 I wrote a book about the future I want to imagine and want to contribute towards, and the reason for that was to clarify for myself primarily whether we can achieve this, this being 10 billion people living on the planet in balance with the planet and equally wealthy on all five levels of muscle hierarchy of needs. And yes, I absolutely know that this is doable. Thomas Schindler is my guest on this episode of Inside Ideas brought to you by 1.5 Media and Innovator's Magazine. A childhood dominated by dinner table conversations around ion channels, power, microscopy, nuclear war, and ecosystem collapse left its marks. Instead of becoming a rock star, which had been the original plan, Thomas became an entrepreneur driven by applying the power of science and technology towards making the planet a good place. This led to a series of for-profit and non-profit organization initiatives, projects towards that objective, which have been explored on this website, on his website, thomas.cr. Thomas is also the author of a couple books, which we will discuss in our podcast today, Mother and Jungle Factor, and has a wonderful TED talk, a TEDx Frankfurt talk, an economy that grows a happy planet instead of happy money. Thomas is also a very good friend of mine, and we've known each other for a while, and welcome my friend. It's so good to see you. Thank you, Marc, for having me on the show. It's amazing. You're absolutely welcome, and thank you for giving me the shorter version of your biography. You have been around the block and done many things over the years, so I know I could not, you actually left your books and your TED talk off of there, so I could have went on with many other fabulous organizations and things you've done over the years, people you've helped, but really, not only do you want the happy planet, but you also like to make people and organizations happy in your interactions with them and giving them a different vision of the future and the possibilities for a good planet. Am I getting it right? I think you're getting it right, yes, and I think to work good is a critical component in there, and I also think that the reason why there's not so much to talk about in the past, because I like to be biased towards the now and the future more than the past and the now, but picking up on the good. I like saying I'm trying to contribute towards making the planet a good place. I say good deliberately. I got that from Isabella Yende, so most of the things I say, by the way, aren't my inventions. I just might put them together in new ways, but I am inherently lazy, so I build on the shoulders of giants. And this one is Isabella Yende who said, better an increment is actually not an option. A better world is not an option. We have to build a good world. And the way I like to describe that is 14,000 kids under the age of five dying every day from preventable causes would be better, because that's 1,000 less than today. But is it good? Yeah, it's only this, like I said before, this going slower in the wrong direction. Yeah, correct. Type of thought process, correct? Correct, absolutely. And talking about what's good forces you to or trying to move toward what's good forces you to ask the difficult question of what that actually means. And that changes something in your mind and in your behavior. And then you're tied into that future of the good future, which gives you the possibility to act differently today. So in the best sense of live in the future and build what's missing, I'm trying to live in the future that I want to see and then by acting in the now I see and feel what's missing and try and contribute towards making that happen. But also the way you were describing it, creating happiness in the deepest sense, I think is a key component of the future. And that's why I try and do that. You have been doing this, like I said, for quite some while, you've had this thought process that started early in childhood. And like I mentioned, you've done the books, you've owned the companies, you've consulted for different organizations. I know, but my listeners don't know how you've weathered this pandemic, but has any of that past experience helped you get through this period better? And what does that look like? And can you kind of catch us up to speed of how it's been for you? So I think there's several things that I'd like to describe to set the stage for how this experience is and was for me. One is that for the past 20 years and more, I've been busy building organizations and building stuff from scratch is always a bit like falling. You're trying to assemble the airplane in midair while you're falling, something like this. I try to, what I've learned over time is that I'm actually not building the airplane, but that I am flying already. It's just my idea that there's a ground that I'm falling towards that I might hit, that is scary. But once you understand that there's actually no ground and that everybody is falling at the same rate, you can change your experience of falling and the scary experience of falling as flying, which is a totally different perspective, but you're still doing the same thing. So that's something that's been instilled within me over time through that tough training of building organizations and often failing and sometimes succeeding that has given me a tool to look at situations like the pandemic in a different way. The other component is that I expect catastrophes like this on a much, much larger level in the not-so-far-future. So from that perspective, I can see this as a training exercise. I mean, we're not sure how it will pan out. Maybe there is much, much more physiological harm done in the brain through COVID-19, which we don't know of yet. So it's probably a bit early to say, but saying it hyperbolically, this is the softest possible training exercise for humanity, and I'm thankful for it. I mean, there's a lot of harm and I totally acknowledge that, and I have lost the friends in that pandemic, but it could have been so much worse. So these two factors combined actually created a situation where I was almost enjoying it because all of a sudden people like in our bubble, all around the world, they were in their sub-bubbles, started connecting in an entirely new way. And I feel something emerging out of that that is powerful, and that can help the people that are having traumatic experiences right now and will have even more traumatic experiences in the next catastrophe or crisis to step beyond that and start using that as a potential into building a new reality. So I have to ask, and maybe we'll get into a deeper rabbit hole with this question. Are you telling us that we need to prepare for the apocalypse, the dystopian future, you know, get the gas masks and the spacesuits ready, or are you telling us that through this experience we'll have a different type of resilience and the future will look different regardless of those pandemics? What exactly are you saying? Is it optimistic? Is it hopeful or oh shit, here comes the apocalypse and let's get the the bunker in the mountain and that's that's going to be the future. Okay, so I think there's two things going on at the same time right now, and we tend to tend to mix them. The one thing is that we have reached a point of cultural complexity through globalization, through mainly through globalization, but through technology, etc. that is breeding a new perspective on the world. And this new perspective on the world is popping up in different places and shapes and experimenting and trying to come to life. And we don't know yet what it is, but it's we know it's going to happen. And some people call it the awakening and the global consciousness and whatever it is, it wants to come out, and it is going to come out. And that's a massive transformation on a societal global level. And at the same time, we have, and by the way, that the first thing is, I believe, wonderful and absolutely positive. It's the next step in the memetic evolution of mankind. On the other hand, we have burned 100 million years worth of trees in the last 100 years to bring a portion of humanity into, well, wealth on at least the two lower levels on mesozygias of needs. I'm not sure about the upper layers. And destroyed large portions of our home to the point that there's ecosystem collapse happening right now. So these are the two competing elements that we often tend to overlap. And that's not just the capitalistic organization's way of doing their own version of Burning Man, or is that, you know, are you saying that they're eventually going to be recourse from that? Or, you know, it's basically a geoengineering experiment that they've done on a much different skill, right? Well, so yeah, so to go deeper into the question of why we brought ourselves to ecosystem collapse is very much tied into a systemic configuration that we've created over the past couple of hundred years, and that has led to a point in 71, which I believe is absolutely fundamental and crucial, which is a point where we set up our most fundamental system of economic exchange money to be self-serving. So we have created a system where we need to create money in order to keep keep money stable. And in order to create more money, everything goes, anything goes, right? So this is, in order to create more people, in order to create more GDP, it's okay to externalize, to have negative externalities that are too expensive to cover anymore by society. And this is what is systemically moving us towards ecosystem collapse is actually a reward system for exploitation. That is a fundamental systemic problem. And everybody I speak with doesn't want that, right? It's a bit like the discussion about general intelligence. We're afraid of that machine that will be smarter than us and growing faster than us and learning faster than us, etc. Well, we've already built a version of that by designing the monetary system in the way we have. So we're locked into that. Just to give a brief example, I've had the pleasure of spending a weekend with the 20 people from boards of directors of a very, very large engineering company in Germany. And part of that weekend, we did an Ikigai exercise to identify the individual reason for being. And one question in the Ikigai Venn diagram idea is that you have to answer the question, what does the world need? Now, you have the typical 20, 50 plus white male guys. And I asked them, okay, so what does the world need? And I went through a process and then I came back with an answer. And the answer was love. So I see and feel that everywhere, wherever I speak with people, people want to get to the same mountaintop, right? Just the same summit. They see the same thing. It's just hard to get there in a world that is not set up for that systemically. So that's the one end. The other end is the question of, okay, through all of this complexity, something new is emerging. And there might actually be a fit. There might actually be a fit in the way this new thing is emerging and the problems we need to solve. And what we're exploring and what is being propelled by the current situation of the pandemic as a global conversation is, what does that look like? And I currently, I like putting it in the following terms. There's five possible rough directions of the future. There's extinction for mankind. There's what I call Mad Max lo-fi, which is basically what you see in the Mad Max movies. Very dystopian. Dystopian, people competing based on the scarce resources. Then there's what I call Mad Max high-tech, which could be something, a mixture between Mad Max and Matrix, like people running the Matrix to enslave everybody else. And that's a dystopian scenario. Then there's Star Trek high-tech, which is Star Trek. We use a lot of technology to bring everybody onto an amazing level of knowledge and prosperity and all of it. And then there's what I call Star Trek low-tech. And I believe that it is possible to create a Star Trek low-tech future with a high-tech option. So what do I mean? Let's take the example of an Earthship. So an Earthship has an off-grid building built with essentially the materials you find, more or less, works with the fundamentals of physics. So the air, cool air comes in at the back bottom and hot air leaves at the highest point, which is also at the hottest point. So you have a natural ventilation. You just have to open a window. Now you can open that window manually or you could have sensors and actuators to open those windows at some thresholds. That's what I call Star Trek low-tech with high-tech option. If the sensors break because there's a solar flare and all of the electric systems fry, no problem. We can just open and close it like that. So thinking in these terms and setting up a society that works on the Star Trek low-tech channel, the idea, the perspective, from the ground resilient enough to be able to do without high technology. The Star Trek is very science fiction, but tell me if I'm wrong. The high-tech option is it really only there because you and I or others are uncertain where the infrastructural grid of a renewable future of technology that is Star Trek or sci-fi or futuristic may not make it to the future to be there to give us that transition. And if we go beyond the limits to growth or have bigger collapses or problems with climate or whatever it may be unrest, conflict, refugees or climate refugees, whatever may influence that, that we have the manual regular Star Trek low version. Is that kind of also the thinking? That's the thinking, yeah. And so currently in my mind, currently there's a picture evolving of how to manifest that. And there's a second component to the high-tech in there. So we might want some high-tech, but that high-tech is a different form of high-tech than we're currently used to or are generally referring to when we say high-tech. It's more material science as high-tech. So what if humanity becomes a seafaring species, right? So let's just imagine for a moment that we manage to invent something like a floating island that holds a couple of hundred people that is fully self-sustaining. And by definition doesn't want to pollute the environment because that will feed directly back in. If you pollute the body of water you're sitting on, then you will ingest that directly. And so you don't want that. So you have a really, really strong motivation to be sustainable. So can we build something like this that's self-sustaining and sustainable in a way that it can scale up to 10 billion people? If we can create this in one small island for 300 people, we can scale this up. We can configure this into villages and cities and et cetera. We can move it into the parts of the world that are more habitable because of the temperature and storms, et cetera, that will become more unpredictable and definitely will move over the planet in new ways that we don't know yet and cannot really predict. So we're geoflexible as a species, but we don't know where we will get the materials from to make that sustainable for 10 billion people. So my hunch is that there's not only a massive opportunity but also if we think in these terms of if we create these types of artificial constraints, then we can say, okay, so we need something that's through and that shields us from the environment, like a window. Somebody somewhere in history tested what happened if you heat up sand too much and it turned into glass, but is that the only material out there that we can use to provide a window? Probably not. Maybe we find a clever way of growing windows out of the material we have in the sea. I don't know. I'm pretty sure we can if we ask that question to science. So it becomes a function of asking the right questions, asking the right questions from society, from scientists, from politicians, from entrepreneurs, from everybody. And how do you ask the right questions? You ask the right questions by creating an image of something worth living. Say, okay, what do we need to get there? Let's build it. So I believe what you're saying in many respects is that there are a lot of tools and facets that we could reach out for. One is the earthships. One is seasteading. Some other ones that I have in mind are going vertical, better efficiency of land and space usage. But I'm also hearing something else out and I want to make sure I'm hearing it right or if I understand it correctly. Are you saying that if we have 10 billion, 9 billion, 11 billion people in the future that no matter what, there's not enough resources on our planet to sustain all those? Or maybe I should throw in this caveat. Do you believe that there is a way to live within our finite resources and within planetary boundaries and still have those numbers and the population in the future if we use some form of circular economy and new methods of efficiency or ways of doing things? As you mentioned and I wrote a book about the future I want to imagine and want to contribute towards and the reason for that was to clarify for myself primarily whether we can achieve this. This being 10 billion people living on the planet in balance with the planet and equally wealthy on all five levels of massless hierarchy of needs. And yes, I absolutely know that this is doable. So just for example, if you look at the required area of land to feed a person, whether you do that horizontally or vertically plus comfortable space for living, plus comfortable space for recreation outdoors, at least according to my math and even if I'm wrong, it's still ridiculously small in comparison to the potential we have. We could comfortably put the entire human species into space of Europe. No problem. Feed everybody everything. So it's just in our minds the way we think about you say circular economy, the Thai king said sufficiency economy. King Ram the 9th said that. The sufficiency economy plan here. End of 90s, right? So he said okay it's pretty ridiculous that out of all people farmers go hungry really. So what if we put the well-being of our people first? Forget about import and export and all of that. Who needs that, right? What we need is small communities that care for each other. That's ensure that everybody has a good life. And then we can scale from there and make sure that the entire country is self-reliant sufficiency economy. The country can be detached from the entire world and it still functions. Are you talking about mother book or jungle? Mother. So mother is an experiment that came out of another experiment which started a couple of years ago which is a series of books that aren't published for a very simple reason. They provide a safe space for their participants. These are called 50 years hence and the reason why they're called 50 years hence is because this guy Winston Churchill sat down in 1932 to imagine what the world could look like in 1982. And in super strange images he came up with things like vertical farming and solar energy and gene editing and stuff we didn't have in 1982 but shortly thereafter or some of this stuff. So I was curious about what other people imagine the future could and should look like. So I started asking people about that and then we put those essays into a book which we only shared among the authors. And after a while I thought okay I have a feeling that there's something common in all of these essays but it's really really hard to go into that exercise really describe what the world could look like in 50 years. So let me sit down and try to get down into that nitty gritty because that's what we have to do otherwise we don't know what we have to build. And that's why I wrote mother. And to do that I had to find a way of describing all aspects of the human condition in a way that the aspects are distinct enough from each other but overlapping enough so that there's an understanding that yes we're covering everything. And I settled on six questions which are now also guiding a platform that we've built around 50 years hence to get even more ideas about what the future might look like. And these questions are how do we organize supply which is the question around the economy. But I put this on an abstract level to allow the thoughts to become bigger because at the moment we supply essentially says how do we find stuff that we can then put into useful stuff and distribute it to people. There's no rule in the book that says we have to use money and companies to do that. The function is to support everyone. So how do we do that? And then how do we structure society which is a question around governance. We tend to defend democracy at the moment. But maybe our configuration of democracy at the moment isn't really what we need. Maybe there's a better version of democracy. At the moment France and some other countries as well are experimenting with notions that are borrowed from our original template for democracy which is ancient Greece. Which was entirely different. We didn't have parties or there was no voting. But still it's considered democracy. How do we manage knowledge? How do we actually come to the conclusion that something is knowledge? How do we agree on that? How do we distribute it across language barriers, cultural barriers, etc. How do we relate to people? How do we nurture the body? At the moment there seems to be something broken. If you dig down into the food industry, I'm far from being a conspiracy theorist. But it could look like the food industry is set up to feed the pharmaceutical industry because it is essentially making us sick and the pharmaceutical industry is keeping us sick because they're set up in the same way. Is that a good way? Probably not. And then last but not least, how do we mind the spirit? Which is to say, what is that stuff that's more than a sum total of our atoms? And how do we deal with it? And this is also in an abstract terms because we, regardless of whether you're a natural scientist with an atheist background, or whether you're a fundamental Christian, you agree on the fact that there's something more than the sum total of your atoms. So how do we deal with that stuff? So these are the six leading questions and have a lot of fun. And it's very interesting to have these conversations with people all around the planet, around these six questions. Because essentially, it's fascinating. And it's somewhat somehow tying back into these managers that found love as the most important thing that the world needs. People come up with very similar ideas. Very similar. They might have different images and words and different slightly different perspectives might be more tech or less tech or more. But essentially, what people are looking for is a community close to the Dunbar number that is self-sufficient. And that is also interconnected with other communities, preferably around the globe. Well, you probably answered like all of my questions already in one way or the other. But we're going to get more into specifics of that. One of my questions is about globalization. We touched upon that early on. You and I both did a workshop together, a moonshot workshop together in Lake Como, a beautiful place, type of a castle or a nice historical house sitting on Lake Como. And it was basically a moonshot about what the future is, thinking about the future, how to plan and think and get there, how to run scenarios out to achieve that. And we had some wonderful conversations there. So we've been thinking about this for a long time. We've been working about it. You've been writing about it. You've asked yourself the hard questions. And that's why I wanted to really know, has that helped you in this time? The answer that I hear out very easily is that, yes, you've been put in a better place to advise and bring groups of people together from all over the world. People have reached out to you. You've also felt the heartache and death and suffering of people who are been touched personally from the pandemic, but that you have yourself been prepared in a better, more resilient way to weather through this. It's seen as a very positive way because not only through this pandemic, more people are awakened. More people are saying, holy hell, what do I do? And now, how can I be better prepared the next time, which you're saying there will be some next time? Am I getting it right a little bit? How I'm hearing that out? We know each other better so and speak often. It's something I kind of wanted my listeners to know as well. But also, I have access to your calendar. You have access to mine. We're so hard to get a hold of it and so busy all the time. So I really know, I mean, normally people would say, wow, this has been like a forced vacation. Now I get to be in my own human zoo, my own prison, but we've created something a little different for ourselves. So yeah, I remember that our meeting in Lake Como very well, especially our ride afterwards around the lake for hours in that bus, the six of us, and having the most amazing deep conversation I've had the entire year, I think. It was really, really, really good. And building on these images that you put into my mind with that gathering in that beautiful location, I think that's... Well, I wouldn't say that the situation has helped me so much, but I've seen something that I think is important. So the work you and Mika and Jussi and Harald and are doing around the moonshot or Manuel is doing with future modeling or what I'm doing with 50 years hence, trying to come up with these broad, big pictures that give us a compass. A compass in the best Jack Sparrowish sense. So the compass that shows us where we want to go. It's very, very crucial. And so that's absolutely vital piece that more and more people are beginning to understand, and I really don't understand the social dynamics behind why that happens in this pandemic. My guess is that there is a big pun now, but zoom in and zoom out happening. Big pun for sure. But the fact that we're sitting in our homes at the same time connected to the world and experiencing firsthand for the first time a global crisis, a real true global crisis that has personal individual effects forces you to become more clear about yourself, but also to zoom out and look at the world. So that's and zooming out and looking at the world forces you then to come up with questions or answers on. So how do we do this differently? That's number one. And number two, this is overwhelming to most people because now you're sitting here, you're clear about yourself, but you're also very, very scared. And you feel helpless and powerless because you're embedded in a mesh in the system. And then the question becomes, so how do we deal with that system? How do I even start to understand that system? How can I attempt to understand that system? And that is the reason why we or I came up with jungle to provide a framework that helps you map a system, create a rough map of a system that you're looking at. And then knowing where your moonshot is, knowing where you want to go, start moving towards that. And while you're moving, measuring where are you going in the right direction? Is this a good path in a system that you don't know yet that you're exploring? And why is that important? It's a tool that takes some of the risk out of being free for change. Because we've created a culture for ourselves where we tend to be more free from stuff, free from fear and dangers of any kind. And we employ politicians to protect that and to manage that freedom from fear for us. But that bubble is bursting. So we need to become free for stuff that we're exploring, but that's not for the faint of heart because that can fail. So what we do with jungle is we try to provide a tool that helps you move from being free from fear to be free for solutions. That's beautiful. And I don't know, we can edit this out if you don't want me to touch upon it, but so you weathered it fairly well through this pandemic time. But I must say, I was invited to your honeymoon. So you were supposed to have your honeymoon during this pandemic. So that through a big, personal, emotional, beautiful time for you, basically on hold because we couldn't travel anymore. Do you want to say anything about that? Yeah, that's actually the, apart from the death of one friend, the only real negative effect this has on me, because Vanessa and I got married in end of March 29th. That's an important date for us. So we did stick with that. But the hundred people that we'd invited to the party around it just couldn't come. We had this beautiful celebration set up in Costa Rica. And nobody could get there. So we hope that we can follow up on this a year later. We've already reserved the same spot. Beautiful. But we haven't seen each other in four months, except zoom in, zoom out. So I'm flying out there in a week, which is the first possible date. So I'm allowed in the country starting first of August. I'll be flying on the second. But that's been tough. Yeah. Oh, I believe that. And that's also created a plan between my son and myself. We've been spending our school holiday going around with our little boat. And now our plan is to prepare ourselves to be able to cross the ocean with the sailboat. Because even if we cannot fly anymore, we will probably have more time. And so crossing the ocean for a couple of weeks and isn't so relevant anymore. And then I can still be geoflexible without polluting. So that's what came out of it. You truly have a beautiful family. I love Noah and Vanessa. I'm excited to be there. The reason I go into that even more is to address the global citizen question. So do you feel like you're a global citizen? Do you want to know what your feelings would be like if in the near future we would remove borders, nations, limitations, restrictions, holding us and separating us from one another. You know very well, my father's American. My mother was German. My grandfather was German. My grandmother was Austrian. I have family all over the world in businesses. We are all global citizens and whether that's a bad term or not, in some respects there's multicultural different languages that are married and together. And yet we're still dividing ourselves in this world. Can you kind of give me some insight of your thoughts and feelings on that? Yeah. So I'm global from the get go. I was born to Germans in California. I grew up all over Europe. My first wife is South African. My partner for life is Costa Rican. So I'm all over the place. And there is some fear of some people that if we don't have any borders anymore then people will start invading some countries and yes, there will be movement. But I think most people underestimate the value people give to the place they are and love and for the place and also for the people around them. So I think that people are more sticky in their places than we assume. And having that open situation I believe will help create situations where the negative effects of the ecosystem collapse and climate change can be mitigated wherever they still can be mitigated better on the local level. Which means that people will essentially stay where they are. They don't want to leave their country. They grew up there. It's beautiful. There are a couple of people that are by definition geoflexible and want to buzz around the globe and live in all sorts of places. And it might even be that we would want to incorporate something like that into our cultural setup where young people get the opportunity to move around and cross-pollinate ideas and genes. And I know for Germany there was this tradition in for carpenters. Once they had finished their education they started roaming the land until they settled somewhere. Probably usually either because they found a village where there was no carpenter or they fell in love or both. And I think something similar could be very useful. So I think global travel could be an important thing also in the future. Maybe at different speeds and for different reasons. Global understanding connectivity anyway. I just recently I can't remember the name but there's a company trying to bring people to the edge of the atmosphere in balloons democratizing the overview effect. Which I think could be actually very crucial to the survival of humanity to understand that this is one thing. This is Carl Sagan's pale blue dot. Looking at our planet from the edge of our galaxy as this fragile little pale blue dot in the vast nothingness. This is home. And once we grasp that then borders don't make sense anymore. That really transitions over to the deeper probably the first hardest question that I will ask you. I know you have the answer. It's the burning question WTF and you know it's not the swear word. It's what's the future. So I am I'm convinced that once we either by force of catastrophe or by some nonviolent transformation revolution that's happening we will free ourselves from the systemic gridlock and amazing things will flourish. And I referenced earlier the outcome of the 50 years hence conversations. The future I mean this is totally overused but the future will be local and global. We live in local self-sufficient communities at a very very high level of well-being that is entirely possible. I'm not saying this is going to happen but I know it can. It is technically possible and I want this future. The term local has already been out there you know not only Wikipedia some dictionaries have accepted it you know this global and local view you you mix that with the overview effect that you talked about the balloons and having this cosmic perspective of our world from outer space. I believe that's emerging. I believe that we need to realize that we're all crew members on this spaceship earth that we can put our hands on the steering wheel no matter how small our actions we can impact the the future. And I I do like when you say you know local and global there is that you understand your spot on the pale blue dot and and you understand that there's the same air we breathe is the same air in China and Germany and the US and the same waters we drink in the same everything is is all ours it doesn't belong to one nation or border so I really like that and it is possible to do both or to to have both at the same time. I think I think it's very related to to your global hectare idea. It is. Um and becoming a steward of the planet and and and more than that a steward of the living conditions of future generations. I think that's that could be the triggering point. There is a piece of like legislation that was put in place in Wales five years ago which is called the future generations well-being act. What that does is that political decisions have to prove that they in in several categories have to prove that they actually will have a positive effect on the future well-being otherwise they cannot be be be be executed and there's an independent commission controlling for that. So what if we implemented that in Germany and then in Europe and then in other countries? What would that change? I think it would change a lot and then then we would become the steward of the future which would then ask the question what is the future we want for our kids and grandkids and their kids and um and what is missing and let's build that now and I think that that will that will that could be this catalytic event that um unleashes all of the positive potential that is dormant and wants to come out but cannot at the moment. We've seen some experiments not only with my global hectare but also with a universal basic income you know Spain and a couple of Canada in some respects came out with some bailouts or some incentives that are very close broaching on universal basic income. I believe that if we had a fair distribution of finite resources that it was an inalienable right for each individual and that through good stewardship we really showed that we could not only be more efficient but live within planetary boundaries in this circuit that there's some there's some wisdom and things in there that really would help us go far for future generations. I mean to sustainability sustainable has been a big buzzword for a long time but what is it that means to sustain yourself your business your products your your yourself for future generations you know not just for one year but multiple years. So I see a lot of people trying to start to really experiment with this and and I mean I'm part of a bubble that likes to to think and talk and do things about it but my my concrete next step is to really put myself into that position. So at the moment I'm I'm looking for a buyer for for the house in Berlin and then we're going to get a ship to live on fully self-sustaining to experiment with that and also we're going to build an earth ship in Costa Rica to understand how that actually works. I want to know how that works because in theory it's all nice but I think that's the that's what I see emerging at the moment that there are more people that are trying to create these experience spaces for how does that actually feel and what do I actually need and and then usually it turns out that it's not so much that that we need and that we can do very well without most of the stuff. The one experiment some everybody can easily start today is something I started with my son five years ago. We stopped using single-use plastic. That's that sounds big but actually it's not that hard but it's only not that hard if you're open to adapting your habits a little bit and and once you start doing that you start noticing very interesting things like you will automatically feed yourself in a much more healthy way because you cannot buy packaged food so what do you buy you buy vegetables and fruits essentially now what's bad about that roughly nothing right so so then you then you notice oh I the things I thought I needed I actually don't need them and and then you can start experimenting with more and you start creating things yourself um I don't know mundane things like baking bread or making your own soap and so and then you can ask these questions how do I make soap ah there's some stuff in there that I cannot grow I can I might be able to grow some olives and and turn them into oil but that's not enough I need I need some what do you need salt water for alkaline yeah alkaline so it's super hard to create that yourself so I'd be very thankful if somebody came up with it with an easy solution to to to create soap locally that I can create with my kid um just as a tiny example right but this is um or or the beginning of the of the pandemic people went out to buy toilet paper I don't know why exactly because you could just get a hose pipe or a 20 buck thing that you can put on your toilet and turn it into a bidet some people did that but you need that image in your mind to be able to do it now we did it because we didn't get any toilet paper that wasn't wrapped in plastic so we we already had um performed that change but these are the little things tiny little switches and all of a sudden your footprint goes to close to zero right yeah it's that that's a beautiful way of of looking at that and I like that you're experimenting you're you're thinking and pushing those those boundaries of how you can do that for yourself but with that resilience or that um the English word is you know self-sustaining in German it's überlebenskünstler or self-sustaining type of lifestyle you are put in a unique position not only to help your family but then to show others what works and what doesn't there are a lot of examples out there of people seasteading or living on lakes you know uh uh different options there's uh so many choices not just the sea there's tiny homes there's you know living off of the land there's camping there's tons of different things out there that are very much a step in in that right direction now do we have to give all the creature comforts up to to live within our global hectare and to to do that no absolutely not I I believe that we can live a very fulfilling and rich and full life with plenty of food and there's numerous examples out there a lot of them are on the internet even now on the the tiktok craze but um um we we really need to grasp fully the potential of that I want to touch on just one other thing you talked about food and how your transition has been in that but it ties really closely to a couple things you you mentioned the maslow's hierarchy of of needs a few times the bottom two layers of that the bottom layer is our physiological needs the breathing food and water which is food which is more than food it's our most basic earthly and human energy source food is a caloric intake it regulates our body temperature keeps the motor running so that we can stay at a certain heat to survive and to have energy to do things it's our our energy and you know battery source so to say and then the second level is security of resources security of body that security of where we live and and and how we do that during this time a pause of this great reset of this pandemic one thing that has been a global citizen or had deep involvement on our whole planet was our energy source was food was still going in ships still going in boats still going in now and in passenger airplanes I saw them packing food and fruits and and things and at passenger airplanes it's one thing that did not shut down it cannot be shut down and to cheapen food is to cheapen life because it is our most basic vital resource and energy source and so now when you lock down people when you don't allow them to travel when you restrict them to come into your country your nation if you build up walls and borders you're really doing a big huge damage to to humanity in our world and the way our world functions not only within that mazl's hierarchy needs and so I think you touched on many of those things I I think it's very vital to address that and put that into relation to what you've said and what possibilities there are to live more resiliently and to live more sustainably in the future some things that you discussed were having this whether it's a collapse or a catastrophe happen that makes that push that nudge to get a mind shift a paradigm shift for humanity to start seeing we need to change we need to do things differently so that we can be around for future generations and that really leads me to my second to last most scary question and you've you've addressed it in some respects during this but it's a little bit different what does a world that works for everyone look like for you well I have to build that on the assumption that everyone essentially at the core is concerned about the same thing and that thing is ultimately the well-being of themselves and their loved ones so the only way to think about that world for me is to find a way to maximize the well-being of everybody without exception if it doesn't if it cannot do that then it's not it's not worth thinking about it but it's even more complex because well-being to you and me who are very very similar in in in in our upbringing and general embeddedness in society is might be something different from well-being for somebody else so that also needs to be taken account for and so that brings me back to this Star Trek low tech scenario where we enable ourselves to have local communities that are self-sufficient to a level where we're able to grow coffee and pineapple in area like let's say Berlin right and there are solutions out there to grow things like that within containers running on sunlight with small footprint on water and there are solutions where you could have a greenhouse that you essentially put into the soil with just a translucent surface on the top and so you can regulate climate through passive solar energy so what I'm trying to say is the solutions out there on between the low and the high tech to grow the coffee we want around Berlin no problem that's so that's what does it count for is that small communities can find ways to figure the way they think about well-being as a group while connected to all of the other little communities all around the globe so it's like a big index of communities and every community has its quirky specialities and because nobody has to compete for resources they're all they can all leave each other untouched but at the same time you can go and experience and visit them and see whether you might like some of the quirkiness and bring it back home or if nobody wants your specific quirkiness you can just set up camp somewhere else and maybe attract some people so it's very very local but at the same time we can interact and have to interact and are asked to interact with all of them on the on the entire planet to as a large global experiment of what works what doesn't how do we do things and the only two real important aspects are maximizing of the personal individual wealth and all five layers of mesle's hierarchy of needs for everyone without exception and implicit in that is care for the planet that's the only two pools we need and and these are globally enforced by a community and we could go into the question of governance around that for hours and like like we already have in other conversations but this is a rough sketch of what I what I see possible what I wish for um yeah we don't have too much more time so i'm gonna try to wrap it up with these last two questions but the you we've touched upon it um several times during during our conversation so mazo's hierarchy of needs you know that i'm a united nation sustainable development goal advocate and that after I show the um sustainable development goals in a wedding cake a pirate chart type of a graph then my very next slide is mazo's hierarchy of needs and I say they are for us and I liken them to uh mazo's hierarchy of needs uh especially the bottom two two layers it's um they're very closely tied to each other that with that knowledge and also knowing that we're limited on on how much time we can have on this podcast do you believe that there is a global plan out there for humanity to at least help us to reach 2030 or some plans out there that are unifiably known that that people can work towards or to see as a guide that also fall in line to many of the things that you've said here today okay so I haven't come across a clear plan yet that people unify around I see islands little ideas um there's there's of course the framework of the of the sdgs um and um that is probably the the the strongest um and most prolific uh sort of plan but um I don't like uh calling it a plan really um I it's a to-do list and and just like so I'm I'm a little wary about that to-do list because it could create a whole range of outcomes and some of them are more desirable than others and I like thinking about what I what I'm cooking before I pull the recipe before I pull the to-do list so I've what is the world what does the world look like with the sdg solved um is the question that I'm missing um and and I understandably solve because it's probably the hardest question when when I when I give my answer or even attempt an answer um I I get all sorts of accusations about being uh a megalomaniac or um yeah all sorts of negative things that that people can call me um but it's I think there's a misunderstanding it's not that I um dogmatically say this is what um this is the world that we need to live in it is what I currently believe is the world most worth living in and this is my view and we can all have a conversation around that and it and so I don't see that conversation happening yet I see bubbles and and and as I as I said earlier these bubbles seem towards heading towards the same summit but there's no coherent plan no I don't see it I have to disagree with you I have to be a little bit we've known each other long enough and you've heard me talk about it that that vision that you don't see or that you don't feel about that there you don't know what it'll look or feel like um December 2030 when the SDGs are the 15 year plan as as finished and for that specific reason you've probably heard me say this a few times but there's a phenomenon that um it's usually not until the fourth time that people say damn he's been saying it all along I just didn't truly hear it until now but for the sustainable development goals I wrote the manifesto the SDG manifesto for the UN I'd like to read it to you now just to see if you can get the feeling of what it would feel like December 2030 when we reach it imagine a world where there is no poverty and zero hunger we have good health and well-being quality education and full gender equality everywhere there is clean water and sanitation for everyone affordable and clean energy has created decent work and sustainable economic growth our prosperity is fueled by investments in resilient industry innovation and infrastructure and that has reduced inequalities we live in sustainable cities and communities and responsible consumption and production has healed our planet climate action has stopped and reversed the warming of our planet and we have flourishing life below water and abundant diverse life on land we enjoy peace and justice through strong institutions and have built long-term partnerships for the goals now the reason I wrote that is because the sustainable development goals were presented to us in the wrong way or not at all we didn't understand if they were for cities or communities or corporations we didn't understand how they were developed through back casting foresight modeling dynamic modeling through through many tools that we've used for a long time there's a certain amount of dollar figures behind them not only are they goals but there's targets and indicators behind them to reach them and it's really the world's first historical precedence set by humanity just like this pandemic is the worst first global wake-up call it's the first historical precedence set on a global level for humanity and it I believe it is a roman the problem is people don't know about it they don't know that vision and they don't know what it feels like if we achieve that one last caveat I just want to say and then I want to get your feelings and your opinions on that is that when those of us who know about them who've heard about them we still don't understand that it's a it's a new global operating system if we strive for any or all of the goals it is not just for one nation one country one border it is for all of us and in order to do that we actually have to change our current models and accept a new global form of governance a new form of doing things that levels the playing field for everyone on earth every nation on earth and it's it's a total reset in a new operating system most people think that it's just a tweak on the normal it's a little business as usual with a little couple tweaks well no it's a complete new operating system it's new economies it's a new way of thinking and doing things than we've ever done before and that's what people don't really understand they they still think you can have nationalism divisions and borders and you can have nations and countries but you can't you have to have an higher global operating system that those adhere to and still have your cultures and your borders and and your countries okay so I think it's extremely important that you wrote that manifesto because there's as I said this is to do list and it's missing the image and with that manifesto you've created a vision an image an image right so and so now there's there's directionality but my feeling is that this is not a plan yet and there are I don't know people like you know them all like like Jordan Hall and Daniel Schmartenberger and John Reveke and the rebel wisdom people Thomas Bergman and I could go on and amazing amazing people thinking about how that operating system might look like but whenever I and I you think about that I think about that we we have discussions about that and what always comes out of that discussion for me is since it's a new operating system the power structures the the will will change and plan a concrete plan for me would be a plan that helps the people that currently hold power or political power or financial power to come to terms with the fact that they will lose that power and and will give it up happily we need to have that part of the plan I think that's absolutely vital this is for example what we're trying to do with with Gita with the global impact tech alliance trying to come up with an understanding that yesterday's enormous infrastructure needed for that new operating system there are sketches of the operating system there's an image on at the at the end of it this is the world we're creating is a there's a whole framework how we can how we can roughly at least measure the stuff and and now we need to start moving that power towards building that operating system where it will lose the power I think that's the and that in a peaceful nonviolent way that's the hardest job there I think that's why I need to tell my listeners to make sure to go over to your TEDx Frankfurt because you address some of those and in your TED talk some of those those things and that's a vital to listen to because I think then they can also get on on the same page and align with with your thoughts and some of the wisdoms that you share and have shared today I truly do believe that true power for politicians is in the fact that they give it up and figure out a new global governance operating system that is probably not controlled by them that through that vulnerability and uh succeeding to a bigger operating system and model and uh one that maybe has a trustless system behind it whether that's distributed ledger technology or machine learning or something that is not as fallible and make short-term dictatorial decisions for a certain group of of humanity that impacts the entire world I think that would be a real step in the right direction I'm wrapping this up now with the last question and that is if you could go up to all the millions of people on our earth and give them one message a short elevator pitch message what would it be uh your leaving words or your empowerment that you would impart to them that's a hard question I think I would say that you should try and connect deeply with your innermost fears and desires and trust in what emerges from there because what emerges from there will always be love and whatever happens next will be good thanks my friend I really appreciate it Thomas it's been so wonderful as always we could talk for hours and um yes too bad the restrictions are we won't get listeners for hours so um thank you all the best thank you very much and uh we will see each other and speak very soon again yes thank you for being on Inside Ideas I appreciate it thank you for inviting me it's been absolutely a pleasure speaking with you again my pleasure