The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens - The Optimization Trap: Why Too Much Efficiency Makes Us Fragile with Olivier Hamant

Episode Date: August 5, 2026

For decades, modern civilization has treated efficiency as an unquestioned good: the leaner, faster, and more optimized anything is – from supply chains to your morning routine – the better. But emerging systems science argues that this obsession with performance is actually making humanity more brittle. What if the over-optimization baked into our economies, our agriculture, our institutions, and even our own bodies is at the root of our shared predicament, and how can nature's intelligence show us a different way? In this episode, Nate is joined by biologist and biophysicist Olivier Hamant to explore why living systems prioritize robustness over performance, and what that means for a civilization built almost entirely in the opposite direction. Olivier distinguishes performance (efficacy plus efficiency) from robustness (the capacity to remain stable and viable despite fluctuation), and he points out that nature rarely selects for the most efficient organism; it selects for the most adaptable one. Together, Nate and Olivier also trace how cheap, abundant energy allowed human societies to substitute the "safety net" of resource abundance for the safety net that living systems actually rely on: diversity, redundancy, and cooperation. As the twenty-first century moves from an era of stable averages into an era of volatility and standard deviation, Olivier argues that the path forward likely isn't degrowth or continued growth, but a third way: economies and institutions designed to be robust and adaptable to risk, rather than avoid it.  What wisdom have we forgotten for the sake of maximizing material output and efficiency? How has our search for optimization affected our quality of life, and what do we risk by continuing down this same path? Most importantly, could balancing our focus on performance and robustness be the key to reframing our relationship with the entire Earth, bringing more stability, rest, and meaning to our lives?  (Conversation recorded on July 28th, 2026)\   About Olivier Hamant: Olivier Hamant is a French biologist and biophysicist whose work combines plant science and civilizational thought. He serves as Director of Research at the French National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and Environment, teaches at the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon, and directs the Institut Michel Serres – an interdisciplinary institute focused on ecological transition.  Hamant's work is centralized around the idea that modern civilization has confused "performance" with "fitness" by prizing efficiency/optimization/specialization/maximum output. This is in direct contrast to most living systems, which rarely optimize for these characteristics – instead, living systems survive because they are robust, or able to maintain their identity despite unpredictable disturbances.    Show Notes and More   Watch this video episode on YouTube   Want to learn the broad overview of The Great Simplification in 30 minutes? Watch our Animated Movie.   ---   Support The Institute for the Study of Energy and Our Future   Join our Substack newsletter   Join our Hylo channel and connect with other listeners  

So resilience, I used to use the word, I don't use it anymore, because resilience is you fall and then you bounce back. Robustness, you create the conditions in which you don't fall. This is something we miss because we are going to say it's a problem of the climate, it's a problem of pollution, it's a problem of energy. All this makes our life more unpredictable. And so when we know that, the solutions have to be built on standard deviations. And so when it happens, you're not afraid.

It's serenity, basically, right? Because you know that you always find a solution. because you've made everything so that it's possible to change all the time. You're listening to The Great Simplification. I'm Nate Hagen's. On this show, we describe how energy, the economy, the environment and human behavior all fit together and what it might mean for our future. By sharing insights from global thinkers, we hope to inform and inspire more humans

to play emergent roles in the coming Great Simplification. Today I'm pleased to be joined by biologist and biophysicist Olivier Haumont for an exploration of some of the newest research on what are referred to as robust systems. And what that tells us about the fragility of our modern, hyper-optimized human civilization. Olivier is the director of the Michael Seres Institute and serves as director of research at the French National Research Institute for Agriculture, food and the environment. He also teaches at the ANS de Lyon in Lyon, France. In this episode, we discuss Olivier's decades of work studying living systems and how they compare to human societal models, particularly in the face of unpredictability. Olivia unpacks what we can learn from robust biological systems, including the characteristics that enable them to with

understand disturbances and what that pretends for a society currently optimized for performance and output at the same time we're facing a decline of cheap and abundant energy and materials. Ultimately, we talk through various ways that we might make human societies more robust and dig into the deeper question of how this would challenge the very foundations of what we value and what we aspire to as individuals and as a society. Today, instead of asking you to subscribe to our YouTube or our substack channels, I will make a different request. If you enjoyed and learned from this fabulous conversation, both of which happened for me, please share it with some friends and host an in-person convening to talk about

it. That's always been my hope with this podcast, and this was one of my favorite conversations in the last year or longer, and so what better time to ask you the audience to share it. With that, I hope you enjoy this one. Please welcome Olivier Hamon. Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you, Nate. This is one of the fringe benefits of running a long running, uh, running. podcast is I've never heard about you. And your name came up dozens of times in the comment section on my recent work talking about robustness and nature. And so here we are, our first conversation. And welcome to the program. Thank you for writing. So you're a biologist and biophysicist, I understand. And you've been working on challenging one of the deeper assumptions,

in modern society, that of maximizing efficiency is always the best path forward. And you argue instead that nature tells a very different story and provides a different lesson. And your research is built around this idea of robust systems versus performant systems, particularly, as I understand it, in regards to how human civilization compares to biological system in terms of things like efficiency and specialization and redundancy and the like. So for those might be learning about your work or hearing about you for the first time. Maybe we start with you giving an overview of what you mean by systemic robustness versus performance. And maybe you could also explain how you came to believe this idea is central to your work.

Well, thank you. I have to say it in one sentence. It would be that the great simplification is a great over-optimization in some ways. Oh, the great simplification's inevitability is a result of a great over-optimization. Yeah, there you go. Exactly. Yeah, that's the root cause for me. So maybe I need to define words just to make sure we're on the same page.

So when I talk about performance, it's for me, it's a sum. of efficacy and efficiency. Effectacy is to reach one's objective and efficiency with the least amount of means. So when you reach your target, your performance, basically. And robustness, it's the capacity of a system to be stable and viable despite fluctuations. So for instance, a tree in the wind is stable, but it's also viable because it's able to withstand, you know, drought, freezing temperature. so the space of viability is very large. So forgive me, I may interrupt you because I have a lot of questions.

So you talked about efficacy, efficiency, and robustness or stability. But does it matter what time that could happen during one day or over 100 years? So it's really a property of any system. So it can be for a second, for a century. It's any system. I mean, there's a trade-off between the two. And that's the main point. We've been in a society of performance.

We are still in a society obsessed with performance, with KPIs and all this. But if we understand a little bit deeper of this, this society of performance can exist because we have abundant resources, oil to say it very simply. So we can play around with competition with performance because there's a safety net, which is the abundance of resources. when you're not in that safety net,

when you don't have that safety net anymore, when there's fluctuations, turbulence, uncertainty, but you don't have that safety net, so your safety net is not the abundance of matter, it's the abundance of interactions. And what you do with these interactions, symbiosis, you do robustness, you make robust systems with diversity, redundancy,

so counter-performance to the service of robustness. And so this is why, living beings are so exemplary, I would say, that they've been around for millions of years. And so what's in their genes, in their cells, in their physiology, in their ecosystems, is robustness before performance. What we human societies of the 21st century have built is the opposite performance before robustness. And so that's why we are in what we could call a normal accident.

A normal accident? What do you mean by that? So that's an extra idea. I should quote the source. It's from Charles Sparrow. Someone who is working on organizations. He's written a book on a normal accident. So a normal accident is when a system is very complex and very interdependent.

Then the accident is unavoidable. It will happen. And we are in this. I mean, there are many examples where we see in globalization, AI. I mean, all this is designed to fail. Well, one could argue that it's. As soon as we figured out how to mine vertically, in addition to horizontally, and we accessed this ancient sunlight that there was an inevitable normal accident.

Exactly. I mean, if I can use the word of a biologist here, but if you take a living being and you put it in an ecological niche with a lot of resources, which what happens when we can mine vertically, we suddenly have the Pandora box, then you turn into a parasite. So you optimize yourself, you're just an extracting machine, basically, and you lose a lot of over capacities, you can only mine, basically. And this makes you very fragile. So it's really the abundance that triggered that.

So how do you measure all this in nature as a biologist? How do you look at an ecosystem or a species and claim this is a robust system? So there's a good test for this. It's called the stress test. You know, you can go for an organization. It's the same. But in living being, it's the same. So you challenge them, right?

So you can challenge them virtually to say, well, for instance, what happens if suddenly there is a drought, suddenly there is a mega fire? So how do you respond to this? And so if you're robust, you have a plan B, basically. You have some redundancy. You have some allies. And so you can survive the fire. If you're very optimized, you're sure to be.

very efficient, but or thus very fragile. So, I mean, the stress test is almost the antidote to the indicator of performance in some ways, right? The stress test is a dynamic test, a dynamic tool to live in a fluctuating environment, in an unstable environment. So first of all, what's the opposite of robust? Would that be? Fragile. Fragile. Okay.

So what characteristics of human civilization would potentially signal to a robust? biologists that our system has become overly fragile, and was that always the case? Probably not. No, exactly. Homo sapiens, I mean, 315,000 years, most of its time of Homo sapiens, it's been about robustness. Like when, you know, the hunter and everything, that's not a place where there was a lot of cooperation, social hunting and these kind of things, right? It's a lot of cooperation. It's only recently in some ways. I mean, if we can, maybe there's some points of the Neolithic age, when we start. to invent agriculture, we start to be sedentary. So we start to have a safety net, abundance of

resources, abundance of food. Then it starts to derail in some ways. We start to optimize. I mean, of course the food, the plants, the animals, and then plantations at the Renaissance, right, colonization, and then mechanization. And it's a race towards more and more performance. That's very recent in the history of humanity. According to your research and contrary to what I think most people in our culture might think those that even believe in evolution. Evolution usually does not select for the most efficient organism. And why is that and how does that pattern differ from the most basic economic principles about reducing waste in order to optimize efficiency and output?

Yeah, it's crazy for the way we've read Darwin over the years and centuries, even decades, let's say. It's been crazy because if you read Darwin, the origin of species, actually it's really a claim to the selection of the most adaptable, not the most adapted. And so what we've done,

actually, when we look at evolution, it's exactly what you said. We don't select the most efficient. Evolution does not select the most efficient. Evolution selects the most robust. By definition, because for a species to survive several millions of years,

Over several millions of years, you have to experience a lot of fluctuations. And so species that have to go through these fluctuations, they have to be robust before they can be efficient. Let's drill down in that a little bit, because evolution works over large, large tracks of time. And it could be that you could look back and say, oh, what arrived here today was the most robust. But you also could say that it was a long,

a contiguous series of selecting for the most efficient or the most capable in that one time frame and then another time frame and then another time frame and what arrived here was the result of what was collectively more robust. And then a related question that comes to mind is multi-level selection on individuals and larger groups and I'm sure you have something to say about that too.

For living beings to go through evolution, they have to go through populations. Some of them are very efficient and they are going to serve the ecosystem in some ways and so these other species are going to live in a world where they are efficient and non-efficient or less efficient

species. So they benefit in a way or they are built on this diversity. But the species that go through tens, hundreds of millions of years, they are robust. I mean, a shark is robust. It's not efficient. For sure. But if you think

of some orchids that we see today that have co-evolved with a specific insect or something like this, they are very specialized, very optimized. Those ones are going to disappear, most likely. Okay, I have a ton of questions now because this could go in many different directions because what we've built into the pipeline

in terms of exceeded planetary boundaries, global heating, which if you're in France right now, you're aware of a little bit of a glimpse, of coming decades. So robustness in nature is going to be incredibly relevant in coming decades and centuries. What animals, what organisms,

what sorts of systems are going to make it through the bottlenecks of the 21st century? So that's an interesting question. It's not going to be individual species that will survive. It's collective populations that will survive. So, for instance, because the trap would be to think that we're going to select a tree

that will resist drought, freezing and everything, right? And so we'll make a monoculture of that tree which will attract a pathogen and that forest will disappear. So what will resist is collective robustness. So a collection of different species that will mutually help each other

and that's going to be robust. So that's where it's difficult for us because after decades of performance we often think in a silo, right, in solo as well. So what will survive is groups, heterogeneous groups that are robust. Let's drill into that a little bit

because in biological systems, as you're describing, diversity is extremely important. On the other hand, human economies often eliminate diversity in favor of standardization and efficiency and profit. So can you outline specifically why diversity is important to underpin robust systems in nature and in human economies and what might that look like going forward?

Well, I mean, diversity is a form of heterogeneous redundancy, if you want, right? So if you have, you know, if I take, for instance, if you only have a car to go to work, that's very efficient because you know what to do, it's easy, you know the road and everything, but you have to control your car a lot because you really depend on your car. So if you don't have diversity, your car is not working, you can't go to work. But if you have a bike, if you have a neighbor that can bring you to work, if you have all this diversity, then you always have a plan B. And so you don't need to control your car so much. You can be serene because you have enough plan B.

It's the same for biology. If you have a diversity of solution, you can resist. I was taking the example of the monoculture. So when you have wheat monoculture, for instance, you know that all these, all these, all this suite is the same everywhere, right? So this is going to attract the pathogen. The pathogen will be selected in a place where everything is homogeneous. It's the same for informatics, by the way, the cyber attacks, they attack the dominant software, right? So diversity is also a shield against pathogens, for instance. So how does this work? How did this work historically? You have

these ecosystems of different species that implicitly, but probably not consciously, collaborate with each other and build a robust ecosystem. But in the human case, 200,000 years ago, were we consciously advocating and supporting diversity and robustness in our systems? Or was it just an externality or a spandrel to use an evolutionary term of just our daily lives and behaviors? I would buy the idea that it's just because we could do competition,

We could do performance because we had a lot of resources. When I say we, it's cast, it's not everyone. But there was a group of people who adds enough resources who could, you know, determine an economic model in a way, and we've just followed. Because even if you're poor, you can buy mimicry think that that's the model, right? So even it's crazy, right? It's really in the culture.

The culture of abundance is everywhere. And so if you're in that abundance, then you're going to perform because you can. the three years after World War II, so 1945 to 1948, after a big trauma, we have developed robustness. Social Security, human rights,

IUCN, I mean, all this has been created because we had the experience of fluctuations. And so we developed robustness, but after 1948, it was back to performance and more than ever, because oil was even more present than before. So it's a little bit of a double-edged sword that a huge amount of energy

surplus makes redundancy and robustness feel less important because we have doovers. We have mulligans. If we screw something up, it's so cheap that we can just do it again. But gradually, that is causing a lack of creativity and a lack of evolutionary response to a biological organism that naturally wants to have a plan B and a bicycle and all those things and be robust, but the signal for that has been squelched because of the carbon pulse.

Exactly, exactly. Let's take an example. You have a false banker with trying to be to scam you, right? If you use double identification, so a lot of control, a lot of performance to be really controlled, your vigilance is going to decrease.

And that false banker is going to be much more credible because there's more control. So it's a bit counter-initative, but when we increase the level of control, actually we increase the level of insecurity. And it's the same with performance. When we optimize, we think that we're doing the right thing because it's more efficient, but actually we are more fragile and we don't see it. For every question I ask you in all of the concepts that we're going to discuss today,

there are kind of two answers or two lenses with which to view them. One is a large aggregation of humans, society, or the total human population of 8.1 billion, or individual humans. So I think my understanding is most of your work discusses institutions and systems. But how does all this map onto individuals? Do modern individual homo sapiens people optimize ourselves in the same way that our civilization has? It's crazy because it's actually at all scales. We even optimize our cells in some ways. We optimize our food.

We optimize the routine for the breakfast. We optimize the plan for the holidays. So it's at all scales. We are contaminated by this ideology that performance is always positive. It's not that it's always negative. We like to have a fireman that is performing. Of course, efficient. When you're in the fire, when you're in the middle of a crisis,

you want to be performed. At the peak of the crisis, you want to be performant. But the rest of the time, you have to be robust. But what we do, the rest of the time, we are performing. We claim efficiency all the time. And it's really at the individual level, at the family level, at the company level, at the world level, it's everywhere. As a biologist, and I assume that part of that is you've studied history, how does this differ from our ancestors hundreds of years ago, thousands of years ago, hundreds of thousands of years ago, hundreds of

thousands of years ago, take your pick. For me, the turning points based the Neolithic age, the Renaissance, and of course the oil revolution, let's say the industrial revolution. That's definitely towards this. But if you look at the longer time before that,

I mean, humans were rather cooperative. So it was robustness because they had to live with fluctuations. You can't survive if you're performance with fluctuations. It's too dangerous. So you can't. I mean, it's basically

it's a lesson of viability. So if you, for any living beings, if you live in a niche, an ecological niche with a lot of resources, you can, I mean, you have to be competitive because there's a lot of resources, and so there will be a lot of competitors, so you have to be the most efficient,

the most performance to survive. You take the same living being, you put it in an ecological niche with less resources, fluctuations, scarcity, shortages, they cooperate. That symbiosis.

And that's what's, dominating on Earth. There's a lot more symbiosis on Earth than parasites. And so that's what we should see. If you take the ocean, for instance, the ocean is a very, it's an ecosystem with very little resources, very

poor, very scarce. There's a lot of cooperation. There are a lot of papers analyzing the network of interactions between the species. They are cooperating. So we can have the image of the shark, you know, when we take the ocean, it's the shark and the danger and everything. Actually, no, it's all of this, you know,

plankton and everything that is cooperating. In a wide boundary sense, they're cooperating, but the shark is also just directly eating the fish. I don't think the fish feels like it's cooperating. Of course. But, you know, it's the hunt. That's a moment of performance. The lion that is

hunting is performance, but the lion is sleeping 16 to 20 hours every day. So when we reduce the lion to an hunter, we are biased by the pro-performance bias, right? So the problem is, that in nature you have to perform,

but the percentage of your weak or life in performance mode is very small, whereas modern humans are thrust into this performance mode, 90% of our waking time, and that can't be healthy. It generates planetary burnout. So burnout for humans, burnout for public services,

burnout for ecosystems. It's really, I mean, the root cause is this. It's performance. It's not selfishness. It's not individualism. It's not even oil. If you really want to go to the root cause, that's that tropism towards performance.

That compass on efficiency all the time. So that's a more powerful driver than sexual selection or status, relative fitness. It's, or it's embedded in relative fitness, yes? Yeah, exactly. It's embedded. So actually, basically, so if you have abundant resources, it's a good fitness, actually,

to be performed. I mean, the main thing is that we could justify this type of behavior when we add a lot of resources and when there was no visible negative externalities. So what would a psychologically robust person look like today? Well, someone who likes to do improvisation. You know, when you do improv, you know, you're not in control. You're not trying to say everything you have in mind. You just improvise.

And so you play with what's happening. And so that's the school of robustness. So I can take an example of a musician, for instance. So if you're a musician obsessed with performance, you're going to read your score very carefully. You're going to practice a lot. But if the wind is taking away your shit of music, that's it.

The music can stop. Whereas if you do free jazz, and if your neighbor is doing a, I don't know, like a C-sharp or something like this, that is sounding weird, you're going to play with it. It's going to feel. So jazz is robust.

Absolutely, yeah, absolutely. And not the marching band, of course, the marching band is performance. Because that's not really jazz, right? It's really jazz with improv. So I don't know if I'm skipping ahead logically on the questions that I'd like to ask you, but is it possible to have a robust system with plus or minus 8 billion humans? Of course, it is possible. So it's, I mean, of course, maybe I shouldn't say, of course,

but I think it's possible. Let's say if we take agriculture, food, which is one determinant to have all these people, right now we have increased the demography with rather efficient performance agriculture. But the negative externalities is basically making it very fragile for the future, for geopolitical reasons, social reasons, not only the ecology, for many other reasons.

But there are many, many reports showing that you can switch to agro-ecology, if we could switch to agroecology, you can feed 8 billion people. No problem. How do you define agro-ecology? So agro-ecology is like thinking your agro-system as an ecosystem. And so that means that you replace fertilizer, pesticides, irrigation, by the biodiversity in your field.

So if you increase the biodiversity in your field, in your plot, then this is providing nutrients. you don't have to add fertilizer. It provides resistance to pathogen. You don't have to add pesticides. And it saves the water in the soil because there's a lot more biomass. And so those plots are much more resistant,

much more autonomous, and so they're more robust. Tony Barnoski is a biologist at Stanford and he wrote a paper that showed in the last several hundred years the amount of animal biomass on the planet is up by 700%. Most of that is human livestock and humans. Net wild animals have declined.

But that's because of the energy, Haberbosch and the corn and soybeans that were directing towards animals. In your example, you just said, the animals in the world that are going around and sharing nutrients and everything, that's happening because of this global bolus. of fossil sunlight. So if fossil fuels dwindled and went away, would we still get that much magnitude of biomass benefit from biodiversity? Of course, because, you know, if you think of a field today,

a wheat fields or canola field, I mean, whatever, there is no trees. So if you talk about the total biomass of that field, it's very low. Actually, it's the same yield as the savannah. Actually, it's crazy because we've, we, thousands of years ago, we've copied the agricultural model of Syria, the fertile crescent, right?

Which was a savannah. And we've exported that model everywhere, even in places where there were trees, forests. And so if we switch to agroforestry, so putting trees on top of the wheat field, then we produce a lot more biomass per square meter, of course. and we also protect the fields from, you know, the rain. I mean, like, and we maintain the agrometry, and it's all positive.

Well, I've had people on to discuss this before that higher agricultural productivity is possible without fossil inputs, but there's one major input that's needed, and that is time, human time. So I don't think we could have the cruxious. material lifestyles, at least in the West, in this scenario that you're postulating. But what do you think about that? Yeah, of course. Of course. There would be, I mean, there would be more people working in the field.

I mean, right now it's crazy. There's almost no one, right? It's really the end of the era in that sense. So there would be more people in the field. But we also have to realize that if we do agroecology, it's not like we're going to go back to the Middle Age. We have developed technologies. We just need to make very important.

more robust, repairable in the land, et cetera, right? So if we have this technology, we can repair it, that it's produced locally, repaired locally. Then we have a mix in a way, right? So we've learned from the years of performance, but we make it more robust. Is any of this happening in France or in Europe that you're aware of? Yep, actually, it's, so what's crazy about this?

So if I take agroecology, for the past 20 years, the surface area in agroecology, has increased every year in Europe. So every year it's increasing. Simply because when you're a farmer and when you start, you can't start with intensive agriculture anymore. It's too expensive.

So you start with agroecology right away. So what would classically trained economists think of this conversation so far? I'd be curious. No, tell me. I'm sure you've steel manned your position on efficiency, because efficiency

and another thing that upsets me or frustrates me is there's all this discussion about energy and we need more energy. Our society right now runs on power which is

useful energy per unit time which also correlates to biological principles. So I think there's an often frequent conflation between energy and power. Well, first of all, do you have anything to say about that? When I had interactions with economists, they always take examples of war, of crisis, to teach to

their students. And so, of course, in those contexts, you need to be efficient. You know, commercial war, you need to be efficient. But in the regular time, when you're at peace, when you are experiencing situations, you need to learn a different way to work. Oh, so it's kind of like the lion who hunts once and then sleeps for three days. Exactly. We need an economy like that. Exactly. So if you go to a commerce school, I don't know, a college of economy, let's say, or engineering school, and it's the same.

You're going to be taught the lion that hunts. And never you're going to be taught the lion that sleeps. So I'm dreaming of schools where I would learn about the lion. lion that leaps because that's what it's doing. I mean, that lion is doing most of the time. These are schools of wars. It's really crazy. We are actually teaching kids to be at war.

It's as brutal as this. Yeah. So we alluded to this before, but from the perspective of your research, how big of a role do you think that cheap, abundant energy you parse it into oil has played? in the way that our universities and our leading thinkers confuse performance and robustness. Big time. I mean, so we're really in the era of energy. Even for people who are invested in the socio-ecological question, often energy comes first before life. So we're going to make, you know, windmill or solar panels more efficient.

even if this might have an impact on forests, on lithium mine, and then on life. And what's crazy is that we want to save the machine. We want to save the machine, even though our performance is destroying life on Earth. So there's a lot, I mean, there's a much better way to look at the problem.

So if we put the primacy on life, then maybe those nature-based solutions can resolve a lot of issues on the climate, on the energy, on work, on the economy, on the well-being, etc. So building on that, I love that answer, by the way, do you think that declining net energy is going to naturally force societies back towards robustness or simply produce collapse?

And do we have any say in which direction that goes? So I guess it will depend on who is going to read that signal. So if the people in power with a lot of money, with a lot of power, don't see the decline in energy. For instance, if you're going through a heat wave and you have your air condition in your apartment or in your office, you don't see it, right? And so you're going to still go for efficiency. If you don't have air condition, if you see fluctuations in your work, in your environment, then you start to question your place. You see, well, that's not livable. That apartment is not livable without air conditions.

I need to change, right? But if you are in a hot city and you turn on your air conditioner, I don't think you're thinking about efficiency. You're just thinking about personal comfort. Of course, but that's connected in some ways, right? Because personal comfort comes at a cost of resources, energy, these kind of things. Yeah, so Jean-Marc, Giancovici has an interesting way of describing this, which I've used before, that we can become more efficient,

we can use our technology better, or sobriete, which is let's choose to take a bus instead of a car, or we actively choose to do something differently in the face of energy and ecological limits. And if we don't do that, the third category is poverty, which is we're going to be forced to do these things regardless. I thought that was an interesting framing. For sure, for sure. I mean, it's good at seeing this because we need to anticipate. Otherwise, we're just going to experience it. and then it's going to be poverty for sure. But efficiency and sobriety, I mean, so we both have problems,

and they can be connected because sometimes when we want to do sobriety, for instance, we want to make a machine more efficient so that it's consuming less energy. And we are going to call this sobriety. And of course, we forget about the rebound effect. I mean, the classic example is the plane, the plane that is consuming less kerosene. But actually, because it's more efficient, the rebound effect,

now it's possible to have a low-cost, flight, ultra-fast fashion, and all this is made possible because our planes are more efficient. And sobriety has generated exhaustion of resources, right? Just the opposite. So sobriety is actually a nice word, but it shouldn't be the cause. It shouldn't be the constraint. It should be the output. We should create the conditions that generate sobriety.

And that's robustness. I like that. I will send this interview to Jean-Marc. But you made me think of something. So I've often described Jevin's paradox and the backfire effect more explicitly. But never to a biologist. So I'm wondering how does Jevin's paradox

or the rebound effect or the backfire effect, is there evidence of that in nature? Is that just a product of the human economic supermarkets? organism. It's true everywhere. So maybe something at the border between biology and economy, it's Norman Borlo, land sparing theory. So the idea is that you're going to increase the yields of plants, and by doing this, you're

going to prevent deforestation. That's the original idea, because you produce more in your field, you're not going to have to burn the rest, and so the forests will thrive. Of course, the rebound effect comes in. you increase the yield, you create new needs, I mean the palm oil, the soya, I mean, it's very classic, and this is going to increase deforestation. And so this is a classic example we can also sit in biology. But what about not with humans involved? Like what about a lion? Ah, yeah, no, it can happen as well. So for instance, if you see birds fighting for bread in the park,

there are usually I mean there's a lot of bread they're going to fight so competition because there is abundance and they're going to sometimes overfeed because there is a competition so that could be some kind of

a rebound effect they could just you know I mean if there was some god of bird they could you know divide the quantity for every bird but it's not what happens right so you can have this space it's not as complex as

the rebound effect we experience in humans of course so getting back to the sobriete discussion and declining energy on the horizon. Have you seen or studied any historical, biological or civilizational examples where turbulence itself increased robustness? So there was the example after World War II, which was an example where we had an increase of robustness.

You can also look at endogenous people. So they've been robust for a very long time. And so it's sort of a school of robustness. If you look at the cogis, for instance, in Colombia, I mean, they're very robust people. They can experience a lot of fluctuations. The only thing, though, is that their traditions are starting to be obsolete because their environment is changing.

And so those robust traditions and robustness in their territory, because their territory is not as robust as before, they have to change their tradition. And so these ones are also in danger. So this would be the two extremes, right? people who have been robust for a long time because they haven't entered modernity, the world of efficiency, and us who have entered modernity, and each time there was fluctuation, we have increased robustness. I mean, if you look at the democracy, I mean, we've increased some level of robustness over the years, over the decades, over the centuries. So it's not like it's only a path towards more and more efficiency. There's been robustness along, but in the recent, decades, let's say, because we've been in so much abundance, we've really reduced our robustness a lot. So if you think forward and take out the policy and the planning that's going to be

essential in the coming decade. But if you as a biologist and a scholar, just close your eyes and imagine two centuries from now, or even one century from now, what sort of humans will have made it through the bottleneck? They won't be born yet. But, what sort of human civilization and structures and such. By definition, they will be robust because that's what made it through this chaotic coming century. What can you speculate about that? So we are exactly in what we call,

what we biologists call evolutionary mismatch. So we are exactly this. So we still have the culture of abundance of performance, even though we've switched to a different world. But I agree. So later on, what we can imagine, a robust world. It's a world where agriculture is agroecology.

The economy, it's not a production economy. It's a sharing economy, cooperation economy, functionality economy, where we produce a lot less goods, but those goods are much more robust, repairable, adaptable, but they are shareable. They are shared. So it's the shared car, it's a shared bike, but it's shared everything, right?

And so this is sovereignty for the land, for the territory. So it's more. There's a lot more participatory approaches, which are slower, more heterogeneous, but more robust in the long term.

So this is all what we see today. It's already here. I mean, it's already there today. It's just below the mediatric line, let's say. So Eo Wilson is one of my favorite authors. I have every single book that he's ever written, including the superorganism somewhere on my bookshelf here.

he famously said communism great idea wrong species so we talked about a little bit about this earlier but i'd like you to unpack it a little bit human economics often assumes that competition drives innovation and what you said earlier is biology suggests that cooperation is equally fundamental so how do you see living systems now in the future balancing between those two forces Yeah, so competition and cooperation are both good for innovation, but it's just that we humans who think that indeed innovation is driven by competition, and we think that in biology is the same, whereas actually it's rather the opposite. So if you use competition to innovate, by definition you will only have the space that

the competitors leave you. So it's a small space. So the innovation is small. And that's all the gadgets that we see, right? That's innovation driven by competition. So that, and that historically we've innovated 1.1% a year. We've become more efficient over the last 100 years around that. It's been remarkably consistent.

Exactly. And so, but the type of innovation, actually, the problem is that innovation, we often think that innovation has to be to the service of increased performance. Whereas we can certainly think of innovation to the service. of increased robustness. Increased service to the web of life, increased meaning, increased health.

None of those things are chosen in our current economy. Absolutely, absolutely. And so if you think robustness and robustness of your territory, there's going to be well-being, there's going to be all this. And so the type of innovation

is going to be very different. It's going to be connected to life, to your local land. It's going to be also shared. It's going to be open access. It's going to be in Creative Commons, CC by essay, share alike. I mean, it's all this, right?

And so what we do when we innovate through cooperation is that actually we expand the innovation. When we innovate with competition, we restrict the innovation. There's a patent. It's a limit, right? And so innovation is much more open when it's open and when it's cooperative.

And that's what happens in biology. Of course, when evolution happens, there is no patent. When there's a new type of flag or new type of evolving, is not a patent, only this is shared. So that's going to be more like this, right?

In fluctuations, you have to share your innovation. And actually, also, this is happening today. There's calls for commons, actually. So in France as well. So there are new projects on cars that are also bike, like sort of a mixed vehicles, let's say. This is a call to comments. So the companies that are agreeing to respond to that call,

they have to share all. their innovations. So you're a communist. So I like the comments. I'm kidding. The communists, the problem with the communist is that it's often the model we have, the most famous model we have is the Stalinian communism. And Stalinism, let's say, it's another type of extractivism.

And for me, there's no difference between the US and USSR in the 60s. These are two extractivist economy. At first order, they are just pumping oil and mining minerals at very high rate. And if you look at the economy, actually, it's crazy because it's the same. The inequality in salary decreases from the 1950s to the 1970s, both in USSR and in the USA. And after the 1970s, with the oil cracks and everything, these inequalities increase in USSR and in the US. So definitely the driver is not the economic model. It's the abundance of resources and that troublesome towards efficiency.

And so that's why, I mean, so in a way, the commons, it's more like, I mean, it's more subtle than just communism. So in your work, you have discussed how prioritizing robustness, as you've outlined so far today, can offer an alternative third way between endless efficiency-led growth and complete. degrowth? And can you display why that is? And what is that third path might actually, how would that look? Well, that third path is taking on the first line in all the scientific report

on the sociocological question, which is that we are leaving the era of the mean and we are entering the era of the standard deviation. Oh, wow. And often this is something we miss because we are going to say it's a problem of the climate, it's a problem of pollution, the problem of energy.

It's not the problem. These are problems. These are secondary problems. Well, the primary problem is, as speaking to a biologist, is ecological overshoot. Exactly. And so that ecological overshoot is generating the fact that we lose buffers. And so that's why our climate is getting more turbulent. That's why we lose ecosystem services.

All this, I mean, at first order, makes our life more unpredictable. And that's the number one. message from scientists. Our world is starting to be more unpredictable. We're leaving the mean to enter the era of the standard deviation. And so when we know that, the solutions we have to build, they have to be built on standard deviations. So if I just take an example, so if you're living by the sea,

and you think of the mean, so you're going to say, well, the sea level is going to rise slowly. So you're going to build a dike to adapt to this, mean increase. But if you think of standard deviation, you know that there's going to be a submersion soon enough, right, and it could be tomorrow. So you're not going to build a dike. I mean, you can build a dike, but that's secondary. You're going to make an habitat that can withstand this water coming in. So it's going to be more amphibious if you want. We'll be able to withstand water coming in and coming out. That's a very different solution.

If more people understood that we're headed for an era of standard deviation as opposed to mean, doesn't that immediately emotionally activate the lion hunting dynamic instead of the lion sleeping dynamic, which paradoxically is what we want more people to have? So if you live in the world of standard deviation, you do jazz. Okay. So, you know, basically we just have to understand. that the risk looks like a danger. Risk looks like a danger if we've over-optimized everything

because it's very risky to, I mean, the little fluctuation is very risky. If you live in an era of standard deviation, you know that fluctuations are everywhere. You have to re-enchant risk. So you want to make risk. Risk is your everyday, right? So you build all your economic system

or your social systems on fluctuations. And so when it happens, you're not afraid. It's really like a jazz man or a jazz woman playing with a group, right? Fluctuations are actually even welcome. So I don't know how to play an instrument. I sing background vocals on a comedy rap group,

but I'm not musical. So how would this apply beyond jazz? Give us some more examples of robustness. So I can give you, I mean, it's a bit binary, but I can, if I build the house, for instance, So if I want to be very efficient, I'm going to optimize that house so that, you know, every single room is optimized for a destination. A kitchen is going to be a perfect kitchen. A living room is going to be a perfect living room.

Even the furniture is going to be built in and everything, right? Super efficient. The problem is that something happens in the territory or something that a house needs to be a hospital or you need to welcome more people or, I don't know, you have more kids than expected or whatever. Multi-use. Multi-use. Exactly. So if you want to be robust, it has to be multi-use. So that means that your house, the walls can move. The house itself, you can dismantle it and rebuild it somewhere else. But, you know, playing with fluctuations. And so you're serenity, basically, right? Because you know that you always find the solution because you've made everything so that it's possible to change all the time. That was clear. So there are many sustainability advocates, people that work at county boards and town councils that are, aware of climate and ecology and energy depletion and all those things.

How should, I mean, you just talked about jazz and in your house. How should people in counties and regions be thinking about robustness, especially in where they have manuals and procedures that are set already to maximize efficiency and profit, not robustness? A good starting point is to build a repair cafe. you know, like where you can repair your own things. It's already, it's very good because you learn how to repair things. That's a social link.

It's a group, local cooperation. So it's already a seed of robustness in the territory. But you can think of many other things. Actually, it's something that we've experienced during COVID. So, you know, like we've really planned the cities so that they're optimized. And suddenly during COVID, the sidewalks were waiting rooms, right? the plaza was a vaccination center, right? So we still have those places that are multi-use.

And so we just need to cherish them and to actually expand them. But we also need to see them. They are here. So now is the time to really preserve them. How can we tell whether a policy or an action in a community actually increases robustness rather than is just simply reducing consumption and throughput or providing a quick fix? So for me there are four determinants, if you want. The first one is residency.

So there should be another plan B, plan C, plan D. Eterogeneity, diversity. So it means that those plan B must be very different. It's not only the second time the same thing. It has to be different. The third point is a link to life, to the living. So those solutions have to have a link to the living creatures on site. they can't only depend on minerals or something that is coming from outside.

So link to the local life, the local water, the local sand, the local biomass. And the fourth one is a deep link to the local territory. So social, economical material to the economy. And the tool to do this, it's the stress test. So when you have to take a decision, a strategic decision for your company, for your organization, for your local community, you have to ask a double question. Is that project robust?

And is it at the service of the robustness of the territory? And to make sure that's the case, you do a stress test. So you shake it with a very strong fluctuation. Like, for instance, oil price 10 times higher. There's no more internet for the next six months on the entire planet. I mean, like, you know, big fluctuation. And you're going to see two things. what cracks, what is fragile.

So it's going to immediately to give you a map of the fragility in your local community. And the second thing, you're going to ask, what do I need to do so that it doesn't happen, so that it doesn't crack. I wish I would have talked to you two months ago

because I just wrote a six-part series and it's called How to Think About the Future. And I actually included robustness as a key thing and some of the no-regret strategies, but you've just made it a lot clearer. So thank you. And I'm just wondering, back to your cooperation and competition question, if there are 20 people on a decision-making group for your community or your region,

if there's only one person advocating for robustness, that makes it a little difficult. So have you found that there's a critical mass of humans and nodes in a network that make these conversations make more sense and aha and are actualized. So it's a typical case of robustness even for this. If you're alone in a group preaching or pledging for robustness and the rest is pledging for efficiency, the way to go forward.

So if you speak louder, it's not going to work. That's the performance path, right? It's not going to work. It's even going to be counterproductive. So the art of war is the way to go. So you want to create an active minority. So that means that you find other people allies that are very heterogeneous. So that means that they're not like you.

So they're CEOs, they are homeless, they're, I don't know, like a baker. I mean, like really a very wide diversity of people. And so if that group is okay to push that robustness, then for the 19 other people, it's going to be very difficult to say, well, you know, you represent the entire population of the community, but we are going to go against you. That's an active minority. The active minority is activating a silent majority.

And that's, you can't fight that. It's really the art of war, Shunzu. It's almost like, you know, the goal game. You encircle the art of your system, and the art of the system has two choices. either to disappear or to join the periphery. Actually, that's what happens in the flocks of birds, by the way. Again, biology is easier.

So when you look at a flock of bird that is turning right, turning left, changing its shape, it's always the birds at the periphery that are guiding the group. And so that's what you want to create, that periphery that is heterogeneous and that is guiding the group. So it's a non-violent way to transform a system. I like that. How do we deal with the unbelievable complexity of all the issues and the crises that we face? It's a polycrisis. There's all these things.

And then there's overlapping strategies and solutions and institutions. And sometimes they contradict each other as we attempt to navigate uncertainty at larger and larger scales. Does your study of biology offer any suggestions there? So yeah, complexity. Well, it's very complex, of course. It's a difficult case. So again, I would say the local level is the way to start. Because when you encircle the art of the system, it's going to start from the periphery.

I mean, I have doubt very much that the president of the USA or the European Commission will suddenly say, well, you know what? We're going to switch to robustness now. Unlikely. So it will rather come from the basis. It's bottom up. So the more we do locally, the more we create this active minorities, and the more we are contaminating the art of the system.

So I think that's the way to go forward. I'm sure you're aware that the human brain has shrunk 10 to 15% in the last since the agricultural revolution anyways. And I think the leading theories are that that is a result of us specializing when we used to be more robust as individuals because we could be a jack of all trades and whatever came our way. But then once we had this more and more storable,

as Luke Kemp would say, lootable agricultural surplus, we specialized into different roles. And over time, I think that atrophied our brains. Do you have any thoughts on that? Sure. I mean, it's part of the, you know,

when we optimize, we make everything narrower. You know, it's the highway. Everything is, you know, like narrow. And so our brain is like, or how do you call it like La Mashua? The jaw has also reduced because we are eating things

that are a bit more tender now and actually we can see it over this century so it goes very fast. So indeed our environment is modifying our body and so if we're in the environment that is promoting efficiency, promoting performance or body itself, we are actually turning into parasites.

You know like a parasite is the most deviant, the most deviant the most optimized parasites, they've lost their legs, they lost their wings. It's just digestive tract, basically. They're just extracting food. That's it. And they are reproduced. That's pretty much it.

And so if we corn like this, we turn like this. Of course, this will break before that. But we are seeing this in our body. I mean, I was talking about evolutionary mismatch. I mean, there are cases like this very clearly stated in the literature. So, for instance, the cavities that we. have in our teeth is because of agriculture, where we have more sugar in our diet. And so there is more cavities.

The same we are missing some vitamins. But because when we were hunter, like harvesters, the diversity of the diet was much higher than after agriculture. So all this is, yeah, our body is changing when we change our environment. I will attempt one sentence from high school French 40 years ago, we ne We're not robust Yes, we

I'm just sure Full stop, right? Like we are closer to parasites by your definition Yes And here's the thing

too We talk about Energy and well we need this base load So we need a natural gas generator and turbines And

we need solar panels But yes You need 10,000 kilowatt array To get all the things in your house Humans need baseload, we are baseload. And so for most of our history, when it was raining out, we took a nap like a lion. And it was sunny and windy. We went out and did work. And so I think that needs to shift somehow in our cultural awareness too, right?

For sure. But there are examples. So we're not condemned to stay parasites. I can just take an example of a bakery. It's called a neoloco. So it's a bakery where they make bread. with the sun and it's a solar oven. So it's not with electricity, it's not with oil. It's just with mirrors. So just a plain solar oven. But when you do this and you're in France and even in Normandy, where you know there's a lot of clouds, how do you make bread when your energy is not always there?

If you follow the lion, you just wait for when there's enough light to make your bread. So that means that you need to make bread that can be stored for a long time. And so for this, you just use the yeast that is slower, not as performance. So the dough is going to amount slowly. But that bread, you can keep it for seven days. So you just have to wait for the sun to be there. You bake your bread, and that's it. You can sell bread the entire week.

So in that example, is the human culture robust, or is the bread and the yeast itself robust? So it's a little bit everything. Actually, the yeast is more robust because it's slower to, to grow. It's also more robust because when the dough is, well, one thing like this, the gluten is finding it so you don't have to have a mechanical way to increase the connection between the gluten. It happens naturally. And the baker as well is more robust. I mean, it's economically more profitable because you are not dependent on the oil price. You're not dependent on Russia invading Ukraine. You're not dependent on this. You're not dependent on inflation.

You're not even dependent on competition that is, you know, like when the state is supporting the normal bakeries, you don't have any subsidies. Actually, you're so robust, but you don't even need the subsidies. I find robustness as a goal and a theme much more palatable and relevant and interesting than sustainability. I mean, sustainability was always kind of an inaccurate term. We should be more sustainable than we are today, but I really like robustness as a frame. You could say, I mean, if I want to play along your line, you could say that a parasite can be sustainable.

As long as there is a lot of resources. Yeah. It can extract. So to be robust means that you've understood that you're in an environment that is unpredictable with shortages, with scarcity. So you have to maintain viability over the long time. So you have to be robust.

So robustness will require homo sapiens to actually live up to our name wise, wise ape, wise man, because cleverness is in service of efficiency today, for the most part. Which is crazy because if we think of intelligence in terms of evolution, intelligence is the ability to adapt. It's adaptability. Yeah. Rather.

Right. So the most intelligent living beings are the most adaptable. And so if we were homo sapiens, really, we would be a almost. adaptability or something like this way. It's adaptability that will maintain us in the long term. I think I have to ask you, how does AI fit into your concepts of robustness and fragility? AI is here and it's here to stay.

It's like an alien that would have come from another planet and is now with us. So we have to play along with that new partner, if you want. But of course, in a world of efficiency, AI is at the surface of efficiency. And so we are delegating a lot of our tasks to a machine, which is doing it much more efficiently than us. And so by doing this, we are, well, exporting our knowledge to the intelligence, let's say,

but we are losing competency, right? We are actually de-learning. That's what happens to surgeons and, I mean, it's really everywhere. So if we wanted to have AI at the service of robustness, actually it's pretty simple. We want to make non or very inefficient AI where humans have to go after. afterwards to check, to know, verify. So there is a link between AI and humans before and after, and this could be to the service of robustness

because this could add new sources, new reapprentices, new ideas. So sell on DPD, this kind of thing, right? That would be okay. I mean, AI could help. But because it's less performance, it would have less impact on the environment as well. But this would be the only point where it would be positive for robustness. The rest is only performance.

Yeah, well, and AI defines a goal as using less resources to attain the goal, but the goal is more efficiency and more profit and faster things. So unless we change that goal, it's just going to be a very fast reiteration microcosm of the 15% shrinking of our brains since the Neolithic. Absolutely. And it's even worse, I would say, because, the truth of AI is correlative. It's correlations, right? And so what makes for AI is going to try to find the best correlation. So that means that the attractor for an AI is the mean. It's not the standard deviation.

And so the more you use AI, the more you look at what's more widespread on the Internet. But you don't look, I mean, you don't see what's more unusual. In a world where we have more fluctuations, we should be a lot. more interested by the standard deviation and a lot less interested by the mean. So on top of everything else, AI Ceteris Paribus is going to prepare us worse or less because it's going to stifle the creativity that comes from feeling the pending standard deviations. Exactly, exactly. So it's really, it's a tool. to de-learn and to be less adaptable. So one of the recurring themes you may or may not know of this podcast

is that our predicament isn't only technological or ecological, but also deeply human. And you've spent your career studying organisms that cannot escape uncertainty and who live within uncertainty every single day. So if there was one lesson that non-human organisms have been subtly learning or teaching for millions or hundreds of millions of years that humans needed to hear, what would it be? So there are three principles. First one is circularity. Everything in life is circular.

And actually, when you think about it, circularity is when it's not a problem to waste things. because it's a gift, basically. So everything is going to be used by someone else, something else, and it's going to refit the system. So everything is circular. So we're the only one who are inventing non-circular systems. Nuclear waste, for instance, that's not circular. At least for the lifetime of a human, it's not circular.

So circularity is number one. So circular bioeconomy, for instance, making objects that will feed the ecosystems, no tires, anything, right? So all this should feed the ecosystems if we are serious about the circular idea. So that's number one. Number two is cooperation, symbiosis. So when there is shortages, scarcity, fluctuations, living beings cooperate.

And so, I mean, and we know this, right? When there's trauma, when there's disaster somewhere, humans cooperate. So we have this in us. So it's just we need to activate it. And instead of activating competition, which is only okay when you're a fireman in competition with a fire. At the peak of the crisis, yes, competition is okay, but the rest of the time you want to cooperate

to prepare that potential that you can dissipate during the crisis. So robustness is when you create that potential to be able to dissipate it during the crisis. And the third principle is robustness. I mean, I said the third principle, but actually it's the first one. It's the most important

robustness built against performance. And with these three principles, you can be prepared for a century of a lot of fluctuations with joy because it's much

more joyful to live like this. We are social beings, right? We are social beings. And when you do circularity, cooperation, robustness, your life is much more, much fuller, right?

It's just the world of efficiency is very narrow, right? I'm sure this is resonating with a lot of viewers. It certainly is resonating with me. So as an individual human listening or watching this program,

can you give some practical recommendations on how to directionally go in those three categories you just mentioned maybe? So maybe the first advice is to clean your vocabulary, your dictionary. There's lots of words that we are using that are inherited from the 80s and we don't question them.

And so they embark a culture that is not existing anymore. So for instance, so I don't know if it is in English, but we have those companies that are, you know, involved in the socio-ecological questions and the name is, entrepreneurs are impact, impact. So impact is the word that we use

to say that we want to transform and everything, but actually impact is a military term. It's very efficient, very rapid, you know, turn-key solution. If we want to transform something, it's going to take time. So we shouldn't use the word impact, right? So cleaning the words just to see how much of our culture of performance is.

So there's a big demographic out there doing something called impact investing. And so maybe they should change that to transform investing. Absolutely, exactly. The impact is really a military term. So it's why would you use this world? And it's only an example. I can, on our example, trust pilot, that company, you know, that put stars on the internet website.

you know, four star, five stars, just to give a level of trust, right? When you think about it, trust, trust pilot, it's an oxymoron because you can't pilot trust. Trust emerges from uncertainty. Again, when you do jazz, trust emerges because you are in uncertainty. So piloting trust doesn't exist, actually. It's just a tool of control. It's not trust.

So our civilization needs to play jazz In sort, in a way, right? Yeah, for sure, for sure. So improv is a second, maybe second advice. If you do improv, it can be theater improv. Actually, most of our life, what we do during our life, this conversation is an improvisation. So, you know, in the world of efficiency,

improvisation is something that we do, you know, in a specific context. Whereas actually in life, we keep improvising all the time. It's just that we don't want to see it. How does improvisation correlate with fear? And does fear also help with creativity and stuff? Or maybe there's a difference between fear and mild discomfort. I don't know.

What do you think? Well, you can be afraid of the risk if you've optimized everything. Because I would be afraid to go up on stage and do improv. Of course. So doing it like from, you know, immediately, that can be very scary. But if you do it step by step or if you, then that's fine. And, you know, for me, the first time I had to do improv jazz, it was very stressful. But I had a few drinks.

I can share that, you know, to a little bit of less inhibition, and then you go, right? And when you've done it and you've enjoyed it, that's it. You don't need to drink anymore to do the improv, right? So you can have some help, let's say. It also has to be drinking, but it can be anything else. I have a personal related example recently, like the last year or two, when I'm with friends. or a close family, we do speed poetry. And you come up with a title and I write a poem in like two or three minutes.

And they're kind of silly. But someone gives a title and I write a poem and that's improv, really. Exactly. Do you have any other personal recommendations on how to... Another recommendation would be the bug. The bug. So basically, we're in a cult, in a cult of performance. And if you want to convince someone that that person is in a cult

and it's not a good idea to stay in the cult, you can have all the rational arguments is not going to work, right? Because you have your habits and everything, so you're not going to change anything. So the only way you can take someone out of the cult is if you create a bug, like a moment of arrest,

something that derails, something that is weird. A bug, B-U-G? Yeah, a bug, yeah. Okay. So basically, you know, like, so I mean, the burnout can be, it's like a bug, right? So it's your body that is arresting you, right? It's stopping you.

But you can also do a trip somewhere for a long time. If you work for one year in a different country, for instance, when you come back, you don't have the same habits. Your head is a little bit different. That's a bug as well. And so when you have this type of experts as well, they can help us because they are generating trouble, right? They are like, you know, disturbing us in some ways, right? So that's good, actually, because we need to derail. Because we're on rails.

So if we derail, we need a place to start, right? And so the bug is, again, it can be joyful. I mean, burnout is not joyful, but there are other ways to create a bug that is a lot more joyful. And then, well, you see a different, different paths, actually. I don't know if bug is the right English word there. How would you give that advice in French? I would say le bug. Le bug.

Oh, okay. Well, maybe it is the right word then. So how are you finding your reception in the world with communities and individuals when they hear about robustness? Because it does at a gut level make complete sense. So I'm very happy to report that it's actually percolating quite fast and quite well.

So I mean, I've been talking about this, but all the people have been talking about this. this. And now I can just tell you, for instance, so in the francophone world, there are robustness communities, learning communities, so in France, in Belgium, in Quebec as well, so the francophone world, 700 people already, it's only there for the past few months, and it's exponentially growing. So these are local people who are trying to make more robust people in their communities, they talk with each other, and so it's starting to be a movement. There are cities that are putting robustness in their criteria for decisions.

So that's Lyon, Ren, I mean, some cities I know in France. So it starts to be a criteria. There are companies, a group of companies. So, for instance, the center of young dirgents, so like it's 6,000 CEOs in France, who decided this year to switch from global performance to robustness. And so it's happening, it's just happening from bottom up, right? So that's why I, it's, right, I'm hopeful.

Are there resources for local politicians and civic leaders to learn more about this and maybe some strategies in English? Sure, sure. So there's a book. I mean, you can, I mean, I wrote a very short book called Antidote to the Cult of Performance. And it's available as a PDF in English. So it's 60 pages, very to the point. I mean, there's a few of our resources in English. There's also, I mean, the rest is mostly in French.

I must say. We'll put links in the show notes. So what is your day job? Do you teach? So I'm a researcher. Actually, by the way, a research is exactly into robustness because when you're a researcher,

my role is to test the robustness of theories. And so I challenge everything. And all the researchers in the world are doing robustness, right? So they're not doing resilience, by the way, they're doing robustness. They're not trying to make a resilient theory. What's the difference between robustness and resilience?

So resilience, I mean, I used to use the word, I don't use it anymore, because resilience is you fall and then you bounce back, right? Robustness, you create the conditions in which you don't fall. So it's much more positive. And what's the difference between robustness and Nassim Taleb's phrase, anti-fragile? So anti-fragility is a little bit like resilience in so ways, you fall, and when you bounce back, you're actually higher than before. So, I mean, this can be a dystopian model, right? So because you would have to fall to increase, right?

It's like as if when you're a student or when your pupil, you go to school, you would have to fail to learn. Well, hopefully the schools, it's not like this, right? You learn because you succeed, right? So you don't have to fall to learn. So, I mean, resilience and anti-fragility, these are trajectories where you fall and you bounce back. Robustness is a space. It's a space of viability that you engage.

increase. And so it's much more free because you can increase, you can decrease, you can oscillate, whatever. As long as you're in the space of viability, you're fine. And so it's much more I would say with resilience. I mean, there's a lot of interesting things in resilience. But the way it has evolved, it's getting worse and worse. I mean, it's in Japan after Fukushima, the national plan for resilience to not be afraid of radiation after Fukushima. You have to expose yourself. That's resilience. I mean, so you fall. of course, but you select the resilient. That's bad Darwinian reading, right?

So I have a few closing questions I ask, all my guests. You just outlined directionally how we can move towards robustness. Do you have specific recommendations for young humans in their teens and 20s who become aware of our global problematic? So I can base a very nice paper in science a few months ago. They followed young people were virtuous, you know, like in sport, in music,

in whatever, right? And they followed what they became. All of them, they went through a burnout. Or maybe not all of them, but most of them went through a burnout. They never became a champion or, you know, a virtuous. But when you look at the current champions, today's champions that are 20, 30 years old,

when they were kids, they were not experts. were diversified. They were doing a lot of stuff, very different things. Sports, music, chess, playing, whatever, right? So that's what would be my first advice when you're a kid, do explore.

Be a generous. Do a lot of things. I agree with that. What do you care most about in the world, Olivier? Life education. You know, I guess biology. Maybe that's my own bias. But when I see companies,

schools, engineers, life is often absent. The machine is present. And so if you have education for life, then you think differently. Then you think fluctuation,

then you think robustness, then you think cooperation, then you think circularity. And so education to life, and this can be very simple. So when you're at school, spend some time outside, get out of the room,

be exposed to fluctuations, to bees and all this. You're going to develop an emotional link to life and then maybe you'll have a different sense. What were you doing as a teenager? I'm just curious. There was a lot of plants in my bedroom.

There was a mini lab in some ways. So I was already obsessed with plants. I'm doing biology, but actually plant biology. And so, yeah, I was already like this. I was also doing music, et cetera. So I guess, and I was in a little village in the video of France. If you could wave a magic wand and there was no personal recourse to your decision, What is one thing you would do to improve the future?

Change the agriculture. I mean, it may be a bit specific, but if we switch to agroecology or all the permaculture, I mean, all the different versions of agroecology, we are going to depollute the land, depollute the water. We're going to store a lot more carbon in the soil, so we're going to solve the climate crisis. I mean, at least start to solve it.

And we're going to feed the circular bioeconomy. So we're going to be sovereign. So agriculture is crazy, but it's the key to, I mean, it's the main key to revert everything. I am grateful to all the YouTube commenters that suggested we meet. I quite resonate with what you said and I like you. And I would love to have you back on the show in the future. If you would come back in six months or 12 months, is there some topic that you are super obsessed about now that you would be willing to

take a deep dive on something we didn't talk about today? Maybe security. You know, there's going to be a presidential election in France, and I'm sure the topic will be dominant security. And the way it's designed often is security is control. And security should be serenity, which is the opposite of control. And so that's definitely a topic for the coming year, I think. Were you always the guy at parties that no matter what people said,

you said came in and did the Costanza thing. Like the opposite is actually what we should be discussing. Yeah, it's right. I like to invert things. But it's actually it's a good exercise because especially when you're in the world that is going, you know, upside down. To invert everything, actually suddenly it works better, right? Any closing comments for people watching, listening,

who understand and agree with what you've laid out here today, Olivier? I think, Joy, just one word, Joy, I mean, it's when you think of, robustness, you're pretty, I mean, it's not like, you see what's coming, right? It's going to fluctuate a lot, but we're going to make something out of it. And what we're going to make out of it is going to be more joyful. And so there's no reason not to go in that direction. Merci beaucoup. Great to meet you to be continued. Thanks, Olivia. Thank you. If you'd like to learn more about this episode, please visit the great simplification.com for references and show notes. From there, you can also join

our Hilo community and subscribe to our Substack newsletter. This show is hosted by me, Nate Hagen's, edited by No Troublemakers Media, and produced by Misty Stinnett and Lizzie Siriani. Our production team also includes Leslie Batlutz, Brady Hyann, Julia Maxwell, Gabriela Slayman, and Grace Brunfield. Thank you for listening, and we'll see you on the next episode.