s2 EP27 How To Build a Just Climate Future with Sandhya Sabapathy

Yeah, but it's quite eye-opening how that COVID made us all realize just how much we depend on supply chains, like random people in India and Bangladesh and the Chinese manufacturing for car parts, just to name a few that everyone can identify with.

In the book, you talk about the convenience economy.

Is this equivalent to the gig economy? If yes, how so? If no, why?

There are bits and pieces from a correlation standpoint to the gig economy.

So maybe let me start there.

So the gig economy is when you've got contracted work or contingent work with, in some cases, in some countries, like mature countries like Europe and the UK, there is a general social contract, but in other countries that doesn't exist.

So the safety and the infrastructure behind kind of being employed is not there.

And in some cases that could be great because you have flexibility, but again, that works in a mature market.

It may not work in the Global South.

Sometimes, and not even in the material market, because there were the zero-hour contracts here that was very flexible, a little too flexible without adequate social safeguards.

So when you think about these issues, it's not just the developing countries, not just some faraway location.

It's happening right here in London.

Everywhere, exactly.

And I totally agree with you.

So that social contract was something probably we had to redesign all over again during COVID, right? The convenience economy, I call it that because I think we have created products and services and everything else in between to enable convenience, right? So instead of going and shopping for grocery, we've got a way to get that to come to our house.

Instead of writing a paper, we've found a way to use AI to essentially use our skills to put something together, right? And I'm not at a whole saying that building convenience is bad, it isn't, but it is taking us away from being human, being communal and is getting us more isolated.

I mean, loneliness across the board, especially male loneliness is the highest it has ever been.

And I touch on this in the book as well when it comes to Gen Z and their social anxiety and how they move through job market these days.

And we've not made it easy on them.

And we're always optimizing for efficiency, always optimizing for perfection.

but you don't need every single aspect of your life to be efficient or perfect.

Because if that happens, you actually eliminate the cross-pollination, the serendipity, the like running into someone when you are going to a bookstore and having an actual person who's read 500 books recommend you a book as opposed to an algorithm that thinks that it knows you, right? Even if it probably does.

So I think it probably knows it better than most people.

It probably does, right? But at the end of the day, it's the, like, do we need everything to be convenient all the time?

Yeah.