 The movie really altered my trajectory of my life. I really can't imagine focusing on anything else other than having people rise up to create a better world. I think I'll kind of go to the end of my days championing that. So there'll be many more projects over the years really supporting that view of the world that we, the people together can invent a world that works for all of us, that works for the planet. It's completely within our capacity. Michael Sean Conaway is my guest on this episode of Inside Ideas brought to you by 1.5 Media and Innovators Magazine and sponsored by the Lohas Regenerative Foundation. Michael Sean is endlessly curious about how life works, why we do things, the way we do, and how we might do them differently. This led him to become a phenomenological philosopher, someone who examines life from the way life shows up moment to moment. His current work and being and time is rooted in this tradition. Michael Sean's purpose in life is to unleash greatness, to bring about a thriving future. His mission is to empower and accelerate the redesign of our failing systems to create an anti-fragile, anti-rival world, one that works for all, something I really like. To this end, he helped to create the field of generative futurism, the practice of generating or envisioning desirable futures at near and long-time time frames, back casting, steps that would take to realize that future and then acting to take those steps moving forward in time. Simply put, this is the capacity to see and realize futures. Michael Sean is a frequent speaker on long-term strategy, the future and being and time. His keynotes have the uncanny power to shift culture by building a new narrative for the audience. His talks are journeys designed to leave the audience seeing from a new reality. He is the founder of five highly successful ventures, an award-winning film maker, editor, publisher of Proof Magazine, founder of Boldly Now, an entrepreneur education platform, and CEO of Storyworks, a social impact creative agency and the nonprofit generative futures initiative. We're going to talk a little bit today of one reason why he's here, and that is his latest documentary feature, We Rise Up, a cultural shifting film featuring key global leaders. We Rise Up asks a fundamental question. What is success for humanity? Sean's been around the block and he started his career in the mid-90s as a writer and director for video games and by 2000, his creative agency, Storyworks, became the go-to agency for high-tech companies looking to create visions of the future. Michael, Sean is so wonderful to have you on the podcast. It's good to see you, my friend. Yeah, you too, Mark. Really, really great to be here. Now, I could have gone on and on, maybe some would have thought, okay, wow, that's a long biography. You've done a lot. You've touched a lot of people's lives. You've come into interaction with a lot of people's lives. So I think it was truly fitting to give a little vision of who you are, what you've done, and set that up. You and I first met each other in France at the La Grande Rex at a Boma event as a Boma Global Summit, which was held in France in Paris and was a fabulous, beautiful old venue. Mainly French talks, I believe mine was one of the few in English and really enjoyed it. And we met at the after the social gathering and that. And you told me about We Rise Up and some of the things you're working on. And we had some nice connections which really sparked my interest because I had just finished another documentary film called Now, which has since been out and come and gone and been released. Your release for We Rise Up, was it right in the heart of the pandemic? When was the official release and how did that go? And what was the experience that you have as a release in a documentary in crazy times? Was it meant to be? It was, I mean, the whole pandemic impact on filmmaking and filmmakers was terrible. If you're in the middle of a project trying to shoot, you basically had to shut down. We were just about to start distribution in 2019, 2020 when we met. And then of course, we had all these plans the way we were gonna release and whatnot and they were gonna be happening in the spring. Obviously by March, we shelved those plans. And at first we thought, well, we'll just wait a little bit. I think we were all in that place. We'll just wait a little bit. Let's see what happens in the next coming months. And eventually we discovered like everybody else that this was a new reality, a new way of kind of having to deal with the world. And so we decided to do a digital launch, a purely digital launch. We'd already had a really great successful run of film festivals and stuff all over the world. So a lot of people had had the chance to already see the film in theaters. So it wasn't a big disruption. And yeah, we finally released in December this past year streaming platforms, Amazon, Google, Apple, all of those ones. And you can find them there. You can also find on Vimeo, I think there's a, I think we have Spanish subtitles. We'll be trying to get some more subtitles on that in the coming months for sure to let people get a chance to see that. That was a beautiful one. I mean, I'm glad it worked out and that that progress was there. I know a lot of directors, a lot of filmmakers really struggled, a lot of creatives in general struggled during this time because the systems our world operates on, especially in the movie industry, we're not really up to speed for most production and distribution companies. There was a few who were very well placed, obviously Amazon and Netflix and a lot of the streaming formats were really right there and ready to jump on the opportunity to capture people at home and that. But many others were still stuck in these traditional distribution routes where movie theaters were closed and promotion ways were really closed. I wanted to know before we jump into more about the documentary, just did you ever have any aha moments during this time or some learning lessons or things that you saw that said, boy, we need to rise up. We need to change things. Things aren't working how they should be, especially during times of crisis. Yeah, really great question. I think that the film in the film I got to interview a lot of people that we started filming in 2015. And so over a number of years I was interviewing people just as kind of the notion of systems change was gathering some momentum amongst our small tribe. And SGGs that were emerging and all of these things are starting to call less and that's why I kind of felt like I was trying to film an emerging movement or maybe an emerging mindset would probably be even better said. And so looking at my business, the way I was doing a business is looking at what we did around filmmaking and trying to tell these stories. I knew that what we were making wasn't even fit for the distribution models and the traditional business out there in film as it was. And in fact, we'll get to this later. We start talking about economics and things like that. The economics of making a film like this are they're serving the wrong master, that the kind of economic incentive or financial incentive embedded in the film is trying to break down systems and break down the way we think about economics is kind of nonsensical. And so we knew that, but we had investors and we needed to work in the traditional system to make sure our investors could get some money back. So, but it always felt to me like we were paddling the wrong direction in the stream. And that being said, it's a really great example of, okay, great Michael Shani, you can help us imagine these kind of far out futures. Maybe there's no ownership of things or maybe we don't have to pay for things like movies. But what does that do for me today? Like how do I deal with this prevailing system? And I think that's the, I mean, frustration is the first word that comes to mind. That's kind of a frustrating fact of being able to imagine perhaps better ways for us to interact and exchange value and maybe better ways to interact as cultures, anti-racist ways, and would be one example I can give you that, but we don't have yet the structures in place to do that. If you're in that mode right now and say, just keep going, you're a pioneer, you're going to be breaking new ground and you may or may not succeed in the old model, but you've got to get examples of media and conversations, books out there that allow, especially the next generation to pick up on that and go, oh, I could do that, I could move that forward. So I think our hope was always to impact the conversation in general and give benefit to that. And then dealing with the kind of traditional movie model was something we knew we had to do and did quite well at it. I don't, I want to say that we've, you know, we didn't do well, but in a way that it's, it's not the point of making these kinds of media. And I want to just encourage anybody that has an idea to get out there and make it even as a short or anything. It's the world really needs these stories and messages. So it was rough during COVID, but it was kind of what was expected anyway in a strange way for us and our team. You see that the model of shifting in general throughout the industry of filmmaking that movies are in documentaries and film are being made mainly for streaming purposes now, that it's changing a little bit because of kind of the insecurities of the traditional distribution and theater ways. How have you noticed anything that you can maybe touch or tell us about? That's interesting. Yeah, it has to be streaming for anybody who's doing a project that's got a positive impact, documentaries in general, maybe some kind of creative narrative project that maybe shows a different way of living life. It's got to be streaming. And the sad news is that really, you know, like our time of coming up in the 80s and 90s was kind of the launch pad of independent cinema. I mean, I still remember the art house movie theaters when I went to college, there was two in the town I went to and went to Rocky Horror Picture Show at midnight and saw all kinds of weird foreign films in those places. And today, those two theaters that I went to are no longer theaters. They no longer show movies. And in general Hollywood has moved more and more to these tentpole, you know, style movies. I'm thinking of the Marvel Universe type stuff. They are more and more about, you know, maximizing concentration of followers, people who engage in those stories and then by there by, you know, making really, really, really large sums of money and not having a huge amount of interest in artistic films or documentaries. You know, to go back to Michael Moore's days before you have kind of successful documentaries in theaters is kind of crazy. And then they will of course put money into art films for the Academy Awards run. And those films usually release in November, December and they're really good films. And thank goodness we have some incentive for investing into films that maybe reveal more about human nature. It's kind of a sad state of affairs though. I mean, I'm ready for some kind of rebel crew of 20 year olds to, you know, start making movies and only releasing them on a small platform that you have to, you know, make a blood oath to get on to see their great work or something. I don't know. I mean, it just seems like the whole industry is ripe for creative and impact disruption. But I think it will take a movement or a group of people going through it, you know, maybe with some kind of manifesto or something like that. I could see that being a very effective way. And then could attract people to those messages either just for impact reasons or for earnings reasons or the financial aspects of that as well, which have to be attended to in these projects that really costs a lot to produce. Well, that's so interesting to hear. I am seeing the model shifting. I'm seeing like in the TikTok space, even in the YouTube space where there's some pretty big productions. I wouldn't say documentaries or feature films, but almost like series. One of them is the, I think his name's The Beast or that's his name, you know, million, 70 million followers for every one of the videos that he does, just unbelievable. But the production behind it, where they creating, you know, they purchased an island. They did movie sets. They're actually doing movie sets and some elaborate filming and things to pull off some of the things they use where there's a lot of money involved. And I'm seeing so some different models emerge in that respect as well. We Rise Up is an amazing documentary. I've watched it twice. You know, a lot of the people in the film are my past idols and people I really like and admire. You not only had the Dolly Lama, Tony, Robert Robbins, Amina Mohamed and Richard Branson in it, but you had many others, Bob Proctor, John Mackey of Whole Foods Market, you know, Michele Franti, a musician, Craig Sheehan, Pantagonia, Jack Canfield, Chicken Soup series, of course, Tom Chi, Google X. And I could go on and on. It's the who's who of documentaries about a pretty interesting title, We Rise Up. And when you watch it, when you hear about it, about rising up to do our part in the world, to be part of the economics that's going on in a world, to be part of the voice that says, boy, I'm at disease, the system that I thought would work for me and would always work and be there, is starting to feel me. That's what I'm feeling at ease. I need to give my voice. I need to take some action. And so a couple of questions, and I'm gonna throw them out to you at the same time. One, you started in 2015 and, you know, I think it's well over 20 people who you interviewed and maybe even more than that. How did you keep that narrative and that process with the questioning, with the things that you discussed in a way that over a few years period, until completion, was timely with saying the same things, had that consistent message, or was that not something you're looking for in that process? Because I can't believe you did it. You did it, you did an amazing job. And secondly, how did you even get in that respect? Was it a documentary that you brought to inception, or was there kind of a request for that, something that's been emerging more and more in our world? Yeah, two great questions. Well, the project got started with a conference in Boulder, Colorado called the Success 3.0 Summit. And my producing partner Kate Maloney organized that, and she brought a lot of those people there. She was friends with John Mackie, people from kind of business and thought leadership came, and that was to have a conference in which they discussed if kind of success has been that you acquire wealth, that you acquire objects and land and things like that, this kind of acquisition mode, or if you will, taking mode, that that's a sign of success, or that's what success means. And taking and taking more and more is destroying our planet, then maybe instead of just telling people, hey, you shouldn't do that, we should work to re-engineer the whole idea of success. What would be a successful human life that doesn't destroy the planet at the same time or create wealth inequality or create all these other problems that are extrinsic to the whole notion of being successful today? And it really also took in the notion of like, well, if I could just get wealthy today, then I could make a difference tomorrow. It really took on that. It's like, well, is that really viable? I mean, most of us are never gonna be wealthy, so that means most of us are kind of prohibited from making a contribution or an impact. And what kind of came out of that conversation, which was started before the conference, and a lot of the ideas were there before the conference happened and it came to fruition in a lot of the conversation there, was that contribution was a much better model of success. How much am I giving? Not how much am I taking? And then not just giving, but specifically giving to the things that I care about. So what is of greatest importance to me? What do I deeply love and deeply care about? If I can make a contribution to that, if I'm making a difference in that, then success becomes an intrinsically rewarded thing. I feel like the thing that I really care about is getting better and then that makes me feel good because I care about it so much and then I love it some more and it gets better. And then that makes me feel good because it's getting better. And so we get into this cycle of virtue, which the old model has this cycle of detriment, the more and more success you get, the more and more bad things happen. And I don't wanna call out the billionaires on the planet, but it's a really difficult position even once you get there. Now you've got hundreds of financial advisors and lawyers that are keeping you from doing anything of any good with your money. They're keeping the structure in place and your capacity to even understand what impact you could make with a billion dollars becomes very, very difficult. So based upon this notion of, well, how would we actually communicate this notion of why don't we move from taking to giving or from consumption to contribution? How would we do that in a movie form? And so we interviewed everybody that came there and talked to them. I must have interviewed 30 people in a week. It was a grueling. They were having a conference. I was having a one-on-one meeting with everybody in a darkened room. And then from there, it's like we got through that and we thought we're just gonna cut a little short film. We went through the rushes, all the interviews and we were just, well, I was just, I was so moved by the things people were saying. And you know, there's a quality when you're in a conversation, when somebody's saying something, kind of one of the times they've said it for the first time, but they're really lit up about it. And that's the kind of material we're getting back. Like people were really profoundly excited by the the realizations that we're having about this stuff. And that led us into, well, if this isn't gonna be a short, it's gonna be a longer film. We got to interview more people and then we started asking people on our network and everybody knew somebody. And so we just flew around, you know, I was at WAF one year, you know, we, I went to India, I went to London. We were all over the United States. And in the end, Mark, you won't believe it, I interviewed over 150 people and every single of those interviews was about an hour interview. So I had to make a 90 minute movie, I had a hundred, you know, 150 hours of interview footage. And so you ask, how do we, how did that kind of have a thread to it? How did it come to be kind of a cohesive thing? So there's two answers to that. One of them I'd really like to claim that's just not true with that is that I'm a genius. I was a genius and I was able to kind of create this movie as I went along. I'm not a genius like that, but I did trust myself. And just like this conversation we're having today, I trusted dialogue. And so I would walk in with these ideas swimming around of my head and usually one or two starter questions for an interview. But I didn't ask everybody the same questions. I just listened. And then as I listened, things came up that I found interesting. And when I found something interesting, I'd just dive into that and we'd talk about that. Yeah. We got to go to Sundance to do an event there for the film in 2019. And three months prior, I still didn't have a movie. I was like, I had all this stuff got together and there's some great stuff in there, but it wasn't a movie. It was just a bunch of stuff. And I had a number of screenings with close confidence and people that I trusted in the world. And I got some strong criticism and some strong feedback. And my assistant editor at the time, guy named Tyler Wallace, really wanted to fix it. And he sent me down and he tried to fix it. I got really frustrated and I said, just give me a couple of days. And it was right around Thanksgiving time. And I literally just shut down, stopped thinking about the film, but just let these kinds of ideas flow around in my head. And first week of December, I reorganized the entire film, recut it, brought in our friend, Prince the A to do some voiceovers to do a poem. We'd already done one piece for the film. And within about a three-week period, about four weeks before Sundance, I finally had a film. So the genius wasn't being able to see it as we were doing it. It was really being able to listen as we went through and then continuously listen to how the pieces fit together. Yeah, I wouldn't recommend it. It was really, really hard. But in the end, I think we end up with a, and I say it's a Greek chorus film. We get a bunch of people saying the same lines, if you will, together versus somebody's idea of how this should be. Now, that's different than a lot of films you've seen before, people seen before. It's not a standard documentary film because it is really many voices kind of being woven together in one. And it requires some, I mean, I don't know about you, it requires some concentration while you watch the film. You have to listen carefully and you have to follow the threads. So there's a couple of things there. One, I don't know how the hell you did it. 150 hours and 10, 90 minutes. And maybe you didn't have this, but I can imagine myself that I would be like, no, there's so much good content. I just want to put this in and set up the 90 minutes. You're like, yeah, but it's a 24 hour movie now. You know, it's a sequel because you're like, I just want to include it all because there's so many nuggets of wisdom. So I imagine to hone it down to even 90 minutes was really frustrating. One person I didn't mention, I'm probably getting his name wrong. You're gonna have to help me as the poet is. His name Prince. Prince EA. Prince EA and fabulous that the, I mean, I've watched him before and seen him in many different spots, but just the poetry and the way he kind of from beginning to end also helps to do the weaving. I thought that was fabulous how you did that and really enjoyable because what he said and other things that I've seen just really resonates. And so eye-opening and just the truth, you get this beautiful feeling for it. And I really liked that in the movie. So thank you for that. Yeah, that was a great collaboration. I did most of the writing of all that stuff and then he would come in and add his pieces and then we would record it and listen back to it and we would refine it. But he's an example of somebody who's kind of reinventing the media model in YouTube and he does quite well for himself in that. And then he uses it as a platform to tackle what he thinks are some of the world's biggest problems and ills from the place where he's standing. So a great example of somebody using media as a way to make a contribution. And in this system, you have to find a way to have that actually provide for your life as well. We definitely don't want to advocate that people just do good and live out of a VW van like dumpster dive for food. That's not the point. The point is not to not have a good life. It's to make your life meaningful and make it count for something, something other than kind of the hollow material wealth or hollow material gains. There's a lot of research about that once you get a certain level of sufficiency, once you can pay your bills, have adequate healthcare, be able to provide education for your family, be able to eat healthy. In other words, when the basics no longer, you have to no longer cut the corners on the basics, extra money doesn't really make that much a difference. Maybe you drive a nicer car or maybe you go on a bigger vacation. But usually what that means is people continuously overextend themselves and now they're driving a bigger car and now they find more urgency to make more money because they don't quite have enough money to drive the bigger car and it's insidious. It's really that the system we're living in as far as our well-being being tied to our financial success and our ability to make an impact being tied to financial success is very frustrating to me. Now, we have to work with that. There's no way around it at this point. And there are some people actually, a friend is doing a very small universal basic income experiment, it's her and her five friends and they've pooled a bunch of money they made in crypto and then they live off the same amount of money. And then there's enough money for everybody to live like a good life, she's doing an experiment. I'm like, that's what we need. We need crazy people who will try these things, not just an intellectual exercise, but real experiments. I'm super appreciative of that, of people getting into action about stuff. That's amazing. We need about 10 billion... Well, we actually need one billion people doing that for the potential in the future so that we can really have some new models and new economic models and new systems out there that are twist on universal basic income. I really like that. Before we go too far away from we rise up, I wanna know, so not only the people in the documentary, but do you have some kind of a takeaway, a group that can get together a place where they can go if the documentary resonated with them where they can go more for action to kind of collaborate, to find group and some action. And then the others, what's the resonance been? What's the feedback that you've received on it and what are you finding? Yeah, the feedback's been great. I mean, on our Facebook page, the We Rise Up phase of page, you'll see tons and tons of quotes. We get people emailing us every week about the impact the film had upon them. I wanna say the film's not for everybody. It requires some kind of intellectual capacity to think about something. So if somebody's in a state where they don't have the privilege to do that and I acknowledge there's a lot of people that are just working hard to get by and things like that, it makes it a little bit more challenging. Not that the film can't make a big impact for them as well, but I think it takes some privilege to be able to consider some of these things. And I wanna just write off the bad acknowledge that. And for myself, especially I know that I have just a great privilege to be somebody who's able to engage in philosophy and engage in futurism, which means that my life, my basic life for myself, my wife, my kids is taking care of it in a lot of ways. Through my hard work in labor, I'm not saying it's not, but it's definitely through privilege, through the axiom of privilege. It's been great, the reaction. So you also ask about like, how can people get involved in this kind of stuff and move it forward? Well, the basic lesson of the film is discover what your gifts are, figure out what your purpose in life is, what's important to you, what you'd like to make a difference in and then figure out a way to do that, do that by yourself or do that with others on a very, very small local level or in larger national, international levels. It's really what is in your future that matters in regards to that. And so I keep starting projects to try to support that community that the first is I've done a podcast so you can go look at the Boldly Now show on podcast platforms and YouTube. And that's conversations like we're having today, just trying to get people into conversation with these. So instead of having to just get to watch 90 minutes, you get to watch them one hour at a time and as we make them, which I think is really exciting to have these longer conversations about the topics. Two, we've built an educational platform at Boldly Now, which takes you through to like, it's an app that takes you through an interactive process and video-based process to figure these things out to support you. And that's been really successful. We're getting ready to do a We Rise Up specific launch of that at the end of the summer. So be looking out for that. And you can find that in the App Store at Boldly You, I think we called it in the App Store or you can go to bold.ly and find it on there. And then finally we started this magazine called Proof, Proof of the Thriving Future. I got really frustrated that I couldn't find any media about what was going on out in the world that was really great. The things that were really moving us forward to thriving that were moving us towards these new models. I grew so frustrated that I just decided to do something myself. So a couple of us came together. We pulled together articles, once a month, once every six weeks about a topic. It's a theme-based magazine. I write an editorial. We write a couple of other pieces, usually like a 10 steps. How 10 steps to be peaceful in a time of war is the one that just came out recently talking about the Ukrainian War. And we have now, I think we're in our 30 something issue I can't remember. We are now really starting to amass a back catalog in different areas of stories about people doing really great things. And it's so fundamental to being able to make an impact in the world and make a contribution to be able to believe that it matters. Kind of the cynicism and the voice of resignation as this world is screwed and I can't do anything to make it any better. And my life is screwed and I can't do anything to make that better. And then we get down and I think popular media just reinforces this over and over. There's so much bad news that I can barely even stand to read the headline too that it wears me down. So improve, it's not that we shy away from hard news. We talk about things that don't work in the world. We talk about use of petroleum and things like that. We talk about the tough topics but we talk about the tough topic and then who's making progress on that? Who, what are we doing on that? And my promise to anybody that watches we rise up is like you can message me through Facebook or LinkedIn or if you want to hear a question, I'll try to get it answered. I think the movie, before I had been a futurist and a storyteller and done purpose work and all these things but the movie really altered my trajectory of my life. I really can't imagine focusing on anything else other than having people rise up to create a better world. I think I'll kind of go to the end of my days championing that. So there'll be many more projects over the years really supporting that view of the world that we, the people together can invent a world that works for all of us that works for the planet. It's completely within our capacity. Now, can we get organized and do that? Well, that future will be resolved in the coming years. Maybe even the next 10 years being the most pivotal time in a way in human history especially when it comes to existential threats and all the stuff that you and I know and talk about. I love that, that's so beautiful. And thank you for kind of setting that tone and giving us that feedback so that we know where it's going. You mentioned knowing your why, your purpose for existing in some respects. So we both know Simon Sinek's Golden Circle start with why I'm a graduate of his course and also strongly believe in that. Bob Proctor was in your movie. I used to be a coach. I got coaching from Bob Proctor, Jim Rohn as well. Lisa Nichols, many others. The other one is John P. Strelikis. He talks about, was today a museum day of your life? If you were gonna give somebody a tour of your life's museum, would today be a day that you would be proud to show them, give them a tour of today, of what you did today? And he has this thing called purpose for existing as well. So it's all about the big five for life and what's your purpose for existing. What kind of, how did you come to your why, be a purpose, how did you discover that? And how many areas out there through this entire process, 150 interviews, 150 hours worth of footage, did you see where the sources of people are going to find that purpose? And more so than that, is there something that happens before they begin the journey to wanna discover it? Is there a shock? Is there something that nudges them to say, oh man, what's this world all about? Is there a process in that? Yeah. So the first question is how to end up with my purpose statement, which is, my purpose is to unleash the greatness of human beings to create a thriving planet. So that's a purpose I've been working on and it's a work in progress. I'm always changing words and thinking about it, unleashing became a new word a couple, three years ago. I started that process in 2009, I wanna say. I had a course that I was taking called Credibility Impact and Influence. It was a nine month leadership program for executives. And we had to come up with our purpose statement. We also had to come up with the shadow side of that, which is our shtick. What is the way in which that we get our way in the world, we basically bully the world to get our way. So the opposite of our purpose, which was not much fun to work on, especially to have a dedicated cohort of people helping you see how you manipulated the world to get what you wanted. But the upside of both of those processes to look deeply at how I had managed to win up to that point in my life, to have things go my way, not that that's bad, but that I did it in a way that was not conscious and not really producing for other people, but producing for me. And then goes through this process of trying to invent a purpose. Another one of those moments that just profoundly altered who I was. I didn't ever see myself through the lens of what meaning I was bringing to the world. I was always a seeker of meaning. Like what does it mean? What does life mean? Is it life meaningless? Eventually I came to the conclusion that there is no intrinsic meaning in life except for life. Life is its own meaning and it's its own expression. It's us who sit back and think about it and ponder does this have meaning or not? And for the human being, having meaning is really, really important. If we get caught in a cycle of feeling meaningless about things, then life looks pretty bleak. Now, whether or not meaning has any existence in reality or not is a real debatable topic. It is for me and where I stand, it is what we call a linguistic abstraction. It's a word that only exists in the domain of language. When we say something has meaning, it's something that human beings give to a set of circumstances or a set of phenomena, things happening. We bring the meaning to things. And that's a very modern point of view. By the way, an older kind of biblical point of view would say that the God or God's provides the meaning. But in kind of a modern context, we provide the meaning. And what I found, especially after starting to articulate my purpose, which by the way was like five sentences long, it was huge, there's so much stuff in there that had to be weeded out over the years, was that when I kept my eye on my purpose, then the things that I did either had meaning or they didn't have meaning. And really quickly I started abandoning the ones that just didn't have any meaning for me or didn't express my purpose. And yeah, it led me into a place where I suddenly felt fulfilled in everything I was doing. Before it was kind of like, was that a good project? Was it creative? Did I get to invent something really interesting? I came from direct intelligent commercials and doing creative work for advertising and marketing. Did I get to do something that was exciting? Or do we make a lot of money doing that? And that became really less interesting. And what suddenly became more interesting is, did I invent something that will make a difference for people that will free people, that will unleash them and how much of a difference? And then the money side started, it became a problem. It's like, oh goodness, I forgot to make some money on that. We should attend to that sometimes. So literally like a way in which I existed in the world completely changed. And it doesn't, I want to say a couple of things. It doesn't matter how you come about inventing your purpose. It doesn't matter even if you do a good job at it. All you have to do is believe it. Even if it's not the sexiest purpose you've ever done, just inventing a purpose and then investing yourself into it has the effect of fulfillment and directing and sending you in a way that's important. And we don't have a purpose. Like you're not gonna cut me open and find my purpose in there. Purpose is something of creation. I created my purpose. I created my purpose to give me meaning in life. And it does. It's a magic trick I know the magic of. It's not like I'm trying to fool myself. I know that I invented it. I know that it's something I invented to create this positive impact. And then it does. And then the great thing about that is that means that if it no longer fits, if I get to a point where it's no longer satisfying or no longer fulfilling, I'm free to invent another purpose. I'm free to reimagine my purpose at any time so that I have the capacity to be what I wish to be in the world. Not what the world puts on me or what other people might say I should be but really to be what I wish to be. And so it kind of ticks the box of being sovereign really being able to be your own sovereign self. It ticks the box of being unique but also has this kind of larger reflection this larger world that I exist in. And I think most of the great purposes do have this quality of service or contribution. Yeah. I mean, I think it's fundamental actually to being a human being in this age especially if you wanna make any difference in the world. I've never heard it said so eloquently and that is absolutely perfect because it will resonate with a lot of people. It is truly not only sovereign but it's almost like a magic trick because you get to be the creator. You're the creator to live the purpose and way your soul intended to live and you're part of that creation process which is nice. And when you do that, it's your baby. You have ownership, you have empowerment, you have the sovereign ability and then you're the motivator, you're the boss to get up and go and to do it. And the thing that I really learned is it is a huge motivator to when there are no bosses when there is no time card to punch when there is nobody looking over to make sure you're getting that task done it's enough to go well beyond. Usually where our own worst enemy in that respect will end up working a lot harder or missing lunch or dinner or doing other things to see that fulfilled or see us move in that direction. And I really love how you so eloquently put it before we totally do it. I wanna interrupt you. So how did you, how did you have the purpose work go for you? You did cynics for it because that's the first time you did that. No, no, no. So I'd done it many years before Rhonda Burns and I did it with The Secret, I did it with Bob Proctor, did it with Jim Rohn, did it with many others along the way. And the real, really first great experience I had was from my mother. She was one of probably my, not only my best friend, but my best mentor of kind of getting me excited about creating my own purpose and that the world's my oyster, not only am I a crew member on this beautiful spaceship Earth, but I have some ability to steer the path that my life takes. And she really gave me that and that was my really first experience. But the true power came really after I took the Simon Sinek's course and came up also multiple, it was supposed to be one sentence and I ended up being a paragraph, so to say my purpose is really to empower billions of global citizens to live an adaptive lifestyle of health and sustainability within the safe operating spaces of our planetary boundaries. And I do that, I've been doing that ever since and I've haven't reached the billions yet, but I haven't given up the mission. I've definitely reached millions and I do it in many different ways. I write, I do documentaries, I do videos, I do podcasts. I speak at a lot of big events and I really want to spark people with their own empowerment that they can find their way, that they can also get excited about the many things that we can do as crew members of the spaceship Earth that don't mean we're working for the man or that we're not slaves or peasants that we can really kind of guide our future in life. And it's better than any self sovereign identification, any government or anybody could give you to have this freedom in place on our planet. And it's been fabulous. So, and ever since that, it's really, it's like, I hate to say it's magic, but it's just such a powerful potion for a beautiful life and a beautiful future. Yeah, magic like an incantation, right? You just say your purpose, it becomes present. Well, I just want to say that, a reason I asked that is, and I was hoping you would share your purpose is that my assertion is that people who have really strong purposes, that their purpose shows up in the room when they show up. And they don't have to say what their purpose is, it just shows up, like you can hear them and they're talking what they're passionate about, their expression, what they get lit up by, you can sense their purpose, you can feel it, you don't have to have an articulation. But so, getting to hear yours was wonderful. It's like it really summed up who you are for me, like who you show up for me at. You know, within the sustainable, would you say the sustainable boundaries of our planet? Yeah, the safe operating spaces of our planetary boundaries. You know, there's nine planetary boundaries and there's a safe green space in the middle where life is in balance and in harmony and there's a lot of good things. We're reaching a lot of tipping points, but I think we can regenerate our futures endlessly if we get back into those safe operating spaces. And there's some really beautiful ways and better models for life that we're gonna touch upon hopefully here in a few minutes that really can get us there that people say, oh, that's hard, it takes a lot of discipline or this is some crazy tree hugger economic principle. But no, they're not, they're just better models for life and they're so fulfilling in many aspects, not just as an individual, but in other aspects. Yeah, by the way, I'm signed up. Like just let me know what you want from me. I'm all for that purpose. And I think that's another thing that purpose can give us, especially like once our purpose grows to impact the world. Like, and that's one of the models I really like is that our consciousness starts off as consciousness itself. In fact, it takes a while to be born, right? We become conscious as a, oh, I'm a thing separate from my parents. And then through time, our consciousness and our love and our care expands to cover our family, let's say. And then in time, maybe it covers our extended family or people from my area of the planet, call it a town or a country. And if you keep growing your consciousness, and Ken Wilber said this first, then you eventually have consciousness that cares about the whole planet. And if you keep going, then you end up with, you know, universal love for the universe. Your consciousness has a love and care and concern for the universe. And so when people start having their purposes be more than just about themselves or their family or their company or their, and I don't wanna say it's not a lower level of consciousness, it's consciousness. And consciousness is beautiful. It's just consciousness of a larger space. And I'll do the same thing with time, our time, more time, bigger, bigger, longer expanses of time. When that happens inside of somebody's purpose or their action in life, where the way they are living and conducting their life, it's so compelling, it's so attractive. And it's not always, you know, like if you think of Elon Musk, I'm like, that guy is, he's half cocked and crazy. Seems like to me when I read his stuff, but his compelling visions about electric cars, about life on Mars or whatever it is, compelling visions are so large that visions themselves are enrolling. Like the person is secondary to the visions. And so when you've stated your purpose, I could just feel it come alive, that larger vision for the whole planet, for all human beings. And I'm like, yes. And I think, I mean, that's what we rise up. We're just asking you to say yes, just say yes to doing your part, whatever it is to either sitting inside of, you know, Mark's vision and helping him out, which I'm 100% behind, or, you know, you're getting into my vision of unleashing, you know, humanity to have a thriving future for future. All of those things, like it's not that you have to, to come up with the biggest, most grand thing, it's just you have to be in service to whatever one's resonated for you, whatever one's called for you. And then your purpose is a place in that. Maybe I'm the communications officer for planet Earth or I'm an engineer or whatever. As you see your own unique place, then you begin to realize that, like a puzzle, we all fit together in these kind of crazy ideas about new ways of, you know, conducting life on the planet, exchanging value, living in peace and harmony are pretty easy when you've got, you know, 8 billion people working on that problem. Yeah, if there's 80, it's pretty crazy. But if we can enroll your billions, then it's not crazy at all. Absolutely, and I'm right in line with yours and everything you say so resonates. And I think there's some really beautiful models for not only of meaning, but for life in there that are really just absolutely fabulous. There's a few things that I really wanna touch upon. One, before we kind of shift away from the filmmaking documentary stuff, much as I shared this idea with you before and you're also working on some other things. All our media that we see out there is very dystopic nowadays. There's not a lot of, you know, there's TED Talks and then there's kind of a Black Mirror. It's also dystopic. And then your occasional documentary that really gives you hope of a better future. But the most of them were fighting over resources, a very dystopian media, whether it's a series of short or a movie or whatever it is. We don't have a lot of media out there that show us what a resilient or regenerative or sustainable future looks like. What that world would look like if we get there by 2030 or 2050 or 27, 70. What does that world that has really achieved all the sustainable development goals, which has achieved the Paris Agreement, which has achieved, you know, the bigger, higher ambitions of life that where we should be striving for, what does that world look like compared to us pushing the now model, the model that we're living now around the world, Ukraine, Russia, the United States, wherever the Bolsonaro's, the Putin's, the Shays, however political that we wanna get. But let's push those models out into the future. Are we all still hopeful? I can't think of one single model that we're operating on now. If we push that out in the future, I'll say, boy, I'm glad we stuck it out with that fossil fuel or the extractive economy or that capitalism because it's, boy, the futures are great. I'm worried, I'm at disease. And so to reel in all the doom gloom of that, how can we give people like Star Trek from our generation or even Star Wars, which is a little bit dystopian too, set a picture of what a future would look like if we stayed within the safe operating spaces or planetary boundaries and maybe even create that into a series where every week like Desperate Housewives or MASH or something comes out every week that goes into multiple seasons of reruns so that it's ever-present so that people can engineer, do movie magic, architectures, design, create that future that they're seeing. Now don't get me wrong, I still think in the future, even if we reach all those beautiful, almost utopian ideas, we're still gonna have divorce, we still might fight, we still might spit on each other, hurt each other or find crazy ways to manipulate the system. But at least we're not killing humanity, at least we're not messing up the future generations. And so as a filmmaker, as somebody who creates these visions and even verbally, you've just, what you've told us about the why and the purpose and how that works, for me, I can put that into visual things in my mind. I'm like, I'm sold, I bought into this, sign me up, I'm on board, let's go because that's the world I wanna live in. How can we do that with the entertainment, the movie, the media industry? Do we need to call up Tyler Parr's studios and get Leonardo DiCaprio? What do we need to do to get us in a different viewing? I don't wanna numb people, I don't wanna overload them with or kind of, there's a negative force of that where we're kind of this new world order whatever it's kind of like, that, but just so that we can have a different idea of what it's like, what are your thoughts on that? And do you see there's some possibilities we could do that? Hell, can we work on a project like that? Done. Yeah, that's one of my biggest passions right now. I think, I firmly believe that we live into the future we imagine. So if we're constantly imagining a future where computers are gonna kill us all, we're gonna invent that. That's just like, it's like if you're skiing and you keep thinking I'm gonna hit a tree and you keep looking at the trees, it's pretty likely you're gonna smack into a tree at some point, you focus on something and then the brain through cognitive bias and all these other things start creating the conditions for that to occur. You start noticing, oh man, look, there's the way this is going about. Oh, there's a thing that I can see where that's gonna lead. And then movie makers just take that and amplify it. They make it the worst they could possibly make it and they do it because it's compelling. I mean, the human being, if there's a car wreck on the opposite side of the highway, we're gonna slow down and take a look. Not because it's good for us to take a look, but what it's compelling because to the human animal, if I can learn something from a disaster for some other human animal, I could put that into place to have greater likelihood of surviving. It makes complete sense. But it makes sense for, you know, noticing that you shouldn't turn your back to the lake while you're drinking and a bear comes get you. I mean, it's like, it's a practical thing. But when it comes to media, you know, we can create a really dark story that our brain is completely absorbed by and the exchange of value is not that I learn how to deal with terminator robots better or how I deal with zombies better because there are no such thing. The exchange of value is I give my attention to it and the people who make that media make money. So there's no net benefit to me as a human animal to be staring at that, but the compulsion to do so is present. And I'm guilty. I like dystopian stories sometimes. Sometimes I have to, I have a hard night of sleeping afterwards. Like I'll go to bed and I'm like, wow, that's heavy. I don't know if I want to wrestle with that. And so I have certainly backed off from a lot of those things. But the question is, should media be responsible for the future? I don't know. I mean, should probably a big word. Can it? Yes. Can we create viable visions of a thriving future for humanity that gives somebody an idea of what it looks like and gives us some motivation or something to aim for? Look, not everybody as a media maker or a visionary has a capacity to picture these things. In fact, I'm pretty sure most of us can't see those futures. But though for those of us who have some idea, we can generate those visions. We can share them with the world and it gives somebody things to work on. I remember when I was in college, I read William Gibson's books about virtual reality and the capacity to have what we're calling the metaverse now, but to have that world and in those books, it was a computer brain interface. Well, I was so compelled reading those science fiction books. I dropped out of journalism school and went to computer engineering school because I wanted to figure out how to make computers and people talk. Now that's the kind of media we need to be making that gets people to drop out of business school and go into engineering school or go into international relations or any kind of thing where they say, wow, I could actually learn something to be able to make that future happen. I want to say not that future. I want to be really clear. I really think that the future is a multiverse, that human thriving, and especially individual human thriving, requires that we escape these kind of monolithic cultural identities that we begin to fragment, not into little tribes that fight each other for resources, but fragment into worlds of concern and worlds of caring concern, things that we love. Maybe I love cosplay and I want to go live in cosplay land. I want my community to be that or maybe I love chess and I want chess to be a big part of my life and that we could create future societies based upon all kinds of mixes of ingredients. There's not a way for human beings to live life. There's, like you said, there's a safe zone for us to do it so that all human beings can live life and all animals can live life. That's important. But we need a future that's a tapestry of different things and media could really help with that. We could explore the kind of crazy worlds that human beings invent and crazy communities and crazy ways of exchanging values or exchanging value or what work is or what love is or what relationship is, you know, like there's room for all of it. As long as we don't harm other human beings or harm our ecosphere, harm our planet. And so I think this is a place that not only, you know, filmmakers like me or people who are futurists and like to imagine the future and figure things out. Not only it's not just something for us to do, we can take a leadership role there and really get the ball rolling. But I think for me, the idea is we really want to get everybody having a part to play in this. You know, in science fiction, we have a lot of these things where they do fan fiction where people write other Star Wars films or other Star Wars stuff or a new Star Trek thing and they just write these sorts. Harry Potter, I know, has a bunch of it and they write them not to become authors or to make a lot of money. They write them because they love the world so much. And that's what we need. We need a couple of billion people writing fan fiction for the future that works for all. And then we'll have plenty of blueprints. We'll have lots of things to try. So I'm, yes, if we have, if Leonardo DiCaprio is listening to this podcast we need your help now or any major studio. One of the things that's difficult about non-dystopic future media is that it doesn't have that biological hook. It doesn't, the human being doesn't stop and look at the good thing going along on the side of the road. Maybe if the little girl is a lemonade stand you do stop and buy lemonade but most of it's just drive on by, right? And so there has to be some other supporting mechanism other than it making lots of money. Making a positive future of humanity may be motivating enough but the old system really only wants us to give our dollars to watch that stuff. So we have to find out, find a way to support it with economics. So it could be patronage, all kinds of things. There's lots of models that we can talk about that. Yeah, I'm on board for that as is definitely one of my major projects over the next decades to share lots of visions of that viable future of that. And then also there's crazy things marked as crazy economic models. Well, why not tell a story about it? Like I could give you the white paper on a crazy economic model and five people could read it and understand it. But if I could tell a short little 10 or 15 minute story about how life works in non-competitive world, non-competitive land, or then we could actually show like, oh, what would it look like if people weren't competing for resources? What would they talk? How would they interact? Well, creative people can figure that out and give me a vision and see if you would want to move there. You can think of it as a brochure for a future you might want to inhabit. Yeah, I mean, just on that point that you just mentioned, when we shift away from a competitive or we're each doing our own thing type of a model and we do more cooperation and sharing and other things, it turns into a harnessing of the exponential function and that model explodes just like Moore's law, Metcalf's law, us and catapults humanity in the future. There's an ecological phenomenon called symbiosis that it's all about human evolution and how we can really get on that exponential path to stay up to speed with our developing world. The reason I know you're absolutely on board, the reason I mentioned the media aspect like I do is because I think it's a tool that is in such a beautiful medium that we could use to really help us. So with Star Trek, none of that stuff existed. It was all movie magic, the tricorder, the hologram rooms, the transporter, the medical bay, all the things that the 3D food printer, whatever they called it, that was all movie magic, interracial marriages or interracial relationships, no smoking, I could go on and on. And through that vision, it showed us not only a diverse future possibility, but it gave architects, engineers and filmmakers the ability to say, how could we make that happen in some form similar and bring that into reality? And until we have that medium or something to visually stimulate humanity to think in a different way to shift that mindset where we're not using our imagination quite as well as we should out of a media setting, out of a video or movie or something. But time and time again, there's been so many people that through documentaries, through films, through movie magic have been inspired to go out and take action and make something happen or create it. There's one example of the illusionist that's an old Austrian film with Edward Norton as a magician, an illusionist. And then that movie, there was a little locket that he made the princess and gave it to her kind of as a sign of his love before they split up and came back. And I don't wanna spoil the whole movie, but that locket was movie magic. It first was just a locket and then it turned to a heart and then it turned to a butterfly. And then when you opened it up, there was a two-sided picture of them inside that locket. And that was movie magic. That was three separate lockets. Someone saw that and said, oh my God, I gotta have that. I gotta give that to my wife. That's the most beautiful thing and show my love. And he contacted the studio. He looked online for replicas and said, is that possible? And was surprised to find out it was movie magic. And it bothered him so much that it didn't exist. He was an engineer and he figured out a way to make it happen. And the guy is such a successful business guy now. That's all he does is sell these lockets and he's multimillionaire now and he's doing great and he's fulfilled. And he's replicated that with many things. And that's the inspiration I think humanity needs and that's why I asked that. How can we help or nudge to get these in there and get away from the amygdala that leads and bleeds and moves towards to the leading and bleeding of sustainable, desirable future, something like that. And that's kind of really why I brought it up. Yeah, I think it's really important. I love, we run around with communicator devices like Star Trek. Star Trek is a great example too that it's one of the few positive futures that we have. You've got human beings who are not warlike who want to see other cultures in the universe. The next generation put forward this idea of non-colonialism, non-interference with other cultures so that they couldn't go in and meet another race and then change the course of their history. They had to hide their ships and things like that. You know, like that's what the next generation's 90s show. You know, we didn't even have anti-colonial terminology back then, but here they were demonstrating a world that considered that to be just table stakes. Like we'll be anti-colonial, it's just that you have to start with that. And so they really pioneered a lot of these, you know, very positive things. Like you said, the anti-racist stuff with the first interracial kisses on TV with Kirk and Ohura. And, you know, like many people of many different nationalities in the shows is pretty amazing. But maybe what's more amazing is that people didn't copy that, that it didn't become a thing. Now there is a genre of science fiction out that people call Hope Punk, which is, you know, like cyberpunk before. It's like speculative fiction that has hopeful themes and kind of has this more of an approach of sharing, you know, what we could be as human beings. So be on the lookout for that kind of stuff. And those Hope Punk science fiction writers are the first people we should recruit, Mark. We got to get them to come and bring their genius, you know, futuristic brains to thinking about how things can work. And by the way, we should bring some philosophers along for the ride and some engineers and some people who know systems thinking. We need a little team of, you know, geniuses in their own domains to help us to not only create a vision, but to create visions that you can naturally imagine that latticework backwards. So your engineer could see the final object, could see what materials was made of, and he by himself was able to make that journey from, you know, imagination to actual object. Well, for, you know, 30, 50, 100 year futures, you know, it takes some other kind of organization to put all those things together, you know, much like Gaudi and Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, which is still not finished 100 years after his death. You know, it acquired something more than just a set of architectural drawings. It required all these hands and geniuses to come together to keep that project going. Well, in a way, what we need to do is we need to be the Gaudi's of the world to have a vision for, you know, I know that it'll be a church that looks like a forest on the inside. We need that, and then we need the engineers and the people who are able to, you know, system thinkers saying, well, if you do that, though, you could put a lot of stress on this system and maybe you make that better, you make this worse so somebody can make that help us to see that. And then thereby, I think also just so important, if we can give the vision, but also give the backstory about how these thinkers talked about this, how do we imagine something happening in the future? And then how do we check to see if that thing we're imagining would actually be beneficial for humanity? There's been so many things that we've invented as human beings that have really turned out bad. So if we could, you know, explore and invent new models of consideration, how do we invent and create with consideration for the impact of the creation, even just sharing that story of how people come together to do that might be of fundamental importance to humanity, to learn how that process goes. There's a lot of value, I think in every part of that change, the vision, the process, the people, and right now, fortunately, we could share all that media. We could share a TV show and a behind the scenes thing at the same time, maybe different groups of people working on that and thereby learn better how to do what we're doing. We don't wanna generate visions for the future of humanity, like we're people in an ivory castle, like there's five of us, they get to imagine the future of humanity and everybody else has to do as we say. That's the old model. We wanna say there's eight billion people who have the capacity to generate an amazing vision for the future of humanity. And any one of those eight billion people may be somebody that comes up with an idea that becomes in the future fundamental to our successful living of life, for a sustainable living of life. We have to get people, enroll people and train them to do this, to imagine these futures. And then we've got this, the eight billion people population becomes our asset, not our thing to struggle with. It's like, wow, we've got eight billion people trying to solve this problem at the same time. Wouldn't that be amazing? Absolutely. The crazy thing is that, again, Star Trek had its own economic model. There's a book, Trekonomics, it was such a fabulous book because it talked about, Star Trek was not only sci-fi and these visions of the future of movie magic, but they came up with their own economic model, basically where there was no money, yet people were doctors, lawyers and security personnel and had these wonderful jobs. And there was also ranking in some respects, but there was no monetary policy or money, so to say, to hold it all together, yet it worked beautifully. And that's like another vision of, what are these other models? And we've tickled on it a little bit, you so nicely mentioned, this twist on universal basic income and kind of these local communities. And that's something that we have in common, we talk about a lot, we're both doing futurism, we're both doing economic models, we're doing movie magic and documentaries. I wanna get into this economic transition in some respects and have a discussion with you about it. We've got donut economics, we've got mission economics, circular economy, ecological economics, I mean, capitalism extractive and I could go on and on, there's platform, regenerative, how in the hell are we gonna make sense of it all? And what model are we working all of these models at the same time, because we have different futures or what do we hope emerges and what are you dealing with at this point in time on economic models? Yeah, I love economics and the whole notion. And it really demonstrates, if you know, in Star Trek, you see them go to the bar, you know, what would be Goldberg was the bartender and next generation, you know, Picard didn't get out his credit card to pay for the drink, he asked for drink, he got a drink, she gave him a drink, she gave him some advice with the drink as well, she didn't charge for that either. But this is an example of a, you know, kind of a post monetary economics that I don't have to give you something, a mind to get something of yours, it doesn't have to get a direct exchange of value to get that drink. And you know, so when we talk about a post monetary economics, the first and most fundamental thing that has to happen, which for most people kind of blows their mind is that our work and our economic wellbeing have to be separated. So you can't do post monetary economics without having some way to have your needs met and what needs are can be widely defined. I wanna like get clear about what needs would have to be met for us to even experiment with post monetary economics. And those needs are the fundamentals. And I'd almost call them a, you know, like we say universal basic income, I'd say these are universal basic rights. We should have this notion that everybody has a right, for example, for a safe place, safe clean place to live where there's not environmental threats. I'm not under threat of floods or earthquakes where the construction of my home is safe. It's not a home that's gonna fall apart or it doesn't just have dirt for a floor or actually have a safe home, one that I feel safe in. We certainly have to have access to food and quality food, not just crap food that we get sick and die on. We have to have food that's actually nourishing and sustaining. We have to have health care. We have to have the ability that when we're not well that we could automatically see somebody about not being well and they would work to have us be better and that we'd also have people that were working for us be well when we're not sick, so well care and not sick care. We need to have the ability to have for ourselves and for our children education. Just they could be educated in anything that they had passion about. And so these are kind of the, some of the cornerstone pieces of what would allow us to go post-monetary. So if those were handled always, if I always had good food, a place to stay, health care, education, if I had those things handled no matter what then I could choose to work on something that had little or no economic exchange. I wouldn't have to earn money if I never had to pay rent. I wouldn't have to earn money if I didn't have to deal with food or education or health care, these kind of major things. And so, if you think about universal basic income are we giving people money to participate in a system that's economic based or monetarily based? Are we just saying, hey, all human beings will have this taken care of. And then what you do with your life is up to you. You get to create your purpose and your meaning for living and then you get to go out and do that and not be constrained with the things you do because they may or may not make money. As a documentary filmmaker, I have never made any money. I have lost my every time I make these films. Economically, it's the worst decision I can make. Now, impact-wise, it's a great decision. But if I didn't have any economic constraint and maybe there was somebody who's their job was to just make sure that filmmakers who had great ideas could easily have access to the materials they needed to make ideas, I would just make a bunch of stuff. I would be unconstrained in the pursuit of my passion and my purpose. Now, that may not work for all human beings. Maybe some human beings are not capable of producing on their own without some kind of extrinsic motivation. I'm gonna say maybe. As I really believe that working for an extrinsic motivation thing, working to make money to pay the bills is something we've learned. I think in a couple of generations, if nobody ever did that ever again, people would just learn that as you grow up, you've got to find the thing you're passionate about and do that thing. Otherwise, you're gonna have a boring life. I mean, who wants to sit at home watching TikTok all day long? Well, maybe a couple of people, but most people would actually go and make a contribution of things, the things they find most important. So all of these models that you mentioned, down in economics, could work with that. Most of these circular economy, all of these larger economic frameworks could work with that. But to me, that's the fundamental move, that the separation from work and money, the separation from survival and work. I don't know that anything good comes from us worrying about our survival day in, day out. And there are, I wanna mention, there are different degrees of worrying about our survival. There are literally a billion people on the planet that don't know how they're gonna survive tomorrow. Those are our brothers and sisters out there that don't know how they're gonna feed their kids tomorrow if they're gonna have a safe place to live. That is unacceptable. It's just plain unacceptable. Then there's those of us who feel like we're having to work to survive, even though we actually have a lot of those things taken care of. But there's always this pressure of the future and built into our system. Well, I have enough money today to pay for those things, but I don't know what's gonna happen in a couple of years or retirement's gonna come and then nobody's gonna pay for those things for me. We always have this future fear and pressure that someday we may not be surviving. And then I think that's responsible for some of our bad behavior. I'll claw my way over somebody else to make sure my future is secure. And we'll see this in wealthy people who wanna set up trust funds for their kids. A million dollars is enough, 10 million is enough, 75 million is enough. A billion dollars. And maybe now I can secure the survival for myself and for my children. Maybe they're children's children. But it's a crazy perverse incentive to do all that. It's something that we can just handle this humanity. Let's just handle the survival part. Not just surviving, but everybody actually has a good life as a basis. No, you don't get to drive a Tesla. Maybe we don't have personalized use of cars to do that kind of thing. I don't know. But that you worry whether your children will be educated or taken care of or fed at the night, that shouldn't be a human thing anymore. We could engineer that out of existence. So for me, that's like, now from here, if we can get that as a foundation, we can talk about all kinds of crazy models and all kinds of fun models to incentivize different kinds of behaviors. But if we don't get freed up from that survival pressure that we have, all eight billion of us, it's hard to imagine making the leap to these new kinds of value exchanger economics to me. Now, what do you think, Mark? Well, I totally agree. And you also, and not only your introduction, but also in the beginning of our conversation, time is always a factor. Bob Park proctor and we rise up as well. And I think there was one other who mentioned it. Maybe it was Jack Hanfield. Basically that we're trading time for money. That is such an inefficient way of living life. And it's a really vicious cycle to get into how we value our worth and value the lifestyle that we create. And so I kind of want to go a little bit deeper on what you see that time model is for money and how we maybe shift away from, either the model that you'd spoke about, the universal basic income that they're working about or some other ideas of what you'd like to see humanity get into to step away from that or get that separation out. And if it's even doable. Yeah, so this is my favorite research topic right now, time. You know, like who are we as human beings? What is our being in regards to time? And I'll drop a couple of nuggets here because it's important. I just, every time I get a chance to talk about this, there's a couple of people, things I want people to understand. First, nothing happens in time. And we don't trade time for anything because time is not a physical object. We only have language to talk about time the way we talk about things. And, but it's not, time is not like a football field. We can't do anything in it. See, time is literally what's happening now. And the human being and many other species have this memory of time before and an anticipation of time to come. So we have this continuity of living that expands more than just this present moment, but not a single one of us has ever lived outside of the present moment. We are completely living as time. We are a living example of time, not in time or through time, but literally we're a, if you will, an embodiment of time as much as we're embodiment of space. And so we need to start thinking differently about time in order to be able to actually be masters of it and to be able to be able to express ourselves fully inside of it. So when we talk about futurism or generative futurism, we're creating this thing called a future which orients our now moment. Like right now you're smiling because there's a occurring in this now moment that is pulling you, drawing you to something greater. That's powerful. If that could affect your mood just by generating a new future from moment to moment, wouldn't that be amazing? We wouldn't have to take drugs anymore. We could just invent new futures that change who we are now. Likewise, we carry around this trauma from the past. These things happen to me. But we know about the human being is that our brain does not record the past. It's a really bad recording instrument. In fact, every time we recall a memory about the past, we rewrite it in the present moment by re-presencing something that happened in the past. It gets re-contextualized with the current self or the current moment or the current knowing. And then through cognitive psychology, we call that reframing. You can take something in the past, you can tell yourself a new story about it and then you remember it differently. Well, this leads me to believe that there's all kinds of things about our being in time that we just have very, very little access to. Our old model of things happened to me and things will happen to me in time. It's not very effective. It's not very, well, maybe that's a better way to put it. It's like a 1.0 model. Like we had this rudimentary bad model of time that we survived on for a long time. And now we've got this new model which allows us to have an effect in the present moment on our ever-present past and our ever-present future. We actually have those things now and we can have an impact on them. Now, going back to your economics question, if what I am doing is trading time for money, that is both a past-based and all three cases, past-based, present and future-based conversation. But what's really most important is that that working for money, maybe I've got a job that's not satisfying to me or maybe I got a job that's really not in alignment with my purpose or maybe I've just got a job that allows me to keep my kids fed. In that regard, it's the future that counts the most because it's my anticipation of having to go back to that job day after day after day that I really don't like, that doesn't match with me, that ends up as stress in the body and then ends up as disease in the body. And then I get sick and I have to take sick days or maybe I get a heart condition or I get cancer or something like this. Now I'm not saying it's causative. I'm not saying that the way your work occurs to you is causative of those things, but it sets the conditions in the body for those things versus if, for example, we had our basic human rights that we mentioned before operating. And I knew that if I didn't go to work tomorrow, that maybe I'd be responsible helping somebody to do the work that I'm supposed to do or maybe finding somebody that loved doing what I didn't love to do and my job was really to find something I loved to do. Now day after day, my story about the past is I always get to orient myself towards the things that are purposeful and meaningful to me. I get to make a contribution. I've gotten to my pet life, make a contribution to the things I think are important. If that was your past and your future was tomorrow, I get to do this amazing thing that's about a thing I really care about and I'm gonna get to make an impact, then your now moment, your today that you were trading for money is now filled with delight and passion. And, you know, like who wouldn't wanna live in that world and in that story, that narrative of past, present and future. So it's not only that we, like there's a lot of people out there selling courses to stop trading your time for money, become an entrepreneur. Now you're gonna trade your time for a dream. It's like, it's still the same model. I'm saying that what we really need to trade in is our way of seeing ourselves in time. Now, let's say you have a job that you have to do to put money, food on the table. You know, we don't yet have a universal basic rights for your welfare. It may be that you wanna end in a future and you see this a lot in immigrant families, like somebody who comes into Europe or the West from an economically disadvantaged country and then they work really hard to put their kids through college to get them to medical school. And their life becomes about it's hard work, but I'm doing it for a future I believe in. Now they're generating a future for their children and you'll see those kids do really, really great that next generation, like they've got such amazing energy because of the work of their parents and the work, the reason their parents made that work is they had a future that they really cared about. So even doing hard work in the present moment, if it's in service to a future you really care about, it's not so hard. It's not so difficult. Now, it may not be fun and maybe we don't always do fun things. In fact, I've had them to do lots of hard things that weren't fun for things that I really deeply cared about. So that's a bad model. But that's really what I hope to teach people about the way we operate in time, the way a human being operates in time. And there's a lot more to say about that. I'm working on a book about it. One day you'll see it'll be out there. We'll have longer conversations about it, but it's an obsession that I have right now. So I think if we can change that view, it's quite possible we change the way we live, that we change the way we exist at a more fundamental level than economics or politics or these other things we're talking about, that being level or the occurring of being or how does being occur to me? The being a human being, the way it occurs as alters or changes. Humanity has done that a bunch of times. It's not new for human beings, but it's kind of maybe time for, it's time for a new view of time. It definitely is. And I love the way you set it up. And it also ties to what we began with, with the vision and purpose. You also have a vision and purpose in there. And sometimes you get to see that fulfillment, the example you gave of the children being able to go to college and see that future. There's a sense of joining fulfillment through all that hard work and maybe sacrifice during that time to see the achievement of that vision where they're working on generational success of their community, their family unit. And so there's a lot of nice things. That also is a nice transition for us to really talk about generative futurism, you as a futurist, also a futurist. And I believe there's a pure vision, a roadmap, a plan for most futurists. So not only can we do back casting, use foresight modeling and all the tools of futurism, but we also, whether we're talking about space or going to the moon or whatever, those are visions of the future that have a roadmap and plan of actions and things to do that we might tweak along the way, but eventually end up in that future date or time, specifically going to Mars now, they're talking, it takes a while to get there and there's a process and adjustments and trajectory and maybe the slingshot effect that occur along the way. But those are all scientific and math actions that help us achieve that vision. You first have to set that vision and that desire that something you wanna do and then figure out the how in between. We've been in many areas in our world in our lives before where we had that vision but we didn't know how the hell we're gonna get there. We didn't have the tools and technologies, computing power and innovation to get to the moon when JFK set that vision. We're at the same time and similar situation now with the sustainable development goals in the Paris agreement. Eight years left to go, a decade before we have to get there and we have a lot of the tools and innovations already exist. The roadmap exists, we're just still kind of waiting on the implementation to get us there to execute but it's a very similar thing and we're in this conundrum or this situation over and over in history as kind of how we work but I want you to tell us more about generative futurism and what you do and what the concept is and you've tickled on it a little bit but let's move a little bit more there. Yeah, couple of things that you said that provoked for me that the parents working for their children, the multi-generational thing. One of the things that I lead a lot of workshops on and try to get people to do is imagine the futures that are happening long after they're gone. A generation two, three, four, five after they're gone and by the way, most of the time within three to four generations, your name is forgotten. Now, maybe you had a nickname like grandpa or something like that and they will remember grandpa or great grandpa is a name but they might actually forget as your survivors start dying themselves people forget the name. Now it might be written down it might be able to genealogy and see it but nobody remembers your name the way your wife or kids remember your name today, right? It's not present anymore. So one of the tests for me about is something of benefit to humanity is to say, well, is it a benefit? If I was no longer here and could no longer personally benefit from it would humanity benefit? So I'm not cheating. I'm not saying this would be great for humanity and boy, it'd be good for me too. I could get a lot of benefit out of that. I'm not saying you don't wanna do that but if you wanna really get to notions that are purely for humanity then take them out a hundred years really look out a long ways. There's no benefit to you at that point. Also there's no capacity to predict. Are you most predictive futurist? Anyone that's any good will predict two years out maybe three 18 months or three years is about all they're willing to stick their necks out for because if they don't predict accurately then they're not really good at predictive futurism. Their ability to predict what's gonna happen is what they stake their reputation on. Now, you might be a guy like Ray Kurzweil who predicts the singularity but the singularity is like it's kind of such a ridiculous concept in a way that he can get away with it. And so it borders on generative futurism. He starts to say, well, that's not he's predicting it but he's not really predicting it because we don't even understand enough about computers and computing power and how they would be able to be able to be fueled for long periods of time. And now we have an idea if you could ever get a person inside of there because we don't know what consciousness is. So we don't even know how you could capture it and put it somewhere other than a human body. But there's this thing like you said Mars right now we have a plan to get to Mars. Well, when Jules Verne wrote about Mars we just knew there was a planet called Mars and through our telescopes we knew it was red. That's all we knew about it. And then when he talked about taking a rocket ship there and meeting Marshal and all that stuff that was pure speculation based upon imagination. And that's giving us a little bit more of the feeling of generative futurism. If I were to take something, let's say energy I'm gonna say one of the things we know about energy is that human beings have been on a trajectory of consuming more and more and more of it with each passing decade. And at the same time the production of that energy is causing greater and greater damage and externalities to the planet. If we continue to increase energy consumption we'll run out of energy producing methods that are current methods. Now you could say, hey, we're going to increase renewables. Well, renewables also require natural resources. You can't get solar panels without digging stuff out of the ground. Well, you wanna cover the planet in disposable solar panels. Well, probably can't do that either. So now we hit a breaking point. We can no longer predict or really see how clearly to get the kind of energy we need. So maybe as a generative futurist I would say, okay the first thing is that there seems to be two parts to this equation. One is energy consumption. Like, could we imagine a future in which people can be really, really happy consuming 20% of the energy they consume today. Now maybe some of that's driven to efficiency. We could find a way to get the things that they do that cause, for example, when we moved from incandescent bulbs to LED bulbs we got more efficiency. So maybe it could be through efficiency and maybe it could be through behavior and lifestyle as well. Maybe we go to a diurnal day where we live with daylight more. I don't know. You could imagine it really quickly. And then you could begin to plot. Well, what would that be like? And then you could also say, well there's lots of abundant energy out there in the universe. There's a, you know like the universe doesn't have a lack of energy. It's dissipating. It's being, you know and tropical disappearing through heat but we could catch that wave. We could ride that universal wave of energy. So maybe I wanna say that while we became more efficient we also became able to harness the universal energy that's out there. So a predictive futurist would never enter into this domain. How do we, you know, intersect universal energy? Could be solar energy. It could be just the movement of the planets through space because the problem has no engineering solutions but a generative futurist could say well, what are the domains that would be interesting? Well, let's talk to somebody who deals in space. Let's talk to some people who deal in engineering. Let's talk about what, I need a physicist here really quickly so we can talk about what am I talking about when I'm talking about engineers? It's just energy, it's just solar. And then we could together invent a story about how we did it. Well, what we did is we learned to get things that were able to, how do we get the energy to the ground? Well, we don't know how we do it today but we imagine something like this happen. We start imagining parts and pieces. And as we imagine those pieces suddenly they become more like engineering problems. We go from something that's completely indescribable to a bunch of imagined parts and pieces. And then we start to say, oh, but that one we can actually make some progress on. We'd have to first figure out how to transmit energy from space to the ground. Well, I know some people at work in that arena let's go talk to them. And so this is a process of using imagination to create futures that are not possible or not likely to happen because nobody dared to dream them up. And the couple pieces of it. One is dreaming big and dreaming long-term. Now for a company that may only be five years, by the way. Most of the organizations I work with to do this five years is plenty big enough. I worked with a bank that did 10 years last years, tremendous for them to be thinking of themselves 10 years out. A science fiction writer could do a thousand years in the future pretty easy. So we have a lot of capacity to imagine futures. But the process of imagining suddenly creates things that become possible. So when Jules Verne talked about flying to Mars, it was a dream. There wasn't even a thing called a spaceship. But suddenly in the minds of young kids born of that age reading his work, suddenly there was a thing called a spaceship. It hadn't been built yet, but Jules Verne said it could work. Like he brought it to life for me as a story. And now I start working on, maybe a young Werner von Braun starts working on all, and I don't know if you know Werner's story, but he said, I don't care what I build as long as it gets me closer to inventing something that can get us to the moon. He's obsessed with it. Now he did a lot of stuff that he probably shouldn't invent and it was used to ends that weren't great. But that's kind of this imaginative power that we can harness through this process of generative futurism. Now it doesn't replace traditional forecasting and predictive futurism. It's not meant to do that. It's just meant to give us longer time frames to make more bold and audacious claims about what we could do as human beings. And I'm obsessed with long-term futurists. I mean, I would love to see us hit the SDG goals. I think it'd be great. And it's probably fundamental to human survival. But I would like to see us go a lot further than that. I'd like to see a world that really works for everything. I'd like to see human beings that your birthplace on the planet and not dictate what kind of life you're gonna have. Just because you're born in Nigeria doesn't mean you should have less of a life than if you're born in Oklahoma. And it should be irrelevant. You should be able to have a great human life and a great expression. So how do we get to there? Well, I say we get there by starting to imagine what it would look like for somebody in Nigeria to have the same rights as somebody who lives in Oklahoma. We've talked about that already in the past. And fortunately, through the time of me doing this, I've been doing this with organizations for about 10 years. I've found a lot of tools for doing this. And one of the things that I've discovered is that anybody can imagine amazing futures. You don't have to be like somebody who's got a writing degree or somebody who's a visual artist. I've had, I run these multi-stakeholder events where you have everybody from like low levels in organization to the CEO. You've got customers and vendors. We bring in outside interest groups if they're there and we have them together imagine a future. And sometimes though, the things that come out of people's mouths, it's just led me to believe that we all are genius like this. We're all genius at imagining bold futures. We just don't do it because it's not acceptable or there's no place in industry for a long-term vision that's not from an economist or from an operations specialist or a subject matter specialist. So I think it's a human gift, the ability to imagine futures. Then we have to get into like, how would we back cast there? What would we make real? What's the first steps we would take? And then exactly what would we have to invent to get that to happen? And then all of that human ingenuity and engineering stuff gets piled onto it. But like the SDGs, we have to have somebody declare where we're going, like the SDGs, like Kennedy putting a man on the moon, like Nelson Mandela, you know, removing apartheid. Somebody has to say it can happen. And then we can begin figuring out how to do it. And so my passion is really getting people and organizations are just one-on-one to imagine those kind of futures and then vis-a-vis the conversation we just had once that future is in place, just like having that purpose is in place. Now there's all of these courses of action that are available to you. And when you look at, should I take this job or that job or should I choose to invest in this or that? You know, because it will that realize the future I want to realize everything becomes crystal clear based upon the future that's calling you or the future that you've invented. And yeah, wow, if you ask me, do I have hope for humanity? I say absolutely because we can imagine things that don't exist today. We can imagine our way out of all these problems. And then we can come together in groups and engineer that thing out of existence or engineer another thing into existence. But we have to believe it's possible. You've touched on it a couple of times and you've answered it in a few ways. The hardest question I always ask all my guests is what does a world that works for everyone look like for you? And so I believe you have that vision. I'd like you to answer it for us. What does a world that works for everyone look like for you, Michael Sean? Yeah, we'll start with those basic rights and I want to add one to it. That's the right to do meaningful work. That the right to have a meaningful life with purpose. You know, I think that's one of the things that, you know, especially racism and colonialism destroyed. We went to Africa and say, you aren't people, you're animals, you have no meaning. You have no gift to give the world besides maybe the sweat of your back. And, you know, those are wrongs that still percolate in our consciousness. And so a world that works for everything, everyone means that for me that would mean as an individual someplace on the planet from zero to 130 years in age that they wake up in the morning, they feel like they belong in the world, like they have a place and they feel like their life has meaning that they fit into this human world, this animal world, this multi-species world and that they have a place in it, they belong and they can contribute. If that happened for every individual, then we wouldn't have to do any surveys to find out if the world worked for everybody. Everybody would be living a fulfilled life. I think also I want to add one thing. If your listeners haven't read James Kars' book, Finite and Infinite Games, read that because the other thing is that any system we design, humans tend to try to figure out how to make the system work better for themselves than others or better for my kids than others. It's just a kind of a leftover trait from how we came up historically. So we also has to have in that world that works for everything systems that change the rules, that change the way things work such that nobody can win out over other people. We can't have me at the expense of you in a world that works for everything. It has to be that I get these great things and you get these great things too, that this world is available to all of us and none of us have privilege over the other. And until we get that, really until we get that, I just want to get flat. We don't get it for ourselves. All we get is a bad version of it. A, I can fly around in my $40 million jet and burn jet fuel and I can buy a yacht that could fit a small village in Somalia inside of it. I can do that and maybe it's cool. But ultimately I'm going to get bored of that yacht and ultimately that plane is not going to get me where I want to go. Ultimately I'm not going to be able to get anywhere. I'm not going to be able to get away from my suffering fast enough or to waste away to some kind of joyful experience fast enough. I will never have enough money to do that. But if I had a loving community, an ability to work meaningful in the world and a world that was flourishing, it'd be really hard to not be satisfied with that. I think you could find some outliers. It would be really unhappy. But I think for the most part, we'd fundamentally alter what it meant to be a human being inside of that. We would no longer be fighting for our lives. It would no longer be a dog eat dog world. It would be a world where I looked around and thought, wow, we're doing good here. Exactly what we talked about in so many ways today and it's so nice that when you have that vision, which is also kind of a way of having a lie and a purpose and you can articulate that, it's really just a better model. It's a better way for us to get there. It's a brighter future. It's really desirable. I want to be there. I know that's a world that works for everyone. I am all out of questions. I actually have one last one left. I think I know the answer already. But other than that, we've talked long. We could talk for hours. I mean, we need to talk about economic models even more and about I'm also doing a book after my book Menu B on economic models as well. We've kind of tickled upon it, but that's probably another whole another series that we could talk about. Matter of fact, I just have another podcast today that was talking about this new book, Super Charge Me. It was also about new economic models and things. So it's all with something, but I really want to know for you, what have you experienced or learned in this journey? And you've met so many people in this journey so far. And I'm sure the journey's been a real important part in another self, but is there anything that you would have loved to know from the start or wished that you'd either started sooner or found out sooner in this journey that you say, oh boy, wish I knew that from the beginning, or I wish I would have learned that sooner. Yeah, I'd say the thing I wish I had been born into maybe in a larger way. And I would have said, you know, great parents, they were hippies. They had a kind of very eclectic and odd childhood. It was wonderful. But the piece that I didn't get to much later in life, and really I think as part of my daily meditation is the piece about compassion. And just get that, hey, yeah, life is hard for you. It's a struggle sometimes. It's hard for me. It's a struggle for me sometimes. And it's that way for all human beings. Even that person that you're upset and angry with because they did X, Y, and Z cut you off in a lane of traffic or whatever. You know, that they too are enduring, you know, hard times in their world. And that as long as we pit our own happiness against the happiness of another person, we're not likely to get there. We're likely to take advantage of situations and hurt people. Now, if we're taking advantage and hurting people, then other people are taking advantage and we're gonna get hurt. It's just a vicious cycle. And I just see so much to be gained in, looking at every time you're upset about somebody or something somebody's done or something that's happened in the world to just take a moment and say, wow, that's a human being. They're suffering. You know, they're struggling with things. And I recognize in myself struggling and working through things. And one of the greatest things in life is having a friend, maybe like you Mark, that I say, man, I'm struggling with stuff. And he's like, wow, tell me about it. I wanna know, maybe I can help. Oh, I got a great insight on that. And, you know, we work a lot in the domains of competition and we work a lot in the domains of trying to get ahead in life. And it's just looking in the wrong direction. We really need to be looking towards each other and how we can be in service to each other, how we can be compassionate, how we can listen. And then when we need help, how we can ask for help. And then when we do something wrong, we do something that we're embarrassed of. We do something that isn't us at our bell self that we're also able to be compassionate to ourselves and say, wow, I'm a human being, I'm suffering, I'm dealing with things. I get how it fell apart in that moment. That doesn't mean I'm a bad person. In fact, it just means that I did something I'm not proud of. And so, you know, it's the other compassion is the other side of the glove of love, right? It's they're in front of the hand, back of the hand. You know, you can't be a loving person without being a compassionate person. And so maybe we should take that back, Mark. Maybe I did learn about it early enough. I was a Zen Buddhist in my early 20s. You know, it just didn't seem like, when they said people were suffering, I got that, but I didn't get it like in my heart or my gut. Now, like I'm now in my fifties, like I see some people, I do a lot of coaching and often somebody comes to me with a problem and all I can, I was like, oh man, they're suffering. And I get it so clearly. And then the solutions that come from that compassionate point of view or stance are always generated. They always create a better future. But if I were just trying to help somebody get ahead or, you know, in a leadership conflict, I coach leaders, you know, at times, if I were just teaching them to get ahead, then I'd just be perpetrating the same old system. And so, yeah. So I won't say yet, Mark, that compassion is one of my superpowers, but it's one I'm working on really, really hard. Cause it's one, if I were to get to the finish line of this life and feel like I had that as a superpower, maybe not born with it, but I lived my life in service of becoming that, that would be the one I would want to have. That's beautiful. Yeah, I totally agree. If one of us, anyone of humanity is suffering, we're all suffering. There is no model that if anyone is suffering, that we're all going to succeed. It's gotta be a game theory of a win-win for all. There's this beautiful Sanskrit word, and I wanted to mention to you earlier in our discussion because it was good and it was a good point, but it's even better now because you've surmised the whole thing. There's this old Sanskrit word that's called save a selfless service to life. And I've added a little of my own word to the beginning of that regeneration or regenerative selfless service to life. And it is so true because it's just a better model. It's not only compassion, it really works. And it puts us on that exponential positive roadmap towards this desirable, beautiful future and everything that you've discussed, everything that we've talked about here today really sets us on that path and gives me the vision. I'm on board, I'm sold, I'm with you. Let's do this, let's hit the critical mass. Michael, Sean, we rise up, fabulous filmmaker. Thank you so much for letting us all inside of your ideas and for your time. It was a sheer pleasure. That's all I have and I really appreciate this discussion today. Yeah, thanks, Mark. I think you give me a reason to live just being in this conversation with you and such an admirer of your work and what you stand for in the world. I'm looking forward to more great times together. Thank you so much, brother. I really appreciate it. Talk care, talk to you later.