ces interactions, des bioses, vous avez des robustes, vous faites des robustes, des systèmes de la délicie, des redundances, donc des performances de la surface de la robuste. Et donc ce qui est pourquoi les gens qui sont très exemplaires, c'est que il y a été à peu près de millions de ans. Et donc ce qui est dans les genes, dans les celles, dans les physiologies, dans les ecosystems de la bioseur, est de robuste avant le performance. Ce qui nous, les sociétés humains de la fin de la première century, nous avons construit le performance de la bioseur avant le performance. Et donc c'est ce qui est ce qui est ce qui est ce qui est le nombre normal accident. Un normal accident? Qu'est-ce que vous me faites? Donc c'est un exprès, je vais écouter le source de Charles Spérow. Il est un type d'organisation, il est en train de faire un livre de normal accident. Donc un livre de normal accident, c'est quand le système est très complexe et très interdependent. Puis le accident est un envoieable, il va falloir. Et nous sommes dans ce, il y a beaucoup d'exemples où nous avons des globalisations, et je sais pas, c'est des désignes de la faible. Bon, une personne peut vous régler, et nous avons vu comment nous devons réagir, en en rendant le temps de la horizontally, et nous avons pu accéder cette sonne-là, que c'était un envoieable normal accident. Exactement, je sais. Si je peux utiliser le word de biologiste, si vous avez une vie et vous prenez une écologique à l'île, avec beaucoup de ressources, ce qui se passe quand nous nous réagirons vertiquement, nous nous avons donc un pont de la box, puis vous retournez dans un parasite. Vous optimisez vous, vous êtes juste une machine extractée, et vous perdez beaucoup de capacités, vous pouvez juste réagir, et ça me rend très fragile. Donc c'est vraiment le déabendant de la figure de ce que vous vous prenez à vous présenter à la nature et à un biologiste. Comment vous le regardez à une ecosystem et à un species de biologiste, et vous expliquez que ce sont des robustes. Donc c'est un bon test pour ça. C'est le test de stress. Vous pouvez aller pour une organisation, mais en même temps, vous pouvez vous réagir, vous pouvez vous réagir vertuellement, pour vous dire, par exemple, si vous êtes un jour faible, vous êtes un jour faible, vous répondez à ce que vous répondez. Pour le plus, vous avez un plan B, en fait, vous avez des rédéniencies, vous avez des alignements, et donc vous pouvez survivre le phyon. Si vous vous optimisez vous vous en pensez bien très efficace, ou bien, vous êtes très fragile. c'est ce que c'est que ce test de stress est plus. the antidote to the indicator of performance in some ways, right? Stress test is a dynamic test, a dynamic tool to live in a fluctuating environment in a stable environment. So first of all, what's the opposite of robust? Would that be fragile? Frageile. Okay. So what characteristics of human civilization would potentially signal to a biologist that our system has become overly fragile and was that always the case, probably not? No, exactly. Almost at least, I mean, 315,000 years, it's most of its time for sapiens. It's been about robustness. Like when you know, the enter and everything, that's not a place where there was a lot of cooperation, social hunting and these kind of things, right? It's a lot of cooperation. It's only recently in some ways. I mean, if we can maybe there's some points, the Neolithic age, when we start to invent agriculture, we start to be sedentary. So we start to have safety net, abundance of resources, abundance of food, then it starts to derail in some ways. We start to optimize. I mean, of course, the food, the plants, the animals, and then plantations at a Renaissance, right? Colonization, and then mechanization. And it's a race towards more and more performance. But that's very recent in the history of humanity. According to your research and contrary to what I think most people on our culture might think, those that even believe in evolution, evolution usually does not select for the most efficient organism. And why is that? And how does that pattern differ from the most basic economic principles about reducing waste in order to optimize efficiency and output? Yeah, it's crazy for the way we've read Darwin over the years, centuries, I mean, the decades, they say, it's been crazy because if you read Darwin, the origin of species, actually, it's really a claim to the selection of the most adaptable, not the most adapted. And so what we've done actually when we look at evolution, it's exactly what you said. We don't select the most efficient evolution, does not select the most efficient evolution, selects the most robust by definition because for a species to survive several millions of years, over several millions of years, you have to experience a lot of fluctuations. And so species that have to go through these fluctuations, they have to be robust before they can be efficient. Let's drill down in that a little bit because evolution works over large, large tracks of time. And it could be that you could look back and say, "Oh, what arrived here today was the most robust." But you also could say that it was a long, contiguous series of selecting for the most efficient or the most capable in that one time frame and then another time frame. And then another time frame. And what arrived here was the result of what was collectively more robust. And then a related question that comes to mind is multi-level selection on individuals and larger groups. And I'm sure you have something to say about that too. For living beings to go through evolution, they have to go through populations. Some of them are very efficient. And they are going to serve the ecosystem in some ways. And so these overspecies are going to live in a world where they are efficient and non-efficient or less efficient species. So they benefit in a way or they are built on this diversity. But the species that go through tens hundreds of millions of years, they are robust. I mean, a shark is robust. It's not efficient, for sure. But if you think of some orchids that we see today that have co-evolved with a specific insect or something like this, they are very specialized, very optimized. Those ones they're going to disappear most likely. Okay, I have a ton of questions now because this could go in many different directions. Because what we've built into the pipeline in terms of exceeded planetary boundaries, global heating, which if you're in France right now, you're aware of a little bit of a glimpse of coming decades. So robustness in nature is going to be incredibly relevant in coming decades and centuries. What animals, what organisms, what sorts of systems are going to make it through the bottlenecks of the 21st century. So that's an interesting question. It's not going to be individual species that will survive. It's collective populations that will survive. So for instance, because the trap would be to think that we're going to select a tree that will resist, jolt, freezing and everything. And so we'll make a monoculture of a tree which will attract the pathogen and that for us will disappear. So what will resist is collective robustness. So collection of different species that will mutually help each other and that's going to be robust. So that's where it's difficult for us because after decades of performance, we're also often thinking of silo right in solo as well. So what's going to survive is groups, heterogeneous groups that are robust. Let's drill into that a little bit because in biological systems as you're describing diversity is extremely important. On the other hand, human economies often eliminate diversity in favor of standardization and efficiency and profit. So can you outline specifically why diversity is important to underpin robust systems in nature and in human economies and what might that look like going forward? Well, I mean, diversity is a form of heterogeneous redundancy if you want. So if you have, you know, if I take for instance, if you only have a car to go to work, that's very efficient because you know what to do. It's easy, you know, the road and everything. But you have to control your car a lot because you really depend on your car. So if you don't have diversity, your car is not working, you can't go to work. But if you have a bike, if you have a neighbor that can bring you to work, if you have all these diversity, then you always have a plan B and so you don't need to control your car so much. You can be serene because you have enough planned. It's the same for biology. If you have a diversity of solution, you can resist. I was taking the example of the monoculture. So when you have wheat monoculture, for instance, you know that all this wheat is the same everywhere, so this is going to attract the pathogen. The pathogen will be selected in a place where everything is homogeneous. It's the same for informatics, by the way, the cyberattacks, the attack, the the dominant software. Diversity is also a shield against pathogens, for instance. So how does this work? How did this work historically? You have these ecosystems of different species that implicitly but probably not consciously collaborate with each other and build a robust ecosystem. But in the human case, 200,000 years ago, were we consciously advocating and supporting diversity and robustness in our systems? Or was it just an externality or a spanned rail to use an evolutionary term of just our daily lives and behaviors? I would buy the idea that it's just because we could do competition, we could do performance because we had a lot of resources. When I say we, it's cast, it's not everyone. But there was a group of people who had in our resources who could, you know, determine an economic model in a way and we've just followed. Because even if you're poor, you can buy, you know, mimicry, think that that's the model, right? So even it's crazy, right? It's really in the culture. The culture of abundance is everywhere. And so if you're in that abundance, then you're going to perform because you can. The three years after World War II, so 1945 to 1948, after a big trauma, we have developed robustness. Social security, human rights, IUCN, I mean, all this has been created because we had the experience of situations. And so we developed robustness. But after 1948, it was back to performance and more than ever because oil was even more present than before. So it's a little bit of a double edged sword that a huge amount of energy, surplus, makes redundancy and robustness feel less important because we have do overs. We have Mulligans. If we screw something up, it's so cheap that we can just do it again. But gradually, that is causing a lack of creativity and a lack of evolutionary response to a biological organism that naturally wants to have a plan B and a bicycle and all those things and B robust. But the signal for that has been squelched because of the carbon pulse. Exactly. Let's take an example. You have a false banker. We're trying to be to scam you, right? If you use double identification, so a lot of control, a lot of performance to be really controlled, your vigilance is going to decrease. And that false banker is going to be much more credible because there is more control. So it's a bit counter-intuitive, but when we increase the level of control, actually, we increase the level of insecurity. And it's the same with performance. When we optimize, we think that we're doing the right thing because it's more efficient, but actually we are more fragile and we don't sit. For every question I ask you and all of the concepts that we're going to discuss today, there are kind of two answers or two lenses with which to view them. One is a large aggregation of humans, society, or the total human population of 8.1 billion, or individual humans. So I think my understanding is that most of your work discusses institutions and systems. But how does all this map onto individuals? Do modern individual homo sapiens people optimize ourselves in the same way that our civilization has? It's crazy because it's actually at all scales. We even optimize ourselves in some ways. We optimize our foods. We optimize the routine for the breakfast. We optimize the plan for the early days. So it's at all scales. We are contaminated by this ideology that performance is always positive. It's not that it's always negative. We like to have a fireman that is performant. Of course, efficient. When you're in the fire, when you're in the middle of a crisis, you want to be performant. At the peak of the crisis, you want to be performant. But the rest of the time, you have to be robust. But what we do the rest of the time, we are performant. We claim efficiency all the time. And it's really at the individual level, at the family level, at the company level, and the world level, it's everywhere. As a biologist, and I assume that part of that is you've studied history. How does this differ from our ancestors hundreds of years ago, thousands of years ago, hundreds of thousands of years ago, take your pick? For me, the turning point is based on the analytic age, the Renaissance, and of course, the oil revolution. That's a industrial revolution. That's definitely towards this. But if you look at the longer time before that, I mean, humans were rather cooperative. So it was robustness because they had to live with fluctuations. You can't survive if you're performant with fluctuations. It's too dangerous. So you can't, I mean, it's basically a lesson of viability. So if you, for any living beings, if you live in an echological niche with a lot of resources, you can, I mean, you have to be competitive because there's a lot of resources. And so there will be a lot of competitors. So you have to be the most efficient, the most performant to survive. You take the same living being, you put it in an ecological niche with less resources, fluctuations, scarcity, shortages, they cooperate. That's symbiosis. And that's what's dominating on Earth. There's a lot more symbiosis on Earth than parasites. And so that's what we should see. I mean, if you take the ocean, for instance, the ocean is a very, I mean, it's a ecosystem with very little resources, very poor, very scarce. There's a lot of cooperation. I mean, there are a lot of papers analyzing the network of interactions between the species. They are cooperating. So we can have the image of the shark when we take the ocean, it's the shark and the danger and everything. Actually, no, it's all this plankton and everything that is cooperating. In a wide-bound recent, they're cooperating, but the shark is also just directly eating the fish. I don't think the fish feels like it's cooperating. Of course. But you know, it's the hunt. That's the moment of performance. The lion that is hunting is performant. But the lion is sleeping 16 to 20 hours every day. So when we reduce the lion to an hunter, we are biased by the pro-performance bias, right? So the problem is that in nature, you have to perform, but the percentage of your week or life in performance mode is very small. Whereas modern humans are thrust into this performance mode, 90% of our waking time. And that can't be healthy. I think it generates planetary burnout. So burnout for humans, burnout for public services, burnout for ecosystems. And the root cause is performance. It's not selfishness, it's not individualism, it's not even oil. If you really want to go to the root cause, that's that tropism towards performance that compasse on efficiency all the time. So that's a more powerful driver than sexual selection or status, relative fitness. Or it's embedded in relative fitness, yes? Yeah, exactly. It's embedded. So basically, so if you have a planetary source, it's a good fitness actually to be performed. I mean, the main thing is that we could justify this type of behavior when we add a lot of resources and when there was no visible negative externalities. So what would a psychologically robust person look like today? Well, someone who likes to do improvisation, you know, when you do when you do improv, you know, you're not in control. You're not trying to say everything you have in mind, you know, you just improvise. And so you play with what's happening. And so that's the school of robustness. So if I can take an example of a musician, for instance, so if you're a musician obsessed with performance, you're going to read your score very carefully. You'll practice a lot, but if the wind is taking away your sheet of music, that's it. The music can stop. Whereas if you do free jazz, and if your neighbor is doing a, I don't know, like a C sharp or something like this, that is sounding weird. You're going to play with it. It's going to feed the intention of jazz is robust. Absolutely. And not the marching band. Of course, the marching band is performance because that's not really jazz. Right. It's a really jazz. We've improved. So I don't know if I'm skipping ahead logically on the questions that I'd like to ask you, but is it possible to have a robust system with plus or minus 8 billion humans? Of course, it is possible. So it's, I mean, of course, maybe I shouldn't say, of course, but I think it's possible. Let's say if we take agriculture food, which is one determinant time to have all these people. Right now we have increased the demographic with rather efficient, performant agriculture. But the negative externalities is basically making it very fragile for the future for geopolitical reasons, social reasons, not only the ecology for many other reasons. But there are many, many reports showing that you can switch to agro ecology. If we could switch to agro ecology, you can feed 8 billion people. No problem. How do you define agro ecology? So ecroecologists are thinking your agro system as a necosystem. And so that means that you replace fertilizer, pesticides, irrigation by the biodiversity in your field. So if you increase the biodiversity in your field in your plot, then this is providing nutrients. You don't have to add fertilizer. It provides resistance to pathogen. You don't have to add pesticides. And it saves the water in the soil because there's a lot more biomass. And so those plots are much more resistant, much more autonomous, and so they are more robust. Tony Barnaski is a biologist at Stanford and he wrote a paper that showed in the last several hundred years the amount of animal biomass on the planet is up by 700%. Most of that is human livestock and humans. Net wild animals have declined. But that's because of the energy, a hover bash and the corn and soybeans that we're directing towards animals. In your example, you just said the animals in the world that are going around and sharing nutrients and everything that's happening because of this global bolus of fossil sunlight. So if fossil fuels dwindled and went away, would we still get that much magnitude of biomass benefit from biodiversity? Of course, because if you think of a field today, wheat fields or canola fields, I mean, there is no trees. So if you talk about the total biomass of that field, it's very low. Actually, it's the same yield as the savanna. Actually, it's crazy because we, thousands of years ago, we've copied the agricultural model of Syria, the fertile crescent, right? Which was a savanna. And we've exported that model everywhere, even in places where there were trees, forests. And so if we switch to agroforestry, so putting trees on top of the wheat field, then we produce a lot more biomass per square meter. And we also protect the field from the rain, I mean, like, and we maintain the agrometry and it's all positive. Well, I've had people on to discuss this before that higher agricultural productivity is possible without fossil inputs. But there's one major input that's needed and that is time, human time. So I don't think we could have the current material lifestyles, at least in the west, in this scenario that you're postulating. Of course, yeah, of course, of course, there would be, I mean, there would be more people working in the field. I mean, right now it's crazy, there's almost no one, right? Yeah. It's really the end of there, I mean, that's not. So there would be more people in the field, but we also have to realize that if we do agroforestry, it's not like we're going to go back to the middle age. We have developed technologies, we just need to make that happen. more robust, repairable in the land, etc. If we have this technology, we can repair it, that it's produced locally, repaired locally. Then we have a mix in a way, so we've learned from the years of performance, but we make it more robust. Is any of this happening in France or in Europe that you're aware? Actually, it's so what's crazy about this? If I take agroecology for the past 20 years, the surface area in agroecology has increased every year in Europe. Every year, it's increasing. Simply because when you're a farmer and when you start, you can't start with intensive agriculture anymore. It's too expensive. So you start with agroecology. Right away. What would classically trained economists think of this conversation so far? I'd be curious. No, tell me. I'm sure you've steel manned your position on efficiency, because efficiency, another thing that upsets me, or frustrates me, is there's all this discussion about energy. And we need more energy. Our society right now runs on power, which is useful energy per unit time, which also correlates to biological principles. So I think there's an often frequent conflation between energy and power. Well, first of all, do you have anything to say about that? When I add interactions with economists, they always take examples of war, of crisis, to teach to their students. And so, of course, in those contexts, you need to be efficient. Commercer war, you need to be efficient. But in the regular time when you're at peace, when you are experiencing situation, you need to learn a different way to work right? Oh, so it's kind of like the lion who hunts once and then sleeps for three days. Exactly. We need an economy like that. Exactly. So we need, I think, if you go to a commerce school, I don't know, a college of economy, let's say, or engineering school, it's the same. You're going to be taught the lion that ends. And never, you're going to be taught the lion that sleeps. So I'm dreaming of schools where we learn about the lion that sleeps, because that's what it's doing. I mean, that lion is doing most of the time. It's, these are schools of wars. It's really crazy. We are actually teaching kids to be at war. It's as brutal as this. Yeah. So, we alluded to this before, but from the perspective of your research, how big of a role do you think that cheap, abundant energy you parse it into oil has played in the way that our universities and our leading thinkers confuse performance and robustness? Big time. I mean, so we are really in the era of energy, even for people who are invested in the socio-ecological question, often energy comes first. Before life, so we are going to make you know, windmill or solar panels more efficient, even if this might have an impact on forests, on the lithium mine, and then on life. And what's crazy is that we want to save the machine. We want to save the machine, even though our performance is destroying life on Earth. So there's a lot, I mean, there's a much better way to look at the problem. So if we put the primacy on life, then maybe those nature-based solutions can resolve a lot of issues on the climate, on the energy, on work, on the economy, on the well-being, etc. So, building on that, I love that answer, by the way. Do you think that declining net energy is going to naturally force societies back towards robustness or simply produce collapse? And do we have any say in which direction that goes? So I guess it will depend on who is going to read that signal. So if the people in power with a lot of money, with a lot of power, don't see the decline in energy. For instance, if you're going through itwave and you have your air condition in your apartment in your office, you don't see it, right? And so you're going to still go for efficiency. If you don't have air condition, if you see fluctuations in your work, in your environment, then you start to question your place. You see, well, that's not liable. That apartment is not liable without air condition. So I need to change. But if you are in a hot city and you turn on your air conditioner, I don't think you're thinking about efficiency. You're just thinking about personal comfort. Of course, but that's connected in some ways, right? Because personal comfort comes with at a cost of resources, energy, these kinds of things. Yeah. Jean-Marc Jean-Covici has an interesting way of describing this, which I've used before, that we can become more efficient, we can use our technology better. Or Sobrea T, which is, let's choose to take a bus instead of a car or we actively choose to do something differently in the face of energy and ecological limits. And if we don't do that, the third category is poverty, which is we're going to be forced to do these things, regardless. I thought that was an interesting framing. For sure, for sure. I mean, it's good at seeing this because we need to anticipate. Otherwise, we're just going to experience it, and then it's going to be poverty, for sure. But efficiency and sobriety, I mean, so we both have problems. And they can be connected because sometimes when we want to do sobriety, for instance, we want to make a machine more efficient so that it's consuming less energy. And we are going to call this sobriety. And of course, we forget about the rebound effect. And the classic example is the plane. The plane that is consuming less kerosene, but actually because it's more efficient, the rebound effect now it's possible to have a low cost flight, ultra fast fashion in all this is made possible because our planes are more efficient. And sobriety has generated exhaustion, exhaustion of resources, right? Just the opposite. So sobriety is actually a nice word, but it shouldn't be the cause. It shouldn't be the constraint. It should be the output. We should create the conditions that generate sobriety. And that's robustness. I like that. I will send this interview to Jean-Marc. But you made me think of something. So I've often described Gevin's paradox and the backfire effect more explicitly. But never to a biologist. So I'm wondering how does Gevin's paradox or the rebound effect or the backfire effect? Is there evidence of that in nature? Is that just a product of the human economic super organism? It's true everywhere. So maybe something I had the border between biology and economy. It's Norman Borlo, Lansperin theory. So the idea is that you're going to increase the yields of plants. And by doing this you're going to prevent deforestation. That's the original idea. Because you produce more in your field, you're not going to have to burn the rest. And so the first will thrive. Of course, the rebound effect comes in. When you increase the yield, you create new needs. I mean, the palm oil, the soy, I mean, it's very classic. And this is going to increase deforestation. And so this is a classic example. We can also sit in biology. But what about not with humans involved? Like what about a lion? Oh, yeah, no, it can happen as well. So for instance, if you see birds fighting for bread in the park, they're usually, I mean, there's a lot of bread. They're going to fight. So competition because there is abundance. And they're going to sometimes overfeed. Because there is a competition. So that could be some kind of rebound effect. They could just, you know, I mean, if there were some god of bird, they could divide the quantity for every bird. It's not what happens. So you can have this. It's not as complex as the rebound effect we experience in the humans, of course. So getting back to the sobriate discussion and declining energy on the horizon. Have you seen or studied any historical biological or civilizational examples where turbulence itself increased robustness? So there was the example after World War II, which was an example where we had an increase of robustness. You can also look at undergenious people. So they've been robust for a very long time. And so it's sort of a school of robustness. If you look at the cogees, for instance, in the Columbia, I mean, they're the very robust people. They can experience a lot of fluctuations. The only thing though is that their traditions are starting to be obsolete, because their underarmate is changing. And so those robust traditions and robustness in their territory because their territory is not as robust as before. They have to change their tradition. And so these ones are also in danger. But so this would be the two extremes, right? So people who have been robust for a long time because they haven't entered the modernity, the world of efficiency. And us who have entered modernity and each time there was a fluctuation, we have increased robustness. I mean, if you look at the democracy, I mean, we've increased some level of robustness [BLANK_AUDIO] over the years, over the decades, over the centuries. So it's not like it's only a path towards more and more efficiency. There's been robustness along, but in the recent decades, let's say, because we've been in so much abundance, we've really reduced our robustness a lot. So if you think forward and take out the policy and the planning that's going to be essential in the coming decade, but if you as a biologist and a scholar just close your eyes and imagine two centuries from now, or even one century from now, what sort of humans will have made it through the bottleneck? They won't be born yet, but what sort of human civilization and structures and such? By definition, they will be robust, because that's what made it through this chaotic, coming century. What can you speculate about that? So we exactly in what we call a biologist called "evolutive mismatch". So we exactly. So we still have the culture of abundance of performance, even though we've switched to a different world. But I agree. So later on, what we can imagine, a robust world, it's a world where agriculture is agroecology. The economy, it's not a production economy. It's a sharing economy, cooperation economy, a functionality economy where we produce a lot less goods, but those goods are much more robust, reparable, adaptable, but they are shareable. They are shared. So it's the shared card, the shared bike, but it's shared everything. And so this is so variety for the land, for the territory. So it's more likely, there's a lot more participatory and participatory approaches, which are slower, more heterogeneous, but more robust in the long term. So this is all what we see today. It's already here. It's already there today. It's just below the mediatic line, let's say. - So E.O. Wilson is one of my favorite authors. I have every single book that he's ever written, including the super organism, somewhere on my bookshelf here. He famously said communism, great idea, wrong species. So we talked about a little bit about this earlier, but I'd like you to unpack it a little bit. Human economics often assumes that competition drives innovation. And what you said earlier is biology suggests that cooperation is equally fundamental. So how do you see living systems now and the future balancing between those two forces? - Yeah, so competition and cooperation are both good for innovation, but it's just that we humans who think that indeed innovation is driven by competition, and we think that in biologists say, whereas actually it's other deposits. So if you use competition to innovate, by definition, you will only have the space that the competitors leave you. So it's a small space. So the innovation is small, and that's all the gadgets that we see, right? That's innovation driven by competition. - So that, and that historically, we've innovated 1.1% a year. We've become more efficient over the last 100 years around that it's been remarkably consistent. - Exactly, and so, but the type of innovation, actually the problem is that innovation, we often think that innovation has to be to the service of increased performance, whereas we can certainly think of innovation to the service of increased robustness. - Increased service to the web of life, increased meaning, increased health, none of those things are chosen in our current economy. - Absolutely, absolutely. And so if you think robustness and robustness of your territory, there's gonna be well-being, there's gonna be all this. And so the type of innovation is going to be very different. It's going to be connected to life, to your local land. It's gonna be also shared. It's gonna be open access. It's gonna be in creative commons, CC by SA, share alike. I mean, it's always straight. And so what we do when we innovate through cooperation is that actually we expand the innovation. When we innovate with competition, we restrict the innovation. There's a patent, it's a limit. And so innovation is much more open when it's open and when it's cooperative. And that's what happens in biology. Of course, when evolution happens, there is no patent. When there's a new type of flag or a new type of wing, there's not a patent on it. This is shared. So that's gonna be more like this, right? In the fluctuations, you have to share your innovation. And actually also this is happening today. There's calls for commons actually. So there are in France as well. So there are new projects on cars that are also bike, like sort of a mixed vehicles, let's say. This is a call to commons. So the companies that are agreeing to respond to that call, they have to share all their innovations. - So you're a communist? - So I like the commons. The problem is the communist. The communist, the problem with the communist is that it's often the model we have, mine the most famous model we have, is the Staliniian communism. And Staliniism, let's say, it's another type of extractivism. And for me, there is no difference between the US and USSR in the '60s. These are two extractivist economy. At first order, they are just pumping oil and mining minerals. At very high rates, and if you look at the economy, actually it's crazy because it's the same. The salary, the inequality in salary decreases from the 1950s to the 1970s, both in USSR and in the USA. And after the 1970s, with the oil cracks and everything, these inequalities increase in USSR and in the US. So definitely the driver is not the economic model. It's the abundance of resources and that troublesome towards efficiency. And so that's why, I mean, so in a way, the commons, it's more like a, I mean, it's more subtle than just communism. So in your work, you have discussed how prioritizing robustness, as you've outlined so far today, can offer an alternative third way between endless efficiency-led growth and complete degrowth. And can you display why that is? And what does that third path might actually, how would that look? Well, that third path is taking on the first line in all the scientific report on the socio-ecological question, which is that we are living the era of the mine and we are entering the era of the standard deviation. Oh. And often this is something we miss because we're going to say it's a problem of the climate. It's a problem of pollution, it's a problem of energy. It's not the problem. These are problems, these are secondary problems. Well, the primary problem is, as speaking to a biologist, is ecological overshoot. Exactly. And so that ecological overshoot is generating the fact that we lose buffers. And so that's why our climate is getting more turbulent. That's why we lose ecosystem services. All this, I mean, at first order, makes our life more unpredictable. And that's the number one message from scientists. Our world is starting to be more unpredictable. We're leaving the mine to enter the era of the standard deviation. And so when we know that, the solutions we have to build, they have to be built on standard deviations. So if I just take an example, so if you're living by the sea and you think of the mine, so you're going to say, well, the sea level is going to rise slowly. So you're going to build a dike to adapt to this mean increase. But if you think of standard deviation, you know that there's going to be a submersion soon enough, right? And it could be tomorrow. So you're not going to build a dike. I mean, you can't build a dike, but that's secondary. You're going to make an habitat that can withstand this water coming in. So it's going to be more amphibious, if you want. We'll be able to withstand water coming in and coming out. That's a very different solution. If more people understood that we're headed for an era of standard deviation, as opposed to mean, doesn't that immediately emotionally activate the lion hunting dynamic instead of the lion sleeping dynamic, which paradoxically is what we want more people to have? So if you live in the world of standard deviation, you do jazz. OK. So you know, you basically we just have to understand that the risk looks like a danger. If we've over optimized everything, because it's very risky to, I mean, the little fluctuation is very risky. If you live in an era of standard deviation, you know that fluctuations are everywhere. You have to re-enchant risk. So you want to make risk your every day, right? So you build all your economic system or your social systems on fluctuations. And so when it happens, you're not afraid. You're not afraid. It's really like a jazz man or a jazz woman playing with group, right? Fluteuations are actually even welcome. So I don't know how to play an instrument. I sing background vocals on a comedy rap group, but I'm not musical. So how would this apply beyond jazz? Give us some more examples of robustness. So I can give you-- I mean, it's a bit binary, but I can-- if I build the house, for instance. So if I want to be very efficient, I'm going to optimize that house so that you know every single room is optimized for a destination A kitchen is going to be a perfect kitchen a living room is going to be a perfect living room Even the furniture is going to be built in and everything right super efficient the problem is that something happens In the territory or something that house needs to be a hospital or you can you need to welcome more people or I don't know you have more kids than expected or whatever multi use multi Exactly so if you want to be robust you have to be multi use so that means that your house the walls can move The house itself you can Dispuntle it and rebuild it somewhere else, but you know playing with situations and so you're serene it's sereneity basically right because you know that you always find a solution because you've made Everything so that it's possible to change all the time that core that was clear so there are many Sustainability advocates people that work at county boards and town councils that are aware of Climate and ecology and energy depletion and all those things Well, how should I mean you just talked about jazz and and in your house how should people in Counties and regions be thinking about Real busness especially in where they have manuals and procedures that are Set already to maximize efficiency and profit not robustness a good starting point is to Build a repair cafe You know like a where you can repair your own things. It's already. It's very good because you learn how to repair things That's a social link to group Local corporations. So it's already a seed or business in the territory But you can think of many of everything actually it's something that we've experienced during a COVID So you know like we've really planned the cities that they are optimized and suddenly during COVID the sidewalks were waiting rooms, right? the plaza was vaccination center, right? So we still have postplaces that are multi-use and so we just need to cherish them and to actually expand them But we also need to see them they are here. So now is the time to really preserve them How can we tell whether a policy or an action in a in a community actually increases robustness Rather than is just simply reducing consumption and throughput or providing a quick fix So for me there are four determinants if you want the first one is Reldency so there should be another plan B plan C plan D eterogenity diversity So it means that those plan B must be very different. It's not only the second time the same thing. That's to be different The fourth point is linked to life to the living so those solutions have to have a link to the Living creatures on site they can't only depend on minerals or something that is coming from outside So link to the local life the local water the local sand the local biomass and the fourth one is A deep link to the local territory. So social economical material to the economy and the tool to do this it's the stress test So when you have to take a decision a strategic decision for your company for your organization for your local community You have to ask a double question Is that project robust and is it at the service of the robustness of the territory And to make sure that's the case you do a stress test. So you shake it with a very strong fluctuations like for instance all price 10 times higher There's no more internet for the next six months on the entire planet. I mean like you know a big fluctuation And you you're going to see two things what cracks What is fragile? So it's going to immediately to give you a map of the fragility in your local community And the second thing you're going to ask what do I need to do So that doesn't happen to that he doesn't crack I wish I would have talked to you two months ago because I just wrote a of six part series And it's called how to think about the future and I actually included real busness as a key thing And some of the no regret strategies, but you you've just made it a lot clearer So thank you and and I'm just wondering back to your cooperation and competition question If there are 20 people on a decision making group for your community or your region If there's only one person advocating for robustness that makes it a little difficult So if you've found that there's a critical mass of of humans and nodes in a network that make these conversations Make more sense and uh-huh and are actualized So the typical case of robustness even for this if you're alone in a group You know preaching or pledging for robustness and the rest is pledging for efficiency The way to go forward. So if you speak louder It's not going to work. That's the performance path, right? It's not going to work actually even going to be counter-prolited So the the art of war is the way to go. So you want to create an active minority So that means that you find over people arise that are very heterogeneous So that means that they are not like you. So they're CEOs, they are homeless They're I don't know like a baker. I mean like really very wide diversity of people And so if that group is Okay to push that robustness then for the 19 over people is going to be very difficult to say well You know you represent the entire population of the community, but we're going to go against you That's an active minority. The active minority is activating a silent majority And that's you can't fight that It's really the art of war and shunzu. It's it's uh, it's almost like you know the the goal game and uh you you uh you encircle The art of your system and the art of the system has two choices either to disappear Or to join the periphery Actually, that's what happens in the flocks of birds. By the way, again, biology is easier So when you look a flock of when you look at a flock of bird that is you know turning right or in left Changing its shape It's always the birds at the periphery but are guiding the group And so that's what you want to create that periphery that is heterogeneous and that is guiding the group So it's a non-violent way to transform a system. I like that Um, how do we deal with the unbelievable, unbelievable complexity of of um All the issues and the crises that we face it's a it's a poly crisis. There's all these things And then there's overlapping strategies and solutions and institutions and sometimes they contradict each other As we attempt to navigate uncertainty at larger and larger scales um does your study of biology offer any suggestions there So yeah, complexity. Well, it's very complex. Of course, it's a difficult case So again, I would say the the local level is the way to start Because when you encircle the art of the system is going to start from the periphery. I mean, I have doubt very much that The president of the USA or the European Commission will suddenly say well, you know what we're going to switch to robustness now unlikely So it will rather come from the basis it's bottom up. So the more we do locally the more we create this active Minorities and the more we are contaminating the art of the system. I think that's the way to go forward I'm sure you're aware that the human brain has shrunk 10 to 15% in in the last a sixth day agricultural revolution anyways And I think the leading theories are that that is a result of a specializing When we used to be more robust as individuals because we could be a jack of all trades and whatever came our way But then once we had this more and more storeable as Luke Kemp would say lootable Agricultural surplus we specialized into different roles And over time I think that atrophied our brains. Do you have any thoughts on that? Sure, I mean, it's a it's part of the you know when when we optimize we make everything narrower You know, it's the highway. I mean everything is you know like narrower and so our brain is like this or We are do you call it like a mashware? The job the jobs are also reduced because we are eating things that are a bit more tender now Actually, we can't sit over this century. Yeah, so it's very Because very fast. So indeed our environment is modifying our body And so if we're in the environment that is promoting efficiency promoting performance or body itself We are actually turning into parasites. You know like a parasite is The most evolved the most optimized parasites. They've lost their legs. They lost their wings. It's just digestive tract basically. They're just extracting food. That's it And they are reproduced that that's pretty much it And so where we are if we call on like this we turn like this right of course this will This will break before that but we are seeing this in our body indeed I mean I was talking about a relative mismatch. I mean there are cases like this very clearly Stated in the literature. So for instance the cavities that we have in our teeth is because of agriculture We where we have more sugar in our diet and so there is more cavities the same we have We're missing some vitamins, but because when we were Hunter like our investors the diversity of the diet was much higher Then after agriculture. So always is yeah, our body is changing when we change our environment. I will attempt one sentence from high school French 40 years ago. Nune som pa robust. Yes, we just see that go. Full stop, right? Like we are closer to parasites by your definition. Yes. And here's the thing too, we talk about energy and well, we need this base load. So we need a natural gas generator and turbines and we need solar panels. But yes, you need 10,000 kilowatt array to get all the things in your house. Humans don't need base load. We are base load. And so for most of our history, when it was raining out, we took a nap like a lion. And it was sunny and windy. We went out and did work. And so I think that needs to shift somehow in our cultural awareness too, right? For sure. But there are examples where we're not condemned to stay parasites. I can just take an example of a bakery. It's called Neolocaux. So it's a bakery where they make bread with the sun and it's a solar oven. So it's not with electricity. It's not with oil. It's just with mirrors. So just plain solar oven. But when you do this and you're in France and even in Normandy, where you know there's a lot of clouds, how do you make bread when your energy is not always there? Well, if you follow the lion, you just wait for when there's enough light to make your bread. So that means that you need to make bread that can be stored for a long time. And so for this, you just use the yeast, that is slower, not as performant. So the dough is going to bond slowly, but that bread you can keep it for seven days. So you just have to wait for the sun to be there. You bake your bread. And that's it. You can sell bread the entire week. So in that example is the human culture robust or is the bread and the yeast itself robust? So it's a little bit of everything. Actually the yeast is more robust because it's slower to grow. It's also more robust because when the dough is, well, mounting like this, the gluten is finding it so as you don't have to have a mechanical way to increase the connection between the gluten, it happens naturally. And the baker as well is more robust. I mean, it's economically more profitable because you are not dependent on the oil price. You're not dependent on Russia invading Ukraine. You're not dependent on this. You're not dependent on inflation. You're not even dependent on competition that is, you know, like when the state is supporting the normal bakeries, you don't have any subsidies. But actually you're so robust, but you don't even need the subsidies. I find robustness as a goal and a theme much more palatable and relevant and interesting than sustainability. I mean, sustainability was always kind of an inaccurate term. We should be more sustainable than we are today, but I really like robustness as a frame. You could say, I mean, if I want to play along your line, you could say that a parasite can be sustainable as long as there are sort of resources. Yeah. It can extract. So to be robust means that you've understood that you're in an environment that is unpredictable with shortages, with scarcity. So you have to maintain viability over the long time. So you have to be robust. So robustness will require homo sapiens to actually live up to our name, wise, wise ape, wise man, because cleverness is in service of efficiency today for the most part. Which is crazy because if we think of intelligence in terms of evolution, intelligence is the ability to adapt. It's adaptability. Yeah. Right. So the most intelligent living beings are the most adaptable. And so if we were homo sapiens, really, we would be more adaptable, so the ability is adaptability that will maintain us in the long term. I think I have to ask you, how does AI fit into your concepts of robustness and fragility? AI is here and it's here to stay. It's like a nillion that would have come from an overplanet and is now with us. So we have to play along with that new partner, if you want. But of course, in the world of efficiency, AI is at the surface of efficiency. And so we are delegating a lot of our tasks to a machine, which is doing it much more efficiently than us. And so by doing this, we are exporting our knowledge to the intelligence, let's say, but we are losing competency. We are actually delarning. That's what happens to surgeons and it's really everywhere. So if we wanted to have AI at the service of robustness, actually it's pretty simple. We want to make non or very inefficient AI where humans have to go afterwards to check, to verify. So there is a link between AI and humans before and after. And this could be to the service of robustness because this could add new sources, new reapprinces, new ideas. So, select the pt, this kind of thing. That would be okay. I mean, AI could help. But because it's less performance, it would have less impact on the environment as well. But this would be the only point where it would be positive for robustness. The rest is only performance. Yeah, well, and AI defines a goal as using less resources to attain the goal. But the goal is more efficiency and more profit and faster things. So unless we change that goal, it's just going to be a very fast reiteration microcosm of the 15% shrinking of our brain since the Neolithic. And it's even worse, I would say, because the truth of AI is correlative. It's correlation. So the what makes for AI is going to try to find the best correlation. So that means that the attractor for an AI is the mean. It's not the standard deviation. And so the more you use AI, the more you look at what's more widespread on the internet. But you don't look, I mean, you don't see what's more unusual. In a world where we have more fluctuations, we should be a lot more interested by the standard deviation and a lot less interested by the mean. So on top of everything else, AI, Cetarus Parabus, is going to prepare us worse or less because it's going to stifle the creativity that comes from feeling the pending standard deviations. Exactly. So it's really a tool to de-learn and to be less adaptable. So one of the recurring themes you may or may not know of this podcast is that our predicament isn't only technological or ecological, but also deeply human. And you've spent your career studying organisms that cannot escape uncertainty and who live within uncertainty every single day. So if there was one lesson that non-human organisms have been subtly learning or teaching for millions or hundreds of millions of years, that humans needed to hear what would it be. So we have three principles. First one is circularity. Everything in life is circular. And actually when you think about it, circularity is when it's not a problem to waste things. Because it's a gift, basically. So everything is going to be used by someone else, something else, and it's going to refit the system. So everything is circular. So we are the only one who are inventing non-circular systems, nuclear waste, for instance, that's not circular. For at least for the lifetime of a human, it's not circular. So circularity is number one. So circular bio-economy, for instance, making objects that will feed the ecosystems, no tires, anything, right? So all this should feed the ecosystems if we are serious about the circularity. So that's number one. Number two is cooperation, symbiosis. So one day's shortage is scarcity, fluctuations, living beings cooperate. And so I mean, and we know this right, when there's trauma, when there's disaster somewhere, humans cooperate. So we are, we have this in our sense. So it's just we need to activate it. And instead of activating competition, which is only okay when you're a fireman in competition with a fire. At the peak of the crisis, yes, competition is okay. But the rest of the time you want to cooperate to prepare that potential, but you can dissipate during the crisis. So robustness is when you create that potential to be able to dissipate it during the crisis. And the third principle is robustness. I mean, I said the third principle, we actually, it's the first one. It's the most important. Robustness built against the performance. And with these three principles, you can be prepared for a century of lots of fluctuations with joy. Because it's much more joyful to live like this. We are social beings, right? We are social beings. And when you do a circularity cooperation or robustness, your life is much more much fuller, right? It's just the world of efficiencies very narrow. I'm sure this is resonating with a lot of viewers. It certainly is resonating with me. So as an individual human listening or watching this program, can you give some practical recommendations on how to directionally go in those three categories you just mentioned maybe? So maybe the first advice is to clean your vocabulary, your dictionary. There's lots of words that we are using that are inherited from the 80s and we don't question them. And so the embark, a culture that is not existing anymore. So for instance, so I don't know if this is in English, but we have those companies that are involved in socio-ecological questions and the name is "entreprise impact impact". So impact is the word that we use to say that we want to transform and everything that actually impacts is a military term. It's very efficient, very rapid, you know, turn key solution. If we want to transform something, it's going to take time. So we shouldn't use the word impact, right? So cleaning the words just to see how much of our culture of performance is there's a big demographic out there doing something called impact investing. And so you're maybe they should change that to transform investing. Absolutely, exactly. The impact is really a military term. So it's why would you use this word? And it's only an example. I can, on our example, trust pilot, trust pilot. That company, you know, that puts stars on the internet website, you know, for star five stars, just to give a level of trust, right? When you think about it, trust, trust pilot, it's noxymoron because you can't pilot trust, trust emerges from uncertainty. Again, when you do jazz, trust emerges because you are in uncertainty. So piloting trust doesn't exist actually. It's just the tool of control. It's not trust. So our civilization needs to play jazz. In sort, you know, in a way, right? Yeah, for sure. So improv is the second, maybe a second advice. If you do improv, it can be theater, improv. Actually, most of our life, what we do during our life, this conversation is an improvisation. So, you know, in the world of efficiency, improvisation is something that we do, you know, in a specific context, whereas actually in life, we keep improvising all the time. It's just that we don't want to see it. How does improvisation correlate with fear and does fear also help with creativity and stuff? Or maybe there's a difference between fear and mild discomfort. I don't know. What do you think? Well, you can be afraid of the risk if you've optimised the version. I would be afraid to go up on stage and do improv. Of course. So doing it like from, you know, immediately that can be very scary. But if you do it step by step, or if you, then that's fine, right? And you know, for me, the first time I had to do improv jazz, it was very stressful. But I had a few drinks. I can share that. You know, to a little bit of less inhibition. And then you go, right? And when you've done it and you've enjoyed it, that's it. You don't need to drink anymore to do the improv, right? So you can have some help. Let's say I do those have to be drinking that can be of any chance. I have a personal related example recently, like the last year or two, when I'm with friends or close family, we do speed poetry. And you come up with a title and I write a poem in like two or three minutes and they're kind of silly. But someone gives a title and I write a poem and that's improv really. Do you have any other personal recommendations on how? Another recommendation would be the bug. So we basically we are in a cult, in a cult of performance. And if you are, if you want to convince someone that that person is in a cult and it's not a good idea to stay in the cult, you can have all the rational arguments is not going to work, right? Because you have your habits and everything. So you're not going to change anything. So the only way you can take someone out of the cult is if you create a bug, like a moment of arrest, something at derails, something that is weird, a bug, B-U-G, yeah, a bug. Yeah. So basically you know, like, so I mean the burnout can be, it's like a bug, right? So it's your body that is arresting you, right? It's stopping you. But you can also do a trip somewhere for a long time. If you work for one year in a different country, for instance, when you come back, you don't have the same habits, your head is a little bit different. That's a bug as well. And so when you have this type of ex-man, artists as well, they can help us because they are generating trouble, right? Like, you know, well, disturbing us in some ways, right? So that's good actually because we need to derail. And because we're on rails, so if we derail, we need a place to start, right? And so the bug is again, it's, it can be joyful. It burnout is not joyful, but there are overways to create a bug that is a lot more joyful. And then, well, you see a different different paths actually. I don't know if bug is the right English word there. How would you give that advice in French? I would say, "Lubug." "Lubug." Oh, okay. Well, maybe it is the right word then. So what, how are you finding your reception in the world with, with communities and individuals when they hear about robustness? Because it does at a gut level make complete sense. So I'm very happy to report that it's actually percolating quite fast and quite well. So I mean, I've been talking about this, but other people have been talking about this. And now I can just tell you for instance, so in the francophone world, there are robustness communities, learning communities. So in France, in Belgium, in Quebec as well, so in the francophone world, 700 people are already, it's only there for the past few months. And it's exponentially growing. So these are local people who are trying to make more robust people in their communities that talk with each other. And so it's starting to be a movement. There are cities that are putting robustness in their criteria for decisions. So that's Lyon, Ren, I mean, some cities I know in France. So it starts to be a criteria. There are companies, group of companies. So for instance, the Centre des jeunes dirigeants, so like it's 6,000 CEOs in France, we decided this year to switch from global performance to robustness. And so it's happening. It's just happening from bottom up, right? So that's why I am hopeful. Are there resources for local politicians and civic leaders to learn more about this and maybe some strategies in English? Sure. So there is a book. I mean, I wrote a very short book called "AntiDot" to the cult of performance and it's available as a PDF in English. So it's 60 pages to the point. I mean, there's a few other resources in English. There's also, I mean, the rest is mostly in French, I'm a sayer. We'll put links in the show notes. So what is your day job? Do you teach? So I'm a researcher. Actually, by the way, research is exactly into robustness because when you're a researcher, my role is to test the robustness of theories. And so I challenge everything. And all the researchers in the world are doing robustness, right? So they're not doing resilience. And by the way, they're doing robustness. They're not trying to make resilience. What's the difference between robustness and resilience? So resilience, I mean, I used to use the word, I don't use it anymore because resilience is you fall and then you bounce back, right? Robustness, you create the conditions in which you don't fall. So it's much more positive. And what's the difference between robustness and Nassim Taylor's phrase, antifragile? So antifragility is a little bit like resilience in some ways. You fall. And when you bounce back, you're actually higher than before. So I mean, this can be a dystopian model, right? So because you would have to fall to increase, right? It's like as if when you're a student or when you're a pupil, you go to school, you would have to fail to learn. Well, hopefully the schools, it's not like this, right? You learn because you succeed, right? So you don't have to fall to learn. So I mean, resilience and antifragility, these are trajectories where you fall and you bounce back. Robustness is a space. It's a space of our ability that you increase. And so it's much more free because you can increase, you can decrease, you can oscillate, whatever, right? As long as you're in the space of our ability, you're fine. And so it's much more positive. I would say with resilience, I mean, there's a lot of interesting things the resilience, but the way it has evolved, it's getting worse and worse. I mean, it's in Japan after Fukushima, the national plan for resilience to not be afraid of radiation after Fukushima, you have to expose yourself. That's resilience. I mean, so you fall, of course, but you select the resilience. That's bad Darwinian reading, right? So I have a few closing questions I ask, all my guests, you just outlined directionally how we can move towards robustness. Do you have specific recommendations for young humans in their teens and 20s who become aware of our global problematic? So I can base very nice paper in the science a few months ago. That's they they followed young people were virtuos, you know, like in sports, in music, in whatever, right? And they followed what they became. All of them, they went through a burnout. Maybe not all of them, but most of them Ils ne étaient pas encore un champion, ou vous savez, ou vous êtes-vous. Mais quand vous regardez les champions de la courantie, des champions, des champions de 20, 40 ans, quand ils étaient des enfants, ils ne étaient pas expérients. Ils étaient diversifiés. Ils étaient du lot de stuff, des différentes choses. Sports, musique, chess, flammes, etc. Donc c'est ce que c'est ce qui serait ma première advise. Quand vous êtes un petit, expliquez-vous. - J'ai eu de beaucoup de choses. - Oui, j'ai eu de ça. - Qu'est-ce que vous faites la plupart du monde dans le monde, Olivier? - La vie d'éducation, je sais, je sais, c'est la biologie, c'est mon bias. Mais quand je vois les companies, les schools, les ingénieurs, la vie est normalement absent. La machine est présente. Et donc si vous avez l'éducation pour la vie, vous pensez différemment. Vous pensez fréquentement, vous pensez de la croissance, vous pensez de coopération, vous pensez de la sécurité. Et donc l'éducation pour la vie, et ce peut être très simple. Donc quand vous êtes à la school, vous pensez à l'extérieur, vous pensez de la croissance, de flotture, de bise, et vous pensez que vous allez développer une émotion de la vie, et puis vous pensez de la croissance de la vie. - Qu'est-ce que vous faites comme une teenager, je suis juste très curieuse. - Il y a beaucoup de plans dans ma vie de la vie, et il y a un mini-lab dans un certain nombre. Donc je suis déjà déjà obsessed avec des plans. Je suis en biologie, mais je suis en biologie plan. Et donc, je suis déjà déjà comme ça. Je suis aussi en faisant musiques, etc. Donc je sais que je suis dans un petit village dans le videur de France. - Si vous pouvez être un magique et il n'y a pas de personnel à votre décision, ce n'est pas un truc que vous avez besoin de l'improper la future. - Changer la culture agoculture. - C'est un peu spécifique, mais si on switch à agroecologie ou à la culture permaculture, à la version différente de agroecologie, nous allons dépolluer le land, dépolluer le water. Nous allons s'en réunir beaucoup plus de carbone dans le sol, donc nous allons s'en réunir le climate crisis. Je vais commencer à s'en réunir, et nous allons faire le succulat de la économie. Donc nous allons s'en réunir. - A la culture agoculture, c'est très bien, mais c'est un qui, c'est le qui, c'est le qui, c'est de réunir tout le monde. - Je suis très content de tous les éditions de Youtube qui nous suggèrent. Je suis très réconcrediée avec ce que vous avez dit, et je vous ai dit, et je voudrais vous faire une fois sur le show et le futur. Si vous venez en 6 mois ou 12 mois, est-ce un topic que vous êtes super obsessé de maintenant que vous devriez prendre un petit dive sur quelque chose que nous ne parlerons aujourd'hui? - Il y a peut-être une sécurité. Vous savez, ce sera une question présidentielle dans France, et je suis sûr que le topique sera dominant, la sécurité, et la façon dont le design est éventu, la sécurité est la contrôle. Et la sécurité doit être la serenité, qui est la positive contrôle. Et donc, c'est un topic très important pour le commentaire. - Est-ce que vous êtes toujours le type de partage qui n'est pas le fait que les gens ont dit que vous avez dit que le casque est un autre chose? Comme le casque est ce qu'on doit être discussé. - Oui, c'est vrai, c'est le casque. Mais ce n'est pas un bon exercice, parce que quand vous êtes dans le monde qui est en train de réunir, vous enlèvez tout ce qui peut être fait, ça ne fonctionne pas plus, oui? - Écoutez-moi une vraie commentation pour les gens qui ont l'air écouté et qui ont l'air d'enverser et qui vous répondent à agir avec les choses. - C'est ce que vous avez fait ici aujourd'hui, Olivia. - J'ai eu l'affect, Joi. Juste quand vous pensez de la fin de la fin, vous êtes. Je sais ce qu'il va arriver, c'est que vous allez fluctuer beaucoup, mais vous allez faire quelque chose. Et ce que vous allez faire aujourd'hui, c'est que vous allez être plus joué. Et donc, il n'y a pas de raison d'en aller dans la direction. - Merci beaucoup. - Merci. - J'espère que vous allez continuer. - Merci, Olivia. - Merci. - Si vous voulez d'en apprendre plus d'une vidéo, j'ai besoin de vous visiter à la grande simplification.com pour les références et les notes. Vous pouvez aussi rejoindre notre communique et d'en subscribing à notre substagnement. Cette show est postée par moi, "Nate Hagons", édite par nos troublier et produite par "Mr. Stinett" et "Lizzy Céryani". Notre production-team aussi inclue les l'Ezoli Batluts, Brady Hyon, Julia Maxwell, Gabriella Slamon et Grace Brunfield. Merci d'avoir écouté et nous allons voir vous en la prochaine occasion.