24. The Quantification Society: Unraveling Social Credit Scores. Feat. Bronwyn Williams.
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[00:00:00] Bronwyn Williams: One of the most interesting recent examples there would be coming out of China where they now have this idea of being a professional child. Where young adults who have failed to get a job and are demanding that their parents pay them a salary in order to fulfill the role of a child. In other words, you're gonna have to pay your own child to essentially love you, which is extraordinary. But at the same time, if women have been demanding that their husbands or their partners or their children compensate them financially for their service, we shouldn't really be surprised when our children start grasping these ideas and pushing back on them.
[00:00:34] Mizter Rad: So here's the thing: imagine a world where every action, no matter how small, leaves a digital footprint. Each Click. Each purchase. And every word you say, or post on social media contribute to the construction of your digital identity and subsequently your credit score..
As you navigate through life, you start accumulating points and this suddenly shape your eligibility for specific products, services and opportunities. Now the question is, are we currently already entrenched in such a world? Or are we on the brink of stepping into it? I'm thrilled to introduce to you today one of South Africa's most daring voices.
Not only is she an accomplished economist, but she also boasts an impressive talent as a futurist. Bronwyn Williams, how are you doing today? And please tell us, what does a futurist do?
[00:01:55] Bronwyn Williams: Thank you for inviting me.
Okay, so I am a futurist economist and trained analyst.
I'm a partner at a small boutique consultancy called Flux Trends based in Johannesburg, South Africa. What we try and do is unpack macro and micro trends that are outside of our clients control. So they're able to take control of the things they can control by reacting more proactively to the shifts going on in the world around them.
They may or may not be aware of yet.
[00:02:23] Mizter Rad: So what kind of trends, micro, micro and macro trends are we talking about, for example?
[00:02:27] Bronwyn Williams: Oh, everything. We're very much trained generalists. So we look at everything that's going on from politics to economics to technology to sociology to history. The great arcs of human sort of change that tends to bend quite slowly.
Obviously looking at everything to do with demography too. Everything going on in the world business. And the way we relate to each other. So we really do cover the full generalist spectrum of trend, trend and pattern seeking. And also sort of signal spotting across the world. Across space and time is the way we like to put it, because anything can only be really considered a trend when it has that.
It has both the direction and depth.
[00:03:04] Mizter Rad: Okay. And tell me something. So one of the reasons why I wanted to invite Bronwyn is because you're becoming, in my opinion, what I've seen, one of the loudest, clearest, and most influential voices in South Africa in this space, and I wanted to have you here because the way you think is just fantastic about the future and how you spot, like you were saying, the signals , in the macro environment, this trends, and when I started following you on, on LinkedIn, I, I found your content amazing.
So that's one of the reasons why I wanted to invite you. But specifically I wanted to talk to you about, cause you also post about this and I find this topic scary, interesting, and somehow hopeful as well in some ways. And that is the topic of social credit scores.
[00:03:54] Bronwyn Williams: Well, first of all, when my take on social credit scores is a bit broader, it's not just talking about the actual, like explicit credit scores of certain societies, such as China, which is the most sort of common example people use to talk about this, have used as a means of social, social control and monitoring and measuring.
But I think it goes deeper than that. I think this idea of social credit, if we're able to zoom out and understand what it really means, is really talking about a commodification of things that previously would have been in the domain of the sacred or the uncapitalized components of our societies and our economies. I think maybe one of the interesting ways into this conversation is the shift between the terribly named, and I hate to use these terms, but they are used in the discourse on the internet, so people often have a handle on them, and that's the shift from web 2 towards web 3. So web 1, as everyone or thought leaders like to say, was a sort of read only internet. Web 2 was the read and write So we could contribute through social media. And web three is the read, write, and own internet.
And that's the sort of the superficial way of thinking about those shifts as to where we are right now. And web three, of course, is this collision of both the decentralized world of defy and crypto and blockchain colliding with the hypercentralized world of the metaverse. And our massive platformification of everything.
But right at the center of those two seemingly disconnected drivers behind the sort of future of our connected global world is this idea that, as I said, everything does become commodified. So I've kind of termed it as the great sort of commodification of the commons. Other people will speak of things like late stage capitalism or hyper capitalization. I'm not going to give you a moral views to where these things are right or wrong or not.
But what we have definitely seen with the advent of these both centralizing and decentralizing technologies is the desire and the ability to quantify, to measure, and to then of course monetize really every point Of data that we have. And what we see there is that essentially then data becomes credit data. And credit data not just in terms of the monetary sense, Which is the way that most of us understand the word credit. It's a debt. It's access to capital from the bank. It's not that.
At a broader perspective credit is really access To goods services and opportunities. Which is where the idea of social credit scores come in. What this web-3-fication of the world and commoditization of this commons, the collision of big platforms and defi worlds have done, is they've enabled us to start quantifying more and more things and giving them an actual price. In other words, taking intangible credit that we have, whether that's our popularity or our status or our credibility in terms of our sort of value of our contribution. And making that, Giving that essentially an exchange rate or making it fungible with actual cash value.
And again, with access to goods, services, and opportunities. So we've taken the implicit parts of our economy and we've made them more explicit. And we see this everywhere. We see this offline, online. There has been this whole value shift of trying to commodify more and more things, but not just to commodify them, to price them in a way they have been an exchange rate for capital, for real currency.
And an exchange rate across the world too. And that's what makes many people quite uncomfortable, but makes other people quite excited. So, I mean, like we see this trend of commodification, absolutely everywhere. If you have followed this sort of signals I put out in LinkedIn, it's a theme that comes up all the time.
Some of those things are your ratings on apps like Uber or Airbnb or, or DiDi or whatever, whatever sort of, you know, uh gig economy platforms you use. As both a provider service provider and as a consumer on those platforms You get a rating and that rating affects your access to good services and opportunity. If your rating is low As a rider on Uber or DiDi you're going to get a slower and more expensive service on the other hand. You know in the same way drivers that have lower ratings from passengers also then have less access To the best opportunities and to the best rides and to the best drivers.
So this is, we starting to see this in sort of opt in space. It's not just something that's imposed by authoritarian dictatorial governments to sort of monitor and control and give merit and demerit points for good and bad behavior. Although that's also...
[00:08:27] Mizter Rad: that's the, that's the, that's the idea. That's sort of like the common knowledge people, you know, conspiracy theories they talk about this and they talk about this specific government control. Exactly.
[00:08:38] Bronwyn Williams: This is not a conspiracy theory. This is actually happening in certain parts of the world.
[00:08:43] Mizter Rad: Right.
[00:08:43] Bronwyn Williams: It's happening both the public sector and the private sector. So again, people immediately jump to the dystopian authoritarian big brother type government situations, which again are taking place. And you are having societies where your neighbors can report you and that can affect your credit score, which affects your ability to literally use public service transport. You know, all those sorts of things...
[00:09:02] Mizter Rad: So where is this happening actually? Do you know?
[00:09:04] Bronwyn Williams: Yeah. Well, China,
[00:09:04] Mizter Rad: this specific example?
[00:09:05] Bronwyn Williams: Well, China instituted its social credit score a policy for quite a long time. And they've integrated with all sorts of things with a lot of those super apps that they have on that side of the world.
And they had the, the sort of bright's eyes program that was all sort of tracking all of your datas and using this to build a credit profile. And if you did get enough or, and then they've actually quantified it. So you have actual numbers assigned to your credit worthiness. So a lot of these programs are still piloted. They trialed, but this idea of having a social credit ranking. That's very explicit. That's numerical. That can be measured and monitored, is something that's being trialed. But I think that's perhaps the more interesting examples that have probably hit closer to home for most of your listeners who would tend to live on the sort of so called free and democratic world, a lot of these programs are also being opted into voluntarily. I think that my vantage point in South Africa, which I've mentioned on so many of these sorts of shows is in many ways, a preview rather than a throwback as to where the sort of weird Western world is headed is again, a leader in the space of social credit scores, if not by that name, definitely in that nature. And one of the market leaders, there would be our biggest in one of our biggest private insurance companies here by the name of Discovery.
Many of your listeners that are in various parts of the world would already be familiar with their exported product known as The Vitality Programme.
And The Vitality Programme basically takes into cognizance the whole of developments in behavioral science and so called nudge marketing or nudge policy. And what it does is it... I've asked you to opt in to really granular levels of surveillance. So if you have say car insurance with the company, they will install a tracker, not just into your car, but also into your phone.
Now this is for your own safety. As they say, you know, like if your phone is separate from your car and your car's moving, it's probably been stolen. So somebody should be alerted, but still you giving up a whole lot of access to your movements, which are also then again quantified, commodified, and then used to limits or to enhance your access again to goods, services, and opportunities.
If you are messing around.
[00:11:09] Mizter Rad: Let's pause, give me a pause right there. Cause this Vitality Programme. So first thing is like, who is running it? What's this is a private company
[00:11:17] Bronwyn Williams: and it's an insurance company. It's an insurance company, and then if you behave well, according to all the various different incentives they give you, you get discounts on your premiums, or you get a higher, literally what they call Vitality Status Points, which is a private sector social credit score, right?
So if you get to vitality diamond status, for example, you pay less and you've got more perks and benefits, things like with retail partners that will give you free smoothies or cheaper access to electronic gadgets. Lots of treats and incentives. But at the same time, if your status is lower, you're going to pay more and have less coverage, right?
So it's rewards for good behavior, penalties for bad behavior that you opt into. Yes. And that are, and incentives are generally aligned because generally you want to stay alive and healthy and not have accidents and your insurance kind of wants the same thing. So you can see why, uh, depending on your perspective, whether you see this as being quite dystopian or is it whether it's quite progressive, it is definitely efficient. And it is definitely quantifying and making things that used to be quite opaque, because obviously if you studied economics or be involved with finance or actuarial science at all, you'll know that people do lie, you know, so that knowing more about your customer allows you to fairer, more fairly price the products and services that you get.
But I just like to use that example for people that aren't familiar with South African market, because we are so accustomed to this. This company has been around since the end of apartheid. It's like, it's very popular yet. So it's something that's quite normalized in our society, but not normalized elsewhere in the world.
And I'm not sure that listeners in the U S or in the EU are aware of just how.
[00:12:49] Mizter Rad: Well, I can tell you, I can, I can, I can tell you a German, German example. It's, in a way it's kind of similar. You have an insurance and the insurance covers, let's say the public insurance covers parts of your treatments or whatever you need in terms of health.
But a lot of times it doesn't cover most of your dental health. And so if you do a dental cleaning regularly and in general, if you behave, if you do exercise, if the doctor can certify that you have a good heart rate, I don't know, different kinds of things throughout the years, you start getting perks.
It's kind of similar. So you get maybe, a discount and a gym or yoga class. Then if you maybe a consultation with a nutritionist and stuff like that, and you have everything you have that you have everything in the app, so you get points, health points. I don't know. I don't remember how they call them.
So it's kind of similar. And so someone would say, like you were saying before, someone would be very positive about this and say, Oh, but this is great. I mean, I have a lot of discounts. And, you know, why not? I don't see the problem.
But then some other people would say, yeah, but they're also tracking your moves and they learning from you and then maybe they put this on AI and then in the end, they just like you become the product.
[00:14:03] Bronwyn Williams: Or or you denied the ability to get insurance at all. Right? So if your score drops low enough.
[00:14:09] Mizter Rad: Okay. So how would that work? Why? Why would that happen?
[00:14:11] Bronwyn Williams: Well, they'd say then they won't insure you too high risk because you're not doing you eating too many chips.
They know what you're buying at the grocery stores. Cause that's all part of it. So they know, they know that you drive too fast. They know you drive after dark. They could, they could like discontinue your insurance. And now with open banking regulations that are becoming more and more ubiquitous globally, there is a risk that that data again becomes sort of fungible.
But if your insurance company denies you cover other insurance companies will do the same thing. I know there's like a similar conversation going on in the UK at the moment about the wisdom or the fairness of closing down, Farage's bank accounts, right? Obviously he was one of the instigators of Brexit.
So it's not exactly a hundred percent popular character, but his bank accounts are frozen with one bank and people are saying, what if other banks also do the same thing? And he won't be able to open up bank accounts. Similar things have happened with controversial political figures here in South Africa, that a certain bank would close down a certain person's account.
And that's fine if it's sort of one company, but as you get into open banking and that data fungibility becomes shared between not just the organization you signed up with, but actually other organizations too, those credit scores again, they become explicit limiters or enhancers of your ability to access good services and opportunity.
I think that's a really interesting topic because the insurance one is still quite explicit. It's something we understand. It feels grounded in fairness and in price and value and risk and reward. But very similar things are happening in the world of social media. And I think that one of the The interesting examples there that takes the conversation perhaps in a slightly lighter direction, but I actually think it's actually quite a lot darker is what's happened with the ability to convert social media popularity or "social credits" in reverse of commas, on social media into actual cash.
I mean, we've always known that popularity is exchangeable for a certain degree of fame and fortune, but now we've actually quantified this. So we look at that as simply as like influences, for example, depending on how many followers you have, you can get a certain rate to promote products on your feed.
Right. So it's a quantity score rather than like a quality score. Quite interesting. But with the whole sort of NFT explosion, one of my favorite examples there, which is a bit crude, but just sort of makes the point so clearly, was one of these influences made an NFT of her own breaking of wind. Like she made NFTs of her thoughts and sold them.
So this was something that clearly didn't exist. But she was able to do that to convert this sort of this vacuous fame into actual cash and currency. And that's basically what NFTs are. I mean, they're not, they're not sold on the quality of the intrinsic value of the art. Rather, their price is based on the social credit of the creators, which I think is so interesting.
And this is what we're able to do with so many things. And for another third example, so very different from like NFTs and fame or insurance companies and your behavior there, I think there are the moves towards quantifying our care relationships. And this I think is where it starts getting really dark, really quickly.
And it's very related to the social media credit, that sort of idea of being able to exchange fame or fan love into currency. We seem demands from all corners, from policy makers, from NGOs, from individuals, from feminists, to start quantifying the value of love and care in our homes. Whether that's the relationship, romantic or sexual relationships between men and women.
Where that's the value of relationships between parents and children. And there's so many signals in that space of saying people are demanding.
[00:17:31] Mizter Rad: Tell me more about that. I don't, I don't understand how that works.
[00:17:34] Bronwyn Williams: I mean, like the most explicit way is like saying Only Fans, for example. So you literally are paying someone to be your girlfriend or to sort of fill the role of a girlfriend.
And that's become more explicit now with the likes of like the influencer, for example, who sold cloned AI chatbot versions of herself to be your in-pocket girlfriends to lonely boys all across the world, right? I mean, like this is very explicit. But there's also calls by NGOs to value the work of care work in the home.
In other words, to say that women are owed money by the main folk because women spend more hours taking care of their children and the elderly than men do, for example.
[00:18:10] Mizter Rad: So is this happening? Like, are women now wanting to get paid by whoever?
[00:18:15] Bronwyn Williams: I have a compiler report, like one of the research reports I did for one of our insurance companies, not the one I was mentioning earlier, here in South Africa, in Women's Month, we have Women's Day today. So it was actually, like, I think it was a couple of years ago. We did the report where we try to quantify the value of care work in the home. And I did the work and it was interesting. At the same time, I was so uncomfortable with the outcomes because there's this idea that we are owed by society for taking care of our nearest and dearest, which is such a, it's such a dangerous idea when you start running down that, you know, if you start quantifying your interpersonal relationships.
Saying you owe me X amount of money because I went on the date with you, even though you are my fiance, my time is more valuable than your time because I earn more than you do, so therefore you owe me something. It's such a dangerous way of having a relationship. Right.
[00:19:04] Mizter Rad: Yeah, I see the intrinsic value of, or the intrinsic motivation becomes very like monetary.
[00:19:11] Bronwyn Williams: It takes away a whole lot of the deeper meaning behind that. And it's, it makes, it makes our relationships very fragile. Makes everything commercial and monetized. I think one of the most interesting recent examples there would be coming out of China where they now have this idea of being a professional child. Where young adults who have failed to get a job and are demanding that their parents pay them a salary in order to fulfill the role of a child. In other words, you're gonna have to pay your own child to essentially love you, which is extraordinary. But at the same time, if women have been demanding that their husbands or their partners or their children compensate them financially for their service, we shouldn't really be surprised when our children start grasping these ideas and pushing back on them.
But I do think this idea...
[00:19:54] Mizter Rad: has become normalized....
[00:19:55] Bronwyn Williams: it's like, it's, it's. It's like, um, it's prostitution, but not, not sexual prostitution. It's still a prostitution of our, of our relations and this sort of inability to separate the things that we should be pricing from the things that perhaps we don't need to price.
And I think that that's a... that's a conversation that upsets everyone, whether you are more left wing in terms of your economic policy or more right wing or more libertarian. Is this idea of markets and pricing is such a touchy subject, but, um, clearly we...
[00:20:26] Mizter Rad: do you think that, do you think there is a, there's a way to stop this? Because I feel like this is, um, in a way it makes the world run more efficiently when you, if you look at it from a, like an engineering perspective, because if everything is, if everything is attached to data... basically every move that we make is a number in a way. And so every thought that we think it's also a number. And that number can be attached to a monetary value. And so if you think about it as an engineer. I'm an engineer by training.... if you think about it as an engineer, this is like dreamland. Because, with numbers, you can become more efficient. You can know what comes in what comes out. You can and you can adjust with time and make the world, let's say, a more efficient machine. But I understand that the world is not that. And at least it's not just that. And the life is more than that. It's more than a number. So, but the question is, do you think there's a way to stop this? Because sometimes I feel like it's we're already too much into this?
[00:21:33] Bronwyn Williams: Well, it just seems to be one of those things that we tend towards just like we tend towards more surveillance and more monitoring.
We don't seem to be able to resist that at all. We don't seem to be able to resist the illusion of more security through more monitoring. And what that's Speaks to the same things as commodification of everything is that we have this desire for control, but at the same time, it is a hubris, right?
Because even as we are able to quantify more and more things that we weren't able to quantify before, be able to price and label all these points, we still missing a whole lot of nuance, right? Like, there's a whole lot of things that can't quite be quantified. That's our digital reflection of the world, this digital twin that we're trying to build, will always be a flattened, softened version of analog reality that has spectrums rather than binary codes, sort of underpinning the sort of basis of the way we're doing this. And I think what's probably more dangerous is the idea that we can, the idea that we believe that we have, or that we able to quantify absolutely everything and to capture and price every elements of the value equations that we're trying to compare and contrast from a quite a philosophical point of view. I think it's a very similar conundrum or cul de sac that utilitarian thinkers find themselves painted into. So this would be utilitarian philosophy that, you know, we should do either the most amount of good or minimize the most amount of suffering, but these are very vacuous terms and you start to quantify them and whatever you quantify just becomes very ugly, very, very fast, right?
Like when you start to quantify happiness or, or sadness, or suffering, or love or flourishing. There's so much that we have to leave out.
[00:23:13] Mizter Rad: Why do you think we have that obsession with quantifying stuff though? Cause I feel like we try to quantify everything anyway.
[00:23:19] Bronwyn Williams: We try to quantify it because we want to control. Because the universe is uncontrollable.
The future is unknown. There are a whole lot of macro trends and forces that we do not have direct control over as individuals, or even as a species at large, like even looking at us how we've inadvertently disrupted our own climates on our own planet. But at the same time, we don't actually know what to do to fix it.
We kind of know what to do to stop harming things further. But all of our ideas of things like geoengineering and putting, putting like shields up into space and spraying dust into the cloud, these are all things that have huge unintended or unknown consequences.
[00:23:58] Mizter Rad: Absolutely.
[00:23:59] Bronwyn Williams: We want this idea of control, right?
And uh, we, we, we are happy to delude ourselves into the degree of control. Then we see this at a sort of more micro level with organizations we deal with all the time. If you, if you are a manager of an organization...
[00:24:11] Mizter Rad (2): do you think, this has to do with this patriarchal society that we've had in the past decades... this topic of control...
is it because men have been on top of this society and women have been repressed and if that changes, women are a bit more, let's say connected to nature. More realistic in a way. Less controlling? Or do you think has nothing to do with that?
[00:24:32] Bronwyn Williams: I would say that's probably if anything exactly backwards. If you look at like sort of feminine psychology or if you've ever worked with both
[00:24:38] Mizter Rad: really?
[00:24:38] Bronwyn Williams: And a male boss, you will know that female bosses are much more likely to manage by numbers. And to be less I'm going to be more risk adverse.
And I think this is due to the fact that, you know, we do have to be more risk adverse if you're going to be sort of incubating babies for nine months at a time, right, you need to be pretty certain of your, of your choices. So I would say if anything, women tend towards more conservative, more control based management.
And I think the part of the quantification of everything at the moment that we see right now is due to the feminization of global politics and the demasculization trend we're seeing at the moment.
If you look at things like...
[00:25:13] Mizter Rad: how is that, how is that related to
[00:25:15] Bronwyn Williams: things like carbon credit scores? This has come out of feminist you know, environmental policy as a sort of the underlying roots, the intersectional sort of ideas are at a core of a lot of our responses to climate change and to complexity and to disaster and they are control based rather than adventure based solutions. Right? So, you know, like, there's the, there was a sort of the um, if I can describe it that way, the two ways to sort of approach problems, right? You can try and control it, or you can try and, uh, try something new and like very different.
So the cowboy approaches would be things like trying to spray the clouds with, um, That's that would be the masculine approach to stopping climate change, right?
It's like, let's, let's pump stuff into the sky...
[00:25:57] Mizter Rad: something more experimental. Yeah,
[00:25:58] Bronwyn Williams: figure out what's going on. Like a, like much more reactive. The feminine way to do it is, to try and control, to try and control and to commodify. To try and assign climates, uh, carbon credit scores, which are, which are another sort of layer of this whole credit score thing we seeing. And carbon credit scores are becoming more and more explicit. Right?
I mean, like if you book a flight now, they'll tell you what your carbon footprint is. If you go to the grocery store, you'll get a separate bowl on your printout. Even here in South Africa. And they'll tell you what the carbon footprint of your basket is. And these things can be quantified and used again to limit, also enhance your access to good services and opportunities.
Right. I mean, like if you've overshot your target, it's now quantified, it's quantified in our digital world. It's a printout. There's a paper trail.
[00:26:38] Mizter Rad: This thing of the carbon credits right now, they're more informational. Like they will tell you how much carbon emissions have you had in the last month, whatever, based on your behavior.
But do you think this is gonna pass or go from being informational to being, sort of like limiting your moves or your behaviors?
Or like, at some point, do you think they'll tell you, look, your bank will block you and say, you cannot buy this ticket because you already exceeded your carbon emissions limit this month ?
[00:27:05] Bronwyn Williams: Seems to be the trajectory on but I think it's also important to note That's already taken place at a b2b level. At a commercial level, right? This is what carbon credit markets are all about. And unfortunately, one of the first things we see with carbon credit markets is what gets measured can be manipulated, you know. Which is why you end up with like, you know, the likes of the big cigarettes and coal companies having some of the best ESG ratings, right? Because you're able to buy and swap...
[00:27:28] Mizter Rad: they buy credit...
[00:27:29] Bronwyn Williams: ...problem and you'd making it an abstract problem.
[00:27:31] Mizter Rad: That's ridiculous. Yeah.
[00:27:33] Bronwyn Williams: Same thing will happen at the, at the personal level, but we have already seen and they have been signals and trends and there's a story I've looked at for many years, the companies, because they already have that explicit limiting of good services and opportunities based on carbon credit scores, they are trying to find ways to decentralize that responsibility to employees and to customers, which is why now there's a big push at two points to actually start assigning those carbon credit scores to consumers.
I wouldn't be very surprised if that doesn't get linked soon to like vitality type programs here in South Africa, like with the insurance companies, because obviously your contribution to the global social good is also should have something to do with your sort of personal flourishing. So those sorts of things have the ability to be linked.
And I think that they will, because there are real financial incentives there. And there's, there's a market for markets. There's a market for, for trading points, right? And if it's a market at the commercial level, why not at the, at the retail level?
So we have already seen come some companies in Europe. I think some of the first ones were actually in Scotland where companies started tracking their employees, carbon credits scores. And then using that to justify the company's carbon credit score. So there's this pressure was not coming from the States. It was coming from the employer. To get the employees to make better choices with regards to sustainable modes of transport. Getting to and from work, for example. If they're working from home, how sustainable were their homes. And they had started quantifying that and that was already impacting those employees access to good services and opportunities from the employer.
So that's happening there. And then there's also the voluntary ones again. I think one of the earliest examples we picked up, they also years ago now, was the MasterCard climate card. That that actually allows you to have a voluntary carbon credit limits on your card in addition to the capital credit limits issued by the bank.
This is totally voluntary, right? Again, like this is not a conspiracy theory. I understand that there's many people that are concerned about those carbon credit scores and would like to quantify them because quantifying much like biohacking ourselves or looking at the, at the, the, the macro and micronutrients you put into our body and what our performance gets out, looking at those sort of wristbands or ankle monitors that we wear from, from like Apple or whatever Fitbit and try and track and trace ourselves, you know, in order to optimize our own bodies, there, there are definitely economic incentives to share that with companies. And then increasingly as more and more individuals end up being insured medically by their states. And of course, states also going to be interested in this information because it's information that affects the national fiscus, but also from the sort of climate side, it's information that affects every other citizen from that community. So there are strong reasons why companies and, and sort of constituencies in the public and private sector would be interested in creating markets for this, at the B2C level, not just at the b2B level. So I don't know.
[00:30:20] Mizter Rad: Let me tell you something because I think it's super interesting that the Scottish example, but also comparing that to the Fitbit and the Apple watch and kind of like biohacking yourself for your own health sake, let's say for living longer. Cause in the end, I think if you ask anyone in your circle, everyone would like to live longer, healthy, right?
But when it comes to a company, if you're a company in Scotland, if you're tracking people, your employees, if you're tracking their carbon credit, the carbon consumption. And maybe deciding whether you hire this or not based on their carbon credit scores.
You're putting on aside what I think should be the objective of the company, which is hiring the right people with the right skills in order to have better you know, output as a company, better goods and services for the people in general. And that, has a consequence on the whole economy in this case, Scotland, the Scottish economy.
So I kind of understand that each individual wants to biohack their own body and use all these tools to have a better health and live longer. But I do not understand why a company would just, hire someone based on carbon, as opposed to their skills. Well, they're not hiring them, you know what I mean?
[00:31:32] Bronwyn Williams: Mean they change, they're changing then the economic policy towards that staff member. Right? And they're doing that because,
[00:31:38] Mizter Rad: but at some point maybe they start hiring people based on that.
[00:31:41] Bronwyn Williams: They could, yes. Don't you think? Absolutely they could. But there's an incentive for them to do that too. Right? If at the national, international level, if your access as a company to global trade routes. To whatever tariff limits that you have or not, is dependent on your ESG score, then you as a company have an incentive to make perhaps not the most efficient choice when it comes to hiring the most productive workers. But to rather than hire the workers that will give you the better credit rating to give you access to better goods, services and opportunities at the macro level.
So it makes running an organization that whole sort of maximizing equation that much more complicated, and it does make us seem at some level to perhaps make choices that aren't as efficient at the superficial level in order to get something else that we want. Again, we see the same thing with the likes of the vitality credit scores, because Discovery now has an actual bank as well as having the insurance company for your car and for your body and for your health.
And sometimes those incentives are a little bit at odds with each other, right? So the bank, the bank side of the business might want you to spend more money, even though that's not good for your long term health, but the insurance side wants you to pay for the premium organic foods, because that will give you a better credit score on your insurance premium, right?
So we end up making choices that, uh, Just make that whole value equation that we try and balance as individuals, organizations, that much more complicates it. And perhaps that much more unfair. I mean, all this does really is it skews winning towards the biggest and wealthiest entities in the room, right?
You can afford the best lawyers to do the best carbon arbitrage, to do the best sort of credit score balancing, you know, that's, that's kind of, that would be for me, probably the more realistic dystopia you see. Because when things become made explicit, most social credit scores are quantified. Then of course, we putting more of a weight on on actual cash value, right? So if you have a bigger bank balance, you can sort of buy up all those points. As we, as it's exactly what we've seen with ESG scores at a commercial level. So expect the same thing.
[00:33:48] Mizter Rad: How do you think this is going to play in a macro level when you compare, let's say countries, and I hate to call countries like this: first world and the developing second and third world.
How do you think that plays on a macro level?
People in the first world have more access to information, to education, health, etc. But they also have more access to understanding this whole new economic system that seems to be developing. And people in the third world, they're just thinking about something else. They're thinking on a day to day basis, how to survive, how to pay for the food they need to eat today, but they are really not thinking on their carbon credit score.
So how do you think that affects that standing in the world from, a first world country perspective and a third world, second world country perspective?
[00:34:36] Bronwyn Williams: It does exactly like you say, it does reinforce, uh, winners and it does reinforce effective and de facto sort of country clubs that already exist. So i've written quite a lot about this the sort of the green lining of Africa compared to say the EU. So if you want to trade with the EU you have to meet EU created standards, right?
Both from a commercial money laundering perspective, but also now from an environmental perspective. So there's a whole lot of red tape and hurdles to overcome Which are expensive. It's another expense in order to do business with the more elite country clubs of the world. So the way I've kind of framed this trend is kind of like the ha ha ification of the world.
I don't know if you're familiar with ha ha's. They were a very interesting term. So the landed gentry in medieval Europe, right? Instead of building a wall, which would have spoiled their view as a nice wealthy Prince or, you know, aristocrat, you want a nice view around you. Right? So you don't want to put up an ugly wall.
[00:35:30] Mizter Rad: Right.
[00:35:30] Bronwyn Williams: Instead what they would do is they would ditch. So the peasants couldn't accidentally wander into their views, these kind of like these hidden barriers that everything looks open, but actually it just becomes that much more closed because you have to meet the credit scores in order to, in order to get access to those good services and opportunities once again. And these sort of invisible green lining, red lining, you know.
haha ification you see all over the place and quite often quantification and management of scores, whether they are personal credit scores or ESG scores are the sort of invisible tape that separates the haves from the have nots and insiders from outsiders. Invisible barriers to entry is something I'm very interested in as someone that lives in the developing part of the world in Africa. And these are conversations that policymakers, economists, politicians are having a lot here.
And some of the ways you start to see then as we get very destructive pushback. So we've kind of got the sort of eco extortion that's growing as a trend in the global South. In both South America and in Africa where companies are saying, well, these, these are countries that are saying they can't meet, uh, these sort of these, these high price barriers to entry, these invisible toll booths that you effectively being having to pay to meet these credits standards in order to get access to market. And one of the ways they pushing back is they essentially saying, if you don't pay us reparations, or if you don't let us trade with you, we're going to destroy our natural endowments, right? We'll like, we'll cut down the rain forest. We'll burn...
[00:36:58] Mizter Rad: but really did, did, did this happen?
[00:37:00] Bronwyn Williams: Yeah. Basically they don't say it in those words though. The, the sort of eco extortion trend is a bit more subtle than that. They're like, pay us money and we'll protect the forest. But the sort of a threat is Right, don't pay us money and we'll pollute the dam. We'll burn the natural endowment because it's the only way for us.
To sort of survive in the very...
[00:37:17] Mizter Rad: but listen, where does China come in here? Because I think China is, is playing a big role here as well. China is clearly not in the elite, at least to my knowledge, not in that elite world of Europe and maybe the US, Canada, et cetera, Australia.
And it's rather with the BRICS so isn't China a good ally
[00:37:34] Mizter Rad: In the, in the sense that, um, China, maybe I'm not sure, maybe I'm wrong, but maybe China is not building these invisible barriers and it's rather helping out, the other way.
[00:37:45] Bronwyn Williams: Yeah. So they've always got a very different strategy when it comes to the global South.
I mean, they literally are the same sort of BRICS, which we also part of here in South Africa, but in the sort of social credit system, I think it's interesting to compare and contrast; the very explicit social credit scores China has imposed upon its own populations and is exporting to Africa. So our neighboring country, for example, Zimbabwe has now instituted very similar systems with their border posts.
They're in fact, sharing biometric data with the Chinese governments that build up essentially African faces into AI systems, which has been one of the limiting factors for facial recognition in that most of the data sets that the AI that we know today is based on Western white people faces. From the internet as we know it.
So that is meant that facial recognition does not, is basically racist. Right. But at the same time, it means that it means that if you are a person of color, you less likely to be correctly identified by these systems, which could actually be in your own benefit. It's bad if you get a false negative and you get accused of a crime you didn't commit, which is definitely happening in the Western world. But it's kind of good if you want to not be seen by your states. If you want to float under the radar. You're effectively unidentified, right?
So a lot of governments, particularly had to have gray economies that have people that aren't paying taxes to have people that trade in cash are looking at ways to quantify and digitize those identities. And they very happy to take on board a lot of those systems that China then exports in terms of population surveillance and control and monitoring and numbering and all those sorts of things.
It's not just China doing that. So like if you look at the whole world coin project the same thing over there, by the way I'm looking to quantify, digitize, get people that are unidentified Identified. These are all kind of projects that are looking to solve that same sort of problem there. But in terms of getting people to pay Tolls and taxes and jump through ESG hoops that's clearly not China's strategy. They've got a very different strategy when it comes to extorting wealth from the poor, right? You know, like the rich take what they, the rich and the strong take what they will, the poor suffer what they must. They have different strategies to do that. So you can do that through innovation.
[00:39:53] Mizter Rad: So would you say, in a macro level, would you say that the elite world, let's say Europe, US, they're using ESG as a strategy to control the weaker countries and populations? And China on the other hand is using more like a, how do you, how would you call that?
Like a social...
[00:40:09] Bronwyn Williams: I would say both...
[00:40:10] Mizter Rad: social credit score...
[00:40:12] Bronwyn Williams: All the strong, whether that be Europe, America or China or Russia, all the various different strong looking at Africa's real resources, which is the only continent that has actual real resources for the future. We talk about human labor. You're talking about oil just being found in Namibia.
What are you talking about arable land. We've got natural resources here at the rest of the world wants. And everyone looks at buying to control that in different ways. So Europe's strategy, Europe, that's going into a degrowth phase that has preferenced ESG and carbon created scoring over other forms of control and other futures.
They seem to choose that as a future. A degrowth, higher regulated future. They try and influence control and extract tolls, taxes, or extort money from Africa, effectively through legislation and through taxation, right? But they are an aging, weakening power over time. They're still stronger than Africa, economically speaking, military speaking, but they exercise their power as they are as a de growing sort of region of the world through regulation and through taxation.
Whereas China does it through sort of, it does it through trade and control and technology. So it does it through infrastructure and technology, which is essentially come with strings attached, whether that be through data sharing at the border points, or whether that be through dates deals that you're going to end up losing land like Sri Lanka did to China, right?
So it's a, it's a more sort of economic and technological way of innovation. So control through innovation. And then of course, America does it through the financial system, right? So through, through having, having a dollar, you can, you can steal quite a lot, or at least expropriate quite a lot at a discount, thanks to things like cancelling effects, but that's a different conversation.
We're going way off topic on the social credit course side, but I do think it's interesting that both Europe and China are using different variants or different flavors of this quantification of everything trend, but that speaks to their bigger philosophies and their greater strategy and tactics for power and control.
So Europe being through regulation and taxation via quantifying and trying to tax at that level. And China through of course innovation and technology and more explicit surveillance.
[00:42:19] Mizter Rad: And when you look at this explicit surveillance or trying to control through different tactics, like you say, like Europe or China or the U. S. which countries are putting this systems in place already? In the in the case of the social credit score, for example, the social credit score system...
[00:42:35] Bronwyn Williams: So on the 1 end of the scale is China, which has done it very explicitly and they have actual numbers for these things and it's based on morality and social standing and very various things that aren't just based on credit. But let's be honest. Every country in the world has a credit Bureau, right? And credit Bureau is used to only look at sort of cash in your bank account, but they look at other factors too. I don't know if you've pulled up a credit score for yourself.
There is this credit score that sits on your name. And I certainly know that the, the big credit bureaus like trans union, which is international company are looking at alternative credit data sources. This is something that came out in the fintech space. We see a lot of these sort of pilot programs taking place in Africa. So one of the companies there, it's quite interesting to look at would be Tala.
They looked at making, giving people financial credit scores, but based on non financial data. So they'd look at things like how many contacts you have in your cell phone. How much airtime balance you keep on your phone. How long your average phone call was. They used a whole lot of phone data. Cause everyone in Africa has a phone.
If they don't have internet access. I mean, in South Africa we've got like more cell phones than they are people. For example, this is quite common across the continent. But...
[00:43:42] Mizter Rad: really? So you have more than one phone? Wow. Why, why is that?
[00:43:47] Bronwyn Williams: Not me personally, but, um, often because there's migrant workers. They'd have a one phone that has a different SIM card and one for the, their one for local.
Other people have one for business, one for pleasure, one for the girlfriend, one for the wife. You know, like there's a whole lot of reasons for these things. Anyway.
Now we've got e-sims that's gonna, that's gonna fall away. Some are just straight up criminals. It's, let's be honest. But the point is...
[00:44:08] Mizter Rad: oh yeah, e-Sims, I see that.
I see that. That's a, that's happening, right?
[00:44:12] Bronwyn Williams: But my point is that these explicit or these, these implicit, not explicit credit markers are already being used. Those like companies like Tala and Tala like data is being used by financial credit bureaus indefinitely in South Africa, and I'm sure in other parts of the world too.
So we really have these credit profiles being built about us. They are sitting in sort of quasi private sector placement at the moment, but as more and more things become digitized. As open banking opens up. As we move towards central bank digital currencies, not a conspiracy. Again, just the way the world is moving.
We went from paper money to what's credit cards. Now, central bank digital currencies, just make the next sort of logical link in the chain we're moving towards. We are going to see all these data points coming together. So as I said, sort of enhance or limit your access to good service and opportunities. The most obvious one, they being literally your access to capital. Loans from banks.
Which again, not that long ago used to be a negotiation between like your grandfather who walked into the bank and the bank manager shook his hand and sort of asked a few questions, saw if he trusted the guy and issued you a loan or not. That's all quantified now, right? Computer says no. Computer says no.
And these sorts of things also play out in terms of schools, right? So, I mean, it depends on what grades you get and what universities you get to go into, not just private universities like the US, but also state universities, you know, who gets assigned those limited slots. In the UK now, like what's at the Tony Blair foundation is busy, like suggesting that some high school students in, or A level students in the UK get an explicit merit score on their graduate certificates, in other words, along with their academic scores, that should be used to, again, enhance or limit their access to further education and opportunities in the States and in the education system. These are credit scores.
[00:46:04] Mizter Rad: But hold on a second. These scores are not really based on their studies.
They're more based on maybe their behavior and the way they think, the morality. Okay. That's what, that's what, that's where it becomes a bit dangerous as well.
Which is
[00:46:17] Bronwyn Williams: the same way the Chinese social credit scores work. It's based on whether you are a good citizen, right? I mean, these are done for, whether if you, if you're less cynical, you could say these are, these are fair systems, just like your insurance company charging you more, if you're more risky, right?
You know, like it depends on your values, whether you value privacy and independence and whether you, um, understand or think that there is any benefits in Implicit... remaining implicit...
[00:46:45] Mizter Rad: do you also feel like because I feel like in some ways this social credit system or let's say social credit control has positive things, or it could have positive things, as long as it doesn't... so the thin there's a thin line between say scientific knowledge that can be shared with its citizens from a top level. But it becomes very complicated when you try to instill or influence people on a specific way of thinking about life or morality or ethical values. So it is a bit of a thin line there. I feel. Like you cannot really start giving points to people based on the way they think about life or the kind of religion they have or...whether they support X or Y.
[00:47:31] Bronwyn Williams: Why not?
[00:47:32] Mizter Rad: I'm just saying this is my opinion. Like it's a bit crazy.
[00:47:35] Bronwyn Williams: Yeah, of course. Of course, it's a line. Of course, it's a line. And I think for me. Most people will lean into these systems as long as they believe that they are increasing fairness. I think it's very interesting to note, in terms of the Chinese systems, how happy Chinese people are. Not all of them, but many are with the systems. In that they believe that it keeps people accountable, and it keeps it fair.
Like, a lot of us have this sort of vigilante... Tendency. In fact, psychology tells us all the time. Most people are punishers. They like to play tit for tat games. They like people that are naughty to be punished. Fewer, fewer of us are happy to break the rules or are happy for other people to break the rules, but don't want to sort of tell on them and we don't want justice dished out.
So as long as these systems appear to be fair, they are going to appeal to the majority of people just based on what psychology tells us about how people work. At the same time, as soon as they start to feel unfair, people are going to give huge pushback and they will be unfair because we cannot measure everything.
We can only measure what we can define . That's the problem with all quantifications. With all sort of flattening of human nuance and complexity into numbers. Like trying to quantify romantic relationships to say, who's brought more to the table than not based on trying to quantify every little interaction. Every value of person's scale from their height to their beauty. To their intelligence. To their conversation. To whether they're male or female. How big their boobs are. You know, like all these things increase or decrease your value, but you can't quantify all these things. The same thing with like states trying to quantify the morality of school children or insurers trying to quantify your total health profile.
The only way we could do that is if we are monitoring and measuring everything, which is impossible. If we, once we get to like it, the only way we do that is bubbling. Building a perfect replica of the entire universe. Like our digital twins are way far behind on that one. Right. And whenever you leave is going to leave unfair because people who win at the games that are most easily measured will win compared to people who win at things that aren't so easily quantified. And that I think for me is a scary part of this, that superficially it feels fairer that if everyone has a score, you can see who's, who's been naughty and who's been nice. And who sent it to give presents to it. Who shouldn't and who should pay more and who should pay less. And who's pulling their weights and who isn't. But there's so much we missing out on there. And only after those systems are imposed and people start to get penalized, get redlined, get green lined, get computer says no in their own personal lives, will I think they, they'll be pushed back. And that's probably going to be too late for a lot of people and organizations who have already been hurt by these systems.
And there's many ai, it's across the sort of, uh, political sphere who are concerned about these things, about how anything that's quantified has baked and bias, and unlike more analog bias, it happens to everyone all the timeforever, right?. As opposed to more human bias, which is one mistake being made at a time.
So I think that's...
[00:50:36] Mizter Rad: Forever, you mean that it gets registered forever in your sort of like...
[00:50:40] Bronwyn Williams: yeah. So it's like it's quantified, it's notarized and it's, it's on the blockchain, you know, everything's going to be on
[00:50:46] Mizter Rad: the blockchain. Okay.
[00:50:48] Bronwyn Williams: At least that's the sort of, so the right to be forgotten. There's so many, there's so many routes you can take this conversation, but the basic is we quantifying more things, but we'll never be able to quantify everything. And there's a whole lot of danger in thinking that the things that we can measure are the only things that matter.
[00:51:08] Mizter Rad: It seems to me like this is a journey into the matrix and sometimes it feels like it's impossible to escape it. Do you feel like in the future or soon there'll be more and more countries or governments trying to appeal to those that, for example, value freedom and tell them, Hey, if you move here, we're not going to have any social credit score system. There's not going to be such thing where you're going to have your liberty as always and whatever. So try to sell their country, their location as a jurisdiction that is outside of that sort of like complex matrix. Do you think that's possible or is, is this all very interrelated and there's no way out?
[00:51:48] Bronwyn Williams: Well, there's always swings and roundabouts. I mean, El Salvador trying to make itself the Bitcoin capital of the world. I mean, these, these are all things that people, people where there's an opportunity, somebody's going to go after the niche, but I think before we get to that point, we still going to see a whole lot of countries selling the opposite direction that quite frankly, if you, if you do survey of people, not just ask people, but look at their behavior. Revealed preference tells you so much more than what people say they value. People say they want freedom. People say they want privacy. But what people really want is convenience and security, right?
[00:52:19] Mizter Rad: Right. They just want to be
comfortable.
And that's it.
[00:52:22] Bronwyn Williams: In terms of the private sector, so much of this, like giving away our data in exchange for actually getting social credit cores , whether it is on Airbnb's or whatever your insurers, it's for convenience, for cheaper price, for efficiency and also for the sort of sensation of safety, right?
We're happy to give up information for for money and for the the perception of safety. That is what people do. I mean. Look at what happened with Covid.
Right? We were very happy for our governments to lock us in our homes so we could pretend to be safe. You know, like...
[00:52:53] Mizter Rad: some of some of them some of them. I was not personally...
[00:52:56] Bronwyn Williams: you were the minority, right? I mean, like, most people wanted more safety and less freedom in my country...
[00:53:05] Mizter Rad: I feel like it's a matter of lacking of questioning as well.
Like, why is this happening. And is there a better way?
But people tend to conform. And just let it be. Without questioning more.
[00:53:16] Bronwyn Williams: Yeah, I think if this is something that scares you, I think that the way to have conversations with people is to, um, draw the, to finish drawing the, the squaring that circle that like what feels to be safer in the short term and what feels to be fairer in the short term actually ends up being more unfair and less Safe in the long run.
Right?
So it's like, that's what, that's what we do in the future space. It's like, there's the short term consequence. There's the midterm consequences. The long term consequence. And in terms of the, the wisdom of adopting these sorts of systems, like with most things in this life, there's probably marginal returns to giving up and to quantifying things.
Some things work very well with prices and with markets, you know, this is, this is how commodities work. This is why we have toilet paper and toothpaste in the shelves because markets work. But at the same time, do we really need a market for mothers and children to be really need a market for lovers, right?
Like, you know, should it be the default that girls are demanding to get paid to go on dates with boys in their school, not hookers, just regular girls. Or, you know, like, you know, these questions that I hope we think about, right, but like, where are these things, where, where's too far or should we just going to do it all?
[00:54:27] Mizter Rad: Like, do we have to monetize everything?
[00:54:29] Bronwyn Williams: We're not very good at stopping before we go too far. That's, that is the human condition.
[00:54:35] Mizter Rad: That's the thing that that's what's scary.
But anyway. Bronwyn. You spot trends.
Your signals on linkedin, like I said before a spot on. Um now I think trends are temporary.
They're naturally changing as you know. They come and go. They're visible to everyone, or many people, let's say. Some people are, seem to be blind. Value shifts , on the other hand. These ethical human values, are more permanent. And they last for generations, and they aren't a hype. And most of the times they go invisible.
So when you look at the world. And you're very good at spotting those trends. But I want to know from your perspective, what are those value shifts that are Happening... that you see happening in the world. That will last for generations...
[00:55:21] Bronwyn Williams: . human values also shift and they can shift pretty far and pretty
I mean, just look at the sort of cultural norms of the family, for example. In America, how quickly the whole sort of sexual revolution turned the two parent, get married forever, have children, value system upside down within literally one generation. I think values can shift quite, quite quickly.
Religious values tend to last longer, particularly if you're looking at the sticky religions, which tend to be more of the sort of monotheistic Abrahamic religions. Seem to have tapped into a certain level of our human brains. But I want to go further than that. I think that the, the trends that really do last that are, that have outlasted all of us, the trends that you can see dating back to the Iliad and the Odyssey and the Bible and whatever religious texts you want to look at are really sort of put it as simple as terms... my thesis there is that in general, we're looking for immortality one way or another. Which sounds quite grandiose and it sounds very transhumanist, but that's not my point. The point is that whether we, whatever, whatever value set drives us and different people are driven by different goals, they can all be sort of tend towards this idea of immortality.
We want to leave works, whether they great buildings or a great book or a great idea that will outlast us. That's a form of immortality. We want to, we're driven biologically to have children to leave our seed in a very literal sense to, to go after us. Or if you're more metaphysically minded, you want to transcend to, um, An immortal life towards, uh, whether it's a reincarnation, whether it is getting to heaven, whether it's whatever it is, there's this idea of like a, uh, immortality beyond the mortal plane.
And then of course, there's also now what we see in the more sort of hubristic version of immortality of literally trying to stay alive forever, which is what most billionaires try and do, right. As you can desperately see was those days. But like this idea to, to outlast ourselves is I think what drives most of us most of the time.
And this also taps into these ideas of why preservation is so important and conservation and security is so important to us, because most of us are just trying to stay alive a little bit longer, whether we want to admit that to ourselves or not. I think that those drivers are very critical. And then as you sort of unpack immortality, you've got a whole sub tier of drivers, which is of course, sex and mating and wanting to be accepted by our herds and wanting, wanting to connect with other people, wanting to persuade other people, wanting power and control. Those things don't go away. And those are, and those subsets are dependent on what flavor of sort of immortality you're chasing there, where, how you want to extend, uh, sort of small small place in space and time. And I think that as you start unpacking that, you can get to all those different layers. But I think we're going to go way off base on this conversation if we start unpacking that. But that would be my, that would be my flip.
[00:58:09] Mizter Rad: No, that's a, that's a, that's an interesting, take on that.
Definitely mortality. I mean, you see longevity now, the term that is being coined. And it's all over the place. It's, everyone is touching on that. And investing on, there's a lot of money flowing into that.
[00:58:22] Bronwyn Williams: Yeah. That's the manifestation we see in our current era. Like this idea of longevity and literal immortality. Which is so typical of a sort of the, the, the measurement, quantification society, right?
This idea that we can control our own biology.
[00:58:38] Mizter Rad: Yeah. Again, controlled. Yeah, that's, that's true.
[00:58:45] Bronwyn Williams: We can do it
ourselves.
[00:58:46] Mizter Rad: I find that beautiful at the same time, because we are so we're so, in a way, so innocent. And so arrogant at the same time, we feel like we can do it. And, and that's great. And, and there's people working towards it. And there's a lot of scientists and and very smart people working on really cool stuff. But at the same time, We don't know much about what life is in general? If you if you become very philosophical about it...
[00:59:10] Bronwyn Williams: that's true.
[00:59:10] Mizter Rad: But yeah I find that interesting. How do you think? Brownwyn just to wrap up this conversation because I think we can go for much longer, but, I don't want to take more of your time. And, today is very nice and shiny here so I want to go out and play with my dog. But, how do you think the world would look like in a hundred years from now?
If someone would tell you, look, Brownyn, when you, you, you're going to take this pill and you're going to live a hundred years more, from what you are now.
How do you think you will find the world then?
[00:59:44] Bronwyn Williams: Well, I think firstly, it won't have changed necessarily as much as it did in the last hundred years, if you're looking at it visually, if you just arrive on the planets. I mean, we have to be quite realistic here in terms of peak human, in terms of just the sheer volume of us, we're going to reach that in our life span. Like halfway to that point, a hundred years, half or 50 years, 30 to 50 years, there's going to be as many people as they're going to be for the next hundred years on the planet. And then we start sort of declining again, because for various different reasons. We not making as many babies as we used to.
So, and then in terms of like the way we live and the sorts of things we build, I think that the last sort of decade and probably the next couple of decades will be checkered with degrowth and with a lot more breaks and a lot less accelerators in terms of increased development. So we see much more redevelopment, replacing cars, electric cars, which are not all that different, you know, it's still, it's still getting you from point A to point B.
I kind of made this point on Twitter last week, looking at the movie back to the future, like in the original one, they went from 1985 to 1950 and it was a complete culture shock for the protagonist in the movie. So if they made that movie today, we going back to 1993. And the only thing that's really different visually, if I was to suddenly transplant my child back to the world of 1993, the only thing that she'd be looking for, that she wouldn't have, would be cell phones. And they were cell phones, which is a big change, everything else, you would know the TVs look like TVs, the books look like books, the cars look like cars, the clothes are even the same, you know, so I think that I think we tend to, we tend to overestimate the sort of aesthetic changes and how the aesthetic changes have actually slowed down.
And how once you've kind of reached homogenization in terms of everybody wearing Western blue jeans. And everybody listening to sort of K pop today. Or listening to Taylor Swift tomorrow, whatever, you know, how, how that actually slows down. So sort of, we see this future being more distributed rather than like accelerated.
And that's part of that pattern is probably going to you know, follow along with the physical degrowth of our populations too. In terms of, in terms of what we're going to see changed, obviously the weight of where the world is, is going to shift. And that will be the biggest difference. So the sort of sticky trends that you can't do anything about are trends like demography. And there is simply going to be more people in Africa. Africa is going to catch up with a lot of the rest of the world. But again, I'd say more that we're going to see africa looking more like the Middle East. Looking more like what happened in Southeast Asia too. Rather than being an entirely new thing. Cause that's kind of what we saw over the past.
[01:02:09] Mizter Rad: When you, sorry, when, when you say Middle East, you mean the Dubai region, Saudi Arabia region?
[01:02:15] Bronwyn Williams: I'd say pockets of it will end up, will end up with quite a lot of Middle Eastern influence there.
Sort of Emirates in particular. And other pockets will end up looking a lot more like China's view of the world. Just due to the way the investments and infrastructure is coming into Africa from. So that would definitely be over the next sort of 30 to 50 years. The next 50 years thereafter, it's going to start looking quite different as the world de grows.
So we'll start to see a sort of de urbanization and sort of breaking down of some of the biggest cities that we've seen, but that's going to be a lot further towards the end. So I think the biggest shift will be how things have moved. Rather than what has changed as far as things like flying cars and the rest of it probably not. A bit of space travel, sure..., we can have some of that. In terms of what we want, what we hope for, not going to change all that much.
[01:03:02] Mizter Rad: You think we'll still live a bit longer?
[01:03:04] Bronwyn Williams: Yeah, definitely. But not, not all of us. Again, that's, that's going to be the future is going to be caught up. It's going to be better distributed.
So I'd expect more horizontal growth of age rather than vertical growth of age within certain pockets. I think the sort of trends in the U S are quite definitive there that, um, wealth and, uh, you know, prosperity are not necessarily correlated with increased longevity past a certain point, right? That, uh, as, as things become more comfortable, we become our own worst enemies and they, they're, we do end up, end up finding new ways to kill ourselves, even as we find more ways to keep ourselves alive for longer, but overall global longevity will increase.
[01:03:44] Mizter Rad: Are you positive about the future or rather negative?
[01:03:48] Bronwyn Williams: I'm quite positive about the future. I'm more positive about the future of my grandchildren than I am for the future of my own poor daughter. If you want to put it that way. So I think that that's that we go through cycles of expansion and contraction and that most of those contraction are own goals, but there are a few pretty big bills to pay that are going to have to be paid that are going to have a cost. And I'm pretty sure we can, my, my lazy generation of millennials can probably kick that can down the road to the next one, but I don't think it's going to be able to go much further than that.
And I'm talking fiscally, I'm talking environmentally, I'm talking in terms of the sort of geopolitical tensions we see at the moment, there are a whole lot of shoes that are... that are going to fall. That cannot remain in the air forever. It's just a matter of seeing how long we can keep them in the air.
But midterm, less optimistic, longer term, quite optimistic. I think humanity is, um, finds a way whether, whether we, we, we like that or not.
[01:04:46] Mizter Rad: We always find a way, and that's why I like to speak to people like you because, you represent a good example of, uh, someone in Africa. Someone that has a good view on the world and on how we could evolve in the next years to come.
And I want to thank you so much for accepting this invitation. For being here. For sharing all your ideas. All your knowledge. And it was a pleasure. Maybe we can do it again sometime soon. And, I'll keep following your content on LinkedIn. What is the best place for people to follow your work? Is it LinkedIn, Twitter?
[01:05:19] Bronwyn Williams: Yeah, on Twitter, quite a lot. So I'm quite easy to find at Bronwyn Williams. Same on LinkedIn at Bronwyn Williams. Or forward slash Bronwyn Williams.
Otherwise my company is Flux Trends. That's F L U X T R E N D S. com. You can find out what we do on a more professional basis.
[01:05:37] Mizter Rad: Well, people follow Bronwyn. She has very cool ideas, very cool content. Check her out. And, uh, it was a pleasure to have you all here. Until next time and talk to you soon. Ciao, ciao.