 We're living at extremely complicated times. There are all these vectors coming together, climate change, social change, geopolitical change, and COVID has just highlighted some of the intense weaknesses in many of our global systems. In order for us to build a better future, we all are going to need to come together in new ways and radically collaborate. My new company, Boomer, is a company that educates all stakeholders on how we can build a better future. So please join me to hear more. MUSIC Laura Stein is my guest on this episode of Inside Ideas, brought to you by 1.5 Media and Innovators Magazine. Laura is the co-founder and CEO of Boomer Global. Prior to founding Boomer, Laura was the executive director of Women's March Global, where she built the Women's March Global platform and oversaw all Women's March initiatives outside of the US. Previously, Laura was the MD Global Development at Singularity University, responsible for Singularity University's global expansion and implementation of vision and strategy. Prior to her time at SU, Laura was the founder and director of the TEDx program at the TED conferences, creating and leading the effort to bring TED to the world by developing a program that granted free licenses to third parties, to organize independent, TED-like events. Laura also currently sits on the board of Equality Now, dedicated to creating a more just world for women and girls and Lilella, a nonprofit dedicated to education through the arts in South Africa. Laura, welcome. It's so great to have you. How have you been? Thank you, Mark. Lovely seeing you. And it's, you know, we're living in the middle of a complicated time. And so I've been OK. Definitely like everybody, having a lot of personal and professional challenges, which hopefully will both make me the stronger for it, but also help us redesign a more resilient global world. We last saw each other this year at the World Economic Forum. I think it was the last, no, it was actually, was it after that in Beaumont France? Yeah, Beaumont. Yeah, that's right. That's right. It was actually not the World Economic Forum was the last place it was after that in Beaumont France. And the year really started out with a positive bang, a move in the right direction, a lot of ambitions and movements towards sustainability and future goals and plans and agenda. And at that time, I don't feel guilty one bit. We were pretty happy and things were going in a good direction and we're excited about the momentum that was happening. Matter of fact, it was called Boma Momentum in France. It was the annual meeting. So that was the last time we saw each other. You've been involved in a lot of movement, a lot of global organizations, not only future, but also kind of active marches and campaigns. I don't know if I'm even saying the right word and I'm sure I've left out some things in your biography. But have any of those things helped you weather this time that we've just gone through or still going through this pandemic time? So I was born in South Africa during apartheid. And as a narrative and as a way of life, it definitely taught me how systems can be optimized to bring great suffering or be optimized for efficiency and a good quality of life. During apartheid, obviously there were a lot of people suffering based on a system that was and a narrative that was set up. And so I think going back to sort of my childhood and everything I've worked on since then and I've worked for some large for-profit companies and run big divisions and large for-profit companies and then I founded TEDx and I've done a lot of work in movement building as well as systemic change. I think it's sort of all really taught me that nothing is a given, no system is a given, but that humans create their systems and are ultimately in control of what we do and what we build and where humanity goes. And so right now, the way I look at it is there's no prescribed narrative of where this all lands up. We saw that human beings are very much in control of designing that narrative. And the world's in a pretty complicated place right now. And so for me COVID has been a time, both personally and professionally, to step back and think about the lives we're leading and the lives we could lead if we designed things better. And I'm not a consumer, but it definitely is one of the essence of where I keep going back to as humanity and as more people move into the middle class, we tend to consume more and more. And what we're consuming is often products and services that are bad for the planet and often bad for us. And we most certainly don't need to live with as much that as we are consuming right now. And COVID, that was one of my learnings. I was exiled to Florida where we got stuck there for three and a half months and I'm just back in New York. But I took a bag for three days and I lived with my computer and my bag of stuff that I packed for three days. And it just showed me how little we really do need to live on if we really step back and get away from this cult of consumerism that we have all been sucked in. Was that the biggest aha learning, so to say, during this period in time? Or I'm not sure if I read out of that, there's a positive way forward. Have you done as the world economic form has come out and recently two, I think two weeks ago said it's the great reset. Definitely no back to business as usual. It's not the new normal. It's got to be a complete great reset. Can you kind of give me some more insights on maybe learnings that you've had or what your way forward is, is the direction you were taking with Boma originally and the things you were working on. Is that still the right direction for us? Is that still the way? There are lots of different ways to unpack that. There's the my personal way, there's Boma and then there's the world in general and how we are dealing with this moment. You know, if I just talk about Boma for one minute, Boma was set up as an evolution of the last communities I've built. And it was a entity that was about bringing all stakeholders together to educate humanity differently. It was about a decentralized network of local partners working on transformational educational experiences that really could think differently about how we educate all stakeholders to drive us to a more sustainable future. The model was set up in a way with this decentralized network of partners. I have three founding partners and nine other country partners on board who are all focused on moving again, all stakeholders from corporates to governments to youth to universities forward in a way that creates this meaningful change. It was done in three different ways. One was through large scale impact events that were focused on big global challenges. We did one of the future food and food security that everybody from the minister of Agri there to local tribesmen working on regenerative Agri to high school students and very much focused on the impact piece. The second pillar was on how do we going into corporations and working with them on ESG, sustainable change, gender equality and all the issues they would need to be more courageous leaders in the future. And we broke that out into who you need to be and what you need to know to lead in a way that we can move towards a more sustainable future. That was being done in person as training programs in all companies. And then finally, as you participated in we launched our BOMA community at Momentum which was working with 100 communities as a starter around the world on bottom up innovative formats that really drive meaningful actions. So for example, we did one on the university campus where we worked with all the research labs. It was very bottom up. It was a professor and some students who worked on projects that were around social impact. They then pitched those projects to funders of campus and the winners of that pitch competition came to our big events and were part of our innovation ecosystem. And so there were these three big pillars all around in-person meetings. Obviously when BOMA hit, it really upended who we are and what we are as an organization. And so we've spent the last four months doing a number of things. We've been public facing events where we've done a series of round the world conferences around two hours in each country in 11 different countries around what we can actually learn from each other. We also have our BOMA studio where we're doing independent sessions in each country in collaboration with big media companies. And then finally, we really focused on a digital transformation product where we go into companies and work with them on who they need to be and what they need to know in order to be more meaningful leaders in the future. So that was a massive transition over a period of four months. But we feel very confident, we actually feel because we're now all digital, we can scale more efficiently but also when things hopefully go back to normal, we can create a hybrid which is in person and online in a way that's meaningful that we possibly wouldn't have been able to do before. So in some ways, it's been a very difficult period for BOMA but it's also made us focus in very different ways, right? And which is a positive thing. So that's on the professional front. On the global front when you recall the statement that I think you said Davos put out. Yeah. I am not that optimistic and I wish I was but I really feel as I look around, look there is gonna be a lot of negative repercussions from COVID economically as we're seeing but I'm not so sure that the big corporations that survive this downturn are actually gonna come out the other side doing things that radically differently. And I want to believe they will all step back and there are a lot of coalitions and imperatives going on right now where people are coming together to try and figure out what that might mean. But I feel that the people at the table are people we've all been speaking to for the last 10 years and it's the same people at the table. I'm not seeing a lot of new CEOs or voices at the table inside of those think tanks and conversations that are really stepping back and saying we're radically gonna use this moment to transform. That's not good news. I wanna also kind of dive deeper into what you just said a little bit. Have you had any positive stories come from those who participated at Ebola or those in any of those programs that you mentioned within BOMA that have come back and said, wow, because of that or with that experience, it's really set us on the right path, the right way of thinking. And I know because you're an event platform on, so there's a huge disruption that you've had and experienced in that and I also believe that with some of the partners you had before, they also had to figure out how are we gonna go forward with some new programs, some new tools to continue doing what we're doing or are we going to change the model a little bit? Like you said, you've done to continue to get that message and that movement going throughout the world. Has there been anything like that that you can report on or tell us about or is that partly why you're not so optimistic or so positive? I'm not optimistic because as I say, I mean these big groups of thought leaders that are trying to push the world forward in a different way and at the end of the day a lot of it is still advocacy, it's not actual, how do we create these new systems and how do we disrupt our own companies to make them more sustainable, more resilient in the ways we should be gender quality, transparency and a more sustainable model in general. So as far as our programs go, they're happening every day and they're broken down into two different types of programming. One is what I need to know. So how do I have the tools to be more courageous in what I do and how I show up in the world? And we have a lot of individuals who have been throughout various different now digital programs that come out of it saying, it was amazing, I need more of this and it gives me a new way of dealing with confrontation and disruption but also a way to think about the world and frame the world to understand why I need to be more courageous in how I'm leading or what I'm doing within my own life. And then there's the what you need to know and as you know, pre-COVID we did a lot of work on these bit large scale events but also programs inside of companies around what is the digital transformation, what does it look like, how do you prevent your company from being disrupted? Why does gender equality matter? Like why do you, why does it make you a stronger more resilient company to have a workforce that is balanced equally and has diversity? And so we did a lot of work with companies where there was a lot of positive feedback inside of those ecosystems around understanding why this shift is really important to mankind and to their organization. And I guess I'll go further to say a lot of work around them understanding that it's not either for profit or for purpose. You can have profit, people and purpose and be equally if not more successful. It doesn't have to be an either or. And so I think if there's anything that is, that is like essential to how we are positioning this future narrative, it is to really get companies to understand that, that it doesn't have to be, I've got to be a more resilient, more gender equal, more transparent with my supply chains company but that's going to be a negative and actually longer term will land up making your company more profitable. So yeah, I think that's the hard work that we need to do. This is also tied to the world economic format and Davos and that BlackRock was one of the big representatives there and been a little bit more, it's very controversial but also been a little bit more outspoken in the last little while to their investments and their companies that if they do not change and make some shifts towards strong ESG investment portfolios and divest from fossil fuels, that now is coming out that there's going to be some stronger punishments. Also we're seeing that the S&P 500, the S&P Global, the NICI, the NASDAQ, the New York Stock Exchange, all those divestments that people made in advance to ESG investments have really outperformed or done better than their conventional counterparts by a substantial margin during this time. So we're seeing some benefits by changing your model or if you have changed your model beforehand but what I'm also learning during this pause and this time of a reset that we've had is that it's not too late to make that change, to change your model, to go to an organization like BOMA for help and structure to move forward in a different way. I consult and advise a lot of different companies, Fortune 1000s and the tendency is is they've come to me now and said, we didn't really listen or apply what you told us in the past or for this reason or the other was too expensive or was too painful or difficult of a journey. Now not only do we have to, but we need something else. We need a plan for the future. BOMA is very futuristic, things that you've done in the past, not only singularity and that all been very future-oriented that leads nicely into my next question about being a global citizen, whether you feel like you're one, what you feel about that terminology or that vision of what it might be to be a global citizen, but even more so, what if in the next two to four years we had a world without borders, limitations, nations, divisions, things holding us back from each other? How would you feel about that and what are your thoughts or ideas of that? Look, I'm definitely a global citizen. The reality is borders are man-made and the issue isn't even the borders. I mean, borders are disputed all the time. The challenge is that we have lost the ability to listen with respect and talk with respect when it comes to other people's point of view. So we right now and social media is partially to blame. Our leadership is most certainly partially to blame, but we sort of all are living in our bubbles and it's become harder for us to listen to somebody with a real divergent point of view, acknowledge their point of view and be open enough to even think we could shift. We've just totally shut down, especially in the US and this has profound effects because if we aren't able to understand the other, then we most certainly cannot build a system that takes all of us into consideration and all of our point of views. We're never all gonna agree, always gonna disagree, but it's how we disagree and how we manage that conflict that ultimately matters. And we should get rid of all borders. Borders mean absolutely nothing. Nation states are constructs again of an old system. And so we should create a new system that's about listening to culture and people in a way that's meaningful and constructing the system with those sort of inputs in an agile, very decentralized way. I've always been a bridge builder. I've always translated between different groups of people and I've always believed in giving other people the benefit of the doubt and listening really actively to people who may look at life completely differently and try and really understand where they're coming from and respect that. And I think we've completely lost the ability to do that right now. And our leadership is in fact, especially in the US, enforcing this further divide. You've kind of gone through this period. You mentioned that you've almost were captive in Florida for a while, three days worth of clothes and many of the other craziness things that you probably experienced there. But as a global citizen, as someone that I've seen in Davos and seen in France and I know you travel the world and that you South Africa and there's many, many other places you've been because you're trapped in the lens of the United States and the Trumpocalypse and all the crazy things going on there. Do you think that's added a little bit of this distaste or non-optimism to your view because you're seeing it more than ever? Do you think that's an influence? Because I've seen you in other places and the people you run with or do you think it's a global thing? Or do you think it might be just a little bit more intense where you're at? Okay, I think there's no doubt it's more intense where I'm at but I don't think it's unique to the United States. I mean, if you look what's happening with Bolsonaro in Brazil, if you look at Putin in Russia, it's not like these are leaders who lead from a pace of understanding and compassion. There is definitely an old power structure going on inside of each of those regimes and I think that's what we absolutely have to move away from. If you look at New Zealand, they have really great compassionate leadership, right? And it's easy to say because it is a tiny country and it's an island, but there is no way that every leader on this earth couldn't be taught to lead from that place. It's a skill you can learn. And it feels like we have a series of leaders right now that are leading from a place of ego and a place of, I mean, in this case of the United States, I don't even want to go there. Yeah, I understand. So, you know, leadership, compassion, courage, it can be taught. It's a muscle. It's something that anybody can learn and why our leaders don't have it right now is something, it's a question we should ask and why people don't respect the importance of those values and those skills and elect people that don't have those values and skills is hugely concerning to me in America. There's two areas I want to go into. One is, I don't know if in your description of Boma, you defined enough the storytelling, the cultural, the narrative around what actual Boma means and the vision of how that brings us together as global cities, cultures, communities, kind of in a global way. So it's this global, but it's also very local, indigenous and cultural. Can you explain that just a little bit? The word Boma goes back to the Great Lakes, to Africa, where I'm originally from and a Boma was an enclosure, often where the tribe would come together and have their hard conversations and make decisions. If you've ever been to modern-day Africa, you've often sat around a Boma and had your break bread and tell stories until late into the night around the campfire. And we're playing on this idea that the world's power structures, the old power structures that are free top-down, commander control and the rate of change and the complexity and the globalness, we need different power structures. We need circular, emergent agile power structures. And so with Boma, we're really working on how do we take all stakeholders and design systems that allow for this emergent coming together of decision-making in new sort of agile ways. And as I said, the pre-COVID vision was very much a big vision across stakeholders and we had a lot of great momentum. And as you saw in Paris, we're moving forward at a rapid speed. COVID has definitely made us reconsider certain things in the short term and hopefully we can circle back to some of those ideas in the long term. The thing I'd like to actually circle back on is we were talking a little bit about BlackRock and the imperative to create new systems when it comes to economic systems to drive us forward. And I think what's challenging for me right now is that you do have the BlackRock's of the world and you do have some of these financial institutions that are working very hard to try to design what sort of new economic model could look like a model that moves away from the shareholder only value system to a stakeholder cost stakeholder system. So I think that piece of it in order to move us forward in any way is imperative right now. And again, I really see the CEOs who were forward thinking being inside that conversation but I don't really see a lot of the CEOs that weren't inside that conversation coming together and using this moment to say, oh yes, we need to join that conversation. And I think that's our biggest challenge, changing our governance systems, our legal systems and our systems around how we design the economy based on Milton Friedman's doctrine in the sixties we can't radically rethink that then I don't believe that that much will change. And I think where that actually does start is very much, most certainly with the CEOs right now across the world stepping back and saying, this is now an imperative this has to happen. But I also think it has to happen inside business schools so that every single young boy, girl and five to college kids are meant to be starting in the fall if they go through any kind of a business degree that they are being educated as to what kinds of value system is important and why. And so the next Mark Zuckerberg understands why he cannot be making the decisions he's making right now and why there's a sense of agency. But I don't necessarily, I see that happening some business schools and it's usually a opt in rather than a must have. Yeah, it's not at a governance level yet that it's a standard operating procedure for businesses that it's a new model that's just a given which where it really needs to be. You know, from many different areas that I'm an advocate for the sustainable development goals. I truly believe it's not only a historical precedence but I believe it is the only goal or the only plan that I can think of to get us to December, 2030. I must say it was presented to us wrong and I also have to say with disappointment we're now five years into it and I think there's still not enough people on board although I feel that we, especially at the beginning of this year and some of the things I'm seeing is have really stepped up to where we need to be but we do need to be on this exponential roadmap. Do you also believe that the sustainable development goals targets the indicators are a global plan for us all? Percy, I really, I do believe in the sustainable development goals. I think it's an important framework that has created some organizing principle. Right now it's probably the only framework that I can see that is even creating some way to bring us all together around the big global challenges. Challenges I sometimes have with the goals is that they tend to create silos and as we know, all complicated issues are deeply interconnected and so everything from funding to execution becomes we'll do your fit in this bucket and so if you try to do something that's more interconnected, it's hard to get funding and it's hard to partner because it's more complicated and because there's no, if you don't fit into the bucket, it's not necessarily being allocated. So I've been talking to a couple of big organizations that are very much focused on change but also have large communities behind them about using this moment during COVID and the fact that we all sort of semi-stuck in this digital space to leverage the digital space to try to create something a new collaborative momentum around the, maybe even a couple of the SDGs. If you think about the digital space right now, it is a great democratizer, it is a great equalizer. You don't, somebody paid for me to come to Davos. It was a lot of money. I would have never been at Davos if I hadn't have had a sponsor. Thank you, Asha. But the majority of people at those sort of conferences are people who either have the means or have somehow been sponsored to get there and it's not necessarily truly representative of humanity and our challenges as a global society right now. And I think that's one area that being on a digital platform, you could really reinvent how a big global convening happened in a really fundamental way. The other part that I think is interesting about the digital space is, and I go back to some of my work on the Board of Equality Now, which deals from a legal perspective with hard gender issues like sex trafficking and the likes. A while back, an organization in Kenya forced all the ministers to come and saying, you know, act as if this was your mother or your daughter and they had a whole listening day where they listened to young women who had been raped, who had been trafficked and it was an active listening circle. And it really shifted the mindset. You could easily do that in the digital space because nobody really has to shop anywhere. You could have people with very different perspectives talking and you could curate the audience in a way that it makes a profound shift because it's voices they may never ever have heard from before. Right, but doing something like this on a scale that really moves the dial would take us, putting our brands aside, putting our egos aside and showing up with our superpower ready to make this happen, right? And it's hard to get people to be that selfless even though they know it's an imperative, but I think we have a unique opportunity to do it right now. And so we've been having some conversations about something along those lines and I'm really optimistic that that could be something really interesting that drives innovation, decision-making and brings together the different silos in a way that you limited when you at Unger Week or you at Davos or you at some of these big events where it's expensive and it's structured in a way that it's very centralized. That's only for the Elite Boys Club in some respect. So I like that push to something much different, put our brands and our social differences aside. If we could also get people to give each other the same respect that they would face to face, things that they wouldn't say to somebody if you were right across from that person, tend to be said easier online. And I think that's created a lot of issues which is a whole nother behavior on psychological thing that we could delve into. But that leads nicely to my first major difficult question for you. That's the burning question, WTF. And it's not the swear word, it's what's the future and not for the world, what's the future for you or your vision of the future? So my very possibly idealistic vision of the future is the design of a new economic system that involves some kind of a stakeholder economy a borderless society where we create systems where we can hear people from very different backgrounds who can actually respect one another and a decision making process that enables global inputs leading up to some important, well, local inputs that lead up to some really important global solutions because all our big challenges whether we like it right now or not right now are deeply interconnected. And COVID's most certainly been the stock realization of that. What happens in one little village in China can affect the entire planet. And so many of our big global challenges right now are gonna involve us coming together in a very different way as humanity and finding ways to solve those problems. And our structures are not set up for that right now. And so if you look at climate change, if you look at pollution, plastic pollution, if you look at something like COVID, none of this can be solved if we don't find a different operating system for humanity. And we don't have that right now. We have a group of old boys hanging onto some old power structure. We have groups of global citizens that are trying to shift. And we don't really have any clear leadership to say, here's a new path forward. I, in many of my podcasts, usually talk about the Trumpoclipses, the Bolson Arrows, the Shays, the Putin's, the Duarte's, the Erdogans, the Brexits. And I could go on how our global governance, our national governance is failing a lot of us and even if the decisions in Brazil of Bolsonaro are meant for Brazil, they're not. They're meant for people in Germany and the US and China because those decisions made national on a national level to let the Amazon rainforest, for instance, burn, affect us all over the world. We're all breathing the same air, drinking the same water. We're all in the same boat moving in the same direction and there is no place we can hide from these poor decisions. One misnomer or one big mistake that people make about the global goals, the sustainable development goals in this plan, this roadmap to December 2030, is that you can choose them in silos or cherry pick one or two and say, oh, I'm just gonna work on no poverty, red, it's my favorite color, that's the one I'm gonna work on. It's virtually impossible to do that because they're all tied together in a system. If you were to pick that one, you would automatically touch on zero hunger and quality education and clean water and sanitation, life on land, life below water. And you would realize, wow, I've got 11 and they're all connected in a system but it's also working to stop no poverty. In that respect, there's an even bigger mistake that people make about the sustainable development goals and that is that it's just a tweak or a different twist on business as usual. You just mentioned that we need a new global operating system, a new governance system, something that you can still have your culture and your nation, but a global standard, an operating system that is setting the bar at a new level for all of us globally. And that's what the United Nations sustainable development goals, the targets, the indicators, what's required on that does. It's a global new operating system. It's a brand new global economy and it's a brand new way of creating a solid base and infrastructure to springboard off onto. And most people don't understand that that's really what is being said behind that. And they think, well, it's just something we can do as a nation and we can meet some targets or indicators. But if you really break down and you dive into that plan, that roadmap of what it brings, it's a new economic system globally. It's a new operating system globally. It's so much different. And so I wish that more people would jump on board for that because the flip side of what you also were saying is that people are looking for leadership. They're looking for plans. They're looking for hope and optimism of what's the plan of the future, where we're going to. The model we're currently on is one of face mask social distancing, extreme racism, extreme gender equality and all sorts of on and on. That is a model, if we push it out into the future, doesn't seem to have a plan in place to get rid of it or to make it better. It's like the next step is we go from a face mask to a gas mask to an oxygen mask to a spacesuit and this dystopian future. And we really need to find some model out there that is for us on and so I wanna go back again. I actually say though with regards to that, I think at the end of the day, none of this shifts if we don't focus on education. I mean, everything you just said there right now is fixed by education. And if I look at the US alone and how broken our education system is, the people right now who are the people voting for Trump have felt left out for many years and why have they felt they are? Because their kids couldn't get a decent education and then couldn't get a decent job, right? The school system in the United States is pathetic. And I have two very small kids, twins. One went to public high school, one went to private high school. He went to the top public high school in the city that was test in. And if I even look at the kind of education well round, I mean he's an amazing science math kid but maybe the well roundedness of my daughter's education relative to my son's education and what they focused on as a value system around humanity and what we need to do for humanity. And I mean, he has me say, I beat him up every day about it. So he'll be okay. But for the kids that don't have that in their family life and they're going to these, even the top public schools and getting an education that is not focused on any of this. Right? And so, and that's the top schools. So you can imagine the people and the kids in communities in the deep South. This isn't even factoring vaguely into the education. And so how do we design the next generation to understand these structures and these operating systems and these potential future imperatives if they're not getting that installed in any way at a young age. And you can look at the world in general and pretty much say the same thing. Where there's a great education system like the Nordic countries, there's a very different perspective on respect for gender, respectful of female leadership, you know, laws around sex trafficking, laws around governance and organization. Like it's a whole different way of living and leading, you know, and but it all comes back to education. And we found a massive amount of money when COVID came along. If we're just directed a small fraction of that in the US towards education 20 years ago and said every child in America deserves an amazing education with a value system that matches up to who we want to be as a country. We've been a very different place right now. We wouldn't have elected Trump. I agree. So it's also part of education that we don't fix our education system in the US and globally. We are doomed. I don't have a solution. We need to fix it. We absolutely need to fix it. So I'm also from the US and you know that. So I believe that there is a disparaging difference between the education even in the worst places in the United States compared to almost anywhere else in the world that there are some really fundamental things that are just not taught, not planned for. And the biggest thing, it's also a global citizen movement. If you look at a car in the 1950s and you look at a car in 2020, drastically different. You can't tell the difference. You can tell the difference that's so modern and automated and electric or whatever the future of cars are now. But if you look at a classroom in the 1950s and you look at a classroom today, there's not fundamentally from the actual structure in the classroom and the way it's set up that has really changed. And- Again, the change in my time was private school. They sit in school. They were optimized for this moment. Really? Yeah. They're doing everything to really, through this direct, I think that's interesting about COVID. I mean, it truly disrupted an educational system that was so deeply stuck in its fundamental ways and they switched in the manner of three weeks. But the challenge is the public system is not optimized to catch the kids. So they're being left even further behind, right? And because it doesn't have the funding and a lot of reasons. But- Well, I believe there's individual schools that made that update. I think your son's called, but I think in general, we're still stuck not too far off of the same model that we're in in the 50s, even in the 20s and the 30s, that that model hasn't really changed drastically and they haven't got up to speed with our exponentially growing world and the times. But the reason I'm kind of going back to what the comment you made about the monies, right? The monies that we spend on health or education compared to defense spending, compared to building walls or whatever else we're spending that money on is just out of whack. It's out of balance for where we wanna be in the future, where we need to be in the future to have any hope, to have that sustainable, resilient, desirable futures where we wanna be, where not just the US needs to be, but where the entire world needs to be as global citizens to get us up to speed. And I relate that the monies, the monies thing is I still think it's unfathomable that we are fighting against each other. We're all Homo sapiens. We weren't dropped off here in Germany spaceship or US spaceship or whatever. We're fighting against each other and spending billions and trillions of dollars to protect ourselves against us when it could be spent on us to educate us, to prepare us for the energy needs of the future, of the food and the resources and the economies of the future that will keep us within planetary boundaries and bring us truly to the future, which leads to my second most difficult, probably the last real difficult question and you've probably answered in a few different ways already, but I wanna see if you can maybe give us something succinct. What does a world that works for everyone look like for you? So you mentioned education, but do you have a plan? Do you know what that looks like that will work for us all? Yeah, I mean, a world that allows your basic needs to be taken care of. It's just simple, you know, allow me to put enough food on the table for my kids, allow me to educate my kids that I feel like they have a future, you know, allow me to have a job. So I feel like I have something meaningful to do with my life and I'm contributing in some meaningful way. And allow me to be curious and be respectful of other human creatures on this planet, even if I completely disagree with them. And most importantly, allow me to understand that humans alone don't own this planet and there are all these other living beings on this fricking planet that we have ignored. And that's the part like, you know, because, you know, we think we dominate over other species because, you know, the Bible has told us we do. It doesn't mean we should go around destroying all those other species. We should have equal respect for those species and we should make space for them that they can prosper because what people seem to forget is that the survival of us as humans is deeply tied in to us allowing them to thrive. And so we need an ecosystem that allows all living things to thrive and is respectful of all living things. And right now we couldn't be on a more opposite path. I don't think I could have said it better. I mean, I talk about this homosymbiosis, the symbiotic earth that we try to live in that realm with all other species and our earth and environment. That's really an important message. And I knew you would have a good answer for us. And I thank you because that's one that not everybody has really thought about. If you were advising one of your clients or someone for Boma and you would give them a tip or suggestion to become a better human being, a bit more impactful innovator, or to strengthen their social business or their business so that it was more in line with where we need to be, what would that tip or suggestion be that you would give them? Kind of asking you for a free giveaway to our listeners and maybe something that they'll set them on a different path or give them some ideas of where they should be moving. I guess to be to understand that there's a finite amount of resources and every time you take a natural resource out of the earth and make something with it, that that has to go somewhere. And if a congo back into the earth or be reformed to create something else, it's going in a landfill. And that circular system has to be fixed. So every time you or your organization creates something, make sure you know once it's being used where that end product is going and take responsibility for it. It's just that simple, you know? And if you can't, put a coupon on the back of your plastic bottle and allow somebody else to clean up your mess. I love it, I love it. We're out of time, so I have just one last thing and that is, is there anything that, one message or anything that we haven't discussed that you would like to let our listeners know or if you could go up to them and give them just one last a party message from Laura, what would it be? We are all in this together and we have some huge challenges ahead of us and we have to start putting our ego and our brands aside and create some kind of new system, operating system for radical collaboration because without that, we're not going to be able to even start to build this new system. We need to put egos aside and we need to really focus on who we wanna be as humans and understand that courage and compassion is a muscle and everybody can work on that muscle and change and listen to others. And listen to others, yeah. Not only are you a fabulous listener but you're also a wonderful educator, Laura and I don't know where you got it from maybe it's your children or maybe you've had this year's worth of stewardship not only with Ted and Singularity and that but you're very well at bringing global citizens together and educating them and the most thing that we really didn't touch on in our talk that I wanna make sure our listeners know before we go away. You kind of tickled on it earlier but my strong belief is that the top three ways to draw down and fix some of the problems we have is by globally reforming food and second and third is to empower women and empower girls. And I know through your marches and through your other interactions you empower women and girls immensely and you will continue to do that and I applaud you for that and thank you so much because we need a hundred thousand, a million more just like you because everybody has a voice and everybody can grab onto the steering wheel of mothership earth and help us to get to that future where we wanna be and you're really the biggest influence that I've met in a long time. So I thank you. Yeah, I think everybody can be a leader. I believe that and everybody can step in to be a leader. I wasn't a born leader. I stepped in. I chose to step in in many cases and so I think everybody listening and everybody out there has the opportunity to be educated and to lead. Thank you so much Laura and I hope we see each other live soon. I hope so soon. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you.