 But if I take a look at how everything is interconnected, the wars that we're having, the geopolitical standoffs, it's all about resources. It's all about energy. It's all about fighting for having this top one position and the whole energy value chain. We're talking about oil. We're talking about access to information. We're talking about access to data. Pascal Morgan is my guest on this episode of Inside Ideas, brought to you by 1.5 Media, Innovators Magazine, and sponsored by the Aloha's Regenerative Foundation. Pascal is a technology pioneer, creative thinker, passionate speaker, and cross industry digital transformation advisor. As the founder of ThinkSpeak Transform, he looks back at over 30 years in IT, technology, media, and innovation as executive and strategist for Fortune 500 companies and industry leaders, such as Coca-Cola, Deutsche Telecom, AOL, and Pixel Park. He is a member of the faculty at Future IO Institute, a good friend, and we're also on that faculty together at Future IO Institute. For Emerging Technologies, a senior mentor at German Tech Business Coach for startups, co-founder of the company Builder United Peers, and previous board member of the European Technology Chamber, and chairman of their Academy Commission. Driven by exploring, connecting, and researching on transformation, disruptive technologies, and new business models, global societal challenges for a sustainable future. With a love for coffee, gadgets, and especially people, I'd like to welcome my friend Pascal Morgan and welcome to the podcast. Thanks for being on. Well, first of all, thank you for inviting me, and thank you for having me, and thanks for that kind and warm welcome. I feel very humbled, and I have to say, in the very beginning, there are 1,000 people out there. There are 1,000 times smarter than me, and that's why I feel very honored to have that conversation with you, Mark. You know, I'm a big fan of yours, of your work, and we've been connected now for several years now. And I love you more. Yeah, but almost 2015 or a little bit more, somewhere around there, I think. Yeah, so our paths have crossed over the years, for sure. So, I mean, it's an honor to be there. We've worked on many projects together, many books, many masterclasses together. So I'm glad we finally have the time. We've wanted to connect all the time where just both of our schedules are so busy, it just never happened. So we're gonna make this podcast kind of a reconnection and let people get a deeper dive into you, your transformation, and what you do. First and foremost, I'm not sure, but correct me if I'm wrong, if Think, Speak, Transform was around when we first met. And if it wasn't, or if it wasn't the making, I would kind of want you to tell us a little bit about that, how it's come to life and what you do with it, and why did you choose that and give us a little update on where you're at, what's going on? Yeah, thanks for that, Mark, and a very good question, because it actually touches back on where I come from and also my roots. So I think when we met, I think it was in the transition phase, I was still in corporate, at my last corporate gig as CIO Germany and IT Innovation Director Europe for the Coca-Cola company. And I was in a transition of moving out and I was asking myself, what do I stand for? What is my brand? What do I want to do? What is my legacy? And it was really interesting. I worked together with a very good coach and friend of mine at the time, trying to find out what really motivates me. What is my intrinsic motivation? Why am I here? What is my purpose? And I remember, I mean, I started my career around 30 years ago within IT and digital. And at the time, I actually was studying philosophy in Frankfurt, here in Germany, actually, Adorno, Habermas, I mean, those are the big, the modern day philosophers. And I remember the Philosophical Institute in the Dantestrasse next to the Goethe University in Böckenheim in Frankfurt. So I was studying philosophy. I was an artist. I studied dance and choreography parallel to my school and my university studies. And I thought I was gonna be an artist, an artist and a thinker and really absorbing society, absorbing all the impulses, processing that, metabolizing that and bringing out artistic output. And I was working at the Frankfurt Book Fair as a student because I have to finance myself because as a choreographer and dancer, you don't really earn that much money. We were part of the founding companies, dance companies in Frankfurt for the Muzantum at the time was actually the first big off theater space in the area. And we're very proud of that. It was the fiest Tanztheater Frankfurt together with the Vivien Newport Company. I noticed going a little bit more into a different direction now, but it was still referring back to my roots. I mean, what motivated me. And we'll talk about that in a second because that's very important to me. What does it mean, personal resilience and personal transformation and also purpose which is a very, very personal answer for everybody of us, right? So going back, I was working as a student at the Frankfurt Book Fair to finance my university studies and to finance my art. And I was working at the postal department and we're talking at the beginning of the 90s and the postal department then talking about GDPR and data privacy. I mean, I had to open every letter as a student worker, opened every letter and took a look at was this addressed to the right department? Was this addressed to the right person? I have to make photocopies, put it on a stamp with the date, you know, when it came in this letter. And I put it into these compartments and then, you know, twice a day I would collect all the mail and all the parcels that arrive in the boxes. And I would then go through the whole Frankfurt Book Fair. This was called the Ausstellungs-Messegie-MBH Dispers und Vereins des Deutschen Buchhandels and would deliver the mail. Now, after like working for a year there you get to know everybody. You get to know all the departments, international departments, the publishing rights departments, the ones that interface the publishing houses and so forth. You get into conversations, you understand how the company works, the processes. You get really a deep dive into the whole publishing industry, into the whole media industry. You get exposed to all of that. And I had an idea one day. Actually, I really didn't have this idea. I just got into a conversation with the Book Fair Director because his secretary was out so I brought him the mail personally. And I was just telling him, I think your IT sucks. So at the time the IT department wasn't very evolved. Everything was outsourced. There were a couple of external advisors coming in and helping the Book Fair and I just said, well, I think some people in some departments, they're aching. They're not connected. There's no core database and all these kinds of things. I felt the competency to say something because at home I had an Atari and I was using the Atari to produce some of the music for my dance events. So I have felt the competency to speak up. And that's this funny thing with sender and recipient. And it took several years, many years later to really understand what happened in that moment because I think what he really said was, Pascal, come back at a later time. I really don't have time for you right now and we'll talk about it. But what I heard was, Pascal, great idea. Think about it. Come back to me with a concept and we'll discuss. So two months later, I delivered a 30 page concept, a document with my proposal on how to set up a new network infrastructure, how to integrate the IBM AS 400 and 36 mid and mainframe computers, how to actually reestablish a whole company network, also to attach an external department over a wide area network and everything. And he looked at it, he said, Pascal, I have to get this checked by somebody externally to see if this is actually legit. And a week later, he called me and said, Pascal, do you wanna do it? So, I mean, this is a lot of fun, sounds like a lot of fun and you're grinning the whole time, but just to be serious, do you really wanna do it? And I said, yes. And everything else is history from then on. So I broke my heart because I stopped my dance and my choreography and my artistic part. I also even stopped my philosophy studies and I became the head of IT and New Media Product Development because it was also on my table then to produce the first book fair CD-ROM and also to launch the very first book fair website that was 1993, 1994. And yeah, I was then the lead of the Frankfurt Book Fair IT for five years. And that's how my whole IT and digital career started 30 years ago. And yeah, that's a bit to my story. So to answer your question, things speak transform. So when I left Coca-Cola and don't get me wrong, it was a very, very good experience, great professionals, great colleagues, very interesting brand. I mean, they hire the best brand and marketing people you can find on the market. So for me, it was a very intense learning, but at the same time, I was always conflicted with these questions of it's a company making a product, the world doesn't need that everybody wants. And the question around sustainability, around purpose, in this whole field, I'm very thankful and grateful for working at this company, but it also made me refocus and re-question some of the things that drive me personally. And they have a very extensive CSR program, which at the time it was five by 20 or the Eco Center, for instance, getting like 1500 ship containers retrofitted with drilling mechanisms. So send that out to sub-Sahara Africa into rural areas and give them a way to drill into the ground and get fresh water supply. These kinds of programs were a mind-opener or at the time the project honesty, which has changed now, unfortunately, they've sold out of it. When I was at Coca-Cola, this was a new way of getting farmers in local farmers from India that are planting organically, organic tea. And so those kinds of programs opened or wide my horizon, at the end of the day, I asked myself, what do I want to stand for? And that's why I said, okay, well, philosophy, I think, I love speaking, I love communicating, I love connecting with people. Yeah, more like, you know, the Socrates concept of things is learning by exchange and by communication and by reflecting. And so speak. And then of course my own personal transformation story and also being part of a larger transformational movement. And that's why I think, speak and transform. I love it, I absolutely love it. Thank you for answering that. And I'm glad that you gave us the long form because that's important, we want to hear it all, which has opened up many other questions, which are right down the alley of how we normally do the podcast. And so I'm gonna just, we're gonna, we've started out slow enough that we're gonna go into some depth and substance. First and foremost, in case anybody's just asking the question out there. So you speak wonderful German, English is excellent. What is your heritage? Where are you from? How do we understand it? You've got beautiful complexions. So there might be some more things in there. I would love to hear that. And then I wanna really get into the more transformation and thought process behind some things. Yeah, so thanks for that very important question. I mean, our future should not be defined by our past, but our past is the history of our learning and gives us the tools and the capabilities to challenge or to better say, face the challenges of the future. So in that sense, I am proud of my heritage. And thanks for asking that because that's been something that has always defined me has always been a challenge for me as well to find my way through society, through a society mainly driven by a white majority and always feeling a bit on the outskirts of society as also being in the center of things when it happens with transformation and change. So yeah, my background, my dad is from East St. Louis, East St. Louis, Illinois and very proud African-American heritage. Actually just coming back from the US from the family reunion there. We had our family reunion this year in Dallas, Texas. And I'm the lightest, complexed more or less in the family of the core family. I think we had like 90 plus participants. And yes, and it's just wonderful to dive back into my African-American heritage and to be at a barbecue for me at a vegetarian barbecue. That's a point I have to make. We can talk about food and climate impact at a later stage. You know today is Earth Overshoot Day. So, but we'll talk about that in a second. But long story short, yes. So looking back at 400 years of slavery, looking back at abduction of tribes, of people, of dramatic and very drastic personal stories that we can tell ever since the 16, 1700s. And of course that's the heritage of my name. Pascal Morgan. Morgan is not a typical African name. I'm not imbubu or ekeke or something. It's Morgan. And that name comes from Wales. It's a Welsh name. You also find some Morgans in the northern part of France. So, Morgan. But it was the tradition of farmers and plantation owners to give their slaves their surnames. So that's where Morgan comes from. And that is something we have to be aware of in our African-American community is, you know, what has happened to our identity? How have we changed over time and where do we, how can we reconnect to our own roots? Yeah. And there are people that go in the direction of Kwanzaa. There are people that go in the direction of Afrofuturism. I love these movements. I learn a lot from that. I try to stay abreast on these things, on these trends. But that is my story. That's where my complexion comes from. And the other part of the story is my mother. She's from Baddukheim. It's a wine area in Germany. And unfortunately there, the family is very small, very limited, not that much I can leverage. I can just share one sad aspect of it is that her father was an officer in the Second World War on the side of the Nazis. And after the war, he actually never, let's say, he never evolved out of that kind of thinking, which led to quite a divide in our family because he never accepted my African-American father and never accepted me as his grandson. So in that sense, there was no connection. And that was the beginning of this feeling of something is wrong with me or something is wrong with where I come from. I'm not accepted in this society. And my mother, of course, she went through the process. I mean, she did her PhD in history and wrote, or she was a specialist on national socialism, so Nazism, the Third Reich. Every now and then, every few years, I get a call if I still have a copy of her PhD work or of her dissertation, but I can share. I still have a whole collection in the basement. Unfortunately, she passed away 25 years ago. So, but there's still a lot happening and that was her process to get a position from a political perspective. So long story short, my influence is among the spectrum of an African-American father with a lot of pride and heritage on one side, but also growing up in a US military bubble. And on the other side, I had this pre-thinking mom that was a feminist and political activist. And yeah, and I'm still proud to, for instance, be a supporter of a prize of my late mother in her name, the Dr. Dagmah Mogan Prize. So every few years in the area of Damstadt, since she was a political activist in that area, that we actually have a prize that awards social projects around women's rights and empowering, enabling women in STEM, in business, in work, et cetera. So yeah, that's a bit my heritage. Yeah. Yeah, I think not only a global citizen, very diverse and much needed. And I'm glad you brought that up because I wanna talk about some of it. So it's not only ties to the work that you mentioned that your mother did, which to me, and I don't know, you say you still have your mother's writings and things, but I don't know how familiar you are with Hannah Arndt and the Eichmann Trials. And she's basically has some wonderful works here for those on the audio-only podcasts and holding up the books, the human condition Eichmann Trials from Hannah Arndt. So basically a German Jewish American, I don't know how that exactly works, but also a form of a global citizen who really spoke about human conditions, about diversity, about horrific things, specifically also very similar that ties into to what you just mentioned with some of the Nazis and some things and just even in your own family, things that happen. I was born in America, but I've considered myself a global citizen also kind of grew up in Germany, but have family all over the world and a little bit of that diversity as well. And so I think that's really important because through that diversity, through what's going on in our world today, through the big history of our world and the inequalities, this topic of race, of color, of religion or beliefs is really, boy, it's coming even more that we haven't solved it, we haven't figured it out, we're still struggling with it today. So I think it's really important, but sometimes and that's what Hannah Arndt spoke about is that it's not necessarily always the individuals who are the racists or the abusers or the ones doing the honors, but it's these one or two people that kind of set the tone of that's my general, that's my president, that's my leader, and he says, this is bad or she says, this is bad and therefore I have to follow those orders or those regulations to go into this belief system that is or this way of treating others, other human beings or crew members, fellow crew members on this spaceship Earth and in abhorrent ways. And so I would, not that you have to talk about it in length, but just you've obviously figured ways out to deal with it, you're doing very well, things are moving forward. And from what I know about you, I believe you're also working on that with helping others who are facing those things now, today and in the past to kind of get on the right side of history to get into better places who have kind of struggled with that. Matter of fact, tomorrow, you're gonna be speaking as well at an event in Berlin at the factory Berlin at giving a keynote and doing a little moderation. Berlin factory make IT with Ukraine is going to be there as well where there's a lot of diversity and things going on there as well. So I would love to just hear your shortly, your thoughts and ideas as we go then deeper into more systems and transformations and the wise and the purpose and things. No, thank you for that, Mark. So I think maybe there are two larger clusters that resonate with me, what you just mentioned. One is this whole dichotomy between personal responsibility and societal responsibility and how you actually find your way or find your own position, your own voice within a larger context apart from peer pressure and all these dynamics. And the other thing is this very current challenge that we have now, I mean, speaking to you here on the 28th of July, 2022 with the Russian war in Ukraine. And I'm very, I'm very mindful of my words right now. And of course I do have a position to that as well. And but I would like to take a step back because I don't see myself as an activist. I just see myself as somebody who's trying to find a clear word, a clear train of thought and this whole fog and this whole confusion and this whole complexity of things. It's navigating through complexity. And so there are two things. Maybe I'll start with the last because it's very current. And that's why I feel very proud and very honored to have this impulse statement or a keynote at the event tomorrow evening around make IT with Ukraine for multiple reasons. Number one, I love startups. I love people taking the risk and diving into things and having the sense of a purpose and personal drive that and to start things up. But also right now, living in Europe, we're looking at 70, 70 years after the end of World War II, 77 years of relative peace, but there are a lot of conflicts that we've seen in Europe ever since. So we have never really been a fully peaceful region. I mean, looking at the Yugoslavia Wars, looking at even wars that were not even fought in Europe but with European participation with Portugal, Morocco. And so in these 77 years, we've had a lot of challenges, but at the end of the day, I was still hoping that within Central Europe, we would have like a pilot project, a pilot society that is relatively demilitarized, that is relatively peaceful, that is very inclusive, diverse, that has learned from mitigating up to 28, now 27, European voices, that means we have a lot of experience on debating democracy, debating different interests and finding compromises and listening, listening, finding coalitions and frameworks how we can actually drive change and drive things forward. And that is something I think that Europe, even as an American in my heart, I say that I really look up at the European values and the experience that we've had to mitigate those voices because that actually gives us a much deeper sense and a much more resilient approach to democracy, human rights and a general set of humanistic values that we can uphold through all kinds of transformations, societal transformations, macro trends, technological disruptions, these kinds of things. And that's why I'm saying, navigating through complexity, it's a question about what kind of compass do you have? And that's why it's so important to have these open debates and to constantly challenge what democracy actually stands for. So in that sense, it's a tragedy, it's a tragedy in Ukraine, but not since the 24th of February this year, but actually since 2014, this war has been going on Ukraine and Europe has been having quite a challenge to deal with that, right? And to have a very clear position. And now things have escalated dramatically ever since the end of February. And I see something very tragically happening. And let me just touch on that for a second. One thing is of course, the tragedy of war. And I think, you know, Alexander Kluge, Oscar Nick, they already wrote about these things, you know, Geschichte und Eigensinn, about, or this is one passage that really stuck with me, about people being thrown into the situation of live or die and to fight. It's a very physical, a very visceral process and experience. I haven't had any war experience. I don't want to have any war experience. I know my dad had several war experiences and he shared that with the family and that's something that has been with me and has shaped me and has changed me. So that is something I think is so tragic. I don't think anybody, and I'm a proud father of four children, anybody wants to send their children into a war zone. Yeah. And that's why sometimes I plead, I want more women in government and in decision-making positions because I have the feeling sometimes fathers do not know the value of bringing children to life, bearing children and bringing them up and they sometimes go into a war out of pride or dignity or hurt narcissistic feelings. And at the end of the day, it's people actually losing their lives. So taking a step back, what I see tragically happening from a more systemic perspective and more a long-term perspective because as a futurist, I'd like to look at things, what's happening in 10, 20, 50, 500 years from now is war has this extreme flattening effect on society. Militarization goes through all aspects and dimensions of civilian life from education to the most mundane jobs you can think of, things start to militarize. And this whole flattening of society is something that is very counter-innovative, counter-future driven and also always creates like a nourishing ground, like a petri dish for nationalistic, for militarized, for totalitarian systems. And even if you're on the right side of history, it is still going to have an effect on your own society even if you're in the defense position. That's why I think now with Ukraine, even though we're at the peak of this war situation, now we should already start thinking about the society after the war, right? And think about, how can we reinvest into infrastructure, into education, into civilian life? So people, once this war is hopefully over, people can get back to their normal lives and start living an open and diverse and inclusive society. So long story short, that is one tragic aspect that I see happening. And that's why I feel very much called to this event tomorrow evening to actually talk about startups and technologies and how we can reinvest into a future society after the war. Yeah, that's one aspect. And that touches me very much and I have to process that a bit. What was the first part? Another aspect, I mean, is also really, German mother, American father, I don't know if you're a military baby, I'm kind of a military baby myself. And so that ties into what we're seeing in war and how our world is truly diverse and broad and big and the realities of things. But also with the struggles of nationalism, Nazism, however you want to say it within your own family, but yet that's where you live. You live in Germany, speak great German. And there's also a sense of pride and things in that as well as being a global citizen and having that diversity. And we're all crew members on Spaceship Earth. Didn't really even, we don't even really need to go in that much depth, but I think it just makes the whole of who Pascal is and what you deal with and how you help that and the things that you do and the people's lives that you touch is so amazing. And then the last thing is really the last question that you answered first is really where I want to get into it because if we were looking back 20 years of how we were working and doing business and dealing with the word. When you talked with a startup but when you talked about IT, when you talked about any of those subjects, there was no this extra discussion about diversity. There was no extra discussion about the climate and the environment and corporate social responsibility. You didn't have to kind of give people a big history lesson or kind of go out and say, because it's the right thing to do because this is how we create resilient, desirable futures because this is the correct way and more equitable and fair and better resulting models to get us to a desirable future where we're not struggling with war and climate issues and pandemics and things that back then it was just like, just give me the short version, the elevator pitch. I only want you to talk about just that IT one thing. And it was more of a siloed or linear approach and all the discussions we have. I mean, we're already almost into an hour of our discussion now and talking in the end effect of what are the models that we're operating on? What are some of the things? And we've talked about diversity. We've talked about philosophy. We've talked about so many different aspects that it's just not simple enough to say it's this business as usual, very siloed, very linear because we're talking about people. We're talking about lives. We're talking about community. We're talking about a bigger sense of things and whether it's a pandemic that is exponential and affects everybody in the world or if it's a war between two countries that is in one part of the world in Ukraine, it affects all of us. It's not a discussion of just siloed one thing. There's black and white. It's much more complex than that. And I think that's what I pull out of what you're saying and your diversity and your background. And I just wanna know, how did we get there? I mean, is that normal? Is that, do we need to have those discussions? How do you feel about that? I know very well that back when we were working, when we were speaking, when we were doing things, it was just kind of the elevator pitch, the short version, the quick TED talk, we're talking about one aspect and all this other things really didn't matter. But those were also times where we weren't solving any global problems that were we weren't getting ahead because we were taking that siloed linear approach at the world. Mark, and that's exactly why I think it's so wonderful to talk to you about that because, and I learn every time I have that exchange with you is this whole systems thinking. And I know that you're a big fan of systems thinking and your professional in that. And that's exactly what we need. That's exactly the competency that we need today. There was a meme going around several years ago. It was a black and white picture of somebody at a university library going through these little wooden drawers, pulling them out of the wall. And it was these book cards, right? These book cards, where you take this card and you go up to the front and you ask if the book is there and then you get this whole pile of books. A duosimal system. Exactly. And you go take that pile of books then and you go to your desk at the library and the whole air is filled with these fumes from the Xerox machine. And then you try to make your marks and you go take, make your photocopies and the Xerox copies and you sit down, you start working with them, you bring the books back. And the funny thing was, or the, I can't say verbatim, but the tagline under this meme was, whoever knows what this picture is about, I mean, this woman pulling out this little drawer with these little book cards, whoever knows what this really is, studied or was at the university before Google, yeah, was invented. And it's true. It's true. Today, things are so interconnected. There's a much higher level of transparency of what's going on. It's not only about, we can debate that, I do not believe in $69.95 tickets to, you know, across the world and everything. It's not sustainable, but we as a society are globalized. We have a globalized pandemic. We have a globalized economy. We have globalized culture, self-pockets of course, yeah, nationalistic pockets, cultural pockets and so forth, but we know of each other, yeah. The data is there, yeah, things are obvious. And, but also there's something that we personally, we feel much more interconnected with all the things around us, yeah. When I wake up in the morning and I take a shower, it's like, how much water do I use? Yeah, all the way down to how is it heated? And now with the surging gas prices due to the war situation, all of a sudden things are interconnected. When I eat, yeah, am I vegetarian? Am I vegan or do I eat meat? What is my impact? Yeah, we have to be careful though, because you know that there's this industrial communication spin to talk about your personal carbon footprint and forgetting the industrial aspect to it because that's the much larger part. And we have to be very, very, very honest about things. I'm not talking about the activist voice, yeah. And don't get me wrong. I mean, I love what Greta has been doing. I love Fridays for Future and I love all the activists out there because those are very important voices that will constantly keep us on our toes on, you know, what are we forgetting out there? But, yeah, if I take a look at how everything is interconnected, the wars that we're having, yeah, the geopolitical standoffs, it's all about resources. It's all about energy, yeah. It's all about fighting for having this top one position in the whole energy value chain. You know, we're talking about oil. We're talking about access to information. We're talking about access to data. We're talking about, you know, you know, we can get into the whole thing around the South Chinese Sea and with Taiwan and chip production and information technology. We can talk about the whole oil and energy value chain that's out there into that goes from crude oil all the way down to plastics. It's, you know, we have to be very clear about that the modern day war is very much a battle for resources. And that's where I really hope and pray and I don't use these words very lightly. Don't get me wrong. But I really hope and pray that we will be able to take that next step to really understand that we're all in this together. As you say, we're all, you know, we're all a member or we're all a crew member, exactly on spaceship Earth. And there's only one humankind, right? And there's only one habitat, yeah? That can provide us with those resources. And we really need to understand how we're going to be able to feed and provide energy in a sustainable way for almost 10 billion people by the year 2050. And we're on that trajectory, yeah? Of course there are numbers that say, okay, after 2050 we're going to see a dip in population, et cetera. But this is not a wild card. That is not like, you know, your carte blanche that we can just keep on going. I mean, we're on July 28th Earth Overshoot Day. This is, so we're almost, you know, almost at the half of the year where we're actually, you know, depleting Earth's resources that can be regenerated within a year. This is a no-go situation, yeah? Yeah, so everything is interconnected. And we cannot, and that actually goes back to the first question I didn't answer before about, you know, individualism versus, you know, being part of a larger society, a larger group, a larger system is we cannot say anymore we didn't know about it, yeah? I cannot, I mean, internet data information is so ubiquitous. I cannot say today, oh, I did not know that my meat consumption or my fish consumption or my, you know, industrial processed food consumption that had such an impact on the environment, yeah? That information is out there and it's readily available. It's what we do with that, yeah? I'm not trying to moralize, yeah? Let's take the whole moral discussion out of it and just try to be as factual as possible. Is it sustainable that we all have such a high meat consumption? Is it sustainable that we have such a high fossil fuel consumption, yeah? And those are two questions where I can just clearly say, no, it's not responsible, yeah? It's the equation, the math does not fit up, yeah? I'm just trying to get a breather right now. Yeah, you're fine. No, that's perfectly fine. I think you're right in the right direction. Now I want to really make a shift on, and I want to go into three areas on really, on the why or purpose, and then I want to go into resilience and into transformation. And I want to start out with a big, huge fan and mentor of mine as our buck minister Fuller lived from 1895 to 1983. And in 1969, he published a book, but he said this even before that at one of his world games. And it basically is his why or his purpose. And what I thought was so cool about it, it's a why that envelopes the whole world. It envelopes all crew members of Spaceship Earth, there are no passengers. And he said his why and purpose was to make the world work for 100% of humanity in the shortest possible time through spontaneous cooperation without the ecological offense or disadvantage of anyone. And 1968, wow, unbelievable. And it was in his book, in the inside cover of his book, The Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth. Well, one, as a parent, you as a parent, it's like frustrating, these kids didn't come with an operating manual. How do we get this on the thing? Well, our earth didn't come with an operating manual either. And we're still today, we're figuring this all out. But in your opening, the opening question that I gave you and in your answer, you really talked about purpose and your why. And I wanna hear one, first, your why. I wanna know your why and your purpose for existing. And then I wanna dive in a little bit deeper, why it's important. How do you find it? How do you get it? Is everybody's different? Things like that. Oh, that's one of the most beautiful questions you can ask, Mark, and thank you for that. 1969, I was one year old. 1969, Apollo 11 mission, the first human on the moon. The 70s, I grew up with these kind of pictures. I grew up with that kind of sense of space exploration. We were still debating if there were a black hole at the centers of galaxy. And we think there's one at ours, but we don't know about the others. And look where we've come to now with the James Webb Space Telescope out there. LIGO has been, you know, Operative Aureus in several years, proving gravitational waves and proving that Einstein was right. Yes, so there's something very, very, very personal in this whole thing. And I'm not saying, or I'm not proclaiming that you need to have personal life challenges to get to a certain point or to a certain level of insight. I can only share what drove me and what my experiences were. And I think everybody has their own path to get to a certain point. So one story, I mean, I already shared the part of the spectrum that I grew up in the cultural spectrum, which was, you know, very, very diverse, yeah, and very contradictory as well. So this whole thing about dealing with contradictions and reflecting in that space is something that comes natural to me. Another life experience was with 16. So with 16, my family more or less dissolved. It was a very dramatic divorce story with my parents with the result that my father went, you know, went abroad and my mother moved away with my siblings. And with 16, I was homeless. So I was homeless in a German city in Frankfurt. And so, you know, living on the street, you know, begging for money, trying to get food together, living in these, what you call these little Schrebergärden, yeah? So I would find some kind of hut in some kind of garden space. I don't even know the English term for these Schrebergärden. It's a very German thing. And then, you know, trying to find a space where I can sleep overnight or trying to like, you know, and I had some school friends that were helping me out. But ultimately I had to leave the school system. And it took me a while to get back into that school system. So I had a very dramatic experience on a personal level. What does it mean to be homeless? What does it mean to lose everything? Or the only thing I had on me was a small bag and, you know, two pairs of shorts and three pairs of socks and an extra pair of pants and a few t-shirts and a toothbrush and just a few d-marks at the time, you know, worth a few euros. And that is something, you know, and then trying to recover from that. And that took like several months to several years to actually, I wouldn't say get back on my feet because I never lost footing, yeah? It was something about personal resilience and it was something about how do I survive today? Yeah, how can I get into the next day? Am I going to be freezing tonight, yeah? What am I going to eat tomorrow? And that's this thing about personal resilience and all of a sudden, you know, if I look back at it, I was thrown back on myself to say, what am I about? What am I made of? What do I want to do? And for me, what came up very early on was I cannot leave school. I don't know why, but there was something a voice in me that said school, education, that is my safe space. Yeah, that's where I have to get back into and that is going to carry me into the future because, you know, going then to some kind of supermarket, an ID at the time. I mean, that came a few years later, you know, working with jobs and working here and there just for a few pennies to maintain a school life. Yeah, because I did get back into school and I found a place where I could then live. That was a state-funded space for homeless children and there I could finish my school and then move on then into university. So I was able to really, you know, get back into the system and fully leverage it. That's where I can only share my own impulses to say what is personal resilience and what is a focus point. And for me, a focus point was I need to learn. I need to develop. I need to grow. And the only place I can do that is in the space where I'm being, where I find the nourishment. I need to add the mental, the cognitive nourishment to grow and to learn. And that's the only safe space for children. And to be honest with you, also for us grownups as well. Yeah, and that's why I'm a big, big advocate of lifelong learning because that's the only space where we can really sit down and I'm just looking at my own library and I just love, you know, picking out from whatever. I just stumbled over Howard Reingold and virtual reality from the early 90s just reading up to my very old books and what the people at the time are thinking of how the future would look like. But that is something that I can only tell people even when you're in your career and you've already gone through a lot of steps in your career, always get back into this experience of being the small child again, sit at your desk or go out and talk to people and just learn. Learn, debate, discuss, open your mind, challenge yourself, challenge your own beliefs. That is something that I'm very, very adamant about. And so in surmising your why is, I don't even wanna take the words out of your mouth. It's about learning, having that child there but do you have that in a sentence? Do you have that in a paragraph or a purpose? How you would, if somebody said, hey, what's your why? How would you answer that question? So the person of why goes very much into this whole thing about my own legacy. So if I look back and of course it's a luxury being already as old as I am and it's hard to have that level of thinking with 20 or 25 or 30 looking back at my own life. But if I had the chance to visit myself, go back 30 years or 20 years ago, what would I tell myself? Right now for me, I can look back at more time behind me than ahead of me. And I can look at my own children and I can only sense what kind of future that they're going to have. They're going to have a different future than I had or a different life than I had. And so when I take a look at thing and I try to create this balance sheet, this whole accounting balance sheet about my life, how have I paid into my life's experience? How have I paid into my planetary footprint, my cultural footprint, my community footprint? How have I dealt with friendships? How have I dealt with relationships? That is the why that drives me. That drives me today, yeah? And it has actually always driven me but I've never really been that aware of it that until now where all of a sudden you can feel the age and you can feel the time that has passed and you can sense that or I can sense that life is a very, very short kind of time. It's a ticket. It's a ticket to travel on this spaceship Earth for a very limited time, way too short by the way compared to the cognitive abilities that we have and what we can actually still learn in several lifetimes. But I have the feeling that I haven't really even started yet. I'm still learning. I'm not there yet. So I have the feeling that the day I die I'm gonna go like, yeah, now I'm ready. Now I'm ready. But actually, if it comes down to it, Mark, it would be then to say, now I'm ready to go. That's beautiful. And I just, I love everything you talked about and love your why and your purpose. Also the big history of how it's defined you, how you use that to do a lot of reflection, but it's also shaped you moving forward. The only thing I would stray away from is nobody's taking a ticket. We're not passengers. There's nobody here that's been dropped off by some other spaceship or Germany, USA or other planet. We crawled out of the primordial soup of this Earth from our mothers, of course, but we crawled out of this Earth, the basic elements of us. And so therefore there is no passenger. There is no non-observers. Even children, babies, infants and elderly who have issues, disabled people, they're all crew members in some form or another to add to the symbiosis of our world. So to yes, to teach or to guide or to help others in certain respects or to be that infant crew member to show us how do families work? How does the symbiosis of that family structure work on an infant or a newborn who is helpless and can't do much? What are they teaching us on how much of a symbiot relationship we just have in our family construction? And how vital that is when you're left on your own at age 16 to figure it out on your own and to figure out how the world works, how that symbiosis can really help you to reconnect, to heal, to build that future that you want. And so I think there's too many people who think their passengers are along for the good old ride to ride it out or to continue on with an extractive world. And so I love that answer, but the hardest question I'm gonna ask you today is the one I'm gonna ask you now. It can be defined as the burning question, but I'm gonna phrase it a little bit different. And I want your version as succinct as possible what does a world that works for everyone look like to you, Pascal? Oh, wow, wow, wow. So I'm not prepared for that question as I'm just loving the flow of this conversation, but that question already ignites a whole rainbow flash in my head and actually that's already part of the answer. So I tell you one thing, I think for me, the perfect world is just not perfect. There's nothing perfect, yeah. It's a mess of colors, of sounds, of cultures, of interests, of people, of ages, generations. It is very much a sharing economy, a sharing society, an interconnected society and a solution-driven society, not so much around efficiency. It's, I think, that's one of the misperceptions that we have is that we have to become more and more efficient from an economic perspective. Yes, now we have to become more and more efficient on how we actually utilize energy and resources, but that's not the efficiency questions because we have this challenge that we're exploiting our habitat beyond repair. So it's a very diverse, it's a very inclusive world and it's a world where we actually challenge the most valuable thing that we have is our next generations, is our children and, of course, leverage the most beautiful thing that we also have is the knowledge and wisdom of our older generations and bringing those things together. And I think we have, I don't wanna do this kumbaya thing, but you asked me a question and I am an idealist, yeah. And I love dystopian science fiction stories and novels, but in my heart, really, I do have a very idealistic outlook on how we can actually turn things around. You know, sometimes even as an American and maybe you can relate to that in just a funny side story. So this thing, this cultural difference between Germans and Americans, you go to a movie theater and you watch the movies and there's this very emotional moment where people prove themselves or they hold this long big speech or whatever or let's all come together and the whole audience are on their toes and all yelling, yay. I mean, something you would never do in Europe. Everybody's very quiet in the movie theaters in Europe and they just watch these things and sometimes things get a little bit too cheesy, but the Americans are all out for the whole, you know, this whole emotional expression. The funny thing is we always want to have these stories where things work out, where we get together. We always tell each other these fairy tales, you know, these good versus bad. And at the end of the day, the good prevails and we find a way how we can get together, how we can fight off this meteor impact, how we can fight off these aliens, how we can, you know, fight off the bad guys and so forth. And the funny thing is then we walk out the door and we just dump our plastic waste somewhere. We walk past a Jewish synagogue and we think we're better. We look down at somebody of color. We think this society has an advantage over another society. We don't want our kids to play with certain other kids. We don't, you know, and all of a sudden, you know, things all of a sudden fall apart. So this whole narrative of us being like one community, one world, yeah, all of a sudden falls apart on a very personal level. Yeah. And that's why I would like to start asking those questions and saying, what is going wrong? I mean, why can't we find a way how we can foster a system of interconnected society that is built on shared values as colorful as they are, all walks of life. Yeah. And sometimes I'm sad. I'm looking at, for instance, at the US, you know, at the Supreme Court decisions. I mean, first they overturned the New York, you know, gun rules, strengthening the Second Amendment. And then we have these shootings, you know, then they overturn Roe versus Wade. And we're probably going to see something happening, you know, versus gay marriages. So there are certain tendencies of the pendulum swinging back into time, back into history and not forward into a more inclusive society. That's why I'm saying I am idealistic, but I would call myself a more of a pragmatic philosopher. So it's about pragmatism. It's about, of course, we do need certain rules and governance and certain frameworks, but at the end of the day, I mean, if we talk about war, or if we talk about abortion, of course, there are things where you can say, well, who thinks abortion is a good thing? It's not a good thing. It's not a good thing for anybody who's involved, and especially not for the women. But the thing is, in the pragmatics of it, what do you tell somebody who's been a victim of a sexual assault? Who do you tell somebody who's 14 and is pregnant? What do you tell these women? Can you really take the right away of deciding over your own body? Is that something that is future pure for society? No, it is, again, exclusive. It is patronizing. It is creating a very rigid framework that is not inclusive. So that's why I say I am idealistic in a certain way, but it's about pragmatism. I mean, if we put people and purpose and humanistic values into the center of things, that in itself is going to give you the, let's say, the colorboard with which you can actually paint this very colorful future society. I hope that makes sense. It does, but it also opens up a whole another can of words. I really don't want to get, I don't really want to get into too much of the specifics, but I do want to make some comments and kind of just some suggestions. So we didn't leave the stone age because we ran out of stones. And thank goodness. I mean, I think we still need some stones. So, and I think we can still use stones for a lot of things and it's important for that respect. But when we talk about and the United States Constitution or if we talk about any other politics around the world, what is there? A bunch of white men, before they had cars, before they had a lot of the innovations and technologies, setting up a piece of paper, a document that we're holding onto that is outdated, antiquated, racist. It's pretty much anything you could throw at it. I'll tell you what, when the Constitution was done, maybe that was their definition of the question that I asked you, what does a world that works for everyone look like for those founding fathers who wrote the Constitution? That's probably what it looked like, but it's not what it looks like today. And it's definitely not anything I want to be part of. I don't want to be part of real versus way, gun law, whatever. Let's get out of this world of short-termism and racism and all sorts of other things and let's get into something, a world that works for everyone. And so that leads to really kind of a follow-up question. And I don't want to put you on the spot. I don't want to, you don't need to have the answers for everybody and that's not what it's all about. Your answer is a beautiful one and it's very individualistic. And I think it's one that works fabulous for you and your family. But the next question is, is that working for you or what models are you currently living? Are you living that model? Is that your model that you live day in and day out? Are you also living a little bit of capitalism? Are you living an extractive economy? Are you voting for the Green Party for Germany? What are the models that you're stuck into in your work, your private life, your that? Are you kind of maybe running three different models of what that, maybe the founding fathers of Germany or maybe the last miracle or the Green Party or as they pay or say day or whatever party it is have set up some models or maybe it's even, the EU has some, you know, the Green Deal, the new Green Deal or whatever type of models. Are you living any of those currently? That you can say, yeah, there's four of them that I'm kind of living by default or whatever. I would like to know the realities beyond that why what models you're living. Great, Mark. So to be very specific on that, three steps. You talked about the Stone Age. Yes, we're looking at, let's say, you know, some anthropologists say we're looking back at three million years of Stone Age history, one million years since the invention of fire and 300,000 years since the evolution of the hominids. And within that branches out the Homo sapiens and we're like, okay, we have a cranium large enough that will hold something that can, you know, be self-aware and understand their footprint in their own environment. Yeah, and, but as you said, we did not leave the Stone Age because we ran out of stones. And it's the thing of, can thinking of the past be the right framework for the future? And you talked about the founding fathers and you're absolutely right. We don't have to go into the Roe versus Wade and so forth. But 1776, at the time when that was actually put into paper, at the time that was innovative. Yeah, they wanted to, you know, emancipate from the British colonies to a new self-identity and have a more Republican approach. That said, now today that sounds antiquated, right? So what do we learn from history? What we learn from history is, we cannot like design frameworks like 1776, founding fathers, the framework of independence and say that that is going to carry us into the future. We need a different way of thinking. We need a different way of thinking of systems that the future can define itself, that the peoples of the future can define themselves, that they can find their own. And when I say it's, because you mentioned, you said that it sounded very individualistic. It was not meant as an individualistic society where, you know, you preach hedonism and everybody is unfolding on a very personal level. And yes, there is a component to that. I mean, there are so many walks of life. I don't want to have any more of this pivoting, right? There's nothing negative about that at all, that what I meant by individualistic is, and that's exactly what I want. I wanted your personal why. I didn't want to hear what your family's, your father, your mother's. I wanted to hear your personal why. And that is individualistic. And that's exactly what we need. And that's the answer what I wanted. What does a world that works for everyone look like for you, for Pascal? So I give you a very good example. Yeah. And you gave me that answer and I think it's fine. There's nothing wrong with the individualistic. But then the follow-up question, which after I made the statement about the Stone Age is how do we really, is that the model that works for everybody or are we actually all living some different kind of models? And I just wanted to know personally, what one or two of the actual models that you're living are. And then I wanted to set up an experiment or I wanted to ask you. I want to say, okay, well, let's take those models that we're currently in and let's push them out into the future, five years, 10 years, 15 years. Yes. Are they still working for us anymore? And I think they're going to have to change. I mean, just to get back to my personal term and I wanted to build this bridge because some people might understand individualism of maximizing your own personal profit, which I think has always been the culprit of an exploitational value chain. But more if you go into individualism with a 360 degree awareness of how we actually interface our community and our environment and our resources and what are we willing to transact to balance things out. So me personally, I know I'm very aware of being a member of a transitional generation. Yeah. So I do not live in a commune. I do not live on a farm. Yeah, where I'm just growing my own resources. I am in a city and I'm using technology that has been built in Asia. Yeah, we do drive electric. Yeah, we have electric mobility here in our household. I live in a balanced relationship where my wife and I, we have shared responsibility over our children, over our household, but also over our jobs and our careers. Yeah. I know that I've already taken a very, very, very large step from my previous generation and also from my parents because they actually, they could not make that model work. And that's why there was this huge, huge divide. But in the very beginnings, it was a very clear, I remember as a kid getting out of the mailbox, it was addressed to Mrs. John A. Morgan and that was actually addressed to my mom. So I come from a completely different background. I've taken a huge step forward. So yes, I have a vegetarian lifestyle and yes, I look at what kind of things I use. I want to buy organic. I want to live in a more energy balanced environment. Don't use fossil fuels to heat my living space in my office. Yeah. I offset my own office work with, I offset my carbon footprint. Offsetting is only transitional solution. It is not the end solution. But that's why I know I'm very fully aware I'm in this transitional generation in 30 years from now, things have to have a much more trans, fundamental shift and transition. And I respect a lot of people that are doing that now that are building, for instance, communes outside of cities and are building sustainable circular local economies. And I think those are the things that we can actually learn from and we need to foster more moving forward into the future. I love it. Thanks for answering that and thanks for clarifying it. I really strongly believe that when you have that type of approach, what happens is you become more at this ease with those systems around you from governments, from constitutions, from the things that the Supreme Court's doing, the things that the German government's doing, the wars from Ukraine, the things that we see around the world. In a big respect for what's going on in Ukraine, if we were to take fossil fuels out of the equation, if we were to take food as a commodity out of the equation, there wouldn't be much to fight about because we've just taken the resources out of the equation. There wouldn't be much to fight about. There's an added layer to that as we've also made fossil fuels and food into commodities that are traded like investments and stocks and pushed around the world for profit, not really to heal and feed and to take care of people, but as a commodity. When you turn something into a commodity, you cheapen that product or that commodity, which in turn cheapens life, whether it's fossil fuels, whether it's food, whether it's cars or products or cell phones, someone, and usually always included in that someone, pays the price, is also the environment pays a huge cost to that price. And so I have friends and who are doing numerous things and we're also part of that through FutureIO and other organizations who are doing major things to help Ukraine, to help change some of those models and to ease the plight and the problems and the struggles of those who have left the Ukraine and gone somewhere else to learn a new language to get footing at a place that's no longer their home because of what's going on. Hopefully they can return one day, but if not, we wanna integrate them and get them on their feet and get back to living a good life. But now they're accepting some of the models within Europe and around the world that are other policies and crazy things that are going on. So I don't wanna get on the soapbox, but I'm glad you answered that. I think you did it perfectly and I was a little bit tough on you because I told you it was gonna be my toughest question for you. The last one really goes into almost both aspects that I wanted to talk to you about and that is really resilience and transformation. So it's not only part of the title of your company, but it's important to you. When I speak about resilience, for me there's really three main definitions that are used by the United Nations and the most well accepted. I belong to resilience frontiers which will probably be the next iteration after the sustainable development goals or resilience development goals. And we've already created and started working on that resilience frontiers pathway. So the eight pathways and pillars towards transforming our world and society. And those three definitions of resilience, the first one is kind of the one that you speak a lot about and that we've heard in your stories is a resilience of emotional, mental, physical resilience. If somebody swears at you or hits you, spits at you or mentally or physically abuses you that you have the resilience to recover from that or maybe you don't, maybe you become disabilitated or take your own life or something happens that's tragic where you don't have that resilience. So there's kind of that emotional, mental and physical type of resilience. How do you bounce back from your own individual traumas and things that occur to you? The second one is a dystopian resilience. It's one where tomorrow or the next hour we still can survive and be alive on our earth but it's pretty dystopian. We're wearing gas masks, space suits, oxygen masks with it's gray outside or there's acid rain or we don't have any water or we're fighting over resources. We've all of a sudden become into a state where we're fighting against each other or fighting over these resources and it's kind of a mad max water world. It's what we're seeing in the movies. It's a very dystopian type of a scenario. And then the last one is resilient, desirable futures and it's resilience where the next day, the next hour after we've had a major hurricane or a supercell storm that drops these rain bombs of water in one tiny area that just cannot be physically absorbed by our world that the very next hour we have infrastructure, energy, food, shelter and we can go on and we can still enjoy clean air nature and that because we begin this restorative process and that's a resilience. And a lot of people confuse the fact that if you're really sustainable, you have that resilience and you do not. You have, sometimes they'll have a glimmer or some little aspects of resilience within sustainability but what that sustainable bill core sustainability gives you is a solid infrastructure to spring board off into resilience. It gives you the ability that when those natural things or even manmade anthropogenic issues come into our world where we have creating climate problems that are affecting us with heat waves, whatever it is that we have systems in place that are restoring or resiliently through innovations, clean technologies to provide us with that infrastructure to be able to deliver the basic resources or infrastructure that we need the very next hour. And that last one is a resilient desirable futures infrastructure and that's kind of the definition there. I wanna know what your definition is. I wanna know if you agree with what you think as well and why have you taken up the banner about resilience? Obviously I can hear it out and see in the journeys and your stories you've described to me that there's been a lot of aspects in there in multiple levels but I'd like to hear a little bit from you about that. Yeah, thank you. And I think that's very important to have a better understanding of what resilience is or can be what it's not. Yeah. Listening to what you're saying and I fully agree with the system what I hear what resonates with me I hear a lot of this whole thing about what are our beliefs actually? Yeah. And especially with number two with this dystopian thing I do see a tendency I mean the how we humans function bad news travels 10 times as fast and as powerful than good news. There's also a psychological pattern behind that is that we learn from other people's plights or challenges or disasters. There is a community forming function of that of reading bad news and catastrophes and it has formed societies. We have called to arms to defend and all of a sudden out of this defense comes a new national identity. There is something very, don't get me wrong but there's something very negative in the way how we think and our function and the way how our emotional, let's say subsystem actually works and how we focus like to focus on bad news. And it's really tough challenge to say okay, how can we change our belief system our core belief system and have a more positive outlook and have a better understanding on what are our desirable futures and have that this inner sense of a desirable future as deeply ingrained in us as right now the way how we react to bad news. Yeah and not always have this every generation thinks they're when you get older, the older you get the more negative you become and say this is the end of the world. I mean, there's this constant thing about the elderly generations actually it's their own fear of passing and maybe being pushed out into the fringe of society and not being in the core of society of being able to share their wisdom with the younger generation. So yes, I think the whole thing around resilience is going to be a challenge on how can we start developing positive pictures and positive belief systems that can actually drive us forward. Exactly the questions that you've been asking me. I mean, what do we teach our children in schools? Do we have these conversations about how do you envision the future for yourself? And let's start painting a picture. Let's start doing a project. Let's start working on solutions on what we can do, you're six, you're seven, you're eight, you're nine, you're 10, you're 11, 12 years old. Let's start working on that. And then you grow up, it's a natural part of your way of thinking as a grown-up as an adult because you have been exposed to that from the very beginning is to say, what is your picture, your imagination, your projection on the future? I mean, I give you an example. This whole thing I was at the climate conference I was in New York in 2019. When Greta was there, and I will recall being greeted by a delegation, I don't wanna go too deep into names and details, but it was a delegation of elderly business representatives and political representatives. And we were in New York, and I don't know if you recall at the time, it was actually very hot in New York in September, it was actually unusually warm for a September day. And Greta was going to meet Angela Nacka, the German chancellor at the time. And I was shaking hands with the delegation and there's this very senior person coming up to me and I was like saying, it's good that we're here because we can see with the weather now, it's time for us to act and it's great that Greta is here. And the response was, yeah, sure, it's very warm, but I'm not gonna have things dictated by a 16-year-old at the time. Somebody, yeah. And I was like taking it back and I was going like, hold on for a second. What is his perspective on what the young generation represents and why they are so important and why their voices are so important? Is Greta the CEO of a $50 billion company? No, and that's not her role, yeah, but it's about her future and it's about our habitat and that pertains us all. And that's this kind of thinking that we have to really change is to say, I just, I still grew up in this whole legacy framework, yeah? And for me, it's a challenge every day to have this positive outlook and it's a challenge every day when you have all these things like you're being bombarded by negative news and by, you know, this is, it's very, and it is very dramatic, yeah? And you also touched this whole thing about dramatic experiences and trauma and mental health and mental illness and resilience is core of that, but I don't wanna make it too simple because I hear too many slogans, you see that on LinkedIn and business platforms and everything about be yourself and be resilient and be positive and these are the 10 things you need to do and Buddha said, these are the three things you need to do and everything, which by the way, all fake Buddha quotes because Buddha was much more complex than these three things you have to do every day, but long story short, we're making it too easy now throwing it to the next generation to say, just be yourself and you're gonna find out and you're gonna be resilient and you're gonna work this through. No, it's much more complex than that and we're all part of this and we're all responsible on really rethinking on challenging our belief system, start designing desirable future patterns and visions and discussing that with the generations and then see how we can start modeling that out with the solutions that we have out there. So yes, it's a systemic challenge and it's not something that is just done with one answer. It's a continuous dialogue. I don't have the answers. I can only say with my own experiences and I'm being challenged every day even by my own children. They look at me and go like, I'm not so sure, dad. So that keeps me on my toes and that keeps me vigilant and that keeps me awake. And that's what I would like to share and bring out into the world. Love it. The last question I have or last thing I wanna talk to you about is really your viewpoints on transformation. So I'll give you mine and even in our circles, even in the UN, we tend to use the word project or change or pilot when we really wanna say transition or transformation. The problem is with a lot of that is a project, a change, a pilot, they all have a beginning and an end. And I'll give you a couple of examples. I could decide, okay, I wanna grow my beard really long. I wanna go on a diet. I wanna lose a little bit of weight, get a nice 12 pack, a six pack and really work on myself. I can start out with that. I can have a vision of that change or that project or that what I think will be a transformation. But then if it gets too hard or if Trump gets elected or if I pass a beautiful smelling bakery with some super cheesecakes or some super breads that I wanna eat or I see something where I say, boy, this beard is just too gray. It's too big. I look like Gandalf. I can shave that beard off or I can go to that bakery and grab a whole cake of cheesecake and eat it myself or something and break that change or that project or whatever it is. Or I can get into a project and say, I've run out of money to do that so I have to stop the project or all of a sudden someone has been elected or something's changed in the organizational structure that's derailed that project or that change. A transformation for me is a caterpillar going into Chrysalis and coming out as a butterfly. There is no way in hell that butterfly is gonna go back into Chrysalis and if it does come out as anything else except what possibly dead. And that is transformation. That is a transition. Once you've opened that door, once you've gone through the Chrysalis, there is no going back. And that's really what we need. In order to achieve the sustainable development goals, we need to reach six major transformations. The one that most everybody knows about is the digital transformation. But they don't know that there's getting off of fossil fuels, that there's quality education. Education needs to be revamped and updated. But there are six major transformations and it really has nothing to do in that respect to the SDGs because those six major transformations were there before the SDGs. They were there with the Millennium Development Goals and they were even there before the Millennium Development Goals. They are six major transformations to get humanity out of the Anthropocene into a new epoch of something else, something that is more equal, more better for all humanity on a truly global level. I always say I would love us to leave the Anthropocene to get into the symbiocene. I've heard sustainocene, I've heard the future scene. There are so many things sadly to say. They're all beautiful. Yeah, at his 103rd birthday, James Lovelock passed away and his last book that he wrote was the Nova scene. So I mean, some people think we could go into the Nova scene. I would like us to go into the symbiocene, but I just wanna say that for me is transformation and it's something that we need to do regardless of what your belief is of the SDGs or the resilience development goals, resilience frontiers. There are things that humanity has been doing and talking about for a long time. What are we gonna start doing? What's your view on transformation and true systemic change? Yeah, I think that resonates absolutely with me. And so this whole thing around transformation it's like transforming to a constant transformation. And that's I think what, that's how I, for instance, understand these different scenes and symbiocenes is to really understand ourselves as being part of a symbiotic system. We cannot divide ourselves from nature, from our habitat, from the whole ecosystem around us that we're all interconnected with each other. And it's more for me a question about fostering this kind of empowerment or insights. It's like, even the Old Testament spoke, I mean, like Adam and Eve and don't get me wrong, there are a lot of things wrong with this kind of picture of the way how humankind should have evolved or whatever. But it's this process of enlightenment. Once you have the first bite of the apple there's no turning back. Once you've gone out of the cocoon, you're the butterfly, you can't go back to the larvae. Once you know what's going on, you cannot say, well, I don't know anything about it. There is something we have to face those challenges. And again, what you're also very well highlighting is there's no answer to all that is going to persist over time. There's only this thing about becoming able to face those complex challenges and to evolve through that, right? And then the question is, what are guiding principles on moving through this kind of complex change? I mean, you're talking about the SDGs, what do we need to do before 2030 if we want to actually hit a certain mark? I think the 1.5 centigrade trajectory of global warming is already passed. We have to see how we can stay under the two. The scenarios are not so positive right now. And that worries me, absolutely. We have to talk about the inner development goals as like the inner reflection of the SDGs. So there's so many things we have to work on. You have VUCA. I mean, I know it's a very military term that I like from the Harvard Business School how they actually reformed or changed that. So the VUCA with the volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity and transforming that volatility to vision, this uncertainty to understanding, this complexity to courage and this ambiguity to adaptability, right? Is to really have a better mindset on how we can actually face those future challenges moving forward. So in that sense, we need to invest into our education. Education, education, education, education. A smart, enlightened, enabled society is going to be able to persist, to survive and to be resilient. That's why, again, that I mentioned education. So I think it's really so important to invest into that. And that's, it's beyond political beliefs. It's beyond religious beliefs. It's beyond spirituality. It's beyond which camp you think you're in. It's beyond your sexual orientation, your gender. It's really about being enabled and empowered and having the tools available to actually face these future challenges. And that's why I think the future is very colorful and very bright. But right now the challenges are very dire. It's quite tough, yeah. The last question I have for you today, Pascal, is really if there was one message you could depart to my listeners as a sustainable takeaway that has the power to change their life, what would it be your message? And even if it's a systemic message and there's a couple parts to that, that would be fine. So, hold on. So you want me to give your listeners exactly what? Could you rephrase? A sustainable takeaway that has the power to change their life, also probably tied to your message. So what I wanted you to rephrase that is you're actually asking for that or that magical crystal. You're actually asking for that powerful big one message. And to be honest with you, you're actually calling to my very pathetic American heart to say that one magical thing. But honestly, I'm just, I'm messing with you. The thing is if I would really, really get into my own self and try to leverage that last part of me mobilize that and say, what is this one thing I would, I would, I would, I would share might come as a surprise, but it's actually just one word, it's presence. It's really being here. I think with presence, there's a lot of presence and a lot of other things that fall in place that just start to make sense. It's being present here with yourself and being present with yourself also means to face some of those fears and some of those trauma time, but also your expectations to your future. Being present here means being present with you, being present with my family, with my community, being present when I go shopping. I see what am I buying? What am I doing? When I use mobility, what is my footprint? Don't get me wrong, this is a very, very personal thing. Yeah, it's the moment, it's the every moment of your life. I mean, I've, I've, I listened to it. There was a neurosciences being interviewed in NPR, I think some 20 something years ago, and I don't recall his name and I don't recall the setting, but there was something that I'll never forget and I tried to do some research. I never found out who that actually was, but he was talking about, you know, the three most important things in his life and that really stuck with me. And it was number one, it was physical health. Number two was mental health. Number three was spiritual or soul or health of spirit. And then everything else like spouse, children, family, community, jobs and everything, everything else came after that. So a very untypical answer. I was going like, that was almost blasphemic. How can you do that? How can you put your family after that? And he was saying, well, if I'm mentally, if I'm physically not healthy, then everything else doesn't matter. I'm going to be sick the whole time. The same thing with my mental health. If I don't have my full cognitive abilities, yeah, I won't be able to, you know, leverage my competencies and be of value. The same thing with my own health of spirit. My emotional well-being, my spiritual well-being, my sense of purpose. And when those three things are somehow in balance, then I can be a good husband, a good father, a good friend, a good colleague. Then I can really be of value to others and others will welcome me as part of their lives. And that really resonated with me. And that's, and for me, the key to that is presence. I love it. I would agree with you as well. I believe that when you're not numb or desensitized, when you have that presence of moment of time with people, with planet, with nature, there's also so many other things that just ripple effect off of that of how you feel, see the world around you and those around you. It's beautiful. I really thank you, Pascal, for letting us inside of your ideas, for getting very personal, going back into your big history and giving us a deep dive in there and then how you think about the future. I know we can expect much more from you. I'll put the links to your webpages and things, but that's pretty much all I have for you today. Unless there's something that you did not get to talk about, you can have this last couple of minutes to let us know. But otherwise, I really thank you for letting us inside of your ideas. Well, Mark, I can only say thank you back. This was a pleasure and it was an honor and thank you for having me as a guest on your show. I really appreciate the dialogue. I learned from that. I've learned a lot again today because I think that is, I told you that already. It's something that where I evolve and grow is when I have these conversations with smart people like you. And I love following your shows and I love following what you actually published and write about. So thank you very much for having me here. I can only say at the end, when I was talking about the whole presence and I'm going into these big layers or these big dimensions, there's also something very tangible and something very every day we can do. I mean, I host these series every few months to journey to the future and invite thought leaders and decision makers and thinkers and debaters onto the show to discuss some of those challenges. And the last one was around decarbonization and sustainability. And I had Luba Mila John Arnova on the show. She's an Obama leader for Europe and the founder of Plan A here in Berlin. And they work on decarbonization strategies. And I just, what I love for instance, what she does is that, you know, she constantly publishes jobs in the space of sustainability. So she really goes, she, you know, cracks that down into something very tangible to say, okay, how can you get engaged into, you know, designing, co-designing a desirable future. These are the jobs in the space of sustainability and these startups and these companies apply for them. Yeah. And a lot of people are, you know, they are really working on some very tangible everyday things, how you can actually improve your carbon footprint, how you can access certain information, how you can actually qualify yourself with a specific course to deep dive. Yeah. You can actually then attend an event and get to know somebody. Yeah. Or, you know, I mean, that's how, for instance, I got to know you being part of the faculty of future IO. Is, you know, to, to build these kind of networks. And I think that is one important thing is surround yourself with people that, that you admire, that you look up to, that you learn from. I mean, and there's no, there's no problem in asking I mean, if somebody doesn't have the time to, to have that conversation with you, then ask the next person, just move on. And you'll have these conversations eventually. And that's what I think is something very much I look forward to is these very, very tangible steps moving forward. Yeah. So in that sense, I think there's a lot that we can talk about. This has been a very, very short, while with you as always. And look forward to our next conversation. Thanks so much, Pascal. Take care. Bye bye. Yes. Take care. Bye bye.