 we are running a schoolbook Ponzi scheme. It's a schoolbook Ponzi scheme. I'm not meaning it as an analogy. I'm meaning it as an actual. A Ponzi scheme is if you use the future to pay for the presence. In a Ponzi scheme, you pay the present investors by scanning the future investors and then as long as you can expand the investment based. So that's what we're doing ecologically. Motus Vakarnago is my guest on this episode of Inside Ideas brought to you by 1.5 media and innovators magazine. Motus started his PhD, co-created the ecological footprint in the early 1990s with his PhD advisor, Professor Reese at the University of British Columbia. Now he is president of Global Footprint Network which he founded in 2003 with Susan Burns together with its partners Global Footprint Network focuses on bringing about a sustainable economy in which all can thrive within the means of our one planet. Since 2003, this international think tank has engaged with more than 50 nations, 30 cities and 70 global partners to deliver scientific insights for policy and investment decisions with our annual Earth Overshoot Day. They annually reach over 4 billion media impressions as awards include many, many the 2018 World Sustainability Award, the 2015 IAIA Global Environment Award, the 2012 Blue Planet Prize, the 2012 Binding Prize for Nature Conservation, the 2012 Kenneth E. Boulding Memorial Award, the 2011 Zaid International Prize for the Environment and Honorary Doctorate from the University of Byrne and the 2007 Skull Award for Social Entrepreneurship. Motus, welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you, Mark. It's a pleasure. You've been doing this a long time. You came up with a kind of your PhD thesis, I guess, so to say as well and been reading, studying, working on it for quite some time. And you've also been involved in two books. So the first book are Ecological Footprint, Reducing Human Impact on the Earth with William E. Reese, your same person who helped you with your PhD thesis. And then this wonderful book that I have in front of me right here, Ecological Footprint, came out in 2019. You worked with it with Burt Byers. I hope I'm saying that right. He's here in Hamburg with me. He lives not too far away from me here. Yeah, and he's an awesome guy and Ecological Footprint Managing our Biocapacity Budget and you are both awesome. So not only is Burt awesome and William Reese and you, you're all awesome. And I'm so glad to be here. I mean, my listeners have knew, we've never seen Mark so excited because we can talk for hours and we will have tons to talk about, but we've got to kind of structure it because we'll be here a couple of days because we really have a lot of ground to cover, but we want to take everyone kind of on a journey. And first and foremost, that journey begins with, we've been through some absolutely crazy times this last 12 plus months of Black Lives Matters, of racism against Asians, about craziness with an inauguration and a rampant politician in the U.S. and also the pandemic, the lockdown. Oh yeah, that one. On and on and on and it just doesn't stop. And but you have been thinking about ecology, you've been thinking about biodiversity, you've been thinking about climate change and models and tools and things and ways to look at the world to not only measure and get a clear understanding of your footprint, but maybe some tools and things to do to have a better operating model, to live a better life or live a different life or live within the planetary boundaries and do some different things when you have this awareness. For me, it was a time to kind of see that it's a better business model, it's a better operating system. So to say it gives you more resilience, you can weather through that rough times in some circumstances. And so my real question is, how have you weathered this crazy time and have you seen, I read the numbers on your website and there's unbelievable numbers and Earth Overshoot Day has great response. Did that go up? Did you see anything that we need to be aware of and how have you weathered this crazy time up until now? Yeah, 2020 and we're still in it to some extent has been an amazing year in so many ways. And yes, I speak with incredible privilege because I mean, once is like I have a grown child, so I wasn't stuck at home with a child, I have a comfortable home, I live in a climate that is very comfortable, I could go on my bicycle rides, I could work from home, the internet was there because I could continue my work. Of course, I mean, there were limitations, but overall I had it extremely, extremely easy. And also many amazing things came out of 2020. So if you think about Black Lives Matter, that's not just relevant for Oakland where I live, but the United States and the world, I mean, kind of the reflection about our colonial culture. And when I mean colonial culture, it's really this shift from does the Earth or does land belong to us or do we belong to the land? That's really distinguishing feature I would say. And so colonialism is not just a privilege of the Europeans, it happens around the world, it's a mindset. I think it's deeply ingrained in urbanism, we build cities nearly willy and we think we can just get things from somewhere else. So this idea that we can always get more from somewhere else and we have to write to it, is this mathematically questionable? Apart from epically, it puts the colonialists at risk as well because we are overexploiting our hosts. I remember I went to New York some years back in the Natural History Museum of New York, where they showed how they were thinking about when it was still called, they were mostly in Manhattan, it was called the New Amsterdam in the South. They thought, wow, Manhattan, how many people could live in Manhattan? And they came up with about a million people. And they didn't plan yet Central Park, they just kind of graded all out and say, how many people could live there? And they realized, wow, how do we feed them? And that was the impetus to build the Erie Canal because they realized you build a big city, you need to be able to feed them. And the Erie Canal, I don't know by how many percent, perhaps by 95% reduced the effort to bring grains from the Great Plains to New York. So there was a much more, I mean, it's still a colonial, but it's an ecological thing of saying, wow, we are actually, there are people there to eat, how do we feed them? Now we build cities nearly willy with very little concern, how do we maintain them? And so I think the importance of resource security just hasn't fully lived up. Now, last year, that has been a little bit of a shakeup in many ways and we will not know fully what the implications are. But I mean, one realization is, I think, it may have shaken us a little bit out of our electromechanical mindset that we think, oh, it's just kind of bad machines or climate change, bad machines or just the carbon, how do we manage the carbon? That actually we are biology. And that's wonderful and that's unique. And there are not many planets that support biology and that support life. There may be others, we don't know of them. This one is the amazing one. And so we are like, this is, we have evolved with that biology. We are connected as we now know through COVID. I just did a rough calculation. Talk about the butterfly effect. Actually, it's much more extreme. The weight of all the coronaviruses around in the world is probably far less than the weight of a butterfly wing or part of a wing. I mean, that information spread and then how it disrupts our system. So we are one biology, but by recognizing where biology actually the word becomes simpler because you start to realize it's not a coincidence that we have a water crisis and a biodiversity crisis and a climate crisis and the soil crisis, all at the same time. They are symptoms of an overarching theme that the big bottleneck, material bottleneck we face is the size of regeneration on this planet. And how much can the biosphere regenerate in terms of biomass? That's kind of the life force in a quantitative sense and how much do we take? That's the bottleneck. And so by looking at biology in a whole recognizing as regeneration, that's really the 80, 90% thing of everything if you think environment, that's kind of the big lens. It actually becomes easier to understand the word. So understanding regeneration, we call it by capacity to be more specific, is a bit of concept like gravity. So it's not like, are you against gravity or for gravity? Actually, by understanding gravity we can build better bridges. We can build better houses, architects who don't understand gravity, they won't be as successful. And it's still hard to go up the hill if you know about gravity. It doesn't make it easier to go up the hill, but you understand why it's hard to go up the hill. In the same way, it's just helpful to understand regeneration, to understand biocapacity. If you wanna construct economies, that will not fall apart. So it's pretty straightforward. I love that. I love the way that you kind of tied that all together. And obviously you've weathered it well. The numbers before the pandemic hit were really strong on the website and people kind of looking at Earth Overshoot Day with this pause or with this time of lockdown, a couple of things occurred. And I want you to kind of get into deeper in a minute of explaining for those who don't know and haven't followed the concept of Earth Overshoot Day or Global Hectar. But last year, 2020, August 22nd, 2020 was Earth Overshoot Day. It was about 24 days that we kind of went in the other direction again, instead of even worse. And we could talk about that. And that there's a lot of, it's not necessarily a positive thing, although we did gain 24 more days. With that, did you also see people going to the website even more now, say more ecological awareness, more biodiversity awareness, more interest in climate and what's going on in our world and making that connection say, we didn't really pay attention, but now we're starting to connect the dots where we've got more time to think and reflect. We're locked down, we're experiencing these things. They're looking for answers that you've actually experienced more outreach from organizations and people going to the website so that that number go up or down. Are there anything during this time that you've seen that you can kind of tell us what you've experienced where maybe more cracks or bubbles in the system have come to the surface that you've noticed just kind of from your lens in your view, what have you seen and what's the reality of what's transpired during this time? I mean, we all look at the world from our particular lenses and I think how much the world is fragmented and polarized. We start to realize and people live in the social media bubbles, et cetera. There are lots of kind of, there's some more international polls. I think UNEP has done one in terms of how people recognize climate and environmental issues as really significant. Even the World Economic Forum that they do their so-called global risks report, all the top risks are environmentally driven. So I think there's that recognition of that. I also know people are tired. So it's like they didn't like to hear about more problems. So that's what we see as well. And we're not talking about problems per se. We just, we recognize the dynamic. The dynamic is called overshoot. I mean, the strange thing about overshoot is the following. To me, it's the big driver of the 21st century that defines all other problems overall. I mean, effects them in terms of conflict, violent conflicts. I mean, pandemics also, I mean, if you take too much in an ecosystem, you become the monocrop, you know, that is very susceptible to diseases. So that, that misbalance a lot economically become more fragile because we depend on resource flows that we cannot maintain. So I mean, you think of any type of calamity, it's based on kind of this overconsumption that our size, our human size, that human presence has become too large compared to what the ecosystems can renew. And yet most languages don't have a good name for overshoot. If you ask people in the English language, what's overshoot most people don't fully understand. It's like if you have like a major disease that like the major disease that cares about most people and a doctor's don't even have a name for the disease, let alone a therapy, let alone thinking it's a disease. I mean, so that's kind of the weird thing. And I think with some pride, we have been able to bring the story out because they've been always talking about it as well. But I think with overshoot day, which was not my invention. So it's kind of a friend gave us the idea of saying, hey, that may be a great idea to do that. It's a way to have been able to bring that thinking into the public domain in a way that uses very simple words. So we need no concept. So what's overshoot day? I can say it in words that every primary school student understands. You say from January 1st till August 22nd last year. Last year. People use as much from nature as the entire planet can renew in the entire year. Now, how complicated is that? They know, like there's no, I think from January is the only three syllable word than January is understood by primary school kids. So, and they understand, wow, August 22nd, that's still a long time before Christmas and Christmas not even at the end of the year. So wow, that's something not right. So not only do you give the ideas without using complicated words, even give a quantity that people can, oh yeah, actually it's August 22nd. That's too early, you know? So that's kind of helpful. Now, what do we do with that? How do we bring, make that empowering? And we have now for a number, one of our communications people came up with the idea of saying, let's call it move to date. Because the big problem with sustainability is that people know too much and much of it is misconception. And I think, I don't know if it's Mark Twain who said that or somebody like Mark Twain who said the problem is not things we don't know, but the things we think we know, but they, so, you know? So, and I think that's a lot with sustainability. So sustainability is seen as kind of this moral burden of saying, yeah, we should, but then we'll have to suffer and I can't eat chocolate anymore. And I am part of that crime too. I've been in the early days, we had these buttons. I was very proud of it. We got that from a big company in Canada. It said, reduce your footprint. Then I went around the world and gave lectures and I gave these buttons to people. Even that hat said, reduce your footprint and shopping bags and all these things. Reduce your footprint in Chile after a presentation. This is brilliant woman in the back, young student, put up her hand and said, why should I reduce my footprint so that you can eat more chocolate? I thought I was just stunning. And that has really totally shifted my relationship to communication and narrative of saying, absolutely. That's so brilliant. Why would I want to reduce my footprint? Because I think the big battle we are in today is not so much about whether people recognizing that we are destroying the planet. I mean, we I think not have a full picture and understand well the dynamics so we can go into that as well. I mean, we recognize something is not right. But I think the biggest challenge, the biggest limitation is these two tracks that the main view is and kind of the sustainability professional call it tragedy of the commons. The main view is that I have to give up something for humanity. Humanity needs to be saved. And so I have to do a good deed. I have to reduce my CO2 emissions. That's a cost to me because it's so easy kind of just to not take, not care. And all the benefits go to humanity. So that's why we can only act once we all agree to act, tragedy of the commons. Or to vice versa of tragedy of the commons is I get all the benefits from using the energy and I can spread all the costs. And it's kind of this misalignment of incentives. The reality we think is quite the opposite. So we push a totally different narrative. We would say actually think about the word like this. There's a big storm coming. It's called climate change and resource constraints. Even in the best case, there will be climate change equation how much? Even the best case, there will be resource constraints. The question is how much? Because it's a miss bounds. So this is storm coming of climate change and resource constraints. What's the benefit of waiting, fixing your boat? Why are you not fixing your boat? To make it seaworthy for the storm that it's going to come. It's not like a pandemic, the next pandemic may come or may not come. We know for sure like the end that it's totally measurable the storm that's coming. And the good news is also if everybody refers to their boat, the storm will be much less. But think about your boat. And that's kind of the weirdness that we all do as first we have to have perfect global agreement before we can act. And I can tell you silly stories left and right of how that's the main doctrine so much that people don't even see it. I mean, we talk about it. And when I go to parties and people know about my work that people shrivel away and say, oh my God, I know I should compost more. And I never talked with them about compost because it's all like this moralistic burden that people associate. But the story is quite different. I think it's more alike like, let me say, hey, cutting off your arm is not really helpful to you. People say, oh really? But that's what we learn in business school. Nobody, if you cut off your arm, it's actually more difficult to live. You know, it's useful to have an arm. Oh, what an interesting idea. You know, so I think we don't recognize to what extent it's totally in our essential self-interest to act like that. And perhaps the one tragedy is that we think self-interest, the negative word is part of capitalism and selfishness and uncooperativeness. But in the end, it's really about, do you feel that you have skin in the game? It's about your life. Are you gonna be ready? And by your being ready, it's also gonna be much better for the world overall. So I think that's kind of the battle of these narratives. You could call it like tragedy of the commons. Like that's kind of the common. It's so common. It's like we're fishing the water. We don't even see the water. I mean, everything is like that. I mean, we can talk about it. Versus saying, well, actually you have skin in the game. And I think the skin in the game conversation we see in the younger generation. So for example, I mean, very prominent person is Greta Thunberg. She is probably seen by my generation, the older generation that is squeaky moral voice. And she's not. She is a total skin in the game voice because she doesn't say, hey, let's be nice to these distant Ethiopians or the Bangladeshis or she says, no, don't kill me. Why are you killing me? I don't wanna be killed and my friends and the Bangladeshis, but you're killing me. And so there's a totally different perspective and so they answer differently when the journalists ask moralistic questions. Are you legit here? So what are you doing? I mean, when we talk about financial crises, no journalist goes to the bank and say, what about your credit card? Have you always paid your debt? I mean, it's an irrelevant question. No, we gotta save the country from debts, you know, some financial crisis. We don't talk like that, but with the very parallel with the resource question. It's not, it's not, oh, are you a nice person? No, I mean, it's gonna, will you be able to operate? Will you be able to operate? What does it take to make your boat float? Because the storm is coming, it's that easy. You've actually touched on something, we've got to dive into it. So obviously you've touched on tragedy of the commons and kind of gone into explaining that specifically with your example of Greta Thunberg Berry is that she was in the United States, she took the boat trip there, got there, and so glad. And then she was with a bunch of other youth, kind of before Congress or before representatives, there was Democrats and Republicans there. And it was, it was, yeah, it was awesome, but it was also, it was crazy to watch because there was some interesting things. And there was something that happened there that was very similar to what you said how media speaks to her, how, you know, the naysayers or whatever, which is, which was really interesting. There was a Republican representative and he wasn't asking questions, but the cameras were showing Greta Thunberg, the other youth, they were showing this Republican representative and he, he was on his cell phone and it was an iPhone. It was an older iPhone, he was on it and you could see he was kind of smirking, getting some answers, doing his tweeting, whatever with Donald Trump. And then there was the Democrat who was asking the question at that time, very thanking them for coming and it was, it was very nice for why they were there. And then it came time for this Republican to speak to her and he basically rhetorical, negative, very awful type of question that says, you know, the US is doing really good. We've got renewables, we're moving forward with this and that and we're so squeaky, but we're not going to do anything else until the Chinese do it, until the Chinese get on board and do that. What's with all the new coal power plants that they're doing there? And, you know, it kind of came back with a ridiculous question to her and she says, well, you know, I'm not a diplomat, I'm not a politician, I have nothing to do with that, I really can't answer, but it's kind of giving the call, almost the blame to her and also saying, no, we're not going to do anything until they or those guys do something. And what happened is she couldn't kind of answer the question, but she was very, she's very passionate and exactly like you said, she's in. I think she said something very interesting, I remember that, like she said, it's so interesting you mentioned that because in Sweden, our politicians say exactly the same thing about the United States. You know what, I think that's what she did say, but it was still kind of stifling and guess what happened though, or what most people didn't realize is the answer was right in front of her, the answer was right in front of us all in the camera, that cell phone that he had was made in China just shortly before that the US shipping their plastic and their waste to China was stopped, correct? It was stopped, they kind of said, we're not going to take it anymore. And what she should have said is, it's okay for them, it's not okay for anybody, but what it is, it's okay for you to get a cell phone and have your emissions and your waste and all that occur in China. And then you reap the benefits of that and then sit back and complain about the environmental impacts that occurred to produce your iPhone or whatever to process your waste occurs in China and the impact affects us all around the world because we're all on the same spaceship earth, but those emissions and those resource waste occurred in China in actuality and the poor wages to give you that cheap cell phone. And if you're going to say that it's not until they do it then don't buy their products, don't buy stuff that's made there, don't ship your garbage there. And there's these narratives that let's be honest with each other that we just need to get into the realities of it's much more complex than that. In our experience, China is much more attuned to these questions. I mean, they are the pressures of kind of the wants of wanting kind of more comfortable lives and all these kinds of things. I have a very interesting story around that. We had an intern from China. She actually finished high school here, like a parent center here at the United States to get a good education. And then she got a Berkeley degree. She did an internship with us and she told me the following story that's very interesting. In geography class, when she was in high school in China they learned resources are really important. We have to look after resources very carefully. And let's use other countries resources first before we use ours because they're so valuable. Yeah. And then you think that's cynical but I think I wish every country would educate like that because if you say it's so important that we should use other resources first. If everybody did that, you would all make sure you're very careful with that resource. It's like with money. When you say, if you say, okay, spend your money but be careful with your money. And if somebody else's budget for paying it then let's use the other people's budget. So I mean, that's a logical thing with money. Everybody would send the resources. It's very parallel. China is interesting because culturally it's one of the few zones that we're not part of the big colonial empires. I mean, parts of China's were colonized. The Japanese went there, that the Europeans went there, et cetera, drank like the Harper cities and all these kinds of things. But as a country that they're thinking that social science is their economics is based on a very different tradition than the West that has deeply ingrained like colonial spirit in the economic things that we just take resources and somewhere else and so the way resources are being dealt with in the social sciences in the Western hemisphere particularly since World War II, I think because our inability to kind of reconcile with the colonial formal like the former colonial past of the Western hemisphere just kind of denied the whole resource side. If you look at economic textbook about development today and you look up in the index about resources you may find the word resources if you're lucky and then we'll go to the chapter that is called the resource curse. So what we still learn today in Western universities is that resources are a curse. Those countries that have a lot of resources they're cursed by that because it will fuel corruption and people will be lazy. Look at Switzerland where I'm from. Look at Switzerland, they have no resources and look at all the money they have because they have to work hard. I've been to many countries I don't think in Switzerland they work hardest that's not the reason. So it's this kind of super buyers against resources. So deep in Latin America the development doctrine is called el derecho al desarrollo. It means the right to develop and it's a code word for saying let's use up all our resources and then we make money with that and then we will be like the Swiss. I mean, it's just absurd to the nth degree. We had a very interesting conversation that was a long time ago I think it was 10 years ago in Ecuador. And that just kind of to bring that into the picture again between kind of the noble and kind of call it the noble narrative versus the necessary narrative. Back then it was on the Kyoto regime. called some countries annexed to and they were lower income countries. They say, oh, you don't have to worry about this. You know, this is just for high income countries which already says, oh, it's a luxury problem. But actually countries that have low financial means not to be resource secure not to have the wrong resource requirements that's most deadly for them even. So it's kind of this strange thing. Anyhow, they were annexed to country. And so we showed them and you can go to our website at data.fotpenedra.org you can click on Ecuador. You will see that in 1960 they had five times more Ecuador than what they consume, five times more. By now, these two lines have come together just 50 or 50 plus years. When they saw these lines some economists said, you must be against the right to develop. You are contra el derecho al desarrollo. And we said, not at all. We are totally for development but we are against el derecho al colapso. We are against the right to collapse. Okay, what does that mean? Because you're, I mean, when you don't have the resources I mean, where do you put the money to get the resources from in a world that isn't overshoot already. And so they saw that and they put in their national development agenda getting out of an ecological deficit as a priority. They didn't succeed yet because they're so dependent that they continue to make quick money by selling resources but they started to recognize this is not just a nice thing to do for others. This is an essential piece for us not because we gave them money or we had political sway or there were demonstrations in the street or there was anything. They just recognized, wow, yeah, that's what we need to do. I think that's a bit of hope for me that actually once people start to recognize, wow, yeah, it's about my boat. That's the shift. I think the most powerful thing we can do as individuals, as academics, as NGOs are kind of to shift the word is helping people see aligned incentives where they now see conflicting incentives. Now I think that our whole story is conflicting incentive. Oh, we should, it would be nice. Oh, we have to commit. Make the CEOs commit all that language reinforces the narrative that we should wait with action until we have full agreement. That's a noble deed. A noble deed costs us. And a noble deed we may do on Saturday afternoon rather than saying, this is existential. If you don't get your boat ride, if you don't get your act together, you'll go down with others, but you'll go down. Yeah, that old and new world view and really what you're really getting into is the noble narrative that really means nothing. It's a noble number, it's a noble goal, it's a noble statement, but it has no teeth. It doesn't mean a thing. It means we're going slower in the wrong direction or even doing the action. It's pernicious. It's a solid someone else. But there's this necessary narrative that we really need to align ourselves with and get into and you gave the perfect... And I wouldn't even say need to align. I think we want to align. It's in your own interest. It's like when you think about betting. If you understand the word better, your bets are more likely to succeed. It's just gonna be better informed. So it's not, do you believe in climate change or not? Who cares? But I mean, it's like, what's the likelihood? How do you wanna structure your bets? So of course, we don't know how tomorrow is. I don't know if there's gravity tomorrow because tomorrow hasn't happened yet. I think the likelihood is very high. I would bet on there will be gravity tomorrow and there probably will win the bet. So it's not about, do you believe? Believe has no place in science. It's not about believe and not believe. It's about probability. You say it in your book so eloquently a couple of times. It's like flying a plane without instrumentation, flying a plane without a fuel gauge, knowing how much fuel you have left and really you even talk about food in your book as well. But what's the basic energy source for our body's food? Well, wouldn't it be good to know that we're gonna have enough food and be able to maintain our body temperature and keep our motor running or we're just gonna leave that up to someone else and hopefully we'll have some food in the future. And it's really that same way of not changing the narrative, kind of connecting ourselves with the world. So... I would have many funny stories to tell about countries how they fight the idea and they don't understand. Like, why would you fight wanting to have a fuel gauge on your plane? I mean, FAA wouldn't allow flights to fly that have no gauge. I mean, it's so ridiculous in some ways. And so anyhow, but I mean, this ridiculousness is also opportunity because I think how can we make this ridiculousness apparent? It's not, but I think it is this moral shield that people just squirmish about the idea that, oh my God, it's so bad, I'm so sorry. And they can't even hear the possibilities. So this year, we will actually, we almost calculate overshoot day as close to reality as possible because things shift over time. We talked about like last year, particularly in Q2. So the month, how's it called? The second quarter of the year. Second quarter of the year. There was a very significant drop of resource demand. And then things inched up again at the end of the year. So we calculate just for the first part of the year how much we consumed compared to the year. And that was a significant drop just because of that shock. And the thing is, I think, but maybe not enough understood, the regenerative future will come whether you like it or not. It will, it's the only physical option because overshoot will end. It will end. It's like, you cannot overuse your bank account forever. It will be empty at one point, you know? Sorry, it's called math. And yeah, so the only question or the only choice we have is really, do we wanna do it by design? So it's on our terms or do we wanna have it done by disaster? That's the choice. We call it, like we can have one planet prosperity or we can have one planet misery. But choose is very hard choice, very hard. Oh, let me think, oh. And so that's what we saw in 2020 with the epidemic. It was kind of pushed us by disaster and it pushes down. Now this year, the story will be a little bit kind of more boring. That's why we have to just rethinking the story because as some extent, even those resource gains have vanished and we have suffered. So we had disaster and suffering and not even made any progress. Oh my God, what's the silver lining here? So what did you do in the story? But actually I think the silver lining is the following. Things actually have happened. Things do happen all the time. You've been stuck at home. You may not see those things that happened around the world that they are shift and maybe too slow, but there are a lot of possibilities out there. So what we will do is kind of like we will, that's not even announced yet. I just tell it to you for the first time. We will do 100 days of possibility after overshoot days. So because that's kind of the bridge from there to Glasgow, it's to say there's so many possibilities out there. If you want, what do you want? The question is not what should you do? The question is what do you want? All people born after 1985 will be in the workforce by 2050. If we want to have a chance of not to have runaway climate change, we should be out of fossil fuel use well before 2050. So in their professional life, in their professional life, they will have to see a transformation of a size and scale that we haven't seen before. If you think about the iPhone, how quickly it developed there, that's kind of for the entire economy. It's mind-boggling, but it's also exciting. It's kind of building something totally new. Now I think academic institutions have failed people and students today, they come out of university today and are clueless what to do because the professors are clueless largely and are not honest about that they're clueless. The first thing like with alcoholics, I don't know, I don't know my sister's knowledge that you have a problem. I think it's time that we don't know. I don't know how to do it, but I know we need to get somewhere. And so we have to have a partnership with each other and an intergenerational partnership of saying, sorry, we totally f-ed up, but we don't know, we tried and we don't know and we wanna help you and you may have ideas and we are here to be mentors as we can help you. What do you need? What do you want? So because you'll be the captains of spaceship Earth and our duty was to prepare you and we failed so far and now we need to do it in kind of after class hours to kind of help you to be the captain you need to be. So anyhow, so I think that's, and then I think that also brings this energy forward of recognizing there is possibility, what can we learn from the possibilities that exist? And it's quite dramatic and it's kind of, and I think the stunning thing for me is, I mean, how we have failed and I think the so-called sustainability movement has utterly failed and I'm part of that in terms of like we had a conference in 1972 in Stockholm. The first time developed environment came together at the Stockholm conference and then the Gandhi came there and everybody and they had a very clear byline or summary lines, they called it only one Earth. Now, how much clear do we need to be? Only one Earth. Then we moved to 20 years later to the Rio conference and before that sustainable development was kind of defined the way I can tell you the legal thing you need the lawyer to understand what it means. Meeting the needs of the present generation without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. How many people understand what that means? And I mean, we don't even say environment anymore, like we don't recognize the physical context and then we move on and now we have the best computer models and everything and now we talk about sustainability. It's so confused people don't even realize that we need that we are biology, that we live of regeneration and we talk about sustainable growth and all kinds of funny things. And I mean, the confusion is incredible and then you don't wanna measure and it's, oh yeah, we have to bring in everything and then we measure everything and because we don't wanna look at the hard things you can say, oh, we have measured 175 things and three of them are really bad but on 15 we have done really well and it's complicated, trust us we are experts. I mean, give me a break. It's not that complicated. We have one planet and the question is like, how big are we? That's the underlying question. If you're not willing to face it, it's like the architect who says, I don't wanna think about gravity. I mean, it's just, it's... Yeah, it's insanity. We're really fighting against each other or we've got so many politicians and people who were actually aligned in some ways as activists, environmentalists just as human beings but then we're kind of like almost working against each other on this planet in many different ways. You and I both kind of cross paths many times know each other from the Club of Rome planetary emergency group. You're quite active in the group as well and have done many things but that really kind of leads in to where I wanna go because I wanna quickly get through the beginnings of how this journey evolved for you where this thinking came from, how it evolved and then I wanna go into much more depth and substance of how we can really move forward with a global hectare and thinking and ecological footprints to come up with some real strong solutions and there's also some that are emerging. So the Club of Rome is a perfect starting point because books, the limit, the book, the limit to growth and there's been multiple books. So the second book was called Beyond the Limits to Growth. The third book was called the 30 year update The Limits to Growth and it's Donnella Meadows, Dennis Meadows, Yuri Granders, Steve Behrens Jr. We're involved in that. The World Model 3 which you kind of touched upon and what you said, these computer modeling and different things but how does that tie to the journey or does it fit into your way of thinking and how this evolved and then your PhD thesis to come up with this and give us a little bit more insight into the journey you've taken and what are some of the old wisdoms clear back from 1972 is when the first book came out to now. I mean, we all construct our stories possibly but it really feels to me that it kind of, there are like three core elements that kind of put me on that path. The Limits to Growth. Yeah, the growth, yeah. Very cool. So one is that that just was extremely lucky and privileged that like Robin Switzerland that was surrounded by World War II and the most brutal thing that happened to Switzerland because very lucky to stay out of the war was that it was the resource shortage, the food shortage that Switzerland could only grow seven months of food per year. So in their 12 months, you had to eat a bit less and then you had to kind of build victory gardens, you know like, you know what I'm saying and then Switzerland built a merchant fleet. Some of these ships were lost by submarines, et cetera but they're trying to bring grains from South America to Switzerland. And yeah, so it's very dramatic for my parents and grandparents generation. So that story and then like vacations, the vacation that was fantastic on a farm, my grandfather had a house where we could spend vacations and I could help, help, you know, as a small about the farmer milking the cows, spreading manure and just recognizing where food comes from and how urban people look down on farmers and the farmers brought everything to the city and it got nothing back. I mean, just a strange thing. It's mirrored like how Switzerland's such high income doesn't have resources. And it's just weird. It didn't make sense to me. And particularly how then also the Europeans just like to look down on the rural people. It was just so strange. And I just love to be out there and kind of how a farm worked. There's one thing. The second thing was by 73, there was this oil crisis and Switzerland's heroic attempt to counter it was to have three car free Sundays, maybe four. I think it was three. And for us kids, I was 11 years old. It was just amazing. We could bicycle on the highway. Like it was just suddenly we were free. It was, the air was much better. It was not so noisy. We had so much fun. So it kind of, it was a shock. I realized, wow, the world will have to change. And it was really so great. So my emotional relationship to fossil fuel free future was incredibly positive because I thought that that's what has to happen. And I hated kind of the concrete, the paving over. Like, oh my God, it's so ugly. And you know what the nature's getting paved over. And so the idea of this better future was actually very inspiring. Perhaps for my parents or grandparents it was more scary, the idea. But for me, it was like uplifting. And the third thing was I was a very lazy reader and so my father was very concerned about that. So he read me books and he told me the same thing. And then one book that came out was Limits to Growth. And he was kind of, he was very taken by that as well. And I had more of a mathematical mind that's kind of like numbers more than seeing graph. I mean, I don't know if you have seen Limits to Growth. It's super primitive graphics, you know, but the first computer graphics is kind of with letters that go across the page. And before books had only kind of words. And that was like one of the first books that actually also had graphs in there and numbers. And I was really taken by that. Wow, over my lifetime, things could change like that and computer model. So Limits to Growth was super influential in my kind of like upbringing and kind of also professional choice. I thought, okay, I want to become an engineer that builds a renewable economy. And then I mean, the amazing is that then through that like these were like Limits to Growth. I was like the rock star book, you know? And then I got to know most of the authors at the Nella, unfortunately, she passed away. She was amazing. And then the Ark and Dennis, most very kind friends. Like, wow, you can become friends with your rock stars. You know, it's amazing. So very influential. And then when we started, I started a PhD, like when we looked at kind of this whole question of how do we bring the idea of caring capacity or the limited capacity of the plant? How do we make that actionable? One key insight from studying Limits to Growth and how it was received is to be very adamant about being descriptive rather than producing forecasts. Because forecast, because as we don't know if there will be gravity tomorrow, we know for sure nothing about the future. And so philosophically, you can always deconstruct any argument. If you don't like it, you just say, oh, we don't know if there will be gravity tomorrow. And it's an unwinnable argument. You know, it's not the unsettable argument. Oh, maybe that will be this in the future. You can never settle that argument until it stays open and nothing happens. So, you know, we just account. We just document what is. And we still were accused of being like Limits to Growth. You have nothing to do with forecasts. It's just accounting. But it's just because people are so much stuck in their views. So, yeah, Limits to Growth, super influential and we learned about it a lot. We learned from it a lot how to position ourselves. And still, progress is incredibly slow. I mean, that's kind of when I have not worked on it for 30 years on this specific topic. I mean, it was interesting before, but then the footprint started about 30 years ago. And on some level, it's kind of mind boggling that kind of the term. Now it's kind of a common term, but it's also mind boggling how little impact it has made on thinking. I mean, it's kind of just I could go on and on in terms of like the plastics bottles that I see of the company saying, we are reducing our ecological footprint in every flight magazine that I'm on, like there's something about footprint. And it's kind of the most meaningless way possible. We're going to get into that too. So I think we're going to take this, our conversation over a little bit because we're definitely going to get into that. If you're not biased to anybody, you're really, you want to give the footprint and calculations and help people with people, cities, countries, individuals with the tools and the understanding how to do the calculations, how it works and what the global hectare is. And so you have examples. I think there was one example. There's, I mean, there's numerous examples throughout the book, but one is the United Kingdom in 2000. I think you 300 times the footprint size of the size. The land uses a footprint that's about, I think roughly 300 falls larger than the area of land. Of course, yeah. I mean, cities, they don't produce their food. And you know, so. Exactly. And then the one where I have the bookmark is, you're real positive about the new model of development in China. And there's just a lot of things in there that we don't think about. We don't put into perspective, especially when we're with the blinders in the city, living in London, if we're in the middle of it, sometimes we just don't realize it. And especially with the way the world was before the pandemic, many of us were running around from job to job and we were focusing on just surviving almost instead of the bigger picture. Now, I think a lot more people have taken a step back or had hopefully used the time well to have a little more reflection on the bigger picture. One thing that kind of just got swept under the rug that I wanna mention before we go into some deeper stuff is right before the pandemic hit, Australia, 2019, 2020 was still extreme brush fires, extreme fires. They were saying worse than atomic bombs, you know, they were saying equivalent to worse than 650,000 atomic bombs going off during that time that they've seen 1.2 billion tons of CO2 emitted just in the time of those fires. 530 million tons were just in one month, which is, or 530 million tons is the annual normal requirement, but 19 million hectares were lost in one month of fires. Blue Mountain World Heritage Site lost 85,000 hectares in one month, 3 billion wild animal species during that time, 3 billion, I can't even fathom that number, 3 billion. I didn't even know that we, you know, it was so abundant, 7 billion tree species. I didn't even know there was 7 billion tree species. And just from the Australia fires, and that's, you know, very country, local island, so to say, and it just went by the wayside. Yeah, we saw the kangaroo and the koala photos and we heard a little bit about it, but then came the pandemic and it was just like it was forgotten, but that was definitely an overshoot of resources from natural issues, but also because of the way we were using resources, the way that it's got warmer and warmer because of climate change and many other things. So there's that, you know, you spoke in August 2020 about fires in California and also what was the other, Brazil was the other location, I think. Brazil, yeah. Yeah, you were speaking about that. We did, yeah, I mean, it's more kind of to illustrate as well. I mean, we did it very rough because the numbers are not as easily available or as robust, but just roughly to see to what extent, because Australia, we compare the country's footprint, you can compare it to a lot of things, you can say, okay, if everybody lived like Australians, how many planets would it take, you know? Several, you can look it up on data.footburnedwork.org, but then you can also say, how many Australians does it take? And because Australia is so large, their footprint typically is smaller than their biocapacity. So overall, if you look at it from a consumption perspective, but in that year, because of the forest fires, if you actually include that and say, what was the net biocapacity for that year? It was much, much smaller. I mean, it's conceivable that you could have negative biocapacity a year. If you like, if you burn more than kind of like, because it takes many years for forests to grow up, you could actually lose in a year, like more than it's being regenerated, then you'd have a negative biocapacity. But so our rough estimate came to the conclusion that the biocapacity of Australia compared to the normal kind of what we saw in an average year was about half. So it meant to half. And that meant for the first time, Australia was actually running an ecological deficit. But it is pretty stunning. For a country that seemed like massively, like massively resource rich because of that, actually for that year. Yeah. Totally forget about some of those things that are going on. And it's going on all over the world. I mean, the rainforest burning in Brazil ties to politics, bull scenario, allowing things and companies and corporations. Then we, you know, another thing with, whether you group it into colonialism or not, but the Brexit and then the lockdown and all the decisions on that, a lot of had to do with race and food workers, migrant food workers, not only grocery stores but clear to farm workers that now were locked out of the United Kingdom. And because of that, there was no workers to take the job. You think, okay, because of the Brexit and we all had this great vote that now all those jobs would go to the people in the United Kingdom to fill those positions that they were worried about moving. It's quite funny this idea of independence and some level because, I mean, if you look at the UK as a whole and there was like this commission, very academic commission on looking at the natural capital commission, looking at the natural capital, they missed three quarters of the natural capital they use because if you look at demand of the UK, it's about four times larger than what UK's ecosystems can renew. And then we should go even a step further. Like how many planets would actually be good to be used? You know, so getting Earth Overshoot Day to December 31st is probably not kind of the ultimate goal because we are in competition with other species. I mean, the fish that a seal eats, I cannot eat and vice versa. So E. O. Wilson, he made this kind of bold proclamation to say, wow, maybe we should use half Earth. So we just have to plant it, you know? So because the others need food as well, that would allow about 85% of the biocapacity to be maintained, not 100%, but 85%. And that if you use half, it will be good for climate change. Now we use globally about 1.6 fold. So we 60% faster we withdraw than it's being regenerated. And probably a better level would be half. So that's about three times less. Many people when we say we use 1.6 planets, that doesn't make any sense that you just use up the planet, that's gone. Oh, you said Earth Overshoot Day was on August 22nd, but I opened the fridge on August 23rd and there was still beer in my fridge. What's going on? And so yeah, okay. It's like in a bank account if you use more than the interest being paid or deposited, is there still money in the bank? You know, we're just depleting the stock and you can do that for some time. But now we see how tight it is. I mean, there's no carbon budget left. I think that's kind of something we're not honest enough. I think only for just a basic, basic, basic science of climate change, you can do that the models that the thermodynamic equilibrium models of saying if you had like how much climate gas can you have, how much greenhouse gas can you have in the atmosphere to get to a two degrees warmer average world? You don't even need to know about distribution. I mean, it's kind of, it's a simple way of calculation. You don't need to understand transition. Just kind of in the end, like what's the equilibrium temperature for our PPM? So IPCC said back in 2014, with 450 PPM CO2 equivalent, we have a 66% chance not to exceed two degrees. So 450 PPM CO2, parts per million CO2 give us only a 66% chance not to exceed two degrees. If you take the US measures currently from Hawaii to on what the current PPM level is in CO2 equivalent, we are at 500 today at 500. 450 is not even adequate for Paris. We are at 500. There's no budget left really. And then we say, oh, there will be net sequestration in the future from where? I mean, of course, I mean, there are lots of possibilities, they're not saying how possible, but that takes huge effort and may compete with food production. It may not if you're very careful if you shift agriculture. But I mean, that just shows that the magnitude that actually even though we've had overshoot and say, oh, nothing has happened, actually a lot has happened. The debt we have accumulated is very significant to build down that debt, to pay back that debt, which would mean, for example, getting the CO2 out of the atmosphere again. That takes significant effort. And so I think, and the time lags, oh, it's about time lag. It's not that big of a time lag. If you think about how long do houses last? How long do roads last? How long do power plants last? If you compare those time spans with how quickly climate change and resource constraints are emerging or the fact that we need to be out of a fossil fuel economy within like 30 years, these 30 years are much shorter than the life spans of most of our physical investment. So if we continue to invest today, I mean, we should have obviously started earlier, but today to invest in things that have no future, we invest our own demise. That's why it's so hard for me to understand the German commitment to continue to build out the natural gas infrastructure. It's insanity from my perspective. It's insanity. Or, I mean, and even like the kind of the circular thinking logic in Switzerland, people are very proud of incinerating our waste. Now waste in Switzerland has less carbon intensity, it has more carbon intensity. It's more carbon per kilowatt hour produced than coal. It would be much better to burn coal and put the garbage into coal mines. Now that that is a good idea, but it just kind of to show how grotesque our thinking is. Also, oh, it's already existed. It's just waste, it's burning the waste, it's a good thing. I mean, it's just, so we are so far off from recognizing what regeneration actually means. But this is a basic thing. It's not that complex, child knows, you know what I'm saying? Well, with Earth Overshoot with global footprint, so it's ecological footprint, but we're really talking about economics quite a bit. Economics is the major factor. And there's a couple more that we need to talk about. Herman Daly, I think he's 82 years old now, but he wrote this book. Matter of fact, he wrote a couple of books, I've got them right here. Sorry, the early 70s, yeah. Ecological economics, here's another one, they're academic books as well, very thick. Goodreads, Super Guy, used to be with the World Bank and that, was some of those influenced to you as well? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, yeah, I only got to know Herman Daly's writing. Once I went to Canada to study, I didn't know him in Europe back then, so I went to Canada in 89. And that was like mind-blowing for me to read, because I wasn't courses about, I mean, that was very skeptical, like the whole growth idea and then I had courses with professors like there were some that were interested in kind of new ways of thinking about economics, but I didn't know about Herman Daly. And that he put it so clearly and so simply, and it cost him his economic career. He was not able to find a position in any economics department ever after. And it's quite stunning. Yeah, but I mean, the same when you, when your father read The Limits to Grow to you, probably as well above 10 years of age or so, but in the beginning of The Limits to Grow, so much controversy, so much pushback, not just from economists, but many politicians, it was a controversial, a lot of pushback and then it took about 10 years when they did the second version beyond The Limits to Grow because at that time we'd already gone beyond The Limits. That finally people said, no, this isn't that controversial. It's those who are looking at old economic models and looking at old ways of thinking that are giving the pushback. You receive the Kenneth Boulding Award, but this is from him and his wife. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, and the future. And it's a crazy title, the future, but the interesting thing is, okay, let's talk sustainability. You said sustainability in the beginning and the legal definition, it's hard to understand and to grasp. For me, there's, in the UN, where I'm out a lot, there's 17 probably, at least seven solid definitions of sustainability, but it has no teeth. There's no- Are you talking about the ones you're wearing on your shirt? This is the Sustainable Development Goals. No, just about the 17th. The two of them again. That just happened to be also the 17th development. But for me, sustainable is really about the three pillars of, one, a deep understanding of economics. So not just the bad economic models, extractive, capitalism on and on, but ecological economics, the solid understanding of what economic models will work for us best in the future. Second is those positive sustainable innovations, if you can even say that, that will help shift humanity, get humanity into a better situation of not being so extractive, being more efficient, not doing harm on human health and environmental destruction and so on. And then the third is really, people say, Mark, you say sometimes you're a sustainable futurist or a resilient futurist. What the hell does that mean? We thought you were a tree hugger and environmentalist activist, or what does that have to do with the future? Well, it has everything to do with the future because you're trying to think, what models or what roadmap can we take to ensure that we even make it to the future and what will those futures look like? Most of the models, economic models are the models that we have today. Let's just do a mental experiment and push those models out into the future. 10 years, 20, 30, 40, 50 years out in the future. How are they working for humanity? Is there a crash? It goes back to that world model three, you know, MIT limits to growth. Let's put those models into practice and push them out even through scenarios into the future. Are they still working for us in the future? They're not. Most of our economic models that we've had in the past, I think I've lived through five bubbles. You've probably lived through more bubbles. We have these economic bubbles and you hear as they're coming, oh, we're facing a bubble. And then what happens when the bubble bursts or claps? Well, we have a bailout. If you're the US, we have a lot of bailouts. The Netherlands had the big tulip bubble, the tulip economic bubble. But when these bubbles burst, the damn thing is, as we go back to Einstein's problem theory, we go right back to the same broken model and hope that it's gonna be fixed. It's even worse than the bubbles because bubbles could just be a little bit of overheating and kind of like waves. But actually we are running a schoolbook Ponzi scheme. It's a schoolbook Ponzi scheme. I'm not meaning it as an analogy. I'm meaning it as an actual. The Ponzi scheme is if you use the future to pay for the presence in a Ponzi scheme, you pay the present investors by scanning the future investors. And then you expand as long as you can expand the investment based. So that's what we're doing ecologically. So no Ponzi scheme doesn't end. I mean, it's not possible. So it will end. How do you deal with Ponzi schemes? First, you need to recognize them. Then those who actually get out early, better off, they lose less. So it's not a tragedy of the common seater. It's actually very helpful to recognize that you're in a Ponzi scheme and ended as quickly as possible. So I don't fully understand the advantage of not doing that and not recognizing it and how we don't have everything. Oh, this is an extreme view of seeing a Ponzi scheme. But I mean, tell me what's not Ponzi scheme. I mean, so the Ponzi scheme is just an overheating. It's actually just, we're building on liquidation. Yeah. I don't know what else we have to add, you know? Yeah, no, we've got plenty more to add. So in your book, we also talk about some real, some real good models or some ways of thought, you know, this one planet living from bed set and we see it and other examples, I'm working on one, it's called Neome. It's a new city project, Neome in Saudi Arabia in 75. Whether that will be something that really comes out and we don't know, but we hope that it has that. To focus more in, we've got extractive economies. We've got, you know, the doughnut economics have got Kate Rower's book right here. You also mentioned that in your book. We've got Mariana Mazzucato is kind of a mixture of that and other economics and there are so many different types of economic models that we've gone through that we have that circular economy, ecological economics which also comes from Herman Daly which is steady state economy, also an old model of John Stuart Mill over a hundred years ago. And now there's these, and I don't know if it can be considered an economic model but Johann Rockstrom, Stockholm Resilience Institute, Potsdam Institute, Cleveland Institute, this planetary boundaries which really ties to Kate Rower as well with her doughnut economics. And I want to know, because I'm a big fan, I'm a believer, you got me on board. I think that the ecological footprint, I think the global hectare is my ecological economics. I think that is the best model for me and I want to get crazy with you in a minute and kind of talk about some ideas that I've had and if you've thought about them as well but before we get in that, I want to address does your global hectare, does ecological footprint fit into the doughnut economics, circular economy? Can you see that they're tightly integrated or do you think that these models are kind of going off in a different direction? So in your book, Johann Rockstrom gives you a nice kind of a prelude but I've taken his planetary boundaries course and he kind of says, he mentions you, he mentions Herman Daly, he mentions John Stuart Mill, he mentions the limits to growth but then he kind of says, but those weren't all accepted or here's planetary boundaries. And so we have this problem, not only in the club room group within the UN, the World Economic Forum, that we're fighting against each other. We all want to come up with our own system instead of saying that the system's already there. It's been there since 1972. Let's put it to use. Instead of just using it as a measurement tool, let's apply this as an economy, the new economy that goes on for the future. And so I want to know any of these models that I just mentioned, the books, are you working with them? Are you moving towards that or do you see they're going to emerge as new? I mean, was it Amsterdam that's kind of applied the doughnut economics? I want to know what your thoughts and where's that going? It's a very, very good topic overall. So I personally think there's only economics, and so because economics is just thinking about how do we interact with each other? How do we allocate resources? And then there are theories within economics that kind of presumptions and some of them still have to be not so great and numbers are better. Ecologic, I mean, we shouldn't call it ecologic economy. There should be only, I mean, economics is not ecologic, economic is not economics from my perspective. So I think the big premise is to say we have to recognize the economy as a subsystem of the biosphere. Sorry, you know, and so anything that is not, I mean, could not be legitimately called economics. So it's not like bodies of whole theories. So we approach things very differently. But I think that then it's kind of the ones that are more sustainability oriented, we know each other. I mean, it's kind of, this is a bit of a tragedy of kind of, you have to like most of them come out of their own kind of think tanks, et cetera. We have to find our own funding. And so you have to do, so collaboration is not that easy often because the funding is not available to collaborate well. So we're trying to do it a bit. I mean, our organizations that we put network in the organization always worked with others through others. And sometimes, so for example, we're very friendly with Johan Rockstrom, but we have never been able to work together. I think there would be tremendous synergies that if we actually work together closely, but then just if the funding structure is not available, it's hard to, I mean, you can have coffee together, but that's, you know, so that's a bit of a tragedy that we haven't done it more. Now, in terms of many of the tools out there, I think I feel like that planetary boundaries is one of the most significant cousins or brothers or sisters or whatever you want to call them in some ways, they approach the systems a bit different. I mean, it's more kind of an ecological model, but I think it's very aligned. The big aligned is that we both see biology is the big thing and that actually with the functioning of the ecosystems and not to overwhelm the ecosystems. Now we framed it a little bit differently. Planetary boundaries looks at the more ecological systems, how they interact with each other and how like the nitrogen cycle and biodiversity and all these kinds of things, how that works. We look at regeneration and I would just say that the planetary boundaries are kind of items or kind of our components or conditions, parameters or the economists would call production factors that produce regeneration. So if you don't have the, like if these nine areas that are compromised, then you compromise the overall outcome of regeneration. So that's kind of how it then, how it fits together that we are not explaining how the word operates and how the various things kind of hit each other, but in the end there's the outcome of regeneration. So what we can offer then in addition, like the planetary boundaries is great to understand the global system. It's not that great to scale it down to different pieces. So for example, a country. So how do you cut down the water to one country? But actually regeneration you can because we look at the country as if it was a farm. So you can look at in the end how much regeneration happens within your farm. And of course there are boundaries. You cannot cut the environment in pieces. You cannot cut, but there are farms. And if the cow is on your side of the farm fence, I have to pay for the milk. And then if it's on my side of the fence, I can milk the cow without payment, you know? So biocompassive territoriality of it is a way of kind of thinking about like who has access to which part of the biocompassity. And it's in the end, it is biocompassive that we live from. And all these aspects are somehow competition for biocompassive. So anyhow, so I think that there's just to say the synergy. So there would be much, much more that we can do. And I would love to do that. And I regret that we haven't been able to find resources to do that together. Because I think we could leap big bounds. Now in terms of donut economy, again donut economy, I think it's a wonderful way of kind of getting people excited and showing the absurdities. Yeah, the absurdities. And so that's what has been our lemma since the very beginning that we say, how can we thrive within the limits of nature, you know? So that's kind of, that's the big tension. I think rather than saying sustainability, I find that much more helpful to say, what's the soccer game you're looking at? One, it's, we want to live well and there's only so much planet. How do we deal with that conflict? And that's what Kate also put down. I think the brilliance of Kate's work is two things. One is to make that story very visual but a good name, donut. You know, donut is kind of funny because donut is not healthy. So it's kind of, oh, it's round, it's easy to see. And it brings together. So again, like when you just say, how can we live well within the means of one planet sounds a bit boring. But you say, oh, this is like not having enough. And using too much. And so this is donut, you know? So that's kind of, and so visually it's really attractive. It's a great symbol. It brings things together, it focuses. The second piece of brilliance, I think, and I don't know how kind of, or just as a resident, but I think it's a very important part is she didn't put numbers down. And so because numbers are answers and answers kill inquiry. And I think that's something that we have felt like by putting a number down that people feel it's uncomfortable and then you start to kind of kill the messenger, you know? So it's kind of, so I just think staying conceptual, that's, I think that's very important. So we had, we did something quite similar still do, but when we compare, I think it's in the book as well, we compared the human development index, which is basically an approximation of wellbeing, you can say against then, how many plans to take to support it. So we can actually make, we can turn the donut into exact numbers. But then the numbers create conflict. And so that I think was a major barrier for us. I think there are applications. I think we would talk about one planet prosperity. I don't know if you have seen the work we've done with Schneider Electric to basically say, if you really want to think about what the sustainability or whatever regeneration, whatever you want to do just name, what does this conflict between wanting to live well and planetary constraints? It's a long way of saying that's how I'm going to call it. How, what does that mean for businesses? And the sad part is it has become CSR or kind of this ESG battle or kind of all these commitments to whatever, rather than saying, actually, what does it mean? And we make a very, very, very simple premise. That's why we use this diagram as well to say, actually it's so simple. It's so simple. If you as a business don't deliver things that humanity needs to succeed, your market will shrivel. If you offer things that you now need to succeed, that will be helpful for you. Now, it doesn't guarantee your success. It's like playing soccer downhill. It's easier. That may still be messy on the other side or Ronaldo playing against you, but it's easier on average playing downhill soccer than uphill soccer. So how do you know as a company whether you deliver something that humanity needs? You take this HDF footprint diagram, which is kind of a more mathematical way of the donut, and you can make a dot of your clients and say, is it helping your clients to move into sustainability quadrant? If it does, then it helps. If not, then you're kind of going to lose out. So it's very specific. And I think something that maybe it's also a good thing about the donut, you know, the donut has just three spaces, just the inner space, the donut space and the outer space. But actually, if you think about it mathematically, that kind of the human development and footprint, they're actually four quadrants. And it hides a bit the fourth quadrant. And maybe that's a good thing to get the conversation started, but it's the fourth quadrant that is the most challenging, the most difficult. In the donut picture, you could call it the negative donut, like if it's reversed. The difficulty of that more and more are in the situation that makes it so challenging and so hard, more and more on the situation where they don't have a great life and yet a level of resource consumption that is not replicable worldwide. And that's like a mind blower, like it's kind of, wow. So we're just about to bring out the paper and it's kind of, I mean, it sounds more on the tragic side, but it's why it doesn't get enough attention. So amazing, 72% of the world population now live in countries that have both an ecological deficit and you cannot always have that on average. You cannot have that forever. And they have less than worth average income. They have both these conditions. So they don't have the resources in the long run as currently even they're already over and they don't have the money to outcompete others to get them 72% of the world population. And so it's kind of, so maybe that's too dark. But it's just stunning to me. There's $150 billion being spent every year in international development. I mean, I don't know how useful or whatever, but not to have resource security at the core of that effort is just fraudulent, I would say. Maybe it's too strong, no, it's not too strong of a word. It's the exact right word. It is fraudulent because it's anti-poor. It actually maneuvers people into a situation where they cannot be secure. It's really dangerous. And it's just that the blindness is true to that and that the development books that many economists go into this institution's read and learn about resource curves and they still get quizzed on that for their exam is just disgusting. Yeah, it is disgusting. I don't know. It's not running at all. I mean, you're telling us about the education model for the new economists, which has been outdated. Kate Raworth also discusses- It's awesome that Kate, I think she's wonderful, like inspiring and so kind of to help people see whether there's other opportunities now. So the way she talks about economics is like we are more descriptive, you know? So these are all tools. These are all tools that you need in real economics. This is all economics. This is all economics. And there's many that call themselves economists that should be barred. Like, I mean, if you have to take a bar exam to be a lawyer, and so it's like malpractice, like or medical profession, it's malpractice. Yeah. Is that too harsh? I don't know. No, no, it's not. As a matter of fact, Herman Daly said that as well. He said there should be a legal. E. E. O. Wilson said it as well. I mean, you talk about it in your book. A couple of things. So- I mean, politics schemes are illegal, typically. Yeah, they are. They are. And that's what it is. In your calculation, in your measuring the data, a lot comes from the UN, but you mentioned one. You mentioned HGI, which is life expectancy, literacy, per capita gross national income, the place where they live. There's the World Input Output Database, the YOD, there's M-R-I-O, multi-regional input output data. And then one you use a lot as the global trade analysis project, as GTAP. GTAP, yeah, that's also for the MRF, yeah. These are all kind of techniques, just kind of how to slice and dice the data sets, yeah. But now with those data sets or even more so what you just mentioned, there's, I'm hearing this and I understand, but I wanna have it explain better or understand why, why can't we tell people the numbers? Why can't we talk about, we don't wanna mention the numbers or put the numbers on it because why? Because they bury their heads in the sand or they don't listen anymore, they're not interested. It's a shock factor of the realities of where we're at because you said, they don't have any numbers on it, no measurement on it is that because people can't see that or am I misunderstanding what you meant by- Maybe they can't see a way out. I mean, that's why I think the narrative is important and noble to necessary. They think it's just kind of too shocking and that there are people of agencies that they just don't like to say, we cannot say you use 1.6 Earth, we cannot say that. I think it's scientifically as robust as GDP, if not more to say like- I think it's more than- So, I mean, we could go to a comparison of our accounts. We deliberately limit ourselves to UN data, say it's not to look like we're picking data and if countries say they have better data than say it's your problem with the UN and it's not our problem. So, get it straight with the UN. But so, if the UN numbers are right and they're not as complete as they need to be, we can go into details that probably what we do is an underestimate. That's another story. But in terms of, I mean, like Greece, I think that they did once an adjustment of GDP and they realized it would have to change by 25%. I mean, there's so many like money accounting is so much more complex because you need to understand the difference between value add and revenue and it's our profit and revenue or imply costs and whatever. With the footprint, it's straight, basic, like it's basic accounting. You eat a tomato, it took space to grow a tomato. Sorry, you know, I mean, and so everything can be translated in global hectares. It's like putting everything into dollars. I once talked to, it was actually interesting, a central banker in Columbia and he was an agro-economist before. So he had kind of both, he was an agricultural minister before. So he knew agriculture, economics, et cetera. So I told him about the global hectares. And I said, the global hectares is like a currency. It's a physical currency that we can translate everything into in terms of like the ultimate budget. And this is the currency, absolutely. And actually it's the only currency, but it's not a fiat currency. It's backed up by reality. And I said, wow, that's a good line. So that's the global hectare. It's a currency backed up by reality. I've noticed the trend over the years, as far as the numbers go, what you say as well, the AAP Associated Press, the AP used to come out and they tell you the replicable global hectare, which is now 1.6, but then they tell you what the deficit, they tell you what per person global average is that we're using, which was the earth overshoot. And then they'd say, and that's a deficit of this much. And I haven't seen that for the last two, three years now. I haven't seen that anymore. We'll do, I mean, we're now, this year for the first time, it would be a bit more active in Germany, then it will be, what we call the German overshoot day, as its acronym is God. So it's a very Godly affair. It's on the 5th of May. And so we're pushing that a bit. So for countries, it's a bit more complex. They're actually two different days. So for the world, it's earth overshoot day. So by when have you used as much as earth can renew? For a country, there's a number of ways you can look at it. One is to say, if everybody lived like Germans in the world, by when would be earth overshoot day? That's the 5th of May. If everybody lived like the Germans around the world, it'd be at earth overshoot day or maybe fifth. You can also look at it from the perspective of if, by when have Germany used up the German budget? Now Germany is kind of peculiar because it's the country, it's biocompassive per person is about the same as the word biocompassive per person. So the productivity per person in Germany is about the same as worldwide. It's more densely populated, but it's also wetter. So it has more kind of fertility concentrated. So in terms of not the sort of space average, but in terms of global hectares because more concentrated. In Switzerland, for example, we use four and a half Switzerland's, you know, so. Yeah, and in some respects, the limits to growth already kind of also talked about that overshoot and how, you know, you know, the difference scenario. I mean, they use the term overshoot, absolutely. Just that they speculate about the future, how it will play out. And I think what people don't understand so well, I mean, if one is kind of the overshoot theme that we can use more until it's kind of the idea of limits, people think it's like a wall and that's it, you know, but actually it's more like with finances, you can spend more than you earn. It's not a hard wall. So it's kind of the difference between flows and stocks that didn't start to deplete stocks. So that's kind of one thing. And then the other thing that is even less understood is you can increase your demand at a time where you already overshoot, which we have done. I mean, since the seventies, we started to use more than what Earth can renew. And as I said, it's not the ideal to just use the entire planet, but that's when we started to cross the one planet line. And we have been able, even as we use more, we have been able to increase it and we still are able to increase it. And so just the debt that we leave and the implications for lost by capacity is different. So the future will be regenerative, as I said earlier, there's no other way. The only question is how quickly we get there. If we do the transformation fast, more of the regenerative capacity will still be available as our future budget. If we go slow, we also burn the Earth's ability to regenerate to some extent, not totally, but to some extent. So there would be less by capacity and perhaps more erratic by capacity available, which would make it more difficult to have a steady income and also at the similar level. So that will be the hardship. So the choice is between fast and slow, not a bad weather or. Yeah, we're definitely moving towards everything regenerative. You know, most people are still getting used to this and I've been speaking about the last three years, but it's regenerative economies, regenerative medicine, regenerative agriculture on and on. It's the entire regenerative. Just... That is actually interesting. On some level, I love that the word is kind of now more used regenerative rather than sustainability because regenerative sounds more like life. You know, we regenerate and kind of the biological side comes more of four. But like with any word, there's a slight danger that when we have an adjective, it may destroy system thinking because we think something is attached to the object. You know, is this sustainable or not? Is it regenerative or not? It's all about context. For example, a horse is renewable and regenerative. You could think a horse, but if you had 70 trillion horses on the planet, that wouldn't work out either, you know? So it's a systems concept. Does it fit within the context? So yeah, if it's kind of totally destructive, then per se it doesn't fit. But even if it's renewable in itself, it doesn't necessarily mean it adds up to the whole. And so that distinction, so we make it too much. Oh, I own this object, it is sustainable. No, it's about the context. So and really, if you ask me, system thinking is not that complicated. I think the piece number one of system thinking is understanding context. That's where system thinking starts. What's the context? And that's where kind of the textbook economics taught in economics, the currently called economics glasses, fail because they fail recognizing their context. It's very siloed, linear approaches. It's not a lot of systems. And then the other is also that context. I mean, Herman Daly mentions it as well, but thank God for Donella Meadows and her great books thinking of systems and systems thinking and that kind of push forward. There's many that have come since. I really saw a shift in 2018, all international organizations made a conscious shift to systems thinking, the systems view approach to life. I'm a graduate of the CAPRA courses from Fritz Hof Capra and the Systems View of Life. Yeah, and I love it. But the UN started these systems models of the sustainable development goals and other things basing it on the old limits to growth and this Donella Meadows thinking. But then the web had transformational maps on their website from the Fourth Industrial Revolution book from Klaus Schwab and they made a conscious shift to say, okay, the only way we're gonna solve our global grand challenges is really to look at it that way, but you summed it up so nicely. It's not just about putting the words that, okay, this system think is, we gotta make sure that it's not, we're just not saying, okay, systems thinking, slapping that on. We need to make sure it's in the context of the entire. Yeah, I have one funny hobby. Yeah. A little hobby, it's called the World Economic Forum. And I mean, they have great materials and they like to bring people together and to protect whether, and they have the risks report that shows all these extreme risks. And it's not written by some crazy ecologists, but actually asked the CEOs of their members of whatever companies, what they think on some academics, whatever. And then at the same time, they have the competitors report, the real important one, the real important one. Also based on an index that another little pet peeve indices have no scientific validity because they're just made up scoring systems, but they're published by all the great Ivy League universities and it's a total absurdity. But yeah, so they have this competitors index, which countries are able to produce in the long run like a really competitive and then it's built out of 100 plus indicators. And guess what, not one of them, not one of them has anything about energy, environment, climate change, you name it, water and nothing, nothing, zero. Just, yeah, do you have airports? Is it open to open the business? Is it easy to open business? Can you hire and fire people? Wow, so I wrote to them. Yeah, Professor Schwab, how can you do that? I call it the vaccine contradiction. And so Professor Schwab, this credit, he put me in contact with his people. They took them a long time that they had time for me to talk to them because they were so busy, so important. And so it's so very complicated. It's so complicated. It's not that complicated. It didn't help you. No, it's very complicated. But okay, it's complicated. And so I didn't pay attention. And then in the next edition, they actually put in the ecological footprint as a context indicator, not in the numbers, this is a context indicator. And then they said, oh, what we see, there's a tension between environmental sustainability and economic competitiveness. Oh, really? So I said, dear Professor Schwab, thank you that the footprint as a context indicator, the report says there's a contradiction but isn't competitiveness about the future ability to produce and isn't sustainability about the future ability to produce. Okay, maybe it's like the different timescales that I don't know, but how can they be in contradiction? Oh, yeah, talk to them again. Again, they had enough time to talk about it. Then the next one had like, and he said to read the introduction and it's like the most gobbledygook text I've seen in terms of, oh, yeah, it's so complicated. And we have to just do the right things and be smart policy, everything will be resolved. And again, nothing. So I think it's kind of the interest. It says kind of where are these knowledge pieces held? You know, so you have to say, oh, yeah, we do system thing, we do everything. We can talk about sustainability. And we have ESG for financial investment, a third of the investment of the word is under ESG, scrutiny, whatever that means. You actually start to correlate the ESG criterias of this, you just see a cloud. And I think that's kind of part of the tragedy. You have the SDGs there and I'm glad they exist in some level. We did a little paper to show to what extent are SDGs environmentally sustainable and actually the way they are set up. And that's because of political pressures. They are strongly, strongly negatively correlated with environmental sustainability. Because they're not set up in a way to actually take a lot of economics seriously. That's, I've read that paper and your other papers on the SDGs. You guys have in your network have set up a plethora of wonderful papers. The paper you mentioned a couple of times is coming out and is it in nature? Nature is at the building. Yes, coming out soon. I recommend anybody read that. You need to be aligned with what you're thinking. We still have not gotten to where I want to get. Oh my goodness. I want to help the transformation. Running out of time. For my listeners. And that is, you know, Herman Galey talked about planetary boundaries and costs becoming greater than benefit and that prices need to include the external costs and quantitative limits that he even talked about ecological tax reform. And as you mentioned it so nicely, you know, planetary boundaries, Johan Rockstrom and plus them Institute of Klima Shift and Climate Change. And those working on that are definitely, I hope you can collaborate. I hope that because it would only strengthen that because there are, when it first came out, nine planetary boundaries in the way that they're divided up that so closely also tied to the doughnut economics and that. Having given enough. I mean, doughnut economics, I think doughnut economics just says there's planetary constraints and we want to have good lives. And so they used as a way to populate it, the planetary boundaries. I mean, there's no, there's no reason you could use the foot. It's all similar. It depends on what you're trying to do. So I think that the underlying thinking is very much there that they all recognize that the soccer game we're playing is human wellbeing and planetary constraints. How can we get that to work together? Because that's the tension we need to navigate. And so in that way, this is all the same. I think there may be some different tensions. There may be some slight different tensions, as I said, in terms of like the tragedy of the comments versus getting the game. How do we frame it? I believe actually the focus too much on international negotiations could detract us from recognizing the self-interest. So I think the moral arguments, they sound very soothing because they're beautiful. And so I think the one of the most destructive sentences in climate debate is to say, oh, these poor islands in the Pacific that will disappear and the poor people in the South. And of course it's true, but it separates because it's a talk within the urban elite of saying, oh, it's the others, it's othering. It is environmental colonialism rather than recognizing how we sit in it ourselves and how we are like it's relevant to us directly. Absolutely, and Kate Rower says it as well. She says, we have this thing called weird societies. The Western educated industrialized rich and democratic. They're all in the West talking about the island states and it's this convoluted way of looking the world and it's so small, it's not reality. I think we've promoted all the others and their great books and their thoughts enough. I really wanna dive in. I love that. I hadn't heard that before, but Kate said it's great. Wonderful. Yeah, I really wanna promote and get into the global footprint and the global hectare a little bit more and kind of bounce some things off of you and have some discussions. I have been working for a couple of years now. I would like to do a global, a universal global hectare that is an inalienable right for every single human being. The minute you're born until you die, you are given whatever the time of your birth, the global hectare is 1.6, if you're lucky, a few years ago you came in and you were born, I was 1.7, but it's kind of a daily fluctuation depending on how we're living and doing. And then that's something that everyone has, this replicable global hectare that they get from birth and it's an inalienable right. And there is a way through that stewardship that if we have good stewardship over it, the way we live, if we live in a passive house, if we work for a great company that we can increase our global footprint, so to say, we can kind of be net positive and have a better balance, which increases that for the rest of the world, but if we're bad stewardship and we're living like Donald Trump or some Americans where we're using 100 or whatever because of our footprint, because of our lifestyle that we're actually taking it away from others or we're using more than we have outside of that safe space and there's some, it's very complicated, but it can work in several ways. So on a basic level, let's say you live in a multifamily apartment where there's maybe five families between two to four individuals that hopefully you have enough space for that family in each unit. Maybe let's say there's a minimum 100 square meters per unit in that building, and as children are born and they have that same global hectare, they probably won't use as much, but that goes to the family unit and that family and those individuals who are living in an apartment of 100 square meters are living on much smaller than 1.6 global hectares, but the building they live in is run on renewable energy, it's run on rainwater recycling and ambient water harvesting and they have some kind of battery factor or geothermal, they're a passive house. They maybe have a big tree over there. I think this vision is very like, obviously you talked about one planet living and kind of this kind of trying to establish and experiment with it. And I think that's the big experiment of our time how to do it. On some level, of course that's so what our function is is more kind of to provide the camera, the accounting function of just saying we don't have a beef and saying you have to do it like this or like that, we're not the central government that kind of allocates and tells us. So we're separating the normative and the descriptive and that's why we just actually set up a new organization just to maintain the national footprint account as a separate like entity together with York University to make that just as, you need a metric, like the tailor needs to be able to measure the cloth. I mean, the baker needs to have a scale. So that's kind of the basic necessity. And then ideas like you're putting forward then become feasible to say, we need to think about the budgeting. How do we do collective budgeting? We do it around money. We do it around many other things. We're metering electricity, you know? I mean, so how do we deal with physical reality? Do you believe there's a way that depending on how we live or how we do our businesses, our companies, our cities, our communities that we can increase our global heck are? Absolutely, I do as well. Yeah, I mean, so it's both sides. I mean, it's like with money, income and expenditures. I mean, what we've seen, I mean, some of the ways of increasing this regeneration can be very mechanistic and kind of use more fertilizer, kind of more tractors and more energy or whatever. And that may not have lasting effects. It's like, it's more like doping an athlete who can run faster perhaps a little bit, but then wears out. So a lot is possible on the consumption side too. And I mean, so the consumption is not just the ultimate consumption, but I mean, many people could live in houses that are kind of energy positive. For example, so that's possible. I love bicycle, it's so much more fun to be on the bicycle and see more than being in a car. I would do it even if it took more resources than being in a car, it's just so much fun. But if life becomes so much better, and by the way, it doesn't use have any resources, that's better. But I think the other thing, that's why we're focusing so much on the sense of resource security. So we're not taking away. That's why I think we also use the word move the date so much because it's not about, when you say reduce your footprint. Oh my God, why are you taking my chocolate? Okay, maybe next year. But so it's kind of, oh, it's kind of shrinking away. No, it's gonna move the date. We are expanding your resource security and our collective one. So we'll have a better life. I think that's kind of the reality. How can we produce this perhaps a little bit an abstract idea, but we need to have a sense of abundance so we can be generous. And we can produce a psychological space in the way of living to feel this abundance of ideas and by talking with each other, we feel, oh, there's things opening up. It's a sense of abundance and possibility in a context of severe physical scarcity. And that's kind of the big artistic trick. And it's not a trick. I mean, the story is possible. How can we produce an abundance, sense of abundance for people in this context of physical scarcity? And we may not be able to get through that transformation that fast enough and that will leave some damages. So the earlier we do it, the better. The huge possibilities available. And currently already we are physically threefold too large and it will have to mean to look at all kinds of various dimensions. That's why we use the hand, move the date, move the date, find the fingers. That's like how much do we regenerate? Like more regenerative agriculture, more conservation, just so many practices that can make the planet healthy and stronger, to buy capacity stronger. And then on demand state, I mean, overlapping to some extent, but the ultimate outcomes of financing and policy, et cetera, is how we organize our lives, particularly through cities, our cities constructed. How do we power our cities? Like do we have coal power plants or solar power? Everything has an impact, but different degrees. How do we feed ourselves? Already half of the planet right now is occupied for food. And then how many we are? And it's a very delicate issue to talk about the population size, but it's a very significant dynamic. And the good news is by addressing it, there's so many other problems we can address as well. I mean, who doesn't want that everybody has equal rights? Men and women have equal rights. Having everybody participate fully leads to healthier families, smaller families, better educated families, what's against it? And then it's stunning. I don't know how much you're built into the German kind of language group, but I see a lot of conversations in Germany about populations saying, oh my God, they have a few small families, the Germans are dying out. It's rubbish. I mean, kind of actually in an industrial society, slowly shrinking populations are an economic advantage. If you think you need to have a growing population to pay for pensions, then you buy into a pension scheme. And the reality is because in industrial societies, it takes so long for young people to get ready for the workforce. That's a part of the dependency as well, not just old people. Old people now, they live healthier. They can help them a little more. Probably we have to live to work longer, so you cannot have like when unemployment, another unemployment, when pension was started in Switzerland and at 65 was put at the age of retirement. Guess what, 65 was actually the life expectancy in Switzerland. And now the life expectancy of men in Switzerland is I think 80 or in higher. So there has to be some adjustments, obviously. But in terms of dependency ratio, just physically speaking, how many people are able to work compared to how many need to be looked after? The ratio of a slowly shrinking population in industrial age is becoming far more favorable. So it's not even an economic problem. So the fear about shrinkage is just stunning and totally misinformed. And I haven't seen yet an article in the German news that actually makes the opposite argument. It's always about lamenting about cultural suicide. I don't know what. I mean, this is stunning. And it's not just Germany, but I see it in Germany. And just as you live in Germany, I mentioned that. I'm from America, but I live in Germany. My family is German and Austria on my mother's side and have a lot from Spain, Italy and relatives in that. But yeah, it's a unique world we live in. I have five more questions for you and then we're done. And I'm sorry, we've taken this over, but we could talk for hours. I'm sorry. The biggest one that I really think we need to, I need to get the answer from you as the burning question. WTF and yes, we've been asking that this last 12 months, but it's not the swear word. It's what's the futures? And I'd like to get your vision and maybe your network's vision. What's the futures? Where do we need to go? Where do we need to be? I think it's pretty obvious and everybody has a good idea where we want to go because we see more like where we don't want to go. Maybe not enough where we want to go. It's totally possible to live well within the means of one planet because we can make this transformation. It's economically beneficial. It's financially beneficial. It's obviously medically beneficial. I mean, there's only benefits. Why are we not doing it? That's the question I still don't understand and that keeps me fascinated every day. Like I've done it for 30 years. Like, how can I do that forever? Isn't it depressing? I don't think so. I feel like a soccer player. I just, I mean, love it playing soccer. I'm not winning the word championship, but it's still great to play. And that's the question they, why are we not understanding our own self-interest? It's so fascinating, but it also has the energy because that the self-interest is there. The energy is there to make it possible. It's not like, that's why it's a tragedy. Not because it's inevitable, but because it is inevitable. Like it is inevitable. It's not inevitable. And we are not seizing the opportunity and it's so fascinating. So we could have great lives. And I started as an engineer, I believe in that technology, you could do it often. But I mean, so many opportunities. Would you consider yourself to be a human ecologist or how would you define you and your work? What, I mean, what's the term that you give people? I'm just curious. Just curious. Yeah, yeah. I mean, because you really have. And that's what many people probably say to you, he's a little curious. I mean, it's really, we could talk for hours and we won't, we'll have to schedule another call eventually. But if there was one message that you could depart to my listeners as a sustainable takeaway that has the power to change their life, what would it be your message? Give up one thing, never say should again. What should young innovators in your field or thinking about activism environment be looking for ways to make a real impact on our earth? I struggled with that question myself. I think just being okay with not knowing and staying cures with the inquiry I think can bring you the energy you need. Like recognizing the privilege we have to be able to engage with these questions and the beauty it brings to our lives and that not knowing is uncomfortable and the deep listening we can bring to others and together we can do incredible things. This is the last question. I come from six generations of Germany's farmers and organic farmers and that not only did William Reese and you and there are some examples around farming and things also that have to do with the global hectare. But what have you experienced or learned in your professional journey so far? This whole thing till now that you said, boy, I would have loved to know that from the start. I think that's kind of the obsession that I'm on right now kind of the significance of skin in the game. I have worked with too many that when I actually start to realize later on why did I don't really have skin in the game? Like institutions are just there to maintain things and they wanna talk about it but actually they're not really vested in having the problem being solved. That's kind of an insight that came too late in my life or not too late the late, I mean too late in the sense that as you ask, if I had that insight earlier on to really understand who has skin in the game. And if you would have had that insight earlier on, would you have, you would have caught, I mean, called bullshit or kind of came forward and say, hey, do you really have skin or are you just pulling my chain because you just don't give me lip service or what would you have done with that information? I mean, choosing your partners and then how you work with them, how you frame the benefits much, much more clearly. Yeah. I think also something that wasn't clear on some level, I think some people don't like our message that much. And so also because our message has been around for a long time, it's been boring. So it can sometimes feel like maybe a negative word. It's like, oh, I feel ostracized. You know, it's kind of, you think you have like an answer and what he's interested in. And so you can easily fall in the trap that people don't understand. We have to explain things better, whatever it is, rather than seeing that as a power. Now being ostracized means you're actually annoying. So how do you use that power? Rather than, so you can see it from a victim's side, oh, I'm being ostracized. Wow, they get annoyed. So who are our friends? Who want them to get annoyed as well? Maybe they are your friends. So I think understanding kind of who are your, I mean, it's not just friends and foes. It's not that level. It's kind of just aligned from an incentive perspective of making something happen and then something more can happen. And I wish I knew that better too, because obviously my dreams are much bigger than what we have been able to achieve. And perhaps if they weren't, that would be boring. I, that is all I have for you, Mates. I want to encourage all my listeners, please get the book, please go to the website footprintnetwork.org. I'm gonna list in the show notes all of the places people can reach out, find out about the global hector or about the ecological footprint and kind of help move the date and really think of that. Look at your new papers that are coming out in nature and things. But I really thank you for your time. I honestly truly mean it. I could speak to you for hours because I want to pick your brain. I think we're alone. I think about these things all the time. That's awesome. Thank you so much, Mark. I appreciate your time. And that's all I have. Thank you very much. Unless for something else you didn't say. And for those who love geography and traveling, particularly as we're stuck at home, I would go like the first site I would go to is data.forputnetwork.org because it gives you a map of the world. You can go to every country and see what's the research situation, how have they changed? And I think it's quite fascinating. Thank you very much. You have a wonderful weekend coming up. I appreciate it. Thanks. You too. Be well, be safe. And I'll see you soon. Thanks. I'll see you later, bye.