Randy Fernando

Which one dominates?

And almost all the time, we can figure that out if we use a systems lens.

And that allows us to make much better predictions.

And if we're worried about how something might go wrong, we can patch that much earlier if we do that work with the systems lens.

Yeah, and there are lots of other examples that you and Tristan have covered in the podcast, like we talked about Forever Chemicals and how the company that invented nonstick cookware, which was a very helpful invention, ended up creating toxic chemical pollution around the world.

So this principle of protecting the systems we all depend on, it seems obvious at first glance, but actually there's a lot of depth behind it.

To understand what this really means, you have to think about the opposite of that statement, which is the world we're living in now with AI.

A world in which we grow at all costs.

Ship it now and fix it later.

Yeah.

And so what happens when we ship now, fix later without thinking about protecting the systems we depend on?

What happens is the things that we need in order to do the fixing are broken.

And there's another way of thinking about it, which is saying, if you extract faster than something can regenerate, obviously that's a problem.

And that simple idea is actually very good for diagnosing what's going on in many of these situations.

So you say, when we extract, what is powering that?

It's a combination of competition and technology.

Technology is a huge exponentiator of that extraction process.

Okay, what's on the resilient side?

Well, it's the natural ability of us, like let's say our minds, our children, our ecosystems to regenerate, right?

To grow, to recover.