 that global desertification mega fires, now burning at altitudes and latitudes we never had fire before, and climate change of feeding on one another in one of nature's feedback loop and that is spiraling out of control. And it's not easy to be optimistic because it is spiraling out of control and we are causing it and we're doing nothing about addressing the cause. Alan Savry is my guest on this episode of Inside Ideas brought to you by 1.5 Media and Sustainable Innovators Magazine. Alan Savry, born in Simbabwe and educated in South Africa, University of Natal, has a Bachelor in Science in Zoology and Botany, pursued an early career as a research biologist and a game ranger in the British colonial service of what was then Northern Rhodesia, today Zambia, and later as a farmer and game rancher in Simbabwe. In the 1960s, he made a significant breakthrough in understanding what was causing the degradation and desertification of the world's grassland ecosystems. And as a resource management consultant worked with numerous managers on four continents to develop sustainable solutions. He served as a member of the parliament in the latter days of Zimbabwe civil war and became the leader of the opposition to the ruling party head by Ian Smith. Exiled in 1979 as a result of his opposition, he immigrated to the United States where he continued to work with land managers through his consulting business. The growth of that business and desire to assist many more people and the need for furthering his work led him to continue its development in the nonprofit world. In 1992, Savry and his wife Jodi Butterfield formed a nonprofit organization in Zimbabwe, the African Center for Holistic Management, donating a ranch that would serve as a learning site for people all over Africa. In 2009, Savry Butterfield and a group of colleagues co-founded the Savry Institute in Boulder, Colorado to serve the world through an international network of entrepreneurial innovators and leaders committed to serving their regions with the highest standards of holistic management, training and implementation support. The African Center became the first of the Savry Institute's locally led and managed hubs. Savry's books, Holistic Management, a new framework for decision-making by Island Press came out in 1999 and there are several editions described his efforts to find workable solutions ordinary people could implement to overcome many of the problems, best setting communities and business today. In 2003, Alan Savry received Australia's International Bank SIA Award for the person or organization doing the most for the environment on a global scale. And in 2010, Savry and the African Center received the Buckminster Fuller Institute Challenge Award for work that has significant potential to solve humanity's most pressing problems. Most of you will probably know Alan from his TED Talk he gave in 2013 that has received over 3.4 million views and climbing and in 2014 was voted one of them. 50 most intriguing TED Talks of all times. The Savry Institute is one of 11 finalists in the Virgin Earth Challenge and a $25 million initiative for the successful commercialization of ways of taking greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere and keeping them out with no countervailing impacts. He's been in probably numerous documentaries Kiss the Ground is one that a lot of people were talking about during the pandemic and he was definitely in that and had a wonderful section. I welcome you Alan to the podcast. I could go on for days because you have a long history you've seen quite a bit but I'm so glad you could take the time to speak to us today. Thank you, thank you Mark. Something that my listeners probably don't know but I wanna make sure that they do know as you're also a major contributor for our book Menu B Global Food Systems Reformation along with 46 other contributors, scientists, chief food scientist for the Worldwide Fund which used to be the World Wildlife Fund Dr. Johann Rockstrom of the Stockholm Resilience Center and the Pustum Institute of Climate Change Maria Rodale and I could go on and on among the other greats who are also in the book who I believe are very much aligned in your same views of holistic management and how we really need to fix many management problems in our world. The first question I really need to ask and it's more of a personal question I wanna kind of take our listeners on a journey start slow and then move more into depth and substance is really how have you and Jody weathered this crazy time, pandemics, black lives matters, Asian racism, extreme brush fires and around the world, climate catastrophes and the crazy inauguration, out of the Paris Agreement then back into it have you weathered it very well and through all this that you've been teaching over the years and trying to show the world there's some other management tools has that proven itself to be a better operating system for life to weather these resilient hard times to get through pandemics and hard times a little bit better than normal? I think you need to hold on for the ride because it's all going to get a lot worse because we're causing it. Really what we're talking about in almost everything you mentioned there are really symptoms of what we're seeing as global desertification, manmade deserts of the world's grasslands essentially as I spoke about in the TED talk which by the way has gone to eight million people not 3.4. Congratulations. And anyway, that global desertification mega fires now burning at altitudes and latitudes we never had fire before and climate change are feeding on one another in one of nature's feedback loop and that is spiraling out of control and it's not easy to be optimistic because it is spiraling out of control and we are causing it and we're doing nothing about addressing the cause. So I can without any fear of proving wrong tell you to buckle in the ride is going to get worse and worse until we use basic common sense and address the cause of the problem. My life's journey through accident not wisdom and force of circumstance started me on investigating that in the 1950s as a 20 year old young ecologist in the colonial service as you said and it was at that point in my life when I saw the same degradation taking place in wild areas of Africa that we were setting aside as future national parks and they were already losing biodiversity at an alarming rate and the leading to the spiral that we're seeing today and at that age as I say not wisdom or anything but passion to try and solve problems. I realized these, what I was seeing was a direct result of my own management as the professional officer in charge and I was working with people like Sir Frank Fraser Darling some of the world's best and they had no answers. I had no answer and at that point I really changed not overnight but I began to change from a researcher studying the elephants in the game and the wildlife I love to studying what we as professional people were doing that was leading to global desertification, climate change, et cetera today. So for about 65 years of my life I've been focusing on what scientists are just beginning to acknowledge now which is that we are causing it through our management. Yeah, the Anthropocene is something that is debatable in many areas by many people but it is real and it is here and there is no saying it's not. It's funny that we still have in 2021 these discussions and debates amongst people whether we're actually in the Anthropocene and whether it's man-made and now definitive the last IPCC report we know it's code read for humanity and we need some immediate actions. There is pretty much well known in the scientific community, researchers and others that your methods and holistic management your methods and the ways that we can re-nature or re-wild nature work they've proven they're old, they're irrefutable but yet in the beginning you had some kickback and some people saying now one there's no Anthropocene it's not human-made and two we don't believe what you're telling us and how did you deal with that and how did that kind of come about? How do you dive into that debate? Well, Mark, it took me a long time and the thousands of scientists I wasn't just working with branches and farmers and pastoralists when I came to the United States my work was known one American university was already plagiarizing my work Americans had been watching what I was doing in Africa and foresighted people in the Department of Agriculture, USDA commissioned me over two years to put 2000 scientists through training in the holistic management framework that I was developing and in that training we had World Bank economists USAID people, Bureau of Land Management Soil Conservation Service, US Fish and Wildlife Service university professors and faculty members from all the main agricultural universities of the United States. Now that concentration of 2000 people put through a week of training in this new framework looking at how to manage holistically they brought hundreds of their own policies for analysis and they analyzed them they concluded, not me that unsound resource management was universal in the United States. We then repeated that with smaller samples of professional people in India, Tamil Nadu and Bhubaneshwar in Zimbabwe, other countries but with smaller samples and always the same result. Now that is what globally scientists are unknowingly recognizing now you mentioned the discussions about the Anthropocene, et cetera, et cetera. Yes, that's been going on. We've been in denial that humans were causing climate change but desertification mega fires and climate change are indivisible, they're the same thing spiraling out of control. We've had no denial for over 10,000 years that humans were causing desertification. You can go back in ancient texts and read them blaming the nomads with their sheep for causing the deserts but we've had this denial that we were causing climate change. This is childishly simple, right? Now over the last couple of years I think we've had almost every sane person calling themselves a scientist acknowledged that humans are causing climate change. Now that acknowledgement is profound and the society is missing it. That acknowledgement means that if we are causing it then coal, oil, gas, corporate greed, all the things we're blaming are not the cause. If we are causing it, it is our management of resources. I'm leaving you to think about that for a moment. It is how we manage coal and oil, how we manage livestock and have for thousands of years. That is what is causing it, not the resources themselves. And again, if you revert to just simple common sense how can any resource cause your problem? It can only be how you manage that resource. Now we've just had COP26 and just I don't care if you go on to COP100. Every time we have these gatherings, the SDGs that you're very supportive of and COP what happens? We just have more and more and more of them and a cacophony of voices of what political leaders should do. But did you hear any voice at COP26 say we need to address the management? So you have a whole conference of the world's expertise in the production of energy and food and so on and none of them talking about the cause of the problem. So again, that's why I said earlier, buckle up for the ride. Until we address the cause of the problem, there is no hope of solution. And I'm just talking fundamental common sense that I don't think any scientist in the world can disagree with. Now, that's been my same message for 65 years just getting clearer and clearer because I myself battle like anything. I feel stupid that it took me so long to understand something so simple. You've also had some sad moments in the past. I know there were some things with the elephants that maybe you wished would have gone differently as well. But I want to back up a little bit to where you were on the management. I'm fully aligned with you. I use a few different terms and I'd like to unpack them for you to see if we're in alignment or if we could maybe even go deeper into what you mentioned about management. So I've always said it's not about the brands of the future or the products of the future, the innovations of the future. It's about how we produce anything that will have the biggest impact on human suffering and our global grand challenges. And what I mean about that is the way we produce or the way we manage those processes. If we use holistic land management and do it in a way that it is symbiotic with our earth and our biome, that it is regenerative in our processes that we use, that if we're talking about industry or even processing of food, there's a way to do it in industrial, animal agriculture or industrial agriculture that is very destructive, it's very resource intensive, but there's a way to do it in a different type of form of production or management that is not only good for your employees and your consumers, but it's also good for those resources to regenerate over time. And so the biggest impact on human suffering is the way we produce anything, whether it's a computer, a battery or food, that if we use good stewardship, good management on how we do it within ecological economics or in the natural system somehow use that to our benefit, that it's really hard to produce a product that's gonna be bad for human health, that's gonna be bad for our environment. And we could go into this later, but you spoke of the COP and I wanna talk more about the side event that you spoke about, the COP, but also in there, we're in total alignment in this new trend of going net zero. If you're net zero, you're flatlining, you're dead, we need carbon, our world's made up of carbon, our bodies where it made up of carbon, we need to have a balance there that can regenerate and use that carbon in a positive way. If we go net zero and you're dead, you're flatlining, that's been said for a long time from William McDonough and Michele Browngart, many others have said it. So I just kind of wanna get your feeling on that. I mean, production is different than management, but there's a way to produce and there's definitely a way not to produce. You unpackaged a lot there, Mark, so I have to look at it now. In the spirit, not of being argumentative, but of this being a discussion that helps us both understand, you're reflecting the general view of most people, most of society. And if I might say so, that's what frustrates me that it took me so long to understand it. When I wrote the third edition of my textbook, there's a table in it of the things we produce and the things we manage and the things we produce, I could make that list a mile long. The things we manage, I was battling and battle, oceans, economies, blah, blah, blah. I was battling to make that list up at all and I never could understand that until a few months ago when I suddenly got it, oh my God, you tell me, of course you're battling because humans don't manage many things. Humans only manage three things in the whole world. Now that took me 60 odd years to realize that. So let me unpackage that a little bit for you. Please. You said we produce many things, that's right. Management is the cause of climate change, desertification, megaphiles. So that's what we have to, world leaders have to do. Now that looks awfully confusing because the world believes that we manage millions of things every day. So if we unpackage that and peel the onion, we find, no, that's not true. We find we produce many things. We produce beef, corn, dairy, products, whatever, wine. We produce food in many different forms. We produce electricity. We produce cars, cell phones, orchestras, music, entertainment, cities, bombs, space exploration vehicles. We produce millions of things. Now, everything we produce is not where the problem lies because nothing we produce do we manage, right? Everything we produce is complicated. I don't know how to produce an ordinary pencil. It takes a corporation to do that today. It's a thing as simple as that, right? And these things we produce, they stop if we stop producing them. You stop producing electricity, it stops. You stop producing food, it stops. They stop if a part breaks, a battery runs out, power runs out. We're not managing them, we're producing them. And they're complicated, they're not complex. They're not self-renewing, self-organizing. All right, so that's not where the problem lies and that's what Cop was talking about and you've just mentioned it. We could produce food in the corporate model using technology, chemistry, et cetera, as the base. And there are other people at Cop that were arguing, no, we need to produce food, not from corporations but from farmers using the biological sciences. Now, those two sides end in conflict and then you have a massive movement saying, no, we have to manufacture meat from plants which nature's been doing for billions of years, we have to use technology and corporate shares and profiting and so on to manufacture meat now from plants. This is, you're just seeing incredible debate, conflict, confusion, investment of millions of dollars and celebrities, fame and fortune into this craziness about things that we produce and how we should produce them and it's not where the problem lies. So then what do we manage? Three things and I want you to tell us. Well, we manage ourselves, we manage our lives, we manage our families and beyond that, we manage human organizations, those we manage. We manage economies and through our organizations and economies at scale, we manage nature to produce food or electricity or anything else, right? So we only manage three things. Those three things we manage cannot be separated. We can choose to produce food or cell phones, violence or jails or whatever, all right? When it comes to the three things we manage, you have no choice as COVID has shown us. A simple virus has shown the world that human health, economy and nature are inseparable. And so we've only got three things we manage, we do not produce them, we do not make them, we manage them. And those three things are self-organizing and complex by definition. And they have unintended problems, what are called wicked problems, not meaning evil, but meaning almost impossible to solve. Meaning our human organizations through which we're trying to manage climate change, all right, themselves are complex and being managed. And that's what I talked about briefly in a side show at COP, but I'm sure my little voice was drowned in the craziness. Well, I mean, yes and no, I mean, when you look at the going on eight billion people on our planet, seven point, whatever, your talk from COP from just not ended on the 12th of November, you had the last I looked at it, something like 1,300 views. So I definitely don't think it's going under the table but it's also, it's so new. People need to have it out there. What side event was that by the way, if I can ask? Well, it was one on regenerative agriculture and you had very good people there and that's- Patrick Holden? No, Patrick wasn't talking, Vandana Shiva was, Andrew Liu and myself were the main ones. And as I said in my talk, I don't intend to talk about regenerative agriculture. Yeah, exactly. Because other people know far more. I know so little about agriculture. I farmed for a short while. I was a consultant to some of the biggest, one of the biggest companies in the history of the world in production of beef and meat. But I still, I know little about carbon, et cetera. My life has been spent trying to understand how to manage complexity. In other words, cultural, human, environmental, economic complexity. That's my sole area of expertise. So that's what I talked about, not about regenerative agriculture because that is becoming a meaningless term. It's just- People don't know what it means. It's become a hype and a buzzword. Yeah, it's crazy. And the thing is, is it's really old. One of the first scientists, Leonardo da Vinci, actually discussed and talked about regeneration and how he observed it in the natural world and his writings and feathers and plants and animals. And so it's been around for a while, but now we're definitely on the bandwagon. Matter of fact, Paul Hawkin just in September came out with his new book, Regeneration. Talks a lot about farming and different carbon, carbon farming methods and moss and all sorts of things. So- Yeah, again, it's about production. Yeah, it's a game. The three things that we managed, obviously said humans, economy and nature, in that human management, is it safe? Because I've heard you say this before and I want a little bit more explanation on it. Is that institutions as well? At the human part of it, that's where it begins because that's what humans do, is to manage these three things. You've got two levels of management, what I call the human scale. That's you and me and everybody listening to us. We can make a personal choice to change the light bulbs, ride a bicycle to work, what we buy, et cetera. We can make these personal choices, how we manage our family, our farm, our little business, whatever. At the human scale. But we can only make that choice to a very limited level because managing humans, economy and nature are inseparable. And so when we're doing that, we're doing it within the economic environment of Britain, the UK, Germany, France, whatever, where global finance is driving environmental destruction. So we're swimming in a futile manner upstream against a terrible current trying to manage our own lives holistically. That's why I said in my short cop talk that we citizens cannot rectify the problem now. And I said, let me explain. And then I explained that when we manage at scale, we can only do it through organizations, human organizations, there's no other way. Now, when we manage as we do at scale through organizations, we do so for a good reason. There are only efficient way of doing so. As I said, even producing this pen are only efficient way of doing it through a corporation, some institution. But unfortunately, organizations are complex and they have wicked problems. So the moment we develop an organization, it takes on a life of its own and no organization behaves like a human being. And most people don't realize that. They think that our human organizations behave like a human being, they do not. Now, human organizations, when they take on a life of their own, they reflect the prevailing beliefs of society, all right? That's why if you go into any organization, they'll have the latest technology, the latest software, the latest computers, the latest anything you like to name, they'll do it. If somebody, that's because society believes in technology. Now, if somebody like a woman in Kenya did, mentions and gets people planting thousands of trees, society believes in that. So she got a Nobel Prize, even though only 20% of Kenya can grow trees dense enough to provide full soil cover. But society believes in using technology to plant trees. So that, it gets forward. Now, what happens is when new knowledge emerges, like you and I are talking about now, not new science, just new management insights. And I had came up with two of those through the 60 odd years of struggle to understand this problem. When those come up and they conflict with thousands of years of human belief, then our institutions lead the ridicule and opposition. And that's what I've faced. And it was so difficult for me and all those far-sighted bureaucrats in the USDA to understand why in the early 80s, we got to the point of them recognizing that all resource management was unsound in the US. We were talking about training 17,000 Forest Service personnel. I mean, it was incredibly exciting. And suddenly all future training of officials was banned by the same agency. None of us could understand that because we hadn't yet studied the history and the system science, which shows that nothing's changed since Galileo. If you come up with new thinking going against human beliefs, then organizations read the ridicule. And then also, institutions are incapable of common sense. We started UNI with me making some common sense points that any normal human can understand. Institutions are almost incapable of common sense. You have only to ask almost anybody in America, does it make sense for America to produce coal and oil to grow corn, to produce ethanol, to put in vehicles as fuel? No, that is stupid. But how many hundreds of thousands of people with PhDs, advanced degrees, working for institutions are doing that? How many are protesting? Almost none. Now there's a third problem, wicked problem with institutions that we need to face these. And that is that where I could say I was wrong when my research led to killing 40,000 elephants following the scientific beliefs to this day of scientists. But if you don't limit the number of animals to the carrying capacity of the land, they will cause damage. That's a false belief, but we didn't know that. So when I made that error, I could confess to eight million people that I screwed up. It was a terrible mistake, biggest blunder of my life. Not a single fellow scientist has admitted to error 40 years later. Because as institutions, which they work for, we can't do that. Now just to, because this point is so vital, let me recount a discussion I had the other day with two fellows in Africa. I was sitting with them talking about these very simple two ideas that are new in holistic management. And they said to me, Helen, there's got to be something wrong in how you're presenting it, how you're putting it out, because you've had over half a century of ridicule, rejection, whole governments trying to crush it. I was banned from talking at any university campus in Southern Africa for over 20 years. You've had this opposition, so you must be doing something wrong. And I said, well, what about you guys? And they said, what do you mean? I said, having been brought up in this society like you, I know that most of us are Christians. And I said, I know you two are, aren't you? And they said, yes. And I said, well, how are you doing? I said, what did your founder have as a message? Wasn't it very simple, love and caring? I said, millions of people in the world do that. Carry that out. Love and caring is the essential element of the message. I said, now what happened when we started managing religion through organizations? We've got more than 1,600 different Christian organizations that have been fighting each other, killing each other, torturing each other for centuries, protecting pedophile priests and not protecting the innocent children. I said, how are you guys doing? You see, simple ideas, once they're taken by an institution can be totally distorted. Not just mine. And if we face the seriousness of climate change, we need to get somebody in the world to investigate what I'm saying, not just brush it aside. I'm totally in agreement with you. I want to back up a little bit again to the institution part. I don't know if you're familiar with a couple of books out there, Parkinson's Law. I'm not familiar with that one. Parkinson's Law is a good one, or Hannah Aren't, The Human Condition. She also did the Eichmann Trials in Jerusalem. When you talk about management, you also talk about these structures and organization. In some respects, should be an organism. An organism that functions properly. And this is, I kind of want to tell you where I want to go because I've heard some of what you've spoken on this before kind of in the direction of civilization frameworks. We have had more than 20 civilization frameworks that have all collapsed. Early antiquity, Mesopotamia, Incas, Aztecs, Mayas, Greeks, Romans, on and on. And all but two of those 20 collapsed because of environmental or ecological collapse. I mean, we had, and this might even come from your TED talk. For some reason, I tie it to you. Alexander the Great talked about how he walked through these green, lush, lavish areas food and beauty. Today they're deserts, they're desertified. And there's not much happening there in respects of food and thriving. And we see this collapse in ruins. And the other two were displacement or conflict collapses. That's one thing. So those are models of civilization frameworks that were extremely advanced, extremely innovative. But something went wrong. Something went wrong that caused that collapse. And the second part is, is that all of these, all of the frameworks that are no longer here all had the same management structure, all the same hierarchy structure. They were all built with a few people at the top, the peasants, the slaves, the farmers at the very bottom. And it was this hierarchy model, which is not how our world works. It's not how nature works. It's not how micro-Riza works, symbiosis works. It's not how the microbes in our body or our biome work. It's not how land management works, how it restores and how we have this wood-wide web and these healthy soils, how that works with all sorts of other microorganisms and species. And so as the term organization, when I hear that, I think, well, wow, it should function more like an organism, something that's kind of all symbiotic together, working together in this different type of holistic system. And so it isn't because we're continuing to repeat these frameworks over and over again, we're not learning that those models that don't work. And we should be looking towards some different models. Does that fit into that, that institutional part? Mark, it doesn't really fit in. You're an adult and you're complicating it. If you were an eight-year-old child talking to me, you would say, my God, and this is just common sense, what you're saying. Adults battle to learn something new. We all do. That's why I've been so frustrated with myself and how long it's taken to learn the simplest of things. Twice you've mentioned in this talk so far, our land management, holistic land management, and then now you mentioned land management again. But from what we said just a moment ago, land is unmanageable. And yet you're repeating it. You see, and I'm not criticizing you. We all do it. It's so difficult for us to grasp something new. Land is so tied to the culture of people and to the economy that they're inseparable. So anybody trying to land, manage land, I can tell them right now, they will fail. They'll get good results perhaps in the short run and the long run they'll fail, as did 20 civilizations. And it wasn't that their frameworks were wrong or their hierarchy was wrong. They're failing for the same reason we are today, right? And that is how we make decisions, particularly at scale as I talked at COP. So come down to that and I think it will help us understand, all right? What are the two new discoveries, not new scientific discoveries that can be peer reviewed and put to experimentation, et cetera, as academics try to do because they're not understanding. Just two simple discoveries. So let me cover them. The first is that all of those 20-odd civilizations that failed, all right, did so because they could not address the complexity of their rising population and their deteriorating environment and thus economies. And farmers, because agriculture is the basis of civilization, have destroyed more civilizations than armies have done. Armies change civilizations, they don't fail. They change. Farmers destroy them, they fail. Now the only place we've maintained a civilization for a very long time is really lower Egypt. But it took the same decision making was completely unable to maintain civilizations along the now. And it took the destruction of Ethiopia to sustain the civilization in lower Egypt. So many armies changed it over history, okay? That's because the silt was coming down the now and being deposited at the delta and maintaining that civilization. So the problem is how we are managing. So what are the two new insights? First is that you and I and everybody listening to us and all humans for the last billion years have made decisions exactly the same way. And we discovered that in 1983. So people listening to me, I hope any of them will call in and tell you where I'm wrong. I will bet that every conscious decision they made was made that I know how it was made. Now I'm not talking of an unconscious decision. If your hand touches the stove, please believe me, you don't make a decision, you just pull it away. But every conscious decision you made and I make, we make towards meeting a need we have, a desire we have or addressing a problem we're facing. If you think about your entire life, I think you'll find it very difficult indeed to find a decision that you didn't make where that was both a reason and a context for your decision. It was implied in that that you would have a better life. We're all seeking a better life, all right? So you cannot take the complexity of culture, economy and nature or environment and reduce it to meeting a need, a desire or solving a problem. That is reductionist management. That right there is a simple reason why more than 20 civilizations have failed and we're now failing globally, period. That's it there. Now there's a second new discovery and that is we're a tool using animal. Everybody believes we've got millions of tools. Nobody listening to us can even drink milk today without using technology unless they go and find a cow and suck with their mouths. We cannot even drink water. Yeah, I'm drinking water, technology, cup, pipe, dam, whatever. So we're a tool using animal. Now, when we were training those 2000 scientists, I knew that if I told them we had limited tools, they would fight and oppose it because professional egos are an enormous vested interest. So I had to let them learn it for themselves. So all I did was to say to people, all right, we're a tool using animal. Now I want you to list every tool you've ever been taught to use in any profession, in any university in the world, and they listed thousands of tools. And I said, you can add to it any tools you've ever used in your private life. And these lists were long with 2000 people. So it's something we've never done before, right? Now we then broke those lists down and you know what it was? Fire, technology and rewilding. Or leaving it to nature to let nature recover. Three tools. Now of those three tools, all right? Two of them lead to desertification, mega fires and climate change. And the third technology is incapable of solving it on its own. So right there, you know why I said to you earlier, strap in for the ride, it's gonna get rough. Now, not a single scientist in the world can I get to debate that and tell me where that's wrong. All I get is authorities. Authorities, I'm Professor So-and-So, at such and such a prestigious university. And by authority, I tell you it's wrong. It's not peer reviewed, it's not proven, it's wrong. Proof by authority is not science. It wasn't science until the other day and it's still not science. What are our hopes for some new management models, new economic models? Do you have, obviously, I definitely am in line with you that we need to strap in for the ride, especially after leaving COP26. We know that nations and countries are really failing us not only with their nationally determined contributions that they agreed to in the Paris Agreement, but also that they just, they can't find it in themselves to come together and unify. And one of your three areas institutes, humans institutes, economy and nature, I believe that there's some better economic models out there. You've heard all of the ones out there that are real confusing, circular economy, donut economics, mission economics, blah, blah, blah. But what about ecological economics? What about one that we've used for over 35 years, which is Earth Overshoot Day, so global hectare. We've done it to calculate our ecological footprint, but we haven't used it in the way of empowerment or stewardship for each individual that could prove to be a different type of economic model that would work for everyone. Well, there isn't going to be an economic model because that'll work for everyone because you can't manage economics, independent of culture and nature. Now, the only economy that can sustain any nation and ultimately humans has to be based on the photosynthetic process. Now, that is very seldom mentioned in any of these economic models. And I'm working with some of the clearest thinking economists. I'm on an advisory board for a couple of them, but still it's extremely difficult to get people to say, let's stop trying to manage economics or to manage land or environment or to manage social issues. They are one and the same. So when we look at this, we've got to get beyond blaming. Even as you and I are talking, I hear you saying they, them, other people. No, it's us. As I like to say, if I point a finger at you, the three pointing back at me, it's us. We've got to get beyond blaming. It is, as I used in that cup talk, I said, let's just look at national parks. Let me just take a neutral issue. Most people in the world agree the idea of national parks is good. And it is, okay? So what is the aim of national parks? And everybody knows it's to preserve biodiversity, aesthetics, the beauty, et cetera, folk cultural reasons, aesthetic reasons, ultimately scientific reasons and so on. Okay, so we're very clear on what we aim to do. Now I live in Zimbabwe half the year and I'm surrounded by 30 national parks in four countries around there. And I lived for about 40 years in New Mexico with national parks in New Mexico. Now in both places, these national parks are some of our worst examples of biodiversity loss, appalling habitat destruction for wildlife, et cetera, future pandemics contributing to mega fires, desertification and climate change. Now, what could we possibly blame? Who should we blame? We can't blame livestock, they aren't there. We can't blame coal and oil and those things because it's not there. Then we're not mining those in those national parks. We can't blame corporate greed. We can't blame poaching because poaching doesn't cause habitat destruction. We can't blame hunting. We can't blame excessive animal numbers because there are almost none. And as I showed in the TED Talk, even research plots devoid of all animals are desertifying in the United States. So we run out of anybody to blame. We finally got to look back at ourselves as professional people advising governments, environmental organizations on the policies that are leading to destruction in national parks. That's what we need to focus on. Get beyond blaming. Just look at ourselves. And that's why I got so sick of the blame game and fault finding. We have got to synergize, get pulled together, start solving this problem together with one another, not attacking each other because we're all part of it. Who is guilty for not flying before the Wright Brothers did? There's got to be somebody where you can hold accountable and guilty. Do you see what I'm saying? I see exactly what you're saying. That's why at the short talk I gave at TED, I suggested a constructive way forward. And I'll repeat it because I hope you'll get listeners who will think to pick up the phone and phone the Royal Foundation, phone Prince William, whatever. Let's get moving with constructive collaboration in one simple case. So what I've suggested is we just take a small country, somewhere in the world. It doesn't matter with its dictatorship or democracy because they make decisions exactly the same way. Take one small country, let it govern as normal, let it do everything the world is expecting on climate change, et cetera. But concurrently, let us work with the citizens and the scientists of that nation and internationally and have it under international observation and simply pull those people together and develop policy holistically. Where we develop policy for national parks and agriculture in a national holistic context where we do not reduce the problem to needs, desire, et cetera, or the issue. We manage it in the holistic context reflecting what the whole nation wants, better lives, cleaner food, cleaner water, more freedom to pursue our own spiritual values, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, better education, et cetera, tied to our behavior because it's not behaving the right way that doesn't come about and tied to our resource space, nature, environment, hundreds of years from now, as it will have to be if our descendants can live lives like that. Now in that context, get the scientists of that country and global experts to work with me and see how easy it is to develop a policy that the whole nation and everybody gets behind. Now I'm suggesting that as concurrent activity. The cost of doing that, if that small nation fails to develop a policy in that manner is a few thousand dollars and a year of time lost. It's nothing. The benefit, the upside, if that small nation internationally observed shows how we can collaborate, can all pull together if we stop blaming, can work in a national holistic context. The value, the upside of that cannot be measured in terms of millions of human lives that will save billions. It cannot be measured in economic terms. So that's my simple suggestion to the world, carry on as you are, but for God's sake, for humanity's sake, let us take one small nation and see what can be done concurrently without taking political risk or anything else. I would love to see us just do that. Then we have a hope of addressing the problem quickly and a domino effect around the world. If we continue as we are blaming each other, promoting this form of food production, that form of production, producing electricity from coal and oil or from hydroelectric, but producing energy from nature, if we continue in that conflict, somebody expressed it well the other day. It's like us throwing pebbles into the flooding river, making ripples hoping to change its course. It's not gonna save humanity. What I'm suggesting is a different way, just so easy to do, which if it works, will save billions of lives, economies, businesses. There's not a single business in the world that can be sustainable until agriculture is truly regenerative, regenerating economies, communities, small towns, villages, businesses. There are a couple of questions that I still have here or comments also, I wanna get your ideas and your opinions on as well. You've mentioned it a couple of times. It's almost a social evolution, the social culture. And I believe this, I've spoken to this with some scientists and some evolutionary biologists basically said that culture takes us an evolutionary process of quite some time to evolve, but it's probably one of the fastest modes of evolution that humanity could have where we can reach that critical mass and really have a nice, create a nice future or solve some problems. Two things there is Bhutan, a country that's already done some of these things in that positive narrative already. Is there no country or place on earth that's already tried that or had that good governance that can show us those examples? And if we see those examples, if that's done, will our other brothers and sisters or kin around the world say, hey, that is a good model? I think we should all switch that way. I think we should change our structure to follow that lead to do the right thing. I don't need to change structure. I don't need to do any of that. And Bhutan is not an example I've met and traveled with and really enjoyed the company of former prime minister of Bhutan. It was a close friend of the king. I, we discussed this. He was very excited about what I was talking about, but they never carried it out. They just, what they're doing is wonderful, but they didn't change the decision-making. So you still find there are minority groups, religious groups being persecuted and things like that, which shouldn't be happening. And you still find their environment is deteriorating. I can't do more than just keep coming back to, you've got two possibilities ahead of us. Allow for us to keep debating, arguing, fighting as we've done through COP26 and we will do to COP100. I think it offers little hope for humanity until eventually you're managing at scale through institutions that accept that management has to be holistic. All right, so that will be a long time from now before that ever comes about. Or you can try what we've never tried in the history of the world, which is what I'm suggesting is to take, say just time out, carry on as we are, but let's on the side do this one little thing and let us all observe it because this could divert the river far quicker. You know, I had a discussion years ago with a fellow called Jim Tear, Professor Jim Tear. I never worked with Jim, but he had a very good reputation as a wildlife management professor, agricultural, et cetera at Texas A&M. And we met on the King Ranch and we were walking on the land. And Jim said to me, and this is 40 years ago, he said, Alan, either you are wrong and the world will not be able to dig a hole deep enough to bury you in. He said, all you are right and the world will not be able to build a monument by enough. And I said, Jim, it's not about me. It's not about our goddamn egos. It's about the future of humanity. I said, what do you think? And he said, Alan, I'm sitting on the fence. He died sitting on the fence. That's 40 years ago. So I'm saying, why don't we just do what I'm suggesting and see what happens? Because I know what will happen because we've done it so often with so many good people in these very agencies that then banned the training. Yeah, there are some numbers and I'd like to get them from you. How many hectares you've helped over your 65 years and consulted that is pretty groundbreaking. And I think some of that was maybe mentioned and kissed the ground. But I know I saw it once either on your website or somewhere on all the projects you've had around the world in different places as well as the hectares. What is the impact you've seen with the positive results so far? Well, we've had positive results for many, many years from the charter trials to the first international trials set up to end the controversy completely with me, which came out to success and then led to increased opposition because we didn't understand that institutions through which we have to manage are complex and that institutions have egos and institutional and professional egos are bigger even than vested interests, financial vested interests in the world. We didn't know that at that time, right? So we've had successes, but the more success you have, the worse the opposition becomes because if you're being successful and I'm demonstrating something successful to you, it's offensive. That's why I stopped using the word demonstrate even and said, I'll only work with learning sites. We were all learning together. I'm learning every day. There is no silver bullet. All I've discovered is a way that we can collaborate and work it out together. Now it's up to us as humans to do that, all right? So yes, we've had enormous successes. We're having enormous successes. But as I said in a talk I gave in London when we had our conference there about eight years ago, I said, we're doing wonderfully well and maybe we represent 3% of the people and we're preaching to the choir. And I said, if we do amazingly well, better than anybody's ever done in history in expanding two new simple concepts. And if 15, 20 years from now, we represent 10% of the population. I said, the wall be over. Humans have not got that time anymore. You have to either accept that we continue throwing pebbles into the river to try and change its course or we have to sit back and say, well, let's keep doing that because that's what we've done throughout history. That's why I took the Royal Navy 200 years to accept that lime juice would stop scurvy. They weren't stupid. They were just human. A million sailors had to die. We don't have to repeat that. Why don't we just listen to what the silly little brother said, Ray, is suggesting? I mean, in this book that I showed you, Park and Thu Vla, to actually talk about that, the limes and the Navy and scurvy and that as well, it's kind of these hierarchy structures. The biggest structures that really haven't worked for us for a long time is a misunderstanding from Darwin that there's natural selection, survival of the fittest, only the strong survived, severe competition. And that, you know, Lin-Margolis turned the scientific community on their head and really said, it's a symbiotic earth, symbiogenesis. And we need to kind of work together in harmony. We work with the microbes and the mycorrhiza and the ground because part of it's in our body. And there are some... Line it with your economy and everything else. Yes, she was absolutely right, but you've still got prominent universities teaching competition. Yeah, it says neo-liberalism, neo-Darwinism, there's trees and tons of competition, you know? And the TED talks, the quick pitches, that give me the short elevator pitch and we've got to compete in a world. When we look at the size of our population, there is no competition. We're talking the entire planet. And one apple, one Google or even, you know, whether we're talking in food, impossible foods or beyond meats, they're just tickling the surface. We need many of us to reach that critical mass. And that's why I like when you say, you know, it's this cultural shift. If we can hit a critical cultural evolution, that's probably one of the fastest ways that we have. And there's nothing to lose in what you say. We should try it out. Mark, I don't agree with you there. I don't think you need a cultural revolution. I think you just need to change the way we develop policies through our institutions. Now, if you had never seen a bicycle in your life, and I was describing, because I'd developed a bicycle, it's 100% practical. It's not theory, it's 100% practical. And I've got this bicycle that I'm explaining to you how to ride it. The more you question me, the more I explain, the more confusing it would get for you and every listener. And we're doing that a little bit. We just need to get the bicycle between us and within an hour, you would ride it. That's what I'm suggesting globally that we do. Let's take a point, and let me ask you a question. You're a strong supporter of the sustainable development goals. All right, now you and I have exactly the same desire there to see a better world, to see all those problems of poverty, immigration to Europe, changing the political face of Europe, all of that changed. And the sustainable development goals are developed by the finest minds we have in our finest institutions, and you're in support of them and I'm not. So we here are we to good human beings presumably with the same desire that is so essential, you support them and I don't. What is the difference between us? Maybe just the putting them into practice or doing them, it's like riding the bicycle. If you put them into practice, it's gonna get worse. It's like 10 years, roughly, we have new sustainable development goals in an ever-worsening situation. And when the 17 SDGs came out, I predicted publicly that you will have another of these roughly 10 years time in a worse situation. Now, if we were both using the reductionist framework for decision making, which is universal, every human uses it, every tool using animal uses it, it's genetic, it's embedded in us. And it's very simple that you make all your decisions with the implication that you can improve your life to meet a need, a desire, solve a problem. So if we're using that framework, the sustainable development goals look admirable. And so you and millions of people support them. Now, if like me and the thousands of scientists that helped me develop this, if we use the holistic framework, we would say, okay, what are the actions we're going to take? Yeah, here's a sustainable development goal, the 70, we take each one. What is the action that's proposed? And then we would filter it in a national holistic context and see if it's in context of that. We still have the reason we need to solve this problem. So the reason doesn't change, but the context does. Okay, so the context will no longer be solving the problem. It'll now be a national holistic context. And then we'd look at the proposed action and we'd filter it to see if it's in line with that context. And one of the first filters we use is we would say, does this action address the root cause of the problem? And if you look at the 17 SDGs, in about 80% of them it doesn't. So right there, we would know, okay, this isn't gonna work. So now let's go back to the drawing board and look at actions that could address the cause of the problem. Because if you look at the SDGs, about 80% of them are dealing with the symptoms of desertification of that vast area across the whole of North Africa up into China. And all we're dealing is with symptoms, not with the cause. So it's no mystery. It's just like those thousands of scientists who developed this with me, we would at this point say, okay, that's policies unsound. But we don't, you see, because we're all using the reductionist framework where we say, okay, it's sound. In some respects I'll have to disagree, but I also want to tell you this, maybe I take a different look at it than you just described it. I'm in alignment with what you say. And I believe that we both want the same objective by 2030 that we'd like to see a world that remains at 1.5 degrees of warming or that restores and conserves our future. I see the sustainable development goals as an entirely new operating system. And at the key of, all 17 of them are a system. And at the key of sustainable development, what is development? Development's kind of what we've touched upon and what we haven't touched upon what we should be. Can we manage nature? Can we manage land? No, but development is commercial, residential and land management, but what is sustainable development? It's that that can go on multiple generations and sustain itself. And so I don't see cherry picking one or two SDGs and say, oh, I'm working on that. I see it as an entirely new operating system, a new economic model, whereas the most important layer is the biosphere, life below water, life on land, clean water and sanitation and climate action. And that's our biosphere where we get all our resources from and that's how we produce everything. And I really see that if we use the targets and indicators, we use it as a new model applied in our organizations, in our businesses, in our politics and in our countries and cities that it's a vision for the future and for the reason why you can tell and you probably know why I'm so into the sustainable development goals I was with way before 2015 on the track, but I wrote the Sustainable Development Goal Manifesto and the reason I did that is because people have no vision of what it would look and feel like to live in a world by 2030. So one, if I ask you what's the future or what does a world that works for everyone look like by 2030, most people don't have that vision. They don't know the roadmap, they don't know the plan and they definitely don't know what it looks and feels like. So I wrote the manifesto that if we achieve the goals, if we try to do that, whether it's the right way or not, and I believe it is because it was done with back casting and there's some set monies and targets and indicators that we should try to reach to get there that it would give them a feeling of what it would, if we apply those goals, if we apply those actions targets and indicators, that's the world we'll live in December 2030. We're now eight years into it and we have eight years left, sorry, and we really haven't even begun and we haven't even really started to not only not apply the monies, but to put our foot on it, pandemic was part of the problem, but even before the pandemic, we really hadn't gotten on board with this new model because we don't know what it's gonna look and feel like if we achieve that, which is a better future. And so, I mean, not a big disagreement because I believe there's more ways to get there and I'm also big on permaculture and regenerative agriculture and different tools that we could use, but that's kind of one simplistic short view of how I look at the SDGs. If we don't have a plan, whether it's the SDGs or not, what's our future? What is it gonna look like by 2030? And I guarantee it, whatever that answer is for you or anyone else, that's what's gonna be in the future because someone else is gonna deliver that for us or we're just gonna kind of end up in that spot in December 2030, but I think if we have a plan and a vision, like when I was younger with Star Trek and those things, those are things that we could engineer for, create, design, try to work towards as a goal and objective to change our future a little bit or to get into a different place. And I think most of those prove very clear, but there's not a lot of visions today on what those sustainable futures would look like or the plan or the roadmap to get there. And so what I see on TV or media or even in books, very dystopian futures. And I would like to see more kind of positive narratives. What would it feel like to be in a sustainable future or regenerative future or symbiotic earth? And what could I do to work or to contribute to that symbiotic earth to get there? You see what you're saying, I can't disagree at all. You and I are absolutely on the same plane with the passion for that better world, but you say, we have to plan on a vision and what's wrong with the plan or the vision for National Parks that I mentioned earlier? You see, there's nothing wrong. The plan or the vision can be great, but the end result, at the end of the day, you can have all the plans in the world, you can have all the vision in the world. At the end of the day where the rubber hits the road, things change when you take management actions. As I said, you can't even drink milk without using it too. We've got the world talking about planting billions of trees. You can't plant a tree without a tool. We're not asking why do we need to plant billions of trees when they've planted themselves for billions of years? Why do they now need humans to use a technology to plant trees? We're not using common sense. We're not asking the right questions. So we can have all the plans and vision in the world and people have. And so there's nothing wrong with the motive and the passion behind the STGs. All I'm saying to you is as a simple human who's, to her, it is a whole life to studying why our best of intentions go the wrong way. Why is it we can't manage this complexity of culture, society, economy and nature? All I'm saying to you is warning you that of the sustainable development goals, the 17 of them, two or three of them are great because they address social issues, abuse of women and things like this that are just social issues and we're addressing the root cause of the problem. So those are great, but about 80% of them are addressing the symptoms of the desertification of the biggest land mass in the world. And if you address the symptoms, you have no hope. So no matter how good your vision, no matter how grand your plans, you have no hope if you address the symptoms and not the cause. So that's why I'm able to say to you, wonderful motive, wonderful vision, wonderful idea, but please expect roughly 10 years from now more sustainable development goals in a worse situation. Just as we did at Rio, just as we did at Johannesburg, you know, we just keep doing it and just as we've done in COP 1 to 26, and now there are already people talking about COP 27 and getting into more fights and arguments. That's crazy. It's a sad, it's a sad state. I think we're going forward that we should look at. I can tell you right now, so in 2019, I started on the next iteration after the sustainable development goals with the United Nations. It's called Resilience Frontiers and it could develop out from 2030 to 2050 to be the resilience development goals because we've really decided or a few inter-agencies of the United Nations have decided that we really need to build resilience into our structures. And so that's something that's already begun and has been turned over to the inter-agencies and will be continued until 2030, whether we achieve the SDGs or not, which I hope we do or I hope that we really implement your plans. I admire you. I like your writings. I like your talks. I like the way you think and the way you frame those words. You have wisdom well beyond whatever I've achieved and just tickled the surface of trying to achieve to find myself following in the right steps to be on the right side of history. And that's why I've asked you here today to kind of bring out those wisdoms and help us with a better understanding and you've done that so well. We've got a long way to go to realize where we can do it to get, we need to do it together. If one of us suffers, we all suffer. We've got to find that loving connection between us all to get there as you had that conversation with your friends. And I have three kind of last questions for you if it's okay as we wrap this up. And some of you have already answered. I'd like to reiterate them if you don't mind and sharpen them with some questions that I ask all my guests and that is really what does a world that works for everyone look like for you? And besides buckling in for a hard ride and suffering, is there anything we can do? Is there anything we can do to help beyond our own individual lives? If I would answer that question, first I would say you talked about following, referring to yourself just now. No, you're not a follower. Who are the leaders in the world in changing society? They're not people like me who come up with the new discovery say two simple discoveries in management. We are not the leaders. The leaders are the freelance writers, the bloggers, the people who get the information into society. You are the leader. You're one of the leaders. So you need to lead and get very clear on what you're putting out to people. That's you're not a follower. You're a leader. People like me are not the leaders. And you've needed different type of person. The type of person you needed to learn how to fly is a totally different type of person from the person who runs an airline or flies a big jet today. It's a different type of person. So having made that point, you say what could you do to help for that better world? I would just sound like a gramophone record stuck in the same groove. I'd just come back if it's no good people listening to us liking this conversation or just sharing it. People need to actually act. There's that old old saying, you know, the only one thing necessary for evil to prevail is good people should do nothing. So what people need to do is to act and to actually call the Royal Foundation, call Prince William, call these people who are very influential, who have convening power and say, what do you think of this suggestion? Make them aware that there is a way forward short of just continuing to squabble and fight and argue for another century or more while the ship is sinking. So just by creating that awareness because what I'm saying could be so easily tried and I know with supreme confidence what it would lead to because we've done it and most people are good. Most people are doing their best, they're trying their best. It wasn't scientific knowledge we were missing. It wasn't wrong structures, dictatorial, democratic, et cetera. It's how humans make decisions. Particularly at policy level where we manage at scale. That's where we need to focus the fire extinguisher. That's where we need to begin to address global desertification, mega fires, climate change, spiraling out of control. You can't address it at the climate change level. You can't address it at the mega fires level, fighting them. You can address it at the root cause of desertification that began 50,000 years ago. With humans beginning to cause it. When humans got their first tool other than technology which are fire. You cannot solve the world's problems with technology fire and rewilding. So let's investigate that. At least if people listening to us push for investigation, follow up and then as Jim Tear said, either bury me so bloody deep that I'm forgotten or let's start getting the human spirit flying again. Once the Wright brothers flew, we were on the moon in 70 years. Now that we know what is causing climate change, not lack of scientific knowledge, not wrong motive, not all the corporate greed and the things we're blaming, how we all are making our decisions. And our institutions do so. That's the cause. If we focus on that and the world can't argue in favor of continuing with reductionist management where we reduce the complexity to meeting needs, desires and problems, nobody in the world can argue for that. We can argue for management being holistic in a holistic context, a new concept not in any branch of religion, not in any branch of science, not in any past philosophy. It is a new concept, but it's so simple. So we can then discuss that. What is that? Let's see how that works. Now humanity has a chance of the human spirit flying and our future generations have hope. Love that. And you mentioned Prince William a couple of times in the Royal Society, are you referring to the earth shot at all that he's come out with in order for shot price with David Attenborough? You mentioned earlier the Virgin Earth Challenge, that just fizzled out. Yeah. Now Prince William, so David Attenborough and others are doing that right motive. They're seeking solutions all around the world through earth shot prices. But as I said in my small talk at COP, all the prizes in the world for ingenuity aren't going to solve this problem. It's a problem of simply how we develop policies. So either prove me wrong, get me out of the way or let's get moving. Love it. I love it. The last one is really for our listeners, it's, you mentioned this as well. If there was something that you have learned in your professional journey or life's journey these 65 years that you wish you would have discovered or figured out from or known from the start. And a lot of people say, well, it's about that journey, that learning lesson. But with, you've also said buckle in for the ride. Is there any kind of learning experience that we can shorten this buckle in for the ride and get on a better future? Is there something that you could say, hey, I wish I would have learned or experienced this earlier in my journey because it would have really made life simpler or I could have gotten ahead of the game to talk to the Royal Society or Prince Williams. Is there any kind of learning lessons like that that you would have loved to know from the start? Yes, I mean, there is. If you follow my career, I was just changing hats but I was always working on the same problem. Poor land needs to poor people, social upheaval, war, change, et cetera. So I was working on the same problem as first to researcher in government for about seven years and realizing I couldn't do honest research in an institution. So I became an independent scientist supporting myself and my family in every way I could through game ranching, farming, sugar farming, et cetera, then made the breakthrough on livestock but at the same time I was working in the army for over 20 years, from the first shots I saw fired in anger till I was out of the army. I was part of the civil war with three armies in the field and four political parties. I ended up leading one of those political parties as president of a party that I developed from scratch. I had almost dictatorial power. It was then that I realized when I had my shadow cabinet and was trying to develop a policy for education, immigration, defense, agriculture, et cetera, et cetera that, oh my God, as an ecologist, I have no idea how to do this. It's then that I realized there's no politician in the world that knows how to develop a policy. That's when I began focusing on trying to understand that better and then I was exiled and went into the Americas, worked from the Caribbean and that's when there was far sighted people. Often we're damning the bureaucrats. No, they did more than cattlemen's organizations, environmental organizations. What I was saying made sense to them because they were struggling. But so if I had a moment I could go back to, I wished to God that when I was president of a political party, I'd had the holistic framework. I've got the party manifesto, the old one right here. I was so close to it, but so far still. So I don't know what you... No, I think you answered that perfectly. I could learn in increments and it takes a long time when there's a paradigm shifting simple ideas that go against thousands of years of beliefs. It takes a long time. It doesn't happen overnight. And I regret it took me so long. I wish I was now in my 20s and 30s still knowing what I do today. I would change the world, the energy. Now I'm 86, I've got two or three or four years left. I'm running on spare parts and batteries, you know. Yeah, I hope you're around for a long, long time, Allen, because you're a wonderful mentor, wonderful person and I really appreciate this deep dive. It wasn't until 2017 that I took Dr. Fridtolf Kaper's course, the Kaper courses on systemic, the systems view of life, systemic thinking, system science. Yeah, and I'm still learning, I'm still growing, I'm still trying to figure out this world. And readings from you, talks from you, being able to discuss with you and your contributions to menu B can also ensure that we're somehow on this path to get us on the right side of history, to get us all there together as humanity. And I really, really appreciate you letting us all inside of your ideas. We're going to link that talk that you gave for the COP26 in the details, along with your other links to the Saver Institute. And I'm sure a lot of people will listen and I look forward to hearing much more from you in the future and just thank you very much for your time. Well, thank you. Thanks so much and have a wonderful day. Tell Jody hi. Thank you for having me right off. You're welcome. Thank you.