THE FUTURISTS
This week Marc Buckley joins Brett for a fireside chat on the role regenerative techniques hold for the future of the planet. As a member of the World Economic Forum and the UN advisory panel, trained by Al Gore on climate response, Marc has a big role globally in policy setting for the emerging future. But Marc also emphasizes the role that each of us has in creating a sustainable world.
Analysis complete. No addtional information is required for context. Proceed with transcript display ...
Twitter @Futuristpodcast
Facebook @FuturistPodcast
Instagram @Futuristpodcast
Youtube @TheFuturistsPodcast
Soundcloud @TheFuturistsPodcast
We're all on the same spaceship, Earth; we're all crew members of spaceship Earth. There are no passengers, and this way the stories that we tell each other on how we divide each other up and separate each other is not serving us well.
[Music]
Welcome to The Futurists. I'm so glad to be here. Thank you so much. I'm glad it worked out.
So, there's sort of a debate that we have going on with some of our guests over whether or not the title "futurist" is something that is positive or sort of overused. What do you think?
I heard your "Reluctant Futurist" podcast, which was fabulous, and many of the others. I actually think it's a fabulous thing; it's really spot on. We're all futurists. Before history, before the past, always comes the future. Everything that we're doing in our daily lives, we're working towards the future. If you're not, stand still, don't do anything; you're still going to end up in the future anyway.
You bet, yeah, exactly. We had Jeff Jarvis on last week, and Jeff was saying he's a pastist. But I think part of that skill of being a futurist is looking in the past and sort of seeing the mistakes we've made. I know that's a bit of a common theme for you, particularly in your, you know, you call yourself a "regenerative futurist."
Absolutely.
So what are we trying to regenerate?
All life. So we're trying to really create the conditions conducive for life to regenerate itself, to really have flourishing abundance and create those conditions. Regeneration is really a no-brainer. It's natural, it's how the world has always worked.
I wanted to let's get a bit of background as we get into your field and your interests and how you came into this. Tell me about how you came to be in Hamburg, Germany, where you live now, and how you came to be involved in the climate talks, you know, COP 28, and the Dubai Future Forum, and the stuff you've done with various government bodies, the Davos crew, and the World Economic Forum, and those sorts of groups. How did you take us through that journey that's taken you to the upper echelons of European policy setting?
I've been in this field and area for over 32 years, and I have a long background. I didn't see the climate "god." I wasn't struck by lightning or the climate lightning. I'm not a refugee. I'm not a climate refugee. This was a gradual transition over a long period of time, where the lights just kept getting brighter and brighter, and I can never go back. I've emerged out of that chrysalis.
I'm very fortunate to have a lot of wonderful mentors and friends over the years who are also futurists, environmentalists, economists, and sustainable architects. William McDonough, the father of the circular economy, is a good friend of mine. I worked with him as an architect on a couple of projects. Superman, also at the World Economic Forum.
I was one of the first 50 people trained by Al Gore as a climate speaker and leader at his ranch in Carthage, Tennessee, when he did his very first training, and I met him for both his movies, "An Inconvenient Truth" and the sequel. Later, I became the Germany and Austria country manager for Al Gore's Climate Reality Project, and I still do a lot of trainings and mentoring all over the world with the Climate Reality Project.
At the World Economic Forum this year, and last year at COP 27 in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, we had a nice gathering for Climate Reality Leaders, where we talked about what things were going on there. He's upset about having the president of an oil and gas company be the head of COP 28. That's a big part of why he's upset because it's a conflict of interest.
Not because the president is a bad person, or not eloquent, well-educated, and caring about the climate, but he has a stark conflict of interest, doing both those things. We're seeing that pop up a lot more in international organizations where there are more lobbyists from oil, gas, and fossil fuel industries, and they have these conflicts of interest all over the place. That's really bad.
Germany—I've lived in Hamburg, Germany, for the last 14 years, although I'm rarely there, maybe 5% of the year. I travel quite a bit, doing events all over the world. We're here in Bangkok now. I just finished Techsauce, and I'm doing an event tomorrow for DJ on the new triple bottom line. I do all the international circuits, not only Davos, the World Economic Forum, the World Government Summit, the United Nations New York Climate Week, the Conference of the Parties (COPs) that are held around the world. I've been attending the COPs since COP 12 and was fortunate to have two major mentors and friends who have guided me on this journey.
It's interesting when you concern yourself with the future around innovation, climate, and the environment, you tend to attract like-minded people who are also thinking about the future. The two major influences I haven't mentioned yet are Herman Daly, who I studied ecological economics with at the University of Maryland, and Bucky Fuller, the Minister Fuller Institute. He did the geodesic domes and the Dymaxion map of the world. These are the people who've tried to create a template for us to follow.
The commercial viability myth is a problem. We could have eliminated hydrocarbon fuel sources for electricity generation 20 or even 30 years ago if we had accelerated the development of renewable technologies, battery tech, nuclear power, hydropower, solar, and wind. Europe is making progress in solar deployment, and China has deployed more solar in the last two years than the US has historically in the last 50 years. We could produce cleaner air and fix some of these issues, but it's always about who's going to pay for it and the market making money out of hydrocarbons.
Why would we want to do anything different when 10 million people die every year from air pollution? We could have saved those lives, but there's this false equivalency between GDP growth, economics, the stock market, and human lives and the health of the planet. This conflict won't be resolved until we come up with better value systems.
We're kind of in the Kodak East situation, holding out for every last penny of our paper market, while we've already invented the solution, like the digital camera, and we have solutions for fossil fuels too. Fossil fuels are stranded assets. The only thing looking worse than fossil fuel investments is the meat market. Animal agriculture is a huge stranded asset and has gotten a bad reputation.
We didn't leave the Stone Age because we ran out of stones. Guess where that quote comes from? BP. We think we need to hold onto these fossil fuels and outdated technologies to get into the future, but in reality, there are much better ways to live. Better economic models lead to better life models. We need an ecological economic model to replace the outdated ones.
Another term from Bucky Fuller, if you're not happy with the models out there, create a new model to make the old ones obsolete. In the last two years, more than 20 books on ecological economic models have been written. People are getting fed up and beginning to create change. A promising model is "Earth for All" by the Club of Rome, involving five different ecological economic models, including the well-being economy, donut economics, degrowth, and planetary boundaries. They combine all these models to work and provide case studies.
This is a process and methodology we can delve into a bit. Are you familiar with the work Kim Stanley Robinson has done on economics? I wrote the Sustainable Development Goal Manifesto for the United Nations, which outlines what the world will look like in December 2030 if we reach all the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). What most people don't know is that after the SDGs end in December 2030, there will be more goals. I was originally the Resilient Futurist because they were called the Resilient Development Goals, and we worked on the Resilience Frontiers project to envision the goals from December 2030 to December 2050.
Kim Stanley Robinson was part of the Resilient Development Goals project. He's one of the greatest living authors in terms of climate-relevant science fiction. The Mars Trilogy and its economic thinking are intriguing. On Mars, the primary goal is sustainability because they can't rely on regular shipments from Earth. This leads to ecological and social prosperity because everyone works together for the colony's survival and well-being.
The idea that this model could work on Earth is a fascinating proposition. In the book, people gain credibility and wealth based on how much they contribute to the system's sustainability. But trying to apply this model to today's world seems foreign and unconventional, especially to many economists who are committed to the current system.
When discussing the need for better economic systems, some argue that capitalism is the best system currently available. However, if you ask whether capitalism will still be the best system in 10,000 years, the answer is obviously no. So, why wait for 10,000 years to improve the system?
I want to touch on a couple of things. You mentioned that the Mars model is not just a sustainable economic model but a resilient one. It's about survival in the deep, harsh conditions of space, and resilience is key. Sustainability alone won't suffice because resilience is necessary to withstand sudden events like hurricanes, floods, and wars. Resilience ensures you can access essentials like water and energy immediately.
Talking about resilience and climate mitigation, the increasing frequency and intensity of extreme weather events are causing economic concerns for insurers and cities like New York, Shanghai, Miami, and others vulnerable to sea-level rise. When does investing in resilience cease to be labeled as socialism and become a mission for humanity to make cities more resilient?
I'm hopeful that by December 2030, when we transition to the Resilient Development Goals, it will be widely accepted. In the past five years, there has been a strong focus on resilience, thanks to programs like Resilience Frontiers developed at the United Nations. There are three key definitions of resilience:
In cities facing climate challenges, they're building resilience into their systems to ensure these basic requirements are met, such as Singapore and Miami. For instance, Neom envisions a city with everything within a 5-minute walking distance.
Absolutely, let's continue with the lightning round:
In the second half of the show, when we get you back, I want to dive into a bit of the world of 2040 and the world of 2050 and how you think things will have changed. Let's go full futurist.
You bet.
I remembered what I was going to say. I don't know if this would be a good time. The reason I mentioned the European Union is just the ripple effect that the Ukraine war has had all over Europe, not only on gas, fossil fuels, but really on everything, even at the October Fest, beer, bread, and more. I'll get into food scarcity after the break; that's a big concern of mine for the next 20-30 years.
But you're listening to "The Futurist" with futurist Mark Buckley. We'll be right back after this break.
[Commercial break]
Welcome back to "The Futurist." We're with Mark Buckley, a regenerative futurist and Renaissance Man. Mark, you speak a lot about systemic thinking and the need to change systems. Many human systems we've developed historically have been shown to be problematic and have failed. It's likely we're seeing the failure of some human systems right now. Can you take me through that and tell me about what we've learned by looking at history at the systems that have failed?
Absolutely. I studied system science through Dr. Fritjof Capra courses, and I've been a big fan of systems thinking since. Donella Meadows, known for "The Limits to Growth," was also influential. NASA conducted a study called the "Handy Study" and identified 32 core civilization framework models. Out of those, all but five collapsed, and those collapses were either due to environmental or ecological reasons or disease, displacement, or some form of disruption. None of these ancient systems have survived to this day because of their inability to address basic infrastructures such as food, water, and sanitation.
Absolutely none of them survived, and this is a whole different topic, but I think democracy died along with the Greek Empire. But anyway, that's a whole another controversy we don't have another week to talk about.
But the most interesting thing in this report was still kind of surprising that it's not so popular or talked about very much. All of them collapsed running the exact same civilization framework model, like the governance model structure. You know what that model was? Centralized government hierarchy, hierarchical, with a king, queen, emperor, president, someone at the top, slaves, laborers, peasants, and farmers at the bottom.
Right, and this is what... you mean, we're still repeating that same hierarchy structure today in all of our organizations and cities, and that's why we've got this massive global inequality today. It's a division of class and massive inequality, and it's the structure. The other thing the learning lesson from the report was that the peasants, slaves, laborers, and farmers didn't have buy-in to the ecological or the civilization framework structure.
And what they saw is that in every all 32 cases when those civilizations were being built up, they took peasants, slaves, and laborers from other cultures, other countries, other places, brought them in to build up their civilization framework, and they never had buy-in to that framework. They knew that they were going to be enslaved their entire life, be a farmer, and in this form of labor. And we're repeating that same mistake today, Saudi Arabia, Dubai, wherever we look. We have... we don't call them peasants, slaves, laborers. We call them hospitality workers, construction workers. But still, they get a visa, they're paid an unfair wage, they send most of their money home, they live in worker camps and large apartment buildings or places.
You know, the Mexican and Latin workers in the States, exactly. It's doing all the farming and all the stuff to make it sustainable, and at the same time, they're identified as the enemy that's taking American jobs. But the American system would collapse without these grassroots workers.
The Braceros is a huge example, oh yeah, 400,000 to 600,000 migrant workers a year. The UK economy is banking fairly squarely on their bad immigration choices. Yeah, and the US is trying to go that way. I don't think they could. Australia, my home country, is very much on that, and it's like, "Hang on. You know, if you talk to the richest people in the world today and you talk to those at the top of government, they are preparing for society's collapse. They know that collapse is coming because we haven't fixed those same fundamental issues."
Well, let's take it even lower than that. Why okay, civilization, cities, that's big. That's for you and me. That's a big number to talk about. Let's just talk about organizations. If you don't give your employees a buy-in to the organization they're working for, there's no loyalty. They're not going to stick around. They're not going to say and do whatever you want them to do. People need to have a buy-in to the organizational structure. They need to know that they're secure, that they're cared about, that they're going to have a future, that they're building up something that they can say, "Hey, I built that up, I was part of that, and I want to do a good job." If you don't have that buy-in, that role to play in that structure, guess what? That's when the boat fails, that's when the safety standards, that's when something in that organization, so we can accept that at an organizational level, and that sounds very reasonable. Why can't we accept that at a civilization level? Yeah, that's the biggest one.
And I think this goes back to one of my other favorite mentors. So I mentioned to you Carl Sagan. Well, also very unheard of or not very much spoken about, Carl Sagan's first wife. And I actually like to say Lynn Margulis's first husband is Carl Sagan. Lynn Margulis turned the scientific community on its head. Carl Sagan talked about the cosmos, and she talked about the microcosmos. But the biggest claim to fame or thing that we missed is she said neoliberalism, neo-Darwinism doesn't exist, and this misunderstanding that we had of Darwin's meaning of natural selection, survival of the fittest, only the strong survive.
The world has never worked in that way; it always leads to collapse when we divide ourselves into classes. We compete against one another in organizations, in school, and in life. Well, that's not even necessarily true in evolutionary theory. Evolution says our world works in symbiosis, in harmony, collaboration, and cooperation, one with another species and with each other.
In our body, we have these symbiotic relationships made up of microorganisms. We could survive without the bacteria that live in our gut, but we would be in big trouble. Good gut health and the fact that we have more microbial cells and genes in our body than we have human cells and genes in our body. We have more connection to the oak tree or the squirrel than we do with each other as humans. We crawled out of this primordial soup of this Earth, and that's why I love thinking about the core model of civilization frameworks, how does the world work, and how has it always worked.
And she coined a term; it has a lot to do with not only a term but a scientific fact of the way the world has always worked. It's not only symbiosis but the world's fastest-growing form of human evolutionary innovation is what we call symbiosis. It's an ecological phenomenon, and it's not just exponential, it's super-exponential. It verges on quantum tunneling when we harness symbiosis in an organization and our cities as the core model of the world, the way the world has always worked.
Holy hell, what do you think? I want to take you on a tangent here because we're sitting on the balcony in the early evening in Bangkok. Let's get a bit stunning, breathtaking here.
Yeah, it's awesome. I want to ask you, have you heard about the quantum consciousness theory?
I have, and I'm actually really interested in that. There seems to be some quantum effect in consciousness, and the concept of the source, and that we could all be connected. There's so much I've seen in my life, especially living around the world. I was born in Australia, lived in London for a time, lived in Hong Kong, spent lots of time in Singapore and Tokyo, lived in Dubai for many years, and lived here in Thailand for the last four or five years, and lived in the states for 12 years.
I've seen, you know, I've traveled probably to 50 countries just in the last 10 years. I just see everyone as a human family. Everyone's super connected. We have more in common than what keeps us apart. So it's nice to think that there's this elegance where we have the potential to be consciously connected in many ways.
I mean, we get glimpses of this when we come together as groups and find consensus, but this is sort of the great mystery to me. Why is it that humans are tribal? Why do we spin off in groups and compete against each other? Because clearly, even if you look back at Aristotle and his view of philosophy, human cooperation is our greatest secret weapon to innovation and advancement. We rarely do it at a company level and a market level. Why aren't we doing it at a national and international level? Even the COVID-19 crisis, the climate crisis, we can see that consensus is really hard to get to for cooperation. What are your thoughts on how we fix that element of the system that's broken sometimes called out the human condition?
They really do. It's this feeling or this thought or this action that we need to compete against one another. We need to form cliques or tribes or groups to compete against one another. It's really interesting because I speak a lot about regenerative economic models or ecological economic models. There, I use what I just mentioned, symbiosis, as a form of an ecological phenomenon as a source of human evolutionary innovation and the fastest one in an actual organizational model. The way you structure an organization, I'm not competing against other organizations, but if you were to put a regular capitalistic, extractive, or just business-as-usual organization model head-to-head against one that I'm talking about, I'd blow it out of the water.
It's more abundant, it's more resilient, it survives through pandemics and climate change, it's a better model. You lower your cost of goods sold, you increase your profits, you have abundance, you have happy employees, happy customers. It's just a better model, and it's also a better life model. I hope this doesn't diverge onto a tangent, but I think it's really connected. You and I have been talking about the future of work forever. It's all nonsense. There is no such thing as work-life balance; there is only life. If you are one person at work and another person in life, you're probably bipolar or schizophrenic. If you're at work and then at home, and then somewhere else, then you're three different personalities. Let's say that all three areas are going extremely well. You're doing great at work, making advances, doing great at home, having advances there, and in church or other hobbies you're doing great there. But guess what? You're probably staying still, stuck in the middle, not advancing at all because all three of those are probably going in different directions. You're probably still right where you're at, and you're saying, "I'm getting ready to retire; what have I done with my life? Where are we going?" And I think that really ties to the model. It ties to the way you've found a way to turn your life, which is a passion for regenerating society and the world, and so forth, into a career. So you've managed to coalesce those things into an approach for you personally.
Are you supporting concepts like Universal Basic Income (UBI), or do you think we just need to throw out the whole system? In my view, UBI is a way of just extending capitalism just a little bit more so we can keep consumption going when it's not the solution, particularly with AI and climate. Both of those have the potential to break capitalism because capitalism doesn't have a solution for either of them. I gave a workshop this year in February at the World Government Summit on the future of governance. Basically, talking about what are the new governance models, government economic models of the future. Take us out to 2040 and 2050; how does it look, and how's it changing?
Well, I want to answer that question about UBI. I'm 100% on board with you; it is an extension of extractive capitalism. It allows people to work in areas they feel more passionate about rather than just putting food on the table. I have a concept I developed years ago with Herman Di, and I want to eventually bring it out in another book. It's taking a twist on UBI and giving an old economic model, an old ecological economic model that we've used for well over 45 years, a rebirth into the future. We've been using it in the wrong way, using it as an accounting principle to say how bad humans are and how harmful we are. We use it in the form called the ecological footprint and Earth overshoot to say how bad people are doing in our world, with our economies, and impacting climate change, that we're overshooting our resources. There's a flip side of that model where everybody can receive a twist on UBI. It's called an inalienable human right to the global hectare that we use to calculate Earth Overshoot Day. Instead, we give everybody that inalienable right to clean water, clean air, sanitation, food security of body, and security of mind.
I think we measure economic growth and economic success with these measures that economists have produced over the years, GDP growth, full employment, trade surpluses, inflation, and all sorts of stuff. But if you measure the success of an economy on its ability to fulfill the basic needs of the citizenry, then you get a very different view of economic performance. Even with the richest economy in the world today, the United States, it fails in terms of providing healthcare, housing, food, and sustenance to the citizens.
I think China's outdone us a long time ago, don't you, on economics, economies, period?
I think they're the biggest powerhouse, I think more so. What's the difference in terms of thinking that or approach that makes China able to do this? Some would argue it's the one-party system, right?
That's a whole other topic.
It could be the one-party system. I think it's a generational thinking. They think in much longer scale terms than the U.S. does. It feels responsibility to the community, at a government level, which the U.S. doesn't. It feels responsibility of the market and individuals, right? Survival of the fittest.
Exactly.
It's always this competition, it's always about what new governance structures are, deals have been set, and we're still in this "us against them" mentality.
But are you optimistic about the future, Mark?
Absolutely.
What makes you optimistic?
One, understanding the exponential function. Two, understanding that symbiosis, if harnessed, we can solve these problems very easily. We have all the tools, we have the knowledge and capability. It's really that we're our own worst enemies; we're holding ourselves back. If we understand it, we're actually just leaving abundance on the table. We're leaving extra money, however you want to say it. If you're a capitalist, you're leaving money on the table, which you shouldn't do because the more we empower everybody with equality and the same rights, the more we have global abundance.
And I really think, you spoke earlier about global citizenry. You've lived all over the world; I've lived all over the world. I believe that's another part of it. We're all on the same spaceship Earth; we're all crew members of spaceship Earth. There are no passengers, and the stories that we tell each other on how we divide each other up and separate each other; it's not serving us well anymore.
Your family's all over the world; my family's all over the world. I can plan to continue to travel all over the world and work with organizations, even in a one-party system in China, and even in the USA, all over the world. I see those changes coming.
The only way to get rid of a bad model and system, capitalism or extractive neoclassical economics, is not to moan and complain about it. Let's create a better one that makes the old model obsolete. Let's make one that's so good that nobody has a complaint about it because it just works, and it works for everyone. That's that core question that R. Buckminster Fuller said: "What does a world that works for everyone look like that we can achieve through spontaneous cooperation without the ecological offense of anyone or the disadvantage of anyone?"
So the capitalist would argue that in a utopian view of the world like that, the only way we could get there is to lower the standard of living, particularly living in the West. But this sounds like a capitalist argument to keep the existing system going. What are your thoughts on that?
Yes, this is a ruse. It's a fake idea because it just doesn't exist. If you have abundance, if they have abundance, everybody does. It's not a sacrifice; it's always this mentality of reductionism and mechanizing human beings down to the lowest common denominator. That's not what it's all about. It's actually the models that we're talking about. It's not about reducing; it's that we can still fly, eat meat, and do certain things. We just need to do it without human suffering and creating greenhouse gas emissions or global grand challenges. If Bertrand Piccard can fly around the world in the Solar Impulse plane on clean tech and solar energy, there is a much better and cleaner way to do things. Let's figure it out. Let's use those technologies. It's just a technology and show the world that there is a different way to do it.
So we can still have a population; we can still have those things that people say, "Where there's too many people, how are we going to feed everybody?" Again, we're focusing on the wrong areas. If we change the model, we change the way we do it, we will have more than enough.
I think I agree with you. There are different ways of going about approaching farming and production of meat, and so forth. We're looking at technical solutions. Clean water and sanitation for people shouldn't be a question. Access to energy is getting cheaper all the time. It seems like we're going in the right direction.
Tell me about the world of 2050 and what you hope for in terms of human society, a world that works for 100% of humanity by 2050 without the ecological offense or disadvantage of anyone. To really have all 8 billion or plus (by 2050, maybe we'll have 10 billion people by that time) have the empowerment and the basic rights to live an adaptive lifestyle of health and sustainability within the safe operating spaces of our planetary boundaries. That's the future I see. I know we can do it, and we can do it in a short time. We have the goals, we have the targets, we have the indicators. It's not a technology question; it's not an economics question because we can reorganize our own economics. It seems like it's a cultural issue, like how do we create that culture, the culture that we're all this "homo symbios" that we realize we're all together on this planet that we're all part of.
It's interesting; now we're talking about even about the possibility of UFOs and alien life disclosure. All these things popping up lately. So, I think it's a cultural thing that we need to realize that we're all in this together. If we solve it, we can really solve it once and for all. What is this rat race that we're on, and what system have we created? It's actually not working for humanity anymore, and it's sad because I asked that question. Not only did R. Buckminster Fuller say it, I asked this question to 3500 people on my video podcast, and over weeks, months, and years, every time their answer was different. They're not taught to think like that. We're not taught to think like that at all.
Here's a crazy thing and this is why I did it on video because I did this social experiment, I was hoping that everybody's going to know, and the solution is right there in the question. I asked people the same question on the same day twice, both times they gave me a different answer. I asked them over weeks, months, and years; every time, their answer was different, and it all changed. Nobody had the same answer every time. So, there was a lot of learning lessons. I think it's okay if you don't know the answer to that question, but then you need to be okay with the direction your future is going. I always ask the burning question, "WTF," and it's not the swear word. It's "What's the Future?" Where are we going? If you don't know what the future is or what a world that works for everyone looks like, it's okay as long as you're okay with the way the world is working. If you're not okay with that, then it's time to ask yourself that question, get clear with that, and then divest your money, make your voice heard, and things like that so that you know where you're going in the future. The most interesting thing out of all of it is, and it's really funny, I went and asked Chat GPT this question. I asked it in India, I asked it in Africa, asked it in the US, and I asked it in Germany, and I asked it 120 times. Every time, it was the exact same answer, even though that refresh button is supposed to change every time, it was the same answer. It was very close to R. Buckminster Fuller's answer and it was very close to what I told you. The answer was actually even a little bit more eloquent and it went into more detail on specifically what a world that works for everyone looks like. That says two things: have we domesticated technology or Chat GPT or artificial intelligence, or has it domesticated us? And why the heck does it know the answer, and 3500 people on my podcast don't know the answer.
Well, Mark, it's been great to have you on the show. How can people find out more about what you're doing, the work you're doing, the books, and get in touch with you as a futurist?
Best is Mark Buckley on LinkedIn. MarkBuckley.com is my website. I can be Googled, and you can see all the talks and events that I do. I do pretty much this year 31 countries, 200 events already, so it's just absolute craziness. Hopefully, people can find me that way.
And then I do books of philanthropy. This year, I released a book called "Before This Decade Is Out," done in conjunction with Price Waterhouse Coopers. It's based on the meme from John F. Kennedy, "Before this decade is out, we'll send people to the moon." And basically, the meme is, "Before this decade is out, seven years left to go to achieve the Paris Agreement and the Sustainable Development Goals. And what will you do before this decade is out?" It's not as much; we need those big, ambitious goals. I don't know if you remember that speech that Jeff Daniels gave for "The Newsroom," the three minutes, and he finishes it, saying, "Why America isn't the greatest country in the world?" Because he says we used to have these big audacious goals. We used to build these big machines that could take us to the moon and all these things. We seem to be much more micro-focused these days, focused on the politics and focused on what this celebrity said or what this billionaire said, and just not focused on the big picture, which is if we work together, humanity not only survives but can thrive.
Absolutely, I agree. A good way to finish our podcast, Mark. Thanks for joining us on "The Futurist."
Thank you so much. All the best with your travels, and we'll continue the conversation.
I hope so. I'd love to have you on my podcast as well. Sure, absolutely. Talk about your books and many other great things.
That's it for this week on "The Futurists." We'll see you again next week. Until then, we'll see you in the future.
Well, that's it for "The Futurists" this week. If you like the show, we sure hope you did, please subscribe and share it with the people in your community. And don't forget to leave us a five-star review. That really helps other people find the show. You can ping us anytime on Instagram and Twitter at @futuristpodcast for the folks that you'd like to see on the show or the questions that you'd like us to ask. Thanks for joining, and as always, we'll see you in the future.
