 Yeah, so I'm super happy to be joining you because I believe in free cultural spaces, I believe in the importance of what they do for providing space for our creativity. And I think this is an incredibly potentially creative moment in human history. And I think we need that to help reclaim power from corporations and banks and remote state institutions. I call it a great reclamation that we can all take part in as normal life crumbles around us. So I want to take these short moments of your time this evening to invite you to consider three things. First, that the process of the collapse of industrial consumer societies has actually already begun. Second, instead of believing in the delusion of a managed transition to a sustainable consumer way of life. Many people already have a different motivation for engaging for the good of us all. So we don't need wishful thinking to act positively today. In that sense we don't actually need hope to be creative, but instead of faith in ourselves and in life itself. What I want to talk about is that I see that creative art can help more of us recognize that reality and discover explore new aims for our own lives. And that's why I was happy to join your event today. So my new book Breaking Together explains how a process of the creeping collapse of modern societies is already underway, as I said, and modern conveniences although they're all around us they seem to still be functioning. That means we could be skeptical about that claim I just made but the data actually shows us what's going on and I know it's late in the evening but I'm going to hit you with some numbers. The Human Development Index in particular. It's been declining each year since 2019 and 80% of countries in all regions of the world. And some of that data is collected two years prior to release. So it's decline that began pre pandemic. Now previously it was always rising since 1990. But later on our quality of life as well from the Numbio index shows a global plateauing since 2016 in 90% of countries. And the rich OECD countries like the Netherlands the falls being consistent since 2016. And some of that data was collected two years earlier, so it's declined starting before 2015 even. So in the book, I'm connecting those cracks on the surface of modern societies with crumbling foundations in economic and energy environmental and food systems. And I say that climate change is an accelerator of all those fractures, as well of course being a really worrying problem in itself. So although specific societies have been disrupted terribly for centuries before political violence colonialism and so on. The evidence in my book is that it shows that actually we've reached a point where most modern societies, while continuing to function on the surface are already in their early stages of collapse. And in the book, I explain how we've not been told about this process of collapse. Because experts politicians and the media, they're holding the microphone and their incentives, they're incentivized to promote this idea of perpetual progress. And I provide also some evidence that the reason we no longer see content about the breakdown societies going viral is because also executives in big tech they're actually sort of managing the mixing deck through social media. Now we know also that they're in league with security agencies big tech working with the state. So that's for me a really big problem because it means we're not actually getting to talk about what's most important in society right now, which is how things are breaking down. Instead, we keep hearing the same old stories about why we should be more positive. When a lot of people hear the bad news about society and the environment, some react by thinking that it's not helpful to focus on the bad news. But I think that means they're, they're not facing the information fully and they said instead they're switching to talk about well how should we relate to it in a positive way. And so that's also what I have in mind when I hear the story that hope is essential. What is meant by the word hope, and what psychology actually says about the topic are not often considered. Yet psychological research finds that whether people act in pro social ways or not has very little to do with their perception of the future. Research finds that even catastrophic imaginaries can be more motivating than not. So instead being attached to consequentialist ethics is the Achilles heel of activism and pro social action. Now that's the idea we do something only because we know it will have a positive impact or we think that's likely. I say it's the Achilles heel, because it can lead people to giving up when they sense that they can't achieve their goals, or possibly even turning towards violent extremism or support for authoritarianism. For me, the teachings of Buddhism have been relevant here. Now those teaching regard hope as a thought pattern that takes us away from meeting reality as we find it. Even the Buddha himself commented that there are three kinds of people in the world, the hopeful, hopeless, and the one who's done away with hope. The author of the Spirit Rock Teachers Council or MJ software explains that hoping can I quote direct our longing for happiness in an unskillful way. It places our well being on uncertain imagine future beyond our control therefore feeding craving and fixation. And so when that wish for future isn't realized we're crushed. I just want to remember that we choose neither the circumstances of our life nor the results of our actions. What we can choose however is how we relate to each other, and how we respond. And when doing that we can tune in to our intuitive sense that there is something worthwhile about being alive and choose to keep living from our hearts no matter what happens. There's some similarity here in the more mystical understandings of Christian teachings also the invitation for believers to have hope as often summarized in the statement faith hope and charity does not need to suggest that a pain free world will come to exist on earth. Rather it can be an invitation to expect the ultimate rightness of existence will be experienced by each and every one of us in the end, whether that's in this life or after death. Now that kind of hope is closer to a faith or trust in the universe, whatever may occur in future. I think it's also important we ask, what is it that people are hoping for, is it for our way of life to continue, despite that relying on the exploitation of the world's resources. As left field sang back in 1986. Sorry 1996 they weren't that old. How many visions must they burn until we learn. I think it's time for a wholesale rejection of what I call in in this book, the culture and systems of imperial modernity, because I think a collapsing of industrial consumer societies, and the ideologies that they uphold will actually provide opportunities for significant change, which might actually reduce some forms of suffering in some parts of the world. And given the given the cumulative failure of myriad past form efforts at social change to deliver a peaceful equitable and sustainable world, the cracking of old powerful systems could actually be regarded as a painful opportunity as well as a crisis. That's a kind of a darker hope, but it's also a practical one. My view is that we will be collapsing into communities, and the thing to play for still is what we find in community, when it becomes all we have. So in chapter 12 of my book, I promote a range of people profile a range of people who've allowed their acceptance of the future of that they're aware that to allow that awareness to transform them and in many cases it's, it's not immediate it's quite painful. But I talk about some of them changing quickly and some of them changing slowly. Some have become activists, some have become permaculture farmers, some have become spiritual teachers, some have become community leaders, some have become innovators of local exchange and local currency systems. And what they do inspires me with a broader hope that these disruptive times will bring more of us back to further attention to life itself. And in the book I use the term evotopia, where more of us are witnessing and being with reality in all its aspects. We're thinking about a massive shift in our assumptions about life. And I'm thinking about how that might be helped and of course, art can help us see our situation and stories in new ways. And it can involve art can involve a warping or mixing of descriptions of reality understandings of reality stories of reality. And it's, it's that intention and impact of course which makes something artistic rather than the third tools we use. So that's why I was happy to work with a digital artist to create the cover of my book. I'll talk about it in a moment. It's, it's part of a Kintsugi world art project which I'm going to show you in a minute as over the video. And with the images what we wanted to do is invite a reflection on what is breaking in our worlds today, and what we might learn from that breaking what me what we might want to honor about that breaking, and what we want to remember from that and to help us in the difficult times ahead. Before I show you the series of images we came up with, I'll just talk about this one on the cover of the book. This you may recognize is the, it's the statue of the Farnese, it's called the Farnese Atlas statue. So we got a right street image of that from Wikipedia and put it through an AI program, and then asked it to do a Kintsugi effect so Kintsugi is the Japanese art when something's broken, but you really liked the thing that breaks the broke so a mug or a bowl. You stick it back together again with gold, and that doesn't mean it has the original function you don't use it again. As a mug for example it will become an ornament, but it becomes something beautiful, and you therefore still have the connection to that object and perhaps all the memories you know who gave it to you who drank from it, and so on. So, we're doing a Kintsugi Atlas we're inviting reflection on what in this myth has been breaking and what what can we therefore what is it about human nature that's been breaking, and that we can stick back together again, not to repeat it but to keep that in mind. So I don't know if you know the myth of the Titan God Atlas. This isn't the planet on his back this is symbolic of the universe, and the idea is that the Titan Gods, what things stories about them were actually reflections and aspects of the human condition. And that's different from the God Zeus, the Sun God which is more likely the the the originating force, or one of the originating forces and this the story goes that Zeus cursed Atlas with the idea that he had to hold up the heavens otherwise they would fall and kill all his family and all life on earth. For me, this is an invitation to think about the potential and the curse of what could be called anthro anthroposupremises and not just being anthropocentric but anthroposupreme the idea that it all comes down to us. We are the center of the universe and the future of the universe depends on us homo sapiens, and it's a paradox because good things can come for people thinking about what's my responsibility and what's our collective responsibility as a species, but also terrible things can come from that which is actually a delusion. So, with this image we're saying well let's recognize it's an it's a paradox and there are good and bad things that come from this way of thinking. And we can think now as as as homo sapiens as a species we're waking up to the mass, well, biological annihilation we've caused. What do we do about it. I think the impulse to help could actually be as dangerous as not and so we need to be aware of aware of that as we enter this very difficult time of societal disruption and collapse. What I'm going to do now is show you a little video with some of the other the other images. Breaking together a freedom loving response to collapse is written by Jim Bandel and published by Good Works in 2023. The front cover includes an image called Kintsugi Atlas that was made by Darynko Montico and Jim Bandel. It is part of a kintsugi world art exhibition each image of which corresponds to a chapter in the book. The audiobook is narrated by me Matthew Slater and is comprised of the following 15 chapters. First the introduction recognizing and responding to collapse. Then chapter one economic collapse a time for limits and contradictions. Chapter two monetary collapse it was made inevitable. Chapter three energy collapse and problems with net zero. Chapter four biosphere collapse killing our living home. Chapter five climate collapse cascading failures. Chapter six food collapse six hard trends. Chapter seven societal collapse recognizing collapse and cultural decay. Chapter eight freedom to know critical wisdom in this era of collapse. Chapter nine freedom from progress humanity is not on trial. Chapter 10 freedom from banking how the money power drove collapse. Chapter 11 freedom in nature a foundation for eco-libertarians. Chapter 12 freedom to collapse and grow the doomster way. Chapter 13 freedom from fake green globalists resistance and reclamation. Finally, there is the conclusion taking the green pill in an age of collapse. Okay, so those were the images that Derinka and I came up with. We had some fun doing that. AI is quite fascinating but we had to do quite a lot of post AI, adding of the Kinsugi effect. If you're interested in the book, it's free now as an EPUB. I want to make this analysis as widely available as possible. So you can go to jembandale.com to find the book as an EPUB. Or you can order it from there from the publisher. If you're interested in what I just showed you, you should just type my name into YouTube and then you'll find the introduction for free as an audio. And those images again, you'll see. And I'm going to be doing, we're going to be exhibiting them and we're actually going to be working with an artist to actually create some of those images in real life. So we'll see how we get on with on with that. But the reason I've focused on that is because with you today is because for a big part of my life. It's been five years working on this topic. It's been pretty heavy. And also when we talk about it in public, there's quite a backlash. And, but for me, it's things are things are moving so fast that actually it's important not to be shy anymore, and to be more public and more creative and say, this is how I'm living with this awareness and this is how other people are living. And so yeah, to celebrate the fact that we can find purpose once old stories about the future die. So I'm looking forward to the discussion in a moment, but also I'd like to invite you into that way of thinking, which is that, you know, if maybe you know this already maybe you believe it already, but if you don't just think as a thought experiment if what I've the scholarship I pulled together in this book, and the conclusion I've reached that the collapse of modern industrial consumer societies has indeed already begun. If that is the case, then in what ways might you feel more free as a result. Now I'm going to ask you to do is take a few minutes to turn to your neighbor and Indira will also repeat the question I think for you. And then do that first and then afterwards I'll be looking forward to hearing some thoughts or any questions and then of course on the panel. So thank you for your attention.