 And my reasons for being optimistic about the future, you know, right now you could really be forgiven not to be optimistic. I look at myself and at my work and the film I made last year about the good future. And I look at everything around us, including climate change issues and energy issues and of course the coming food crisis and Russia, Ukraine, yeah, and I tend to say, well, you know, the future better than we think, maybe it's worse than we think, right? I mean, even I tend to go into that direction, the rabbit hole of negative thought, right? And I always say in my presentation that business as usual is dead or dying and I think that is so true. We can no longer just continue with what used to work, no matter what business we're in. And especially not if it's about sustainability, it's about climate. I mean, let's face this, and I have something coming up on this very soon, we're going to climate emergency. And this is no longer just far away and we're seeing right now in this summer what hot means and that is just a few days now, for example, the UK at the hottest day ever. But in the near future, it's going to be the hottest month ever. And so business as usual is dead or dying. I think that's actually good news because new things can happen. But if you're looking at the world right now, you see the good things, you see the bad things, you see the bad things. Like climate change that we're struggling with, you see the bad things like, of course, Ukraine, Russia in this kind of political confusion, geopolitical rearrangement. You see inflation. You see all the things that we're worried about there. At the same time, there is kind of a reset going on, makes us think about what we want. And millennials, at Gen Y, is asking for companies to be different. They're also asking for different kinds of investment. And now we have trends around the world where people are saying, we're going to pull our money out from the fossil fuel industry. And you have other examples I show later. You have the extinction rebellion now supported by Stephen Fry, even, taken more dramatic measures in this direction. So it's coming to a head, really. What is going on? It's the crisis also gets opportunity. Now, if you look at this chart, you could also be forgiven for having a negative view, right? Just take a look at all the things that have gotten worse since the COVID crisis. So cohesion, likelihood of crisis, climate action failure, mental health, I mean, basically world economic forum here. The chart goes on until all the way down the screen, right? The things that are more of an issue. And that leads a lot of people to a dark view that is kind of the opposite of what I expressed in my film, The Good Future, which you need to watch at TheGoodFutureFilm.com. And one of the key theories in my book was this one, of course, the future is better than we think. And I still think that's true, but it contradicts kind of what we're currently look at the reality of today, where we're looking at things like this, right? I mean, this is a map of a heat map of the world from the last four weeks. Catastrophic. And yes, people are dying from heat waves now. But anticipations are that if it goes on like this, it could be 100,000 next year and a million the year afterwards. I mean, the numbers are astounding. And much quicker than we would have ever thought. All right, so again, one could say, well, The Good Future, how about the future is worse than we think. Well, when it's about climate change, right? And that drives, of course, the urgency much more when we realize that, you know, this is a really emergency territory now. And clearly, again, looking at the numbers here, this is June 20, 1976, the heat map, and this is June 2022. And in the last 20 years, we have generated about 25% of the CO2. I mean, the numbers are, again, it's astounding. And look at the other numbers like this one, you know, the charts are, again, compelling when you see what's happening there with global warming. And on top of that now, inflation here, with Lithuania and Estonia and Latvia, going up to 15% of inflation, right? The future is worse than we think. When we look at this, but then the question really is this, are we heading towards this kind of Armageddon, right? First climate Armageddon, technology Armageddon, and, you know, this kind of view of dystopia is everywhere. All we have to do is watch television or, God forbid, watch Netflix or any of those shows, right? And then we have the statistics shown that kids around the world, 16 and 25, they're super anxious, especially on the southern part of the globe. So just to zoom in on what exactly they are thinking, right? People have failed to care for the planet, the future is frightening, family security is threatened, humanity is doomed, right? That's what kids are saying. And I think this is a rise in concern pretty much around the world, especially in the southern hemisphere. So basically, I can be with Robin Williams, who said this. I hope you did hear that. Let me just make sure we get the right audio mix here. Yes, it should be this. Let's play that again, because it's so cool, right? Just do nothing else. Let's just do nothing else, right? You could be forgiven for thinking that, I think, right now. So let me bring up the antidote as to why I think we need to get away from this kind of what I call the despondency trap, right? To be despondent, to be just hoping to think negatively. First, we can look at all of the things in a negative light, like here, every year 300,000 women die from pregnancy-related causes. The majority of the world lives less than $10 a day, 10% live in extreme poverty, almost a quarter of the world population lives in autocratic regimes, and the list goes on. I can take the same facts and I can look at it from a time-based point of view and say, well, let's turn this around a little bit and say the number of women who die from pregnancy-related causes has declined. It's actually gotten better. And the percentage of people living in poverty has fallen to less than 10% in a decade. And the percent of the world living in autocratic regimes has also declined, at least as of this reading, which is about two years ago, and so on. So I can take another viewpoint, right? I can have a despondent viewpoint, or I can have a sort of more optimist point of view. And I think this is an important story, because also, of course, quite clearly in social media, which is the prime culprit here, I think the bad things spread about five to six times faster. And this is really a very big deal about social media that we absolutely must address. And the other thing, good things take much longer. To do good things takes longer. It's not, it's much easier to do bad things, right? Or it's much better, much quicker to make a dystopian movie. Look at all science fiction, 95% is dystopia, except for maybe her. Even that is dystopia, right? So good things take longer. And so we have this tendency, as Kevin Kelly says, that we need to look at a different direction here. And we have this tendency of looking at the negative things much quicker. And he says we should be optimistic, not because there's less problems, right? But because our capacity to solve them is larger than we thought. This is a key sentence. Kevin is a great idol of mine, so to speak. Everything he writes is pretty amazing stuff. Of course, he's the co-founder of Wired Magazine quite some time ago. He lives in San Francisco. Let me show you a couple of facts here about what is actually better than we thought, right? Technology is getting cheaper and cheaper, enabling us to do things much quicker, like human genome data sequencing. This is the cost per megabase going towards zero, essentially. Lots of things we can do with that. The power of computing is increasing, so we can do stuff like climate control using technology. We have lots of innovation platforms generating trillions of dollars. It's just a partial list here on the left. We have new nuclear fusion reactors coming up. Lots of money going into this into potentially a safe version of nuclear. We have a sustainability revolution where we can see stuff like protein and transportation already changing in a very large way. And of course, we have the climate change crisis being attacked by climate technology. And that one really allows us to think larger when we look at this curve, right? This is all happening in the next two to 10 years. I mean, tremendous progress pretty much along us to have all the tools we need to solve this. So the bottom line is we have all the tools. We're just going to make the right decisions. That makes me optimistic. At least we don't have a problem with not having the tools or not knowing what to do. We know what to do. We just won't do it, right? So that's another issue we're going to discuss later in the conversation. Key point here, our mistrust of the future makes it hard to give up the past and the present. This is, I think, no, probably, a poet or a keynote speaker who said this the other day, I picked it up from him, but we have to trust the future, right? So that it's not hard to give up the past. So it's hard to move towards optimism. Optimism is a choice. Again, I think this is very clear when we look at the future. Again, Kevin Kelly says, over the long term, the future is decided by optimists. And not by pessimists and by dystopians. I mean, that is just Hollywood, right? Great book you should read about this if you want to be an optimist. Read about why humans are actually kind. Humans are not evil. I believe that as well, generally speaking. There are some exemptions. But Humankind by Rutger Breckman, great book to read if you want to think optimistically about the future. So the other thing is that it's really easy to be dystopian. I mean, to think of the world ending as endless scenarios, right? But utopia, which is a world that is pretty and perfect, that can also be a dangerous fantasy. Think of the Nazi utopia that was propagated as part of the Nazi propaganda. That is like the perfect world that we design and control. That can also be dangerous. So Kevin talks a lot about the alternative. He calls it the protopia. I love the whale here because it's kind of like, whales don't do that, right? But it's something that we can imagine as a potential future. And lots of great quotes from him on this, right? He says, for example, that protopia defines a state that is better than today than yesterday. But maybe just a few steps, right? It's a gradual thing. And protopia is not, this is a great word, word it's not like imaginary heaven or nirvana. It's a stepwise approach to improving things. He also says, in this article I'll put the link up here later, he says he's hoping that we can get out of this being blind for the future. And that we generate plausible visions of the future. And basically, it's thrilling enough to aim towards. And I think this is a really powerful thing to think about how we can tackle the future to create something that's thrilling for us. And he says that summary basically being that it's a slow march towards incremental betterment. That's what protopia is. I think that's a good strategy. It's not dystopia, it's not utopia. It's not utopia with an EU. That's another version of it. It's kind of like this. You know, we have the burning planet now. And protopia would be to imagine that we can return it to the state where it was in within the next 20 years. I think that's entirely possible. So this is something that I think is a good philosophical background of this. Now the last couple of weeks, we've seen kind of the opposite happening with the climate bill, the build back better by Biden being utterly defeated because of this Senator Manchin veto, right? But surprisingly yesterday, we have the opposite where basically a new bill came forward from Manchin. That was the biggest bill ever in the U.S. And then it passed, right? So two weeks ago it was nothing. Everything was falling apart. And now there's a new deal, right? And here's my good friend. This bill would be the most significant legislation in history to tackle the climate crisis and improve our energy security right away. Now give us a tool to meet the climate goals. Keep talking, but basically this is kind of interesting to see how this protopia came about, right? With all the pressure that has built up. And it's not that we're hopeless there, it's just we had to reroute first, right? So as I said earlier, we have all the tools, that's the science and the tech, in the money, we also have the money, but we must work on the telos. Telos is the wisdom, the understanding. This is of course old Greek word that is widely used by our total, refers to the full potential of something. So this is why I've pledged many times that we should have a council of the wise people. You know, to bring forward the telos. And I think we really need to go back to this. And it can't just be the World Economic Forum or the UN or people within country, we need a global forum for telos, for wisdom, how to change those things. Last thing I'm gonna say about Kevin Kelly is this one, where he says, a deep history of an idea makes it clear that the optimistic stance of believing something is possible is a requirement. If we want to build a good future, we have to be able to believe that it's possible. That's where my argument all along in the film, I think that's my argument as to why I feel optimistic. So I really think that right now, can you bring me back on the full screen please? Right now we are at the fork in the road moment. You know, we're at a place where it's essentially emergency time. And this is the fork, it's not just a fork, right? It's a lot of people are saying this is the decisive decade to trust climate change, to look at technology regulation, to create a just world. And I'm with Antonio Gramsky, Italian philosopher. He said that we should have pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will. This is, and I sometimes say optimism of the heart, right? Also, so we should be intellectually curious and ask questions and not be naive, but we should remain optimists. And you know, really what's happening now is we're heading to emergency 2030, not 2050. And we really need to have immediate action on some of these items. That's why we need the optimism. So the belief that tomorrow can be better than today is an essential requirement. And this is why my pledge is for us to develop that optimism and to groom it and to help each other feel optimistic. And this is, by the way, why the world's 10 happiest countries, you can see them here, led of course by Switzerland and Denmark and Finland. There is optimism that people can feel there. So we should discuss as to why that is, but I think this is gonna be really, really important for the future, because I don't wanna be in a future that looks like this, you know, where we all feel like a turtle lying on our back when we can't do anything because we feel stuck there. I really believe our attitude contains our future. And if our attitude is pessimistic, we'll build a pessimistic future. And that's not something that we would want. So that's my pitch for optimism.