 So good evening, everyone. I am. Well, first of all, I want to welcome you all and thank you for joining. I am Marwanik Johnson, and I am staff member at Oikos, and I will be hosting this event tonight. So tonight, we welcome Roman Krusnarik. I think I pronounced that right. Public philosopher who also writes about the power of ideas to change society. So before Roman wrote The Good Ancestor, the book we will talk about tonight. He has also written other books such as Empathy, The Wonder Box, Carpe Diem Regained, which have been published in more than 20 languages. So Roman grew up in Sydney and Hong Kong, studying in the UK, where you still live, right? Unfortunately. Roman is also a co-founder of the world's first empathy museum and currently research fellow of the Long Nile Foundation. And tonight we also invited Philsan Bosman. Philsan grew up in Somalia and is currently a student in African Studies and Languages at the University of Ghent, Belgium, where she also lives. Philsan also writes and she describes herself as a community builder and is also very active in Black History Month, Belgium, right? Right. So I want to welcome both of you. And so this webinar fits in the Just Transition Project, which is a transnational project in collaboration with the Green European Foundation. And the project aims to tackle the challenge of transforming our society from an extractivist to a regenerative one, and this in a just and equitable way. And the question on the future of the planet and the future really to all of our descendants, descendants is here in Central. So the program for tonight is the following. In the first part of the webinar, Roman will present his book to us. This will take approximately 30 minutes. And then in the second part, Roman and Philsan will have a discussion or a dialogue on several aspects of the book for about 20 to 30 minutes. And after that there is room for a Q&A. So make sure you post all of your questions in the chat box below. So just one last thing for good comprehension, make sure you keep your microphone muted so that we don't hear any background noises. I think that's it for now. And so I leave the floor to you, Roman. Well, thank you so much for that introduction. And it's also a great pleasure to be here with Philsan as well. And I'm looking forward to our conversation afterwards. But I guess the place to begin is, well, if you're thinking about how do we shift from degenerative extractive society and economy to a regenerative one, I think one of the ingredients we must talk about is time. And how we extend our time horizons because it is clear that we are held back in so many ways by the tyranny of the now, our obsession with the present. We now our politicians can barely see beyond the next election, or even the latest tweet. And the people who are in the offices can't see beyond the quarterly report market spike and crash in speculative bubbles and nations sit around international conference tables bickering away while the planet burns and species disappear. Maybe they'll do something different at COP26, but maybe they won't. And of course, as individuals, we are, you know, looking at our phones and clicking the buy now button we are immersed in the present tense. And I know that even in this period of immediate covert crisis that we need long term thinking to deal with the challenges of our time. We needed to plan for the next pandemic that might be on the horizon, get our public health systems in order. We need it to deal with racial injustice which gets passed on from generation to generation embedded in policing systems judicial systems and other cultural institutions more broadly. We need long term thinking to deal with technological threats from artificial intelligence or buy weapons many other things. And of course we need long term thinking to to deal with the global ecological crisis from climate change to biodiversity loss and other areas in a way there's a kind of paradox here that the need for long term thinking is incredibly urgent. You know we need it right here right now and one of the ways I think about this is that I believe that humankind has colonized the future that we treat the future like a distant colonial outpost where we can freely dump ecological damage and technological risk as if there was nobody there. And I come to this sort of metaphor of colonizing the future because I'm Australian. You know and knowing a little bit about Australian history recognizing that when Britain colonized Australia in the 18th and 19th century, they drew on a legal doctrine now known as Terra Nullius, you know the Latin for nobody's land Terra Nullius the idea that there were no indigenous people there. So they could just take it. Of course there were people there. And I think, just as today there are still struggles going on against this doctrine of Terra Nullius the way that lands have been occupied colonize. There's also a struggle to be had against Tempus Nullius, the way that we treat the future as a kind of empty time, a place that has that is devoid of inhabitants, and that is ours for the taking. And I think the tragedy in a way is that future generations who are being colonized aren't here to challenge this pillaging of their inheritance, you know they can't. You know go on assault march to defy their colonial oppressors like Mahatma Gandhi or stages sitting like a civil rights activist they have no political rights or representation they have no influence in the marketplace and I think it can be quite difficult really to grasp the scale of this injustice so you can see on the image there one way I think about this that there is 7.7 billion people alive today. And over the past 50,000 years and estimated 100 billion people have been born and died, but over the next 50,000 years and estimated nearly 7 trillion people will be born that giant orange circle. I mean in the next two centuries alone, tens of billions of people will be born, amongst them, or your grandchildren, if you have them, and their grandchildren and the friends and communities on whom they'll depend. And so there's a real question here of how will those future generations remember us for the choices we did or didn't make. And someone who really thought about this issue a lot was the immunologist Jonas Sulk, who were with his team developed the first polio vaccine back in the 1950s. And he said there's one great question facing our civilization today which is this, are we being good ancestors. In other words, how are we going to be remembered by those generations to come and he believed that if we were going to be remembered well and if we were going to tackle the long term challenges, such as the destruction of the living world or the nuclear threat which was big in his time. He said then we would need to expand our time horizons. And instead of thinking on a scale of seconds minutes and hours we should think on a scale of decades centuries and millennia. In some ways there's some really inspiring long term, long time horizon projects around. You know you might already be starting to think of some yourself but let me give you a couple of examples. There is one the Svalbard global seed vault, which is collecting millions of seeds and an indestructible rock bunker in the Arctic Circle, which is designed to last for 1000 years, preserving the world's plant biodiversity. One example is the 10,000 year clock, which is a slow time clock currently being built in a mountain in the Texas desert, and it's been designed to last for 10 millennia stay accurate for 10,000 years. And it's a project of the Long Now Foundation where I'm a research fellow and it's a it's in a way it's about a cultural icon for getting us to take responsibility for future generations to get us to think way beyond the here and the now. Now, as I've been speaking, you may well have been thinking of some long term projects that you might know about and I'd love you to do me a favor. I would like you to open the chat box and just write down in a couple of words any long term thinking projects that you know about that you think are valuable or inspiring. They could be from the realm of the art or ecology or economics or something else because I just love to see some examples of the kind of things that you're thinking of one that I came across the other day is is a 639 year music performance in Habs in Habs I think a city in Germany where they're playing the organ it's a John Cage piece lasting 639 years. Look, there's people have been writing that Ava's written soil. Yes, so yes long term soils, the renovation of cathedral in Utrecht take 100 years I'll talk about cathedrals in a moment. Google's projects for digitizing all those books which might show you that long term thinking isn't necessarily always good for us eco cathedral maybe you're thinking the eco cathedral famous project in the Netherlands, which I think was started in the 1960s and they now have a 1000 year plan for the eco cathedral development so there's all sorts of examples that you might know about you might come up with Ah, there's someone in Aotearoa New Zealand saying here that the Iwi tribes here complete business planning for hundreds of years instead of the Western approach to five to 10 years. It's a really interesting example of that I came across a sustainable food company in Aotearoa New Zealand a Maori company I can't remember what it's called begins with K but it has a they have a 500 year sustainability plan and hopefully I'll remember it by the time we get to the Q&A but thanks for that example Claire. So there's all sorts of really inspiring examples out there but there's a real question of clearly we're not doing enough of this long term thinking otherwise we wouldn't have these the climate crisis and so many other long term crisis so how do we become long term thinkers I think one of the starting points is that we need to look inside our own heads and I believe there's a kind of like a struggle going on in our brains between the drivers of short termism and long termism you know do I party today or save for my pension for tomorrow do I upgrade to the latest iPhone or plant a seed in the ground for posterity and I think of these two parts of the brain is the marshmallow brain and the acorn brain and our marshmallow brain is the part of our brain which focuses on short term rewards and instant gratification that's the bit which is all about clicking the buy now button and it's named after the famous by the way I can see other things coming up in the chat and I hope we can come back to them later such as the Sahel tree planting projects so the marshmallow brain is named after the famous marshmallow test in the 1960s where marshmallow is put in front of kids and if they could resist eating it for 15 minutes they were rewarded with a second marshmallow and the majority couldn't resist and ate the snack but the marshmallow test has been critiqued in many ways and one of the reasons I critique it is because it forgets that there's another part of our neuro anatomy which is this acorn brain this is the part that focuses on long term thinking and planning and strategizing it lives here in the frontal lobe particularly a part called the dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex and this acorn brain as I call it is better developed in humans than most other creatures so chimpanzees for example do plan for the future so they might get a stick take off the leaves and turn it into a tool to stick into a termite hole but they will never make a dozen of these tools and set them aside for next week but that's exactly what a human being will do we are long term planners extraordinaire our minds can dance across time horizons that's how we say for our pensions alright song list for our own funerals it's how we built the Great Wall of China or voyaged into space by using this acorn brain but there is a question then okay we've got this neurological capacity let's say but how do we switch on this acorn brain how do we become better long term thinkers and in my book I explore this my book The Good Ancestor which has recently come out in Dutch as well as in English I talk about something called the tug of war for time and on one side is six drivers of short term thinking many of them are familiar like digital distraction or political presentism that sort of short term electoral cycles some of them are more ancient like the tyranny of the clock the way that clock time over the last 500 years has been speeding up our lives and been diminishing the future you know the first clocks used to chime every hour but by 1700 most clocks had minute hands by 1800 they had second hands the clock became the key machine of the industrial revolution that the assembly line the factory clock we've been speeding it up ever since but on the other side are six ways to think long term and I want to talk just about three of those cathedral thinking into generational justice and developing a legacy mindset now cathedral thinking is all about the idea of embarking on long term projects and policies with very long time horizon stretching decades centuries ahead beyond the lifetimes of those who started them as someone wrote in the chat they mentioned the rebuilding of the cathedral I think and you know of course there are lots of different kinds of cathedral thinking Greta Thunberg as famously said you know we need cathedral thinking to deal with the climate crisis but let's look a little bit more cathedral thinking because there are different kinds of examples one example in the left hand corner there you can see is all minster in southwest Germany which was begun in the year 1377 when the citizens of Olm's decided they wanted to build and finance a cathedral themselves it wasn't finished until 1890 more than 500 years later so a kind of probably the world's longest crowdfunding project on the right hand side you can see a public works project from Britain in the 19th century these are the sewers built after the great stink of 1858 until then raw sewage had been dumped in the Thames River tens of thousands of people would die from cholery each year and but after the smell was so bad in the summer of 1858 the government passed emergency legislation the sewers were built over period of 20 years with 22,000 workers the chief engineer made sure that the pipes or the tunnels were twice as big as they needed to be for the population at the time and that's why those sewers are still in use today kind of sewer thinking rather than cathedral thinking but very long term vision and the bottom left hand corner is just a reminder that image there from the civil rights movement in the U.S. that cathedral thinking is also evident in long term political and social struggles the struggles for indigenous rights women's rights rights of people with disabilities all sorts of struggles for rights often take decades sometimes half a century to achieve their aims they require long vision now all these examples I find really inspiring of course they are they show we can do this we can think long term but there is a danger because cathedral thinking isn't always good for us. It can be used for very narrow and self serving ends think about the regime in North Korea which wants to maintain power from generation to family generation passing it down. Or think, oh, I forgot to tell you show you one of my favorite examples of cathedral thinking. Let me just show you this quickly because I love it so much. The these two power plants in Japan. The right hand one was the Fukushima power plant, which was destroyed in the tsunami of 2011 you can see it went into meltdown the fire there. And on the left hand side is another plant called Onagawa, which survived the tsunami was even closer to the center of it why because the chief engineer built a wall much higher than regulations asked for and then put the plant itself another 15 meters higher. So in fact when the tsunami hit local people sheltered inside that nuclear power plant, it survived amazing cathedral thinking. But as I said, cathedral thinking isn't always good for us you've got this problem of authoritarian regimes wanting to pass on power from generation to generation, but also in the corporate world. Here's a quote from a former head of Goldman Sachs, Gus Lebe who said we're greedy but long term greedy, not short term greedy. Well that's not the kind of cathedral thinking. I think that we need both people and planet to help all future generations to ensure our long term survival. We need to combine therefore cathedral thinking with other approaches to thinking long. And one of them is intergenerational justice, which is about thinking what are our responsibilities to future generations. How do we inject long term thinking into our political decision making structures and I have to admit here that you know I used to be a political scientist back in the 1990s apparently an expert on democracy. That's why I was told, but never once did it occur to me that we fail to give systematically fail to give voice to future generations that they are kept out of the demos, the, what counts as the people who was, whose voices are allowed to be heard. To you though listen to the voices of future generations and bring them into politics. Well, somebody mentioned there in the chat examples like ombudsman's for future generations like they've had in Israel and Hungary. Wales has a future generations commissioner. I'm particularly inspired by the native American idea of seventh generation decision making a kind of ethic of ecological stewardship ship. A lovely quote from Chief Oren Lyons from the Iroquois Confederacy who says, we are looking ahead, as is one of the first mandates given us as chiefs to make sure every decision we make relates to the welfare and well being of the seventh generation to come. And that's the basis by which we make decisions in council. Will this be to the benefit of the seventh generation. Now it's a beautiful idea but people sometimes say to me they say, oh well that's all very nice for Native American communities but what if you're living in the fast paced world of Miami or Shanghai or Dubai you know this is just doesn't make sense and I think well actually it's really interesting. How many movements around the world in different places have been inspired by the seventh generation idea. Here's one, a movement, an organization in the United States called our Children's Trust, which is a public interest law firm which has filed a landmark legal case against the US federal government level. On behalf of the 21 young people, you can see there who are campaigning for the legal right to a safe climate and healthy atmosphere for both current and future generations. This is one of the most extraordinary shifts in in the nature of rights since the French Revolution rights for people who may not be born for decades from now. And this is a David verse Goli struggle you know it's going to take years but our Children's Trust and these young people here called the Juliana 21 are inspiring landmark lawsuits worldwide in Uganda. In Colombia and in many other countries as well. In fact, you might know that there's currently a case where six young Portuguese people have, like, youths have taken 33 European countries to the European Court of Human Rights for violating or you know for failing to act on the climate emergency. So there's really interesting work here in the legal sphere and also, of course, not just rights for future people but rights for the living world is becoming increasingly important. There was someone in the chat there from out there in New Zealand where the Wanganui River, for example, has been given the same legal rights as a person or equally in India the Ganges and your moon rivers so that really important legal changes and our Children's Trust directly inspired by the seventh generation principle. But here's an organization in Japan, also inspired by the Iroquois seventh generation principle it's called future design directly inspired by the Native American ecological stewardship ideas of long term thinking. And future design is about local government decision making and what they do is they invite local people to discuss and draw up plans for the towns and cities where they live. And they typically split them into two groups, half of them are told their residents from the present day and the other half are given these ceremonial robes to wear that you can see there and told to imagine themselves as residents from the year 2060. And it turns out that the residents from 2060 systematically advocate far more transformative plans for the city from healthcare investment to climate change action. And future design is now moving and growing, and it's being used in big cities like Kyoto, Japan's Ministry of Finance companies like Fujitsu, and why not bring it to Belgium to get to Brussels, bring it all across Europe start using this and combining it with the really important energy behind this in assembly movements to inject more long termism into those deliberative democracy processes. And this is really all about giving a voice finding imaginative ways to give a voice to the generations of the future. There are other ways of doing it. I recently came across this example from the UK renewable energy company Good Energy, they're setting up a board, what they call the good futures board which will be made up of teenagers, who will be advocating for the rights of future generations, and speaking and advising the company and the regular board of directors now I don't know how much power they're going to have. Maybe it'll be symbolic let's see what happens. But I think this is a really good and creative initiative. So that's intergenerational justice but I want to just finally talk about the idea of developing a legacy mindset. Now, thinking about legacy I think is really fundamental here because clearly we are the inheritors of very extraordinary legacies from the past that we benefit from in many ways some sectors of society like medical advances made in the 19th century we still benefit from. And we're also inheritors are very negative and destructive legacies legacies of slavery slavery and colonialism and racism that are creating and do create deep inequities that must now be repaired, or legacies of economies that are structurally addicted to fossil fuels and capitalist growth that must now be transformed. And I guess the challenge here is to think about okay well what which legacies are we going to pass on some we want to pass on, and some we don't. Right. But there is a challenge on top of that which is really making that sense of visceral connection with those future generations who are out there decades maybe centuries from today. What do we make that connection and think about the kinds of legacies we want to leave them. Well, in order to do that, I think we need to tap into that acorn brain and our capacity to dance across time in our minds and I'd love to take you on a little imaginative thought experiment. If you'll do this for me just we'll just take a couple of minutes I'd like you to close your eyes. And I'd like you just to imagine with your eyes shot a young person in your life who you really care about. It could be a little brother or sister, or your own child or grandchild or a nephew or niece just picture their face. And now with your eyes still close I'd like you to imagine them 30 years in the future. Just pause for a moment and think about the joys they might be experiencing or the struggles they may be facing. And now with your eyes still shut. I'd like you to imagine them on their 90th birthday party they're 90 years old. They're my family and friends and loved ones and old work colleagues and neighbors. Now, what are they looking at outside the window. What kind of world is it out there. And now somebody comes over and puts a tiny baby into their arms. It's their first great grandchild who they know could live well into the 22nd century. The 90 year old is about to give their birthday speech their birthday speech but instead of giving a speech suddenly they see a photograph of you over on the table. And instead they decide to tell the gathered room about the legacy that you left them. They departed ancestor the legacy you left them and that you left for the world they live in. Just think for a few moments about what they said in their speech about you, they departed ancestor. And now I'd like you to open your eyes once again. Come back to the present moment. Now, I know that for some people that kind of imaginative journey short though it was can be very confronting particularly if you have a dark vision of the future. I think it's one important way we can try and connect on a personal level because certainly the way I think about this is look if I imagine I've got twins who are 12 years old now my, you know my daughter, you know when she's 90 years old and nearly the 20, you know, nearly 2100 or 2098. And when I think about her in that year in 2098. Well, I realized that she's not alone. When I do that imaginative exercise she's part of a community, the web of people and community that support her but also the web of the living world, the air she breathes in the water she drinks so what I think is that look if you if I care about her life, then I need to care about all life, you know, in a way that imaginative journey into someone from your own life your own family perhaps is a bridge to something more universal which is about caring about the universal strangers of the future in the world that they live in the planet the living world that they're part of. So I think this kind of legacy imagining can help us. And it's out of the present tense. And there's some really, I think, powerful projects particularly art projects actually which help us do exactly this and think about our legacies let me show you one of them. This is the future library, a 100 year art project developed by the Scottish artist Katie Patterson, where every year for 100 years a famous writer is donating a book, which will remain completely secret and unread in the future library until the year 2114, when the 100 books will be printed on paper made from 1000 trees, which have been planted in the forest outside Oslo. Many well known writers have donated books so far Margaret Atwood, Elif Shaffa, Hong Kong, the South Korean novelist, and they're never going to see those books published in their lifetimes and it really raises a question I think for each of us about the kinds of legacy gifts, the different kinds we might want to leave, depending on who we are for all those generations to come. But ultimately stepping back, I think what I'm talking about here is expanding our time horizons. It's about moving away from the seconds and minutes of that by now button and 24 seven news in the ups and downs the stock market to thinking on that scale of not just years but decades, centuries, and even millennia. Increasingly, we're living our lives in those seconds and minutes right at the top of that image you can see there, and we need to try and extend down towards those longer timeframes. It's difficult to do in a moment where people are faced with the tragedies and traumas of COVID-19, but there are these very long term challenges facing us and I think in a way if we're going to have a symbol that will lead us, I'm going to show you something that my daughter just gave me just to finish off. This is an acorn. This is going to grow into an oak tree, and she took an acorn and put it in tissue paper until it germinated and then put it in this glass. And if you can just look at those incredible roots growing. This has been growing since December the 21st since the winter solstice. It's going to stay in here for one year before it's I planted out. And then it may well survive for hundreds of years will be here long after me and my children are dead. It is, I think, in a way the ultimate symbol of what we need to do as a society that you can have all the sustainable development goals in the world. You can have all the good intention in the world but if you are still just caught in short term cycles politically, economically, socially, then it's going to be very difficult. You need to become the acorn planters of the future. And with that, I'd like to stop and I look forward to talking to Philson and seeing where the conversation goes. So thank you for listening. Thank you very much. I think that was very inspiring. And I must say the acorn that your daughter gave you is really beautiful gift. I remember when I was well I don't remember it because I was just born, but my family planted a tree as well. It's big now. And so I think in this that the what I find really central in your talk is the idea that we need new values and new goals for our societies and in that sense, the paradigm shift that we need. It's really the most important aspect if you want to really have this radical changes that we need, both on a social level, environmental level. In 1972, in the report of the limits to growth, Danela Meadows also she wrote a text on places to intervene in a system. So where if you have a system, what are the most important places to intervene to change it. And she said, well, the mindset of the people at the hardest to change but it's also the most important and I think that's that's really really central here. And on the, yeah, also this meditative exercise is very powerful because it gives you an emotional connection, it ties you to the past and to the future, and it becomes something really tangible. And I was wondering, feel some with your take was on this, on this, this, yeah, this connection that ties you to past and future and what this means for, for, for, for, yeah, for our descendants. Yeah, well, that bit got me, I must say quite emotional. If I'm being honest, because it's a, it's kind of exercise we do a lot. I am from a communal background, and for us, ancestors are very present, they are present, even when they are physically not around. And that very idea of their presence makes you think a different in a different way, at least if you're raised in that way. So when I first came to Belgium, 10 years ago, it was very, very weird for me to be, all of a sudden quite afflicted with the level of individualism. That I sought to, to try and create community ever since I couldn't place that idea of being or being living for myself, or just being alive for the very, the needs that are quite right there in front of my face and not actually talking about what it is that, that my existence actually means that was easier to do back home because I felt like there was proximity. So there's this thing my grandmother used to tell us a lot. When we were a little bit too caught up with the world, she would tell us to always imagine ourselves. So this is the form of the exercise we would do. So we would always imagine ourselves in a long line where we would stand as a family, like the family member. So if you were the first born to your father or your parents, then you would stand at the first and then followed by your siblings and such which. And then she would say, look to your left and then look to your right and in front of you would see your ancestors and then you would see your descendants. And because both are present, it means you're okay. Because your ancestors are present in when you were okay, if your descendants were present in when you were fine in this time. And it was, it's an exercise I found myself doing a lot. Just to kind of reorient myself when I came to Belgium. So this idea of finding a connection I guess is quite integral and essential to me, but even right now we are preparing for Black History Month Belgium and we're talking about archiving, we're talking about history and we're talking about, and we decided to take it all the way back. So to try and see how we archived before the disruption of colonialism and it was oral and so history embodied in the person, legacy embodied in a family. And so this idea just speaks really, really deeply to me in a way that I think makes it easier probably for me to do the exercise and connect on that level. So I guess my question would be then how do we make it more tangible for for for folks to understand and see what we're trying to say when we say let's think about the legacy we're leaving behind and how integral and important that legacy is and can be for generations to come. Well, I love that question and the exercise that your, or what your grandmother said to you is incredibly powerful and very, very beautiful as well. And it reminds me of I was speaking to one of my cousins, who is half Maori, and you know they talk about this concept of Faka Papa, which I think is the word for genealogy or lineage, the idea that you're all, you know, in that's that idea in a great chain that goes long into the past and and far into the future and the light happens to be shining on the here and now. And I think what we need to do is you know shine that white light more brightly which is, as you were saying it's sort of turning left and turning right and seeing yourself as part of that line and I guess. Well, in fact, you just asked me the question that I really wanted to ask you, you know, which is, how, how do we try and make that kind of ancestral connection and thinking stronger when I think particularly in Western society when we're so severed and kind of cut, you know, cut by consumer culture, cut by the self help industry, all these things which keep us in a very narrow sense of what who I am. You know, there's no connection between me and the generations in the past and the generations in the future. There's no connection for me culturally between me and the living world or it's very, you know, one has to work hard. I look out the window of my study where I am now and I know there's a beautiful ash tree there and that tree creates enough oxygen for four human beings. So it's my external lungs. I kind of know that on an intellectual level but do I feel it. It's hard to feel like it's hard to feel that the living and the dead and the unborn are all here in the room with me. And, you know, maybe the answer to the question partly is just for us to be talking like this, you know, to know that people have even in Western culture wasn't so long ago that people, a lot of people felt embedded in communities and families and could, you know, a lot of people are interested in family history, for example, they can, you know, draw the lines, you know, but it doesn't necessarily connect them with the with the future and what can I say one final thing, I had this really interesting talk the other day with a Buddhist monk called Shokai Matsumoto. He's a very famous Japanese Buddhist monk. And he was saying that he he'd read my book The Good Ancestor and what struck him was that in Japanese Buddhist culture where there's a strong culture of ancestor worship and connection, he said, to be honest, we don't really look forward so much. We do a lot of looking back and not as much looking forward and maybe we need to look more forward so I'm interested in your thoughts on your thoughts really on how do we make the connection closer maybe that's what partly you're doing with Black History Month and other things. Yeah, for Black, at least for diasporic Africans, the idea behind connecting with our histories is kind of introducing disruption to the linear modes of thinking of Western thinking so through art, through just the idea that we exist in and of themselves in these communities or in as part of the structures that honestly try every day to to to for lack of a better term kill us. So there is this idea that you're always standing on something you're never on your own. There's nothing about you that is in the that is that is not informed by where you come from and who you are where you come from in the in in your lineage but also where you come from in your community. Somalis have many people would think that this may be a bad idea but Somalis have tribes in that we can trace all the way back to the your tribal mother. So, I just by calling your name so just by saying my name is Phyllis and I'm telling you who my father grandfather great grandfather great great grandfather is and in that way there is also already a connection every time you say my name you're saying you're invoking my ancestors. There's this also idea that whenever you need help or whenever you are you are you are confronted with a decision that you just invoke the people who are there before you invoke their strength you invoke all the things that they left behind you invoke their legacies and you you kind of put yourself in perspective that way because you're like they've been through worse and they survived I have been through worse than I've survived. And the fact that I'm still here means that this problem is not going to be some problem that I cannot solve it just needs me to kind of frame it in a way that makes it possible. So, for me, I think the biggest thing that I noticed at least the difference that I noticed when I came to Belgium was proximity, proximity to elders and intergenerational proximity was something that that I found quite quickly in Belgium. First of all, they were entirely they were entirely way more older people than I've ever seen in my life. But they were always grouped together away from one another and so young people always group together away from one another and there was kind of there is no way in which the generations can inform one another because there is this idea that maybe the time has passed and it's our time now and then this very, very this concentration or this fetishization of youth and then we and in in that process also forgetting what what what what being old can mean in our now cultures, yes, you're surrounded by your your your extended family, you're surrounded, but I grew up with my grandmothers and my great grandmothers and my grandfathers that were all there. They were all there from the time I can remember, I would look around and see them. See, they taught me some of the most important things that I I consider my life right now. My grandmother taught me how to pray. It wasn't something my parents did with my grandmother's so there's this connection that I will always have that is very visceral and very real with the different generations of my family. I'm the oldest of nine nine children and then if you add stepbrothers and step sisters we are almost 20 and the youngest is 10 and I just turned 30 that the fact that she is someone that I can even like that I connect with all the time that I keep in contact with all the time keeps that that legacy going so I think for me I don't know what play I think proximity really really does play a very big role that idea of bringing people back into the family home like today earlier we had this that I mentioned that we were doing we were looking for homes and we went to ask for advice for advice and we just happened to be just happens to be us and our mother and they were like oh it's going to be very hard because if you were if you were if it is your mom and her husband and her kids are much easier but it's because it's your mom and her kids is going to be much harder and I was like what why why why would it be much harder than she she the person advising us was said well it's because it's because you will find you would you would want to get a family and you would leave the home and I looked at her I said no no can I just say on the other hand you know that often there's a lot of conflict between generations too because you know I know a lot of young people in the UK who are very angry with the older generation who voted for Brexit who don't care about climate change who and they say that they you know they don't care about the fact that we can't afford our housing and we're now we've got these enormous debts to deal with and they're these sort of challenges to between the generations. Yeah, but I think but this isn't also a little bit informed by the idea of proximity because we live so much apart from one another, our values and ideas are also going to kind of progress apart from one another if if you're if somebody if someone older than you kind of has the idea is also raised in that communal idea that they are whatever they leave behind is for you and you for your descendant then that kind of eases a bit of that friction most of the friction is coming from again that idea that we are individuals and so even when you have this when you when you talk right now even when you're talking about student debt crisis in the United States you have people saying they don't want Biden to cut the student debt crisis because they had to pay it and wouldn't be fair if generations after them didn't have to pay it and you have to like I had sometimes I would put on my phone and think this is the most mental thing I have ever heard what like why would you not want that so yes I do understand that there are some problems between the generations but I honestly also do believe that that is informed by proximity I feel like if there was more dialogue those things would would would progress a different way they would move a different way it would feel different to be palatable in a different way I'm not saying it's a perfect model of living I'm just saying that from what I have come across it is it has worked best for me and what I'm finding activist circles and within the black community and the African diaspora is that need to go back to that to at least draw inspiration from that way of organizing society more open and honest composition between the generations for the betterment of the ones who are not here because one of the other things that also strikes me in this area is just the fact that if you think far enough into the future well the future is going to be inhabited by young people older people whatever everybody right and they all need the same basic things you know when it when it comes I mean at the most fundamental level and that is to be able to be within a biosphere in which they can survive you know to to have the air to breathe in the and the water to drink and that in a way goes back to what money money was talking about the limits to growth and donella meadows you know at some fundamental level when we see that world and that world that is coming that we need to be thinking in this very holistic way about our fundamental values about what we share and of course as donella meadows was saying about working on that paradigm level what are the values that we care about but I think these we need different we need many many kinds of values I think for a long term sustainable future that those family ones that you're talking about I think is a really good example of they can be very personal you know the values of family and community and faith and all those things which connect with that larger one about the value of being you know having a responsibility for people and planet and generations to come like that seventh generation ideal if I can just say something I think that this is also for me the example of the student marches for the climate marches is just it really shows this it's kind of yeah this severe ties in a certain way to me because it's really for me it felt like they really didn't feel understood like the real the students who were marching on the streets for for their future really felt like hey what are you doing and this like you say Philson this connection or these these dialogues that are sometimes missing if if young people for example are not into they're not integrated in the political system they can't vote they whereas it's really about their future and I think this is really an important friction that is yeah that we can we need to overcome there was another book that I was actually reading quite along the same lines as the good ancestor that was written by Adrian Merlin Brown about emergent strategy that I read earlier last year and where she tries to I don't leave alone I live with a lot of people and sometimes they are noisy so please excuse them so she was talking about emergent strategy as a response to the natural that the natural world has to the existing environment that it finds itself it's very community based and it's creating resilient robust community outside of the structures that exist so I think I don't know if we can always only rely on the structures that do exist to kind of change and form themselves in a way that make the change that we need possible I think there's also got to be a kind of grassroots bottom up kind of way of looking at how we can organize community and organize ourselves in a way that makes these robust and resilient futures possible because all of the solutions that you propose in the book are quite in scale very big and it can be hard to kind of vision to see that if what you're used to is living is kind of always getting change from the top bottom and I think that's what the students were when protesting all over the world for climate change we're trying to get everyone to see it's like we cannot wait for existing structures to kind of move these things further we also have to as citizens of the world kind of come together and kind of create communities that do not necessarily need to be informed by existing structures I don't know if you agree that change has to be institutional but it's not it cannot be the only change otherwise it would have happened a long time ago yeah I mean absolutely I mean I think changes has to happen on multiple levels as you were just talking there I was thinking about that future design movement in Japan and in one city where they were doing it called Uji the local government had invited citizens to do this dressing up in citizens from 2060 and making city plans but after the process was finished the citizens themselves set up their own future design group and now they invite the local politicians to come and join them and it was a very nice example I think of new forms of community building and spreading through using these more imaginative kind of mechanisms but there are of course there are questions you know can we spread these kinds of ideas fast enough like can we spread the circular economy you know fast enough can we shift to post growth regenerative economies fast enough and you know we are facing a challenge of such scale I mean I remember a few years ago when it really struck me I mean this might sound completely obvious to you but it wasn't to me but that some of the fundamental institutions that we have like consumer capitalism representative democracy nation states were born in the Holocene you know they are products of the 18th and 19th century and they are no longer fit for purpose in the Anthropocene so they are not designed for the kinds of challenges we face like long term challenges around climate and sea level rises and things like that they are not designed for that so we need different institutions and then that raises the question okay you're right I mean big institutions can seem so far away from our everyday lives and so difficult to change how do we possibly do that and do that fast enough you know and that's very difficult but one of the places I find hope this is maybe going in a slightly different direction but you know in the 18th century there was a Scottish economist Adam Smith who apparently at the time didn't even realize there was an industrial revolution emerging around him he couldn't see it because it was too fragmented you know and that's partly how where I find hope because if you connect the dots between all sorts of long term regenerative action just think you've got the donut economics adopted in Amsterdam for city planning then that's then being copied by Copenhagen then copied by Kali in Columbia and then by the government of Costa Rica using the donut as a donut economics as a model that's just one example of sort of regenerative thinking and then you've got all the legal movements campaigning for rights for future generations then you've got all the people who are you know people in the black lives matter movement talking about intergenerational racism like Leila F. Sard who wrote a wonderful book called me and white supremacy and on the first page she talks about being a good ancestor you know recognition of the sort of intergenerational nature of racial injustice and I think I guess this is maybe what change looks like but you're right it does of course have to come from the grass roots because the elite politicians at the top they don't feel it you know and and this is the message of Jared diamonds book collapse about the collapse of civilizations why do civilizations collapses is one of the main reasons is because the elites and economic and political power protect themselves from the impacts of what they've created and they drive their civilizations into the ground yes sorry because and did you want to say something no I was just nodding agree in that sense I think when you say that Adam Smith didn't even realize that the industrial revolution was going on and that you know it just it was created and it became so big the right now the economic system is also well hugely problematic and there is one question in the in the chat box from Alexandra and she asks so what is the alternative that we should look for to the current system so to the current economic capitalist system focused on continuous growth Wilson do you want to answer that answer that you can start I can start you start well I mean I guess one one answer that is what I mentioned like the you know that I think the great thing about this moment in history we're in is that it's very different from after the 2008 financial crisis in the sense that I think there are more alternative ideas lying around you know one of the tragedies of 2008 crisis was that we basically bailed out the banks and kept the old system right but now we've got models like all sorts of people who are thinking about regenerative economies like Kate Rayworth's donor economics model like the circular economy model people interested in degrowth so they're very clear alternatives out there I mean I happen to be a fan of donor economics but you know there are other you know people there are well being economy frameworks and other things as well so I think we're not lacking alternatives the question is trying to get enough cultural energy let's say and political energy around challenging and changing economic structures I mean one of the very bad things that's happened in the UK this week which is that the finance ministry the Treasury commissioned a report on biodiversity it's called the dusk gupta report and it's come out it's very it's 600 pages long so many started reading it but it hasn't embraced the regenerative economy it's it's caught in national capital accounting natural capital accounting and things like this it's you know it's these are massive struggles but I think the alternatives are out there you know where people are doing them like the city of Amsterdam you know Amsterdam you know just one example but you know they got policies in place now 50% circular by 2030 100% circular by 2050 by 2022 I think 10% of city procurement you know the stuff that is bought by the council by the city has to be circular you know and these are real changes you know and businesses then have to follow this is tough stuff indeed and then also on this topic for example also Helsinki is doing really great work I saw that they were they will be completely cloud neutral by 2035 so I think on the scale of other places that's really good and I just say with Helsinki also there's a if anybody's really interested in this stuff there's a finish government sort of government funded think tank about the future called sitra SITRA have really good materials around regenerative economies long term thinking future literacy and things like that they called sitra but sorry Madi Monique I interrupted you No I was just looking at some of the other questions that have been put in the chat and there is one person who is asking so should we then curb the freedom of consumers then and he is referring to Zignan Bauman so I was wondering what your take was on this considering the magnitude of the problems Wilson do you have some thoughts Yes the question would be what how do you define yourself as a consumer if to continue means to rob future generations of the right to live then maybe we need to redefine what it means to be a consumer and kind of think about how housing which way the ways in which we can introduce radical love and care to how we structure the economy and politics and all of these institutions that have an actual real implication on how we live our lives I think when we were talking about these kinds of things we often kind of frame them in ways where we are stopping ourselves from doing things like not being like stopping curbing consumerism or curbing this or curbing that maybe it would be interesting to reframe it in a way where you're like you're not curbing consumerism you're just granting yourself and fellow humans a different way in which to approach the future I think we need to stop coming from places of lack and scarcity and more but talk about abundance because the world is abundant and the solutions to these problems are as abundant as the people on the planet so let's give us a little bit more credit I mean I'm actually agree with you very much there Philsen about the need to reframe the way we think about the relationship between consumerism and freedom I mean I'm all in favour of putting curbs on consumer choices why well we've been doing it for hundreds of years and it's been okay one of the big curbs that occurred in the and limits put on consumer choices in the 18th century was the abolition of slavery and the slave trade in some countries now that's a struggle that's gone on for a long time and continues to go on because of debt bondage but if I if I live in England it's no longer easy for me to buy and sell a slave that's a choice I don't have to own another human being to make my dinner for me now of course it gets played out in all sorts of other ways you know with the inequalities you know with migration refugees and so on but we do put limits and so it no longer is a kind of freedom that I feel I should have by right to buy and sell a slave you know and it felt okay to many parts of the world in the 18th century in Russia and you know colonial countries in all sorts of places so then we move today we put limits on the kinds of things that we can make choices about you know these things again happen all the time if I I don't live in London but I'm not allowed to drive a car into London without paying a fee you know you know I have to pay however much money it is and then one day you know I think we should be putting limits on the amount of airplane flights that people can take of course you know but it doesn't mean that there is no freedom left you know I just put my freedom in other areas and as Wilson is saying there is the abundance in all sorts of other realms you know I don't need to feel I find my meaning by saying I shop therefore I am you know I can find my meaning by look can I tell you something I did yesterday which gave me great joy I organize my son who's 12 to play chess online with my father who's 87 and lives in Australia a small thing it brought me such joy you know and yes we had to buy a bit of internet time I guess and things like that but it wasn't a consumer choice it was a family connection intergenerational choice and oh it was wonderful and there is Durgis asking so do you see ways to turn this extreme sense of individualism into more a sense of community again and I guess also how well let me just say something briefly about that then maybe Philson you can say something you know I where is it down here I once wrote this book called empathy a handbook for revolution okay but now let me show you something okay when the US United States edition came out they changed the name to empathy why it matters and how to get it so this was the for an individualistic culture something was all about me me me me here it was about revolutionary social change but you know part of the answer the question I think is about how we shift from me to we and there's so many ways to think about that but this let me give you just one example in Canada there is a wonderful education project called roots of empathy like the roots of a tree and what they do is they invite babies into the classroom so kids between the age of about five and ten a real baby comes in with a parent and instructor from the program and the kids sit around the baby and they start talking about the baby why is the baby crying why is the baby laughing they're trying to step into the baby's shoes they're trying to empathize what's called cognitive empathy and they then use that as a jumping off point for talking about well what's it like to be a kid living on the streets of Kolkata or to be an old person and old people's home or something like that and then what's it like to they also talk about empathy with future generations who is this baby going to be in the future so it's an education program over a million children have done this roots of empathy it's one of the ways just one that we tackle the deep individualism that we've inherited but I'm sure you have thoughts. I feel like individualism in and of itself is informed a lot by this disconnect between one another so not only from one another but also from yourself this idea that we are we only matter because we are able to produce a certain amount of wealth for a certain amount of people and that's who and what we are we are mostly just workers working for the elite. I feel like empathy require the individualism collectivism requires for us to kind of like kind of see one another again kind of reintroduce ourselves to each other and leave room and space for mistakes and room and space for conflict without kind of not having like without taking away the other person's humanity so Bell Hooks was talking about collective who do you want to be in your collective so she was talking about community and she said community is very easy to have the people you love and people you like it's when you have to invite people you do not that you're actually talking about radical love and radical change and inclusion in so you're trying to make people almost everybody a part of your extended family. Even though they might have ideas or thoughts that do not sometimes push with yours because she then talked about how she found community with a middle-aged white man who was not the biggest feminist on the planet but his daughter was and his daughter loved Bell Hooks and read all of her books and while she was alive we tell him to read her books, read your books like you will understand more of what I'm saying if you just understand what Bell Hooks if you could just read what I read or kind of she was looking for a way to connect with him then she tragically died in a car accident and he found himself going into her things and he found Bell's books and started reading them and contacted Bell and Bell was kind of trying to bring him into her circle and then of course then she would have some flak her peers asking her are you sure you want to be hanging around with a middle-aged white man you know it's like not cool she literally said it wasn't cool but he taught her a lot about what it meant to empathize with somebody put yourself in somebody else's shoes and kind of see someone through a process of discovery and understanding and so I think in order for us to kind of move more towards the we way of thinking we kind of had to kind of re-establish connection with one another and re-establish a way in which we can build upon a relationship in which we can then kind of move into the world a different way where Adrian's book, Adrian Marie Brown, she's talking about imagine strategy is talking about using even the home and households as a place where we can build roots and then those roots will connect to other households and it will be an entire system an ecosystem so kind of trying and foster ecosystems trying to foster community I'm a very easy way of being able to get him to know your neighbors kind of bringing some kind of neighborhood I wouldn't say neighborhood watch because I saw it right but a kind of collective like I have the most engaged neighbor really like next to me, Miriam, she was somebody who has changed where we live the face of the neighbor we live in because she has opened her door up for everyone and has tried very hard to engage with the community around you so try I think the more there are big ways in which we can do the small tiny ways in which we can try and do this is engage with one another, engage with people closest to you, re-establish connections and move in from there you start small steps in them hopefully we start to see all of humanity as part of our community and all of humanity as part of our family can I just add a little something to that which you just made me think of as you were speaking there Phyllis in terms of putting your roots into your community but also putting your roots into the past and having sometimes the uncomfortable encounters you're talking about Bell Hooks that man I was just thinking about how remember last summer when there was a protest in the city where I live in Oxford to bring down a statue of Cecil Rhodes who was one of the architects of apartheid and so I went there with my partner and we sat in the middle of the street and blocked the street with other protestors about this statue and I had this very interesting experience because the statue of Cecil Rhodes this key figure in the apartheid regime was as part of a building in Oxford University where I had studied as an undergraduate so on the one hand on my left hand side was I was a product of this white privilege this inheritance on this side and then I suddenly realized that about 200 meters in the other way was another library where I used to study 30 years ago which was called the Codrington library but it was built from slave money sugar plantations in the Caribbean and I felt like in this kind of pincer movement this thing of my own history of the privilege I was always carrying around with me and then I had this other thought which was a kind of a more profound one in a way that I was thinking about when I was a child growing up in Sydney and I walked into my high school for the first day local government high school was 11 12 years old and I suddenly thought huh what made it possible for me to walk into that high school it's because these were stolen lands this land was stolen right but I had never been taught that it had never occurred to me until I was 49 years old you know and so I just think we need to have these conversations with our pasts and I think these are one of the ways of you also overcome that individualistic myopia of the present I think that was what is so interesting about the wordage in the book, the good ancestors, it really made me think why would someone talk about an ancestor because the ways in which we talk about ancestors would be classified as woo-woo in the West and so it was so interesting to me that if a white man was writing a book about the white and being a good ancestor and I was thinking how did you even come to choose that, you know you could have easily just said we are trying to make sure that future generations are, you could have centered the book around future generations and tried to say yeah we are trying to find ways and modes of existing that does not jeopardize future generations but you decided to pull the idea of ancestry in there that idea of history and one of the things that I have noticed very much like we as people of color are very very connected to our ancestors and our ancestry because of the the disruption of colonialism and so we had to go back to try and find and kind of piece together our own histories and our own stories but that disruption has not existed by the oppressor and so I feel for like for Western culture it is the separation between ancestor and you as an individual now is something that was that it's almost chosen, it's almost something that was chosen like it wasn't informed by trauma, it wasn't informed by separation or forced a forced separation and so when we were earlier when we were discussing, earlier last year we were discussing Adrian Marie Brown's book I had this, I made this plea to everyone in the audience and I asked them to connect with their ancestors and talk to their ancestors and heal those wounds because in order for them to heal wounds here now with the people around them they're going to have to heal generational wounds as well, they also have generational work to do just like we do and a few people worked out but but it was such an interesting concept to introduce and I wonder if for you it was also something that you had to kind of overcome in a way when you were looking into writing the book Well I think, I mean just to say something briefly on this is that you know I'm a child of refugees and you know my father was a refugee from Poland to Australia after the Second World War and in fact just the other day I was involved in making a TV program for a Dutch TV program called Teikendlich, I think it's called Teikendlich, and they asked me to find family photos, well most of my family photos were destroyed in the Second World War there's not you know the photos going back to then but nothing before and many of the memories have been destroyed by war as well and the family connections and the ancestral connections and things so I think you know if I'm looking for the deeper psychological reasons maybe why I wrote this book you know as well as caring about future generations and caring about the kind of conceptual emergency of our lack of thinking about long-term thinking I think it's also and I'm just realizing this now it's part of a way of trying to make more of an intergenerational connection in my own life because it's been partly severed by you know capitalist consumer structures but it's also been severed by geography, war, you know many of my relatives were murdered in the Holocaust their stories are gone you know they were my rabbi great-grandfather had to dig his own grave and was shot in it you know and all his family except one survivor you know and so but you carry this with you you know knowing that there's an ancestry there but it's sort of difficult to as much I think Sadia Hartmann's work has come to mean a lot to me in that she talks about going back into the archive and then critical fantabulation and going back into the archive and then creating your own idea of what could have happened with the information that you can find so this puzzle you kind of put together and kind of like you cement it with your own hopes of what that could have meant for your ancestor and for you now so yeah I could talk about it forever I'm sure there are other questions in the chat that we need to answer I actually have a question myself because the as you wrote in the book it's really hard for us on the one hand you can say that we're homo prospectus so that we can really plan in the long term and that we can actually be good at it and on the other hand there is the distraction or the present day that yeah that we struggle with this finding this connection and kind of putting ourselves into the future and my question was so this idea of intergenerational justice is really an important one and it's very powerful but I wonder how can we take care or how can we put our energy and our time into taking care of the well-being of people that are not even there yet when there are so many people in the world still today who are living in dreadful conditions and then I think caution we take care of them first and then of the others or I was wondering what your perspective was on this yes I mean the the comedian groucho Marx once said why should I care about future generations what have they ever done for me and but I think that's a real issue for in real people's lives because they're dealing with their own shit that's going on in their life right there are 220 million migrants and refugees around the world there'll be 450 million by 2050 probably so they're dealing with their immediate problems of course I think one of the things that I found really fascinating research in this book is to discover how much long term thinking there is in communities who are on the socio economic margins you know that I mean if you think of Native American communities who are using seventh generation decision making they're not privileged members of society with great amounts of security quite the opposite yet they still have the cultural connection with the long term and between the interdependence with the living world the same with Maori communities in Aotearoa New Zealand or often you find them amongst the refugee communities I grew up with who are really caring about wanting to pass on culture for example language food all sorts of things and often the narrowest sense of long term thinking and legacy comes from the most privileged parts of society oh I'm a aristocrat who wants to pass on my house to my child and I don't really care about anybody else but of course there are tensions here you know between the emergencies of the present and the emergencies of the future what does one do and I think there are no easy answers here what I do know of course is the way for example government governments make decisions about the long term is they you know anyone who's studied any economics will know about the idea of discounting the way when governments make long term investment decisions they literally diminish the value of future people when they're doing cost benefit analysis and that is a great form of intergenerational justice which must be you know challenged so I think it is hard to one more thing I would say is that if you look at the future generations commissioner in Wales when she faces this problem what she does is she tends to focus her name Sophie Howe she's really fantastic she tries to focus on policies that help both future and current and future generations as a sort of a bridge so things like you know green energy you know green transport infrastructure and things like that you know it doesn't solve all problems but it's a it's a way of bringing people and other politicians along for the beginning of the journey let's say towards a longer now civilization but you know none of this is easy stuff yeah I think I would just add that taking care of one another also means that you're taking care of future generations just come back to that thought experiment where you're standing in the middle you look to your left and you look to your right if you see your ancestors and your descendants then you know you're okay so take care of the now so that you can take care of the later and because they took care of their now you exist so it's almost time so I think we're going to do a last question and I am quickly looking for the question that so Mary was asking how can I inspire other people in daily life to think in this kind of way ah how do you inspire other people I tell you where I think in a way it goes back to something Philson was talking about which is about in a sense the power of conversation I just want to show you something very briefly I can in this my copy of this book so I can find the right page ah I wish I could show you on the screen probably but here in the book is a menu of conversation questions questions to have with family and loved ones and strangers about long term thinking like what legacy do you want to leave for your family your community for the living world or what for you are the most powerful reasons for caring about future generations I think in a sense so much social transformation comes from conversation actually saying things you haven't said before to people you maybe don't talk about things with very much this is the like the mycorrhizal connections of the roots you know that I think is so fundamental so you know there's a million things you know although I believe these problems we face are of such urgency we must act collectively absolutely but I also believe we need to have these conversations to make it normal to talk about ancestors Philson you and I we can talk about this for hours probably everybody can if you're in the space but this is the bridge you know this is part of it and I think it connects with you know we all get slightly bored looking at human development reports and statistics about you know SDGs and so on and they have their role but we also need to be having face to face conversations talking about those very issues that's where the values change in us and kind of our own abilities to to have those conversations without it being weird trust the transformative nature of being present in your body and holding space for somebody else to be presenting theirs and sharing that experience in humanity I think that's a great way in which we can end I want to thank everyone and especially the speakers for attending tonight