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Welcome back to Breaking Banks. I’m your host, Brett King. This week, I was sitting down in Bangkok, Thailand with Paul Ark.

Paul is a venture capitalist and worked for Apple. You’re going to find his interview, which we did initially for The Futurist, but we thought it really fits also for the Breaking Banks audience in terms of thinking about where investment needs to go in an age where climate is disrupting the planet. And given that 2023 was the hottest year on record in terms of temperature, and we’re expecting that trend to continue for some time, it’s important we have these discussions.

So check out the interview with Paul Ark. I’m your host, Brett King. And this week, I’m in Bangkok, Thailand for New Year’s with my son, Thomas, and caught up with a good mate of mine, Paul Ark.

He’s an American-Thai futurist based in Thailand. And he wouldn’t probably call himself a futurist, but he definitely is. And he is also in the venture capital space in clean tech, renewable tech, green tech.

So Paul Ark, welcome to The Futurist. Thank you very much for having me, Brett. We’ve been talking about this for a while.

We have. We have. So I introduced you as a futurist because I’ve always known you as a futurist, thinking about the future.

We’ve had some amazing conversations in the past about things. In fact, we did an event together, which was a, was it a workshop or a panel with TechSource virtually, which was on what the 22nd century was going to be like. Do you remember that? Oh, yeah.

That was, what was it? That was like something for Clubhouse. Yeah. We just had a conversation.

We were just shooting the breeze about just, you know, I think it was one of those things that when TechSource arranged it, it would be kind of this curated thing and they’d have a moderator. And then as soon as we just started chatting, it was just, they just, they were good enough to just stay quiet and let us talk for an hour. And then they said, OK, that’s it.

OK, time. Otherwise, you’ll go on for three weeks. Yeah, that is definitely the way.

But, you know, Thailand’s an interesting place. Obviously, you grew up in the States, right? Yeah. Yeah.

Born and raised. But I’ve been living in Asia for about 30 years now. Right.

So for people that aren’t aware of your background, of course, you spent a fair bit of time at Apple working on their retail presence across Asia. So choosing retail locations for Apple stores around the world, that’s pretty, that’s a pretty cool job. That was, yeah, that was an interesting moment in my life.

I’ve had a lot of different careers. So, you know, when I think about Apple, you know, that was well over a decade ago. Yeah.

So it’s just one of those things where, you know, it’s part of the kaleidoscope. One of my many past lives. Yeah.

Fair enough. Yeah, that’s cool to sort of have that background. And you’ve been in Thailand for how long? Well, you know, this is my third time living in Thailand and the longest stretch.

So I’ve been in Asia for 30 years. I lived in Thailand for probably the first time I moved here was probably about three, two, three years. And then I think the second time I moved here was probably another three years.

And then I moved back here from mainland China in 2015. I’ve been here since. And were you in Beijing or Shanghai? Where were you in China? Yes and yes.

And yes, you know, because I worked in real estate at the time, I was spending a lot of time on the road. Right. So nominally, I was based in Shanghai first, and then Beijing, and then Shanghai.

But pretty much spending time in probably about a dozen, dozen and a half cities on a regular basis. So what appeals to you about Asia at the moment in terms of economic cycles, in terms of just generally the opportunities here? Well, it’s an interesting question, because it’s not so much like, oh, I’m here because of economic, like I’ve lived here. I’ve been here for a while.

I actually moved out here because, I want to be with my wife, who’s here. I’m in Asia for the long haul. But what I think is quite interesting, I first moved to Thailand in 94.

And this is just as the Asian boom was taking off, soon to be followed by the Asian financial crisis. But back then, people were saying, this is Southeast Asia’s time. It’s on this trajectory.

It’s on the second stage of the rocket booster, and it’s taken off. And the funny thing is, is where Southeast Asia now, in terms of its momentum and growth and development, is probably what folks had in mind back in the late 90s. Because I think Southeast Asia’s growth spurt was very short lived, and it wasn’t that sustained.

And then I think it set back a lot of the economies, both politically and economically for years. But now if we look at where Southeast Asia has been maybe in the last 10 years, probably at the beginning of this whole tech cycle, it’s actually been a period of sustained growth. China’s kind of went through its period of development.

And so, I think when people were talking about Southeast Asian growth the first time around, they didn’t anticipate that China would boom as much as it did, and India for that matter. So as soon as it did, then it’s like, Southeast Asia where? Because everyone was so focused on China and India. Now that China and India have gone through their inflection points in the S curve, now people are like, oh, OK, there’s Southeast Asia.

Now we’re ready to start pouring money in and start seeing where economic growth is going. Probably a lot more politically stable in the region than it was 20-some years ago. So yeah.

I think that’s generally the case. I mean, we make a big fuss about China and Taiwan and the South China Sea and so forth. But actually, from a historical perspective, at least the last 120 years, it’s much more stable here than it’s been for a while.

So I would say the vision of Southeast Asia in 2023 is what I think folks were expecting back in 94, 95. So it’s finally here. The Southeast Asian era is finally here.

It’s just maybe 25 years a little bit tardy. So one of the things we like to do on the show, and this is certainly applicable in your case, is look at forecasting methodologies. And you are in the business now of trying to pick winners from a venture capital perspective.

And so I want to talk about that methodology and how you select and your thesis, because you’ve created a new fund. But before that, let’s talk about the methodology of how you choose an Apple store in a city like Guangzhou or in Singapore or places like this. In terms of long-term planning, because Apple is not going to invest in a store for just a few years and see how it goes, right? How do you go through the process of selecting a location that is going to have the longevity for a brand like Apple? Yeah, I mean, that’s a great question.

I mean, I came up in retail at a time when e-commerce was starting to take off. But I think Apple retail, even though they are a very, very, I don’t want to say capable because it understates it, they’re very good at omni-channel. But the folks on the retail side are very much traditional bricks and mortar retail, at least those of us that actually opened up the stores.

And a lot of our location analysis techniques are very steeped in traditional retail concepts, which is basically foot traffic, catchment areas, demographics. Anyone that’s opened up retail stores will understand the language. But it’s always just identifying which cities, which neighborhoods have the type of demographic profile of the customers that you’re looking for.

And then basically understanding, based on the format of your store, if I open a store here, what is my catchment area? Basically, where is the bulk of my customers coming from beyond those that might be like tourists or out-of-towners? Because you need that sort of local customer base. And so if you’re like a 7-Eleven, you’re probably looking at a catchment area of just maybe a few hundred meters. Or if you’re in Thailand, it’s probably just as far as until you hit the 7-Eleven across the street.

So the catchment areas can be quite small and dense. If you talk about, say, an Apple flagship store, the catchment areas can be quite broad. For the longest time, you had maybe three or four humongous Apple stores serving the entire New York metropolitan area.

And each of them was doing bang-up business. Yeah, just phenomenal business. So when I was doing retail, we did a lot of analysis on, OK, what’s our expected catchment? How many customers are we going to have within, say, we can either look at catchment in terms of physical distance, so a 3-kilometer catchment area, or driving time.

So how many customers are within 15 minutes of driving time? So the interesting thing about Apple stores is when we first started opening them in China, we went in knowing that there were a lot of Apple product that was being sold in China through resellers, either the Apple premium resellers, the APRs, or just standard resellers, which are the notch below that didn’t have as much marketing support. But we knew that any store that we opened, any flagship store that we opened, would absolutely decimate the sales of any reseller within a 2-kilometer radius. Because people were like, there’s just no point in going, unless phones were in very short supply and people were scrounging around for other retail store locations.

And we saw that across the board. We saw that in Beijing when we opened up there. A lot of the resellers that I used to go to in Hong Kong, before I joined Apple, once I opened up stores there, my favorite resellers weren’t there anymore because we literally opened up in the same mall.

So yeah, it was just really understanding where our key markets were. China was incredibly difficult because those cities grow so fast. China is one of those places where it could be a city of like 2 million people one day, and then three years later, it’s like tripled in size.

And that’s not even hyperbolic. That’s actually what happened. I don’t think a lot of our listeners, particularly those based in the US, realize the incredible amount of growth that’s happened in China over the last 30 years.

And China was a weird anomaly because when Apple was first looking at the market and our senior executives in the US were like, okay, can we get a rundown of all the cities in China that have at least a million people? And I said, that’s going to take a long time. There’s 120 cities with over a million people. And that just blew their minds because they come from the US.

A million person market is a major metropolis. In China, that’s like, oh, a quaint little village. And so then they said, okay, how about 2 million? And like, okay, that brings it down to about 50.

So it’s like, if you want like detailed analysis, then give me like six months. And they’re like, okay, how about, you know, so they said, so what’s the threshold if we want to look at, say, 10 cities? And I said, okay, you know, 4 to 6 million. And it just blew their mind.

Okay, if we want to look at the top 20 cities, we’re looking at a minimum market of 4 to 6 million. And that was just mind blowing to them. And then it meant it’s like, where in the city do we go? Because if we’re looking at cities like Guangzhou or not Guangzhou, but Chongqing, Shanghai, you know, these are cities of like, you know, 15, 20 million people.

So it’s like, yeah, that’s like, it’s the population of Australia. Yeah, it’s like one city. So but yeah, I mean, there are cities that have that population, Sao Paulo and others, but it’s in China, it’s scary how many of them are.

Okay, so now let’s talk about your career shift, and why you, you know, decided to go down the route of sustainability and climate resilience and so forth. So from my observation, being that we’re friends on Facebook, and we’re friends IRL, I watched you go through a period of really voracious learning, you know, doing a bunch of courses on AI and climate and green tech. And of course, you were, you led, how we met, of course, was when you were at CM Commercial Bank, running their venture capital.

Yeah. And from there, you went on to Gobi Partners, or there was someone in between that, right? No, no, that was it. Yeah, you got that right.

Yeah. And then when the pandemic came along, you did do a bunch of work and progress on yourself, sort of expanding your horizon. Yeah, I mean, I slightly flipped there, because I, you know, it was all the, so I mean, well, I guess to sort of pick up from your question.

Yeah. So I mean, I spent, I spent four years doing fintech, deep tech investments for CM Commercial Bank’s bank CVC fund, which was also kind of fun, because it allowed me to start flexing some of the futurist muscles that, you know, I think very, very few VCs really ever, like VCs are, you know, supposed to be investing in future tech. Most of them don’t, right? Most of them just say whatever is the hot, you know, tech of the moment.

And I don’t think they spend a lot of time looking beyond sort of the fund cycle. So like, what’s going to be… We had Pablos Holman on, I don’t know if you know Pablos, but Pablos is doing space-based energy systems, microwave energy systems, he’s doing vertical farming stuff, you know, all really futuristic stuff. But as you say, I know a lot of VCs, and you two are the only that I know that I would consider futurists.

Yeah, no, I mean, I think a lot of the work I did on the fintech side was less about, okay, we’re going to invest in specific financial technologies. And I actually kind of pushed my team to say, what does the world look like in 30 years? You know, and not like super science fiction, but what does it reasonably look like? And, you know, I’d asked them to look at like films like, you know, like Minority Report, those that are kind of futuristic, but not, you know, spasmodically, fantastically psychedelic, and not set so far in the future that you can’t sort of see the current world. Yeah, like, you know, I wanted kind of near future type of experience where people would say, yeah, that would totally make sense.

And I wanted them to kind of imagine scenarios like that and say, well, how do people do transactions? How do they do banking? How do they interact? Do they need banking? What does that type of service look like? And then, you know, we would come up with scenarios and start selecting, like, what seems like the most realistic vision. And then we would walk back the technologies 30 years and say, okay, if that seems like a reasonably good vision of the future and how people might either transact or, you know, accumulate wealth or store their wealth or spend their wealth, then let’s walk it back a bit. So if that’s the way people are going to do, if that’s the way people are going to purchase goods in, say, the movie Ready Player One, you know, with the VR goggles and the drone delivery, you know, where, you know, they showed the drones delivering pizzas and he’s ordering, you know, it’s like, okay, so.

And that’s all pretty realistic given where we see investment going. Yeah, like, you know, Amazon was doing drone delivery, you know, tests a little while ago. And so if we said, you know, that’s kind of what people are, if that’s a reasonable vision of the future, then, you know, we should walk it back and say, what are the technologies that are critical today? Much like if anyone, you know, just because anyone who grew up in Star Trek in the 60s are going to create flip phones in the 90s.

And replicators, nanotech, right? Yeah. So, I mean, I think that’s where I started thinking about doing that. And then after I came out of FinTech and going into the pandemic, that’s when, you know, I had a lot of time to say, okay, you know, I’m not working at the moment.

I want to kind of reorient myself and start going down the path of some areas that I didn’t have full reign to do when I was working for a bank. So it was around things like ESG, sustainability. You know, ESG was quite important because I think when you are the VC for a bank, you know, one of your priorities when you deal with startups is not just growth at all costs.

You know, most sort of abide by that philosophy of like, oh, we have to move fast and break things. You know, that whole Zuckerbank. Banks hate that.

And if you are a CVC for a bank that reports to a central bank, you’re saying, here’s how we’re hedging our risk. They say corporate, they say, well, yeah, we’re covering our ass and this is how we do it. So when we go in and inevitably we’ll make an investment with other VC funds, and there’s always going to be one fund that says, okay, we’re going to, we’re going to figure out how to help this company grow as fast as possible.

It’s like, okay, great. You guys got that covered. While you guys manage the offense, you’re going to score.

We’ll be the backfield. We’re going to be the defenders. We’re going to be the goaltenders.

We’re going to make sure that, you know, we don’t succumb to any of the big risks that these startups might do. And a lot of it will be around governance. So, you know, so governance was quite one of those areas that we were spending a lot of time thinking about and was neglected in VC.

I also had a very strong interest in boosting the profile of women in VC and tech. You know, part of it’s just because I’ve always been surrounded by strong women. I married a strong woman.

You know, I was, you know, the son of a when you have an ecosystem like Thailand, where it’s very nascent, we can’t afford to ignore half of our population. Like, you know, if you’re China and you’ve got a zillion people, then, you know, you’re never short of talent. But if you’re a market of 70 million people, you know, you need to leverage, you know, your women and your men.

And so, yeah, so the whole side was quite important as well. How did you get the, I mean, so you’ve talked a little bit about the sort of corporate social responsibility and so forth, but how did you get the bug for creating the current fund you have, which is a great, well, you explain the fund you’ve got at the moment and how you and where did you get the drive for that? Yeah, so I guess, you know, in trying to sort of beef up my understanding around ESG and sustainability and the E as well, so understanding the environment side, you know, I spent a lot of time just reading during the pandemic. I took a lot of online courses at Coursera, really just methodically going down through each piece, you know, so for E, I want to understand, you know, resources, I want to understand extraction, you know, I want to understand, you know, carbon accounting.

For S, I want to understand, you know, race relations, I want to understand gender issues and literally just methodically going piece by piece. And it was through the pandemic when I was approached by GO-B Partners, which is this institutional VC fund in the region. And, you know, they approached me and said, you know, we want to launch an ESG practice or, you know, we want to start implementing ESG process in what we do.

And would you be interested in working with us and coming on board? And so I actually wound up doing that for two and a half years as their head of ESG. And at one point realized that, you know, where I really wanted to start moving to was something a little bit more intimate. You know, at that time, GO-B was already, you know, well past 1 billion in assets under management.

They had, you know, 70 professionals. They covered across the region, which means that anything that I wanted to do that was thematic around either climate or gender was going to be a tough hill to climb when you’re having to move like a super tanker that, you know, may not want to move in the same direction. So, you know, late last year, I was being courted by a woman who’s wanted to launch a climate fund in Southeast Asia with a strong emphasis on gender, which was the intersection of all the things that I was kind of interested in at the time.

And so earlier this year, I basically pulled the trigger and came on board and said, OK, I want to help, you know, join you and a small group of people to build this fund to not so basically, I guess, develop an inclusive climate investment agenda, which meant that we’re looking at climate and we wanted to make sure that women as both, you know, entrepreneurs creating solutions, but also as stakeholders and the receiving end of the solutions are factoring into our investments. Very cool. Well, at this point in the show, we like to do what we call the lightning round, which is I’m going to ask you some short, punchy questions.

Just keep the answers short just so people can get to know you a bit. Sure. All right.

So this is the lightning round. OK, Paul, let me ask you, what’s the first time you can remember being exposed to science fiction? Science fiction? Either like a movie or book or something like that? You know, probably, you know, I think at a very early age, a lot of the movies actually don’t know, to be honest, probably it goes back to just Saturday morning cartoons. Yeah.

It’s probably just watching like Jetsons, Super Friends. I first got into it more proactively when I was in junior high. And I know it’s supposed to be short and punchy, but I picked up my first science fiction novel that I really got into, which was Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Princess of Mars, the first of the eleven.

It’s one of my favorites. Yeah. And so that sort of touched off a lifelong love of science fiction, reading science fiction.

What did you think of Jon Carter, the Disney movie? I disliked it. Yeah. I loved how they visualized it.

But, you know, the storyline is just, you know, they Hollywoodified it. Yeah, true. You know, to be honest, nowadays, that would have made a great series.

Yes. Yes. I know.

I agree. In fact, you try to cram the entire ethos of it in two hours. It’s not going to work.

But if you were to create like a, you know, you create a serial, which is like, you know, kind of like the old. Yeah. Yeah, I get it.

Hollywood serials. And that would have been great in kind of a streaming format. We’re getting off the topic.

What technology do you think has most changed humanity? Oh, most changed humanity. Well, OK, I guess in light of all the work I’ve been doing, it’s probably a lot of the work around fertilizers and the green revolution. OK, cool.

Very interesting. Is there a futurist or entrepreneur that has influenced you or being a mentor to you? And why have they been a positive influence? You mean present company excluded? Yeah, of course. Because you’re the only futurist that I really get to talk to.

Get to hang out with. No, I don’t know if there’s any singular person. You know, I think I’m an amalgamation of all the different incredible science fiction writers and thinkers that I kind of glom off of.

Sure. Is there a prediction that an entrepreneur or futurist or a sci-fi practitioner has made that stands out to you as particularly prescient? Oh, wow. I don’t know about an investor, but I always love to come back to the movie Minority Report just because so much of it is starting to come true.

So much of it looks like it is going to come true. And again, I haven’t read the original Philip K. Dick work, so I don’t know how much of Spielberg’s vision was glommed off of the short story. But, you know, so if it’s mostly Spielberg, if it’s different, then it’s got to be Spielberg, right? Or the writers who said this is what we think.

He did definitely take license, but the core of the story is still there. Yeah. So on that, is there a science fiction story or a treatment you’ve read on the future that is most representative of the future you’re hopeful? Hopeful? Well, if we’re talking far future, I’d love to see something like Roddenberry’s Star Trek, you know, where we’ve ended war, at least on Earth, you know, where we’ve ended poverty, you know, we’ve ended racism, we’ve ended a lot of isms.

Yes. Yeah. That’s that.

I think his vision of the future is probably the most pure and the most beautiful in terms of this is my optimistic. It’s a very common answer, actually. Yeah.

All right. Well, we’re going to take a quick break. You’re listening to The Futurists with myself, Brett King, and our guest this week is Paul Ark.

And we’ll be back right after this message from our sponsors. This show is brought to you by Alloy Labs. As much as we love talking on the show, we believe that action is more valuable than talk.

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I’m your host, Brett King. I’m here with Paul Ark. What is the name of your fund that you’re running today, Paul? The Radical Fund.

The Radical Fund. That suits your persona. Well, I would say that we are taking a very radical approach.

By me, it’s like, or we, it’s like the rest of the team. So it’s not just me. So when we’re looking out at the issues of climate, the debate on whether climate change is happening is sort of really over right now.

And while there’s still some debate over the extent by which mankind contributed to climate change, the requirement for adaptation, infrastructure resilience, food security, all of those issues that come from climate, as well as dealing with extreme weather events and the property damage and so forth that’s going to come with it, relocation requirements, et cetera, mass immigration, all of these problems. How do you see that cycle developing? So when is it, do you think, that humanity is going to start to adjust priorities towards adaptation and mitigation? Well, yeah, so it’s a bit of a binary there, because I think if we think about climate, you know, the easiest way to think about it is either in terms of mitigation or adaptation, either separately or operating in conjunction. But for those that are a little bit less climate-oriented or don’t work in the space, you know, climate mitigation is basically focusing on how to prevent the world from getting warmer.

And a lot of that is around sort of energy transition. So how do we electrify our grids? How do we move away from fossil fuels to renewable energy? All in the way of sort of reducing carbon emissions, bringing down carbon in the atmosphere and preventing the world from getting warmer. The flip side to that is adaptation, as you were talking about.

So adaptation basically focuses on how do we deal with a warmer world. So if we were to go completely zero carbon emissions, like right now, and we were able to wave a magical wand, we’re now completely 100% renewable, and we’re not emitting anything, it is still going to be a hotter world for the next, well, through our lifetimes. Right.

Because to be able to bring down the amount of carbon that’s already in the atmosphere, I think around 424 parts per million, down to a pre-industrial amount of about 250, is probably going to take anywhere between a few hundred years to maybe a thousand plus years. So I tell people, 2023, in terms of record heat and droughts, and once in a century climate disasters that are now once in a decade climate disasters. And multiple cities dealing with one in a thousand year flooding events.

Yes. I said as bad as 2023 is now, this is the best that it’s ever going to be from now on. Because we can either hold the line or it’s just going to get worse.

That’s a great line. And it’s depressing. But if we take it as a given that we’re going to live in a hotter world, how do we adapt? And I think you were mentioning, how do we adapt in terms of food security? So if we’ve got a lot of seasonal variation, then now our ability to predict how much food we’re able to produce becomes highly volatile.

If we talk about things like hurricanes, floods, all these wild environmental events, then how do we build cities and communities that are more climate resilient, both in terms of withstanding damage, but also how do we bounce back from damage? So just every aspect, how do we adapt to that? So we think about in terms of those two binaries, we would think, okay, those are going to be equally important because we do have to hold the line in terms of it getting warmer. And we have to adjust to the fact that it is going to get warmer. Today, however, about 95-ish percent of all investment in climate goes to mitigation.

So we have not even thought about how do we deal with the world going to, even if it doesn’t go to hell in a handbasket, it’s at least going to go to heck in a handbasket. It’s there. And we’re not really spending the amount of money that we need in infrastructure, in building more resilient supply chains.

We’ve seen what supply chains disruptions can look like during the pandemic. All it takes is like, was it the evergreen getting stuck in the canal? And that set back, that did billions of dollars in damage. So yeah, we haven’t spent the money.

Let’s riff on that a bit. Energy transition is a clear goal, but there’s a lot of stuff that you talked about there in terms of trajectory and so forth. So I’m interested in at what point does, because you talked about it’s going to only get worse from here.

I know I’m on the same page as you on that front. But to the point where we have to mobilize considerable resources to do this. I’m talking about double digit percentage of global GDP, where there is broad social demand for this type of action, because we don’t see that yet.

We see a groundswell occurring, but we don’t see mainstream pressure on politics and corporations yet to do this with a sense of urgency. Directionally, we’re going the right way, but it’s not happening fast enough. We’re not going to hit the goals for the Paris Accord.

We know that at risk right now, there is hundreds of millions of lives still at risk because we haven’t taken the action we needed to do that. So at what point does this become almost like a wartime effort? OK, so I was waiting for you to either mention wartime effort or I was going to bring it up, because I think we treat climate, and especially in my space where we do tech investment, as if it were another technology that’s in demand or to solve a problem. It’s one of those things where in terms of consumer products and services, it’s never this sort of globally mobilized effort like, hey, we’re all going to globally mobilize our use of TikTok, because it’s important.

It’s like people supply and demand, people have preferences, but climate is a crisis. It’s not something like, do we want better ride hailing services? Do we want food delivery? And this would be a nice to have service that adds to our lifestyle. For those that are very extreme in their views of climate, and I’m kind of increasingly getting that aren’t, is we are at war.

And I think if we look at what we’re dealing with climate, we’re dealing with an existential crisis that deals with our very existence. It’s interesting. We’re not only at war with the climate, but we’re at war with ourselves.

With our own sort of laissez-faire, blasé kind of view towards… Or our philosophical view of the fact that the planet is here to serve our needs from a resource perspective and so forth, versus we need to live in harmony with the system. But I guess you can ask yourself, it’s like if we look at, say, the US in the 40s, at what point does the US say, we absolutely need to step into this war? We see it going around us. It’s impacting our daily lives.

But Roosevelt is holding the line about entering the war until we have Pearl Harbor. And so what is climate change’s Pearl Harbor moment? Where it’s like, we can no longer stay out of this war. We have to tackle it.

We have to mobilize resources. And it was a moment where not just the government, but the populace understood that life now is forever changed. We’re not going to go to the supermarkets and consume at will.

We’re going to be sacrificing. We’re going to need to hoard tin and rubber and iron. It’s like we’re going to have to make some real hard sacrifices.

And we’ve got to mobilize for this global effort. I do not think that we’ve had our Pearl Harbor moment, because we’re still saying, and I think to your point, yeah, we could use transition fuels. We’re talking about abated versus unabated emissions at COP28.

We are still sticking our heads in the sand. Or maybe not most of the people that focus on it. Well, it’s a process of negotiation right now.

There’s negotiation against the old system. Yeah. And that would be the equivalent of saying, well, we’re not going to war with Nazi Germany.

We’re negotiating our involvement. Diplomatic solutions. Yeah.

So it’s like diplomacy with tanks and guns and bombs. We’re going to call it a robust engagement, but we’re not going to say we’re at war. That’s literally the equivalent of how we deal with climate change, is we dance around it through semantics and legalities.

We can legalize it to hell. So when do you think that that Pearl Harbor moment might come? Like, is it 20 years from now? Is it sooner? I think it’s when we have a, well, I like to think it’s when we have like a severe loss of life that affects one of the major G7 countries. So a major heat wave that kills a large percentage of people.

Well, I’d say I’d like to think, but then we just went through COVID-19 and that was like, even as it was happening and people were dying around us, we had deniers. There’s still demise. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, I know, I know. So just a bit of water. It’s only up to my knees.

I don’t need to move my house yet. Yeah. So I, you know, I’d like to think it happened, you know, the cynical answer is, I think when most of the baby boomers have died off.

Yeah. And Gen Z, millennials, Gen Z. I think culturally Gen Z are going to, even millennials will have a very different view of policy and. And surveys show that there’s as every, every successive generation is more attuned to climate because they’re the ones that are feeling it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That makes sense. So, all right, let’s get really futuristic here.

One of the things we like to do on the show is look out further in the future. So coming out the other side of this, you know, in 20 or 30 years, let’s say 2050s, right, we’re in the 2050s. How do you think, you know, what do you think we can expect in terms of adaptation? What is life going to be like? And, you know, and how, you know, what will the world look like in terms of this arena, in terms of climate mitigation and responses? Okay.

So I think if by 2050, we have not had that, what we’re now started calling our Pearl Harbor moment, where, you know, the governments of the world have agreed that, you know, we need to coalesce around this issue. And if we’re still sort of, you know, fussing around the edges. It has to be by then.

It has to be. Well, you know, the thing, but you have to, so if you look at where a lot of people in power now are, you have a lot of tech billionaires that are now just building underground bunkers, right? They’ve literally just said, you know what, we potentially have the power to change things, but we’re not going to, we’re just going to, we’re just going to hunker down, bunker down. We’re going to take care of ourselves.

Let’s invest in robot laser sentries. Yeah. And we’re just going to take care of like our niche little club of, you know, fellow billionaires, which is basically saying, you know, let the other 98% of the world’s population just, you know, it’s like, screw you guys.

Yeah. And gals. Yeah.

Or you have to fend for yourself. So if you look at that at a country level, if we have not mobilized around this issue by 2050, then it’s going to be global North telling the global South, Hey, good luck folks. Yeah.

You know, maybe it’ll be a lot cheaper to manufacture things because we don’t have cheap labor from Bangladesh or, you know, but by that time it will be automated anyway. So we really don’t need, you know, the greater, you know, the bottom 70% of the world’s population. So good luck.

You know, that, that’s a very cynical kind of, but it’s possible, but it’s possible. It’s very possible. And if, you know, again, I’d like to, as I said, I’d love to buy into that optimistic future, that Roddenberry vision that, you know, we’re all humans looking out for humanity.

But in reality, it’s like, you know, people are self-interested and very corporate and it’s like, you know, Well, it’s capitalism. Can we reform capitalism enough? Yeah. And that’s the thing is, you know, a lot of the stuff I’ve been like either in terms of podcasts or books lately are now saying that, you know, it’s, you know, it’s, it’s not, it’s just thinking, and I’ve been tossing around my head is that climate change is not just an unintended by-product of capitalism.

It is the end result of capitalism. Like it’s, it is not a bug. It’s a feature.

It’s a feature. It’s core. It’s a core feature.

On that we agree. Yeah. So, so then the future, so I guess 2050, what is my vision of the future in 2050? It depends on what is our vision of what capitalism is or becomes because capitalism, you know, in order for capitalism to work, you’d need the profit motive, which means ultra efficiency, which means you need something very extractive rather than circular.

Well, next week, we’re going to have Kim Stanley Robinson on the show. Yeah. It’s great timing that you’re on the show this week because it sort of sets the scene for, for his debates on this, but that sounds very gloom and doom.

And everyone I talked to says, you’re just the most pessimistic person working in climate. And I said, anyone that thinks about it and thinks that, you know, human nature’s brutal and savage, a very Hobbesian sort of vision of humanity, and is still spending their time nine to fiving climate tech. It’s like, I’m not, I’m not pessimistic.

I’m just cynical. Anyone that works in climate finance and climate tech is inherently optimistic. If you’ve been studying this for a decade plus and you’re, you’re.

And you’re still working, trying to make the world a better place. It means that you could be as cantankerous as all you want, but you’re still at the core and optimist. So yeah.

So for Well, because you, you, you wouldn’t be trying to change things. Exactly. A better future.

I’m not a defeatist. So what are the, the worst aspects of climate change we can expect in the 2050s? If we don’t do enough, you know, you know, what, what, what could the world look like so that people get an idea why they should be getting behind this? Well, I hope it’s nothing like Mad Max Fury Road, because that’s a very bleak looking future, but you know, it’s not. But food rationing, like we had during wartime.

Absolutely. Well, you know, I mean, I think, you know, we’re going to look at a world, especially if we haven’t really tried to go down the massive geoengineering route, because once we go geoengineering, that’s really going to do some kind of funky psychedelic experimental. And yeah, that’s going to be funky.

So assuming that we don’t completely try to alter the planet through geoengineering, we’re going to definitely look at a lot less green space. You know, I don’t think we’re going to make the switch over to alternative proteins fast enough. So either we’re going to be deforesting at a greater rate so that we can kind of create enough protein based on beef and pork and all the things that people don’t want to give up.

I mean, which means that the natural world is just going to be a bit of a hellscape. We’re going to lose a lot of green area. You know, water is actually, I think water is going to be probably one of the hugest geopolitical flashpoints over the next couple of decades.

Look at the Colorado River and Colorado River. You know, Hindu Kush is probably going to be an incredible flashpoint. We’re already starting to see a lot of problems in Ethiopia.

All the conflicts that are happening in that part of Africa is all around, I guess, the mega dam that Ethiopia is building. And it’s all basically trying to control water resources for the next half century. Well, we can’t end the podcast on a negative note.

We need to end it on something positive. So I guess I shouldn’t have taken us down that path if I wanted something positive. But, you know, we share similar views on this front.

But having said that, 30 years away, there’s a lot of tech that is going to be really positive for mankind. So what do you think of the areas where we will have made significant improvements and what will the future bring that makes you optimistic? Let me tweet the question slightly. And this will be a nice segue into your next week’s podcast with with Kim Stanley Robinson.

You know, because, you know, obviously, you can’t deal with tech without thinking about Elon Musk, whether you love him or hate him. And one of the big things that’s on his mind is let’s go to Mars. And a lot of cynics are like, well, why do you want to terraform Mars if we can’t even kind of terraform our own planet? And I think in a lot of ways, what he’s trying to do does make sense in the sense that any technology that we would do around terraforming would hopefully be applicable to some extent to our own planet.

So if we can kind of make Mars a more habitable planet, then we can actually it doesn’t have to be either or we can use the same tech here. And then I guess it’s just the belief that whether we need to be kind of a two species, two planet species or more for that 10,000 year horizon insurance policy. So, you know, so I think, you know, the question becomes if we need to look at terraforming as a concept, you know, not just to terraform Mars, but to make now the U.S. atmosphere and the U.S., you know, the atmosphere more inhabitable, the soil more fertile, you know, the whole plethora of technologies that would fall under, quote unquote, terraforming, you know, what should we be developing? What could we be developing? Sure.

And, you know, it gets back to, you know, your lightning round question about, you know, one of the biggest technologies that I thought was instrumental was around the development of modern fertilizers, which basically increased crop yields and fed the planet. Now we’re at that crisis point where fertilizers no longer cut it. They’ve kind of reached the end of their natural usefulness.

You know, it’s sort of like the agricultural equivalent of Moore’s Law. Right. After you hit that theoretical limit, how do we jump onto that next S-curve? So how do we feed the planet when fertilizers are no longer effective? And you figure that out, then you probably answered a piece around terraforming.

Right. So I would like to say any of those technologies, you know, under that broad umbrella are going to be absolutely vital. And I think, you know, again, thinking about next week, you know, I love the Mars series, you know, the red Mars, blue Mars, green Mars.

So and a lot of, you know, Kim Stanley Robinson’s books. Ministry for the Future as well. You know, it’s like you talking about the Pearl Harbor event in that book.

He has a Pearl Harbor chapter one, the heat wave in India. Yeah. Yeah.

Chapter one. And so. So, yeah.

So, you know, it’s never I don’t think it’s ever going to be one technology. I think a lot of people are like, what’s that one technology? But climate is a very complex, you know, systemic issue, which is going to require, you know, really a buffet of a variety of different technologies to sort of pull it off. And so anything that’s sort of how do we how do we reclaim our environment? What size workforce do you think is needed for this? You know, OK, so, you know, I can kind of give kind of the clever pithy answer that, you know, I firmly when I when I talk about my work in Climate BC, the one thing I love to tell people is everything is climate.

In the sense that all the work we do has a climate impact, whether we explicitly think it does or not. And so if you are a banker working in corporate finance you know, there you know, you could be doing work that says, how do we how do we think about modeling and risk around financing sustainable technologies? You know, if you work in agriculture, how do we make agriculture more regenerative? If you work in fashion, how do we make, you know, fashion more circular? So theoretically, it should be a workforce of seven billion people, meaning that whatever wherever you are in the world and whatever business you work in, we need to start thinking about it in terms of sustainability. So, yeah, I’m going to leave it at that.

I guess by the time it really matters, we’re a workforce of eight to 10, depending on where projections are in world population by 2050. Yeah, well, it’s going to stall at some point. But yeah, and food scarcity is going to be a factor in that.

But all right, dude, well, listen, it’s been fantastic to have you on the podcast, though, for people listening and their interest in what you’re doing at Radical and following you and your work. How can people stay in touch with you and where can they find more information about you? Well, if they want to reach out to me, they can. You know, I can be found on LinkedIn at Paul Ark and they’ll see like this really long Thai name.

Granted, I think sometimes I get a lot of inbound requests to look at startups. So sometimes it takes you a while to get through the inbox. Anyone that’s interested in the Radical Fund could look at our website.

If you give me a moment, I can never remember the URL. So my CEO is probably going to kill me. It is www.theradicalfund.com. OK, so nothing too complex there.

And if they see a lot of purple on the website, that’s us. You know, that’s our color. Fantastic.

That’s it for another week of the world’s number one fintech podcast and radio show, Breaking Banks. This episode was produced by a US-based production team, including producer Lisbeth Severance, audio engineer Kevin Hirsham, with social media support from Carlo Navarro and Sylvie Johnson. If you like this episode, don’t forget to tweet it out or post it on your favorite social media.

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