Crafting your Conscious Futures Manifesto

And just to make this more of an official start, welcome to everybody who has joined us and those who will pop in at some point during the session, and for anyone who watches this afterwards. I am Charlotte Kemp. I am a futurist. I am a keynote speaker, a workshop leader, an executive coach. I spend a lot of work and time in the speaking world supporting other speakers and speaker associations. But my heart has always been with the concept of futures thinking, even before I knew that it existed as a discipline, because I grew up on science fiction. Isaac Asimov was my childhood crush. So I have, I've always had this interest in what is possible, and I've always had a discomfort with many things that are not right. In the world, things that don't settle well, things that they just shouldn't be, you know, somewhere deep down you say that this is happening but this is not right. And for a very long time I felt very unable to do anything about that or even to articulate the problem because the problem was so much bigger than just me. It turns out some of these problems are systemic, so the system is designed that way to create the problem. Decisions have been made about how the world would be, and those decisions do not always honor the planet that we're on or the people that are on her planet. It only honors a small group of people, and it's not even honorable. It only serves a small group of people, and as long as their needs are being met, they don't care what happens in the rest of the world. Which means that this particular presentation about how to create a manifesto for a preferred future, or how to craft a conscious manifesto, is hands down the most difficult thing I have done in a very, very long time. I've been wanting to do this presentation for so long, but every time I've tried to work on it, I've got caught up with all of the emotion and anger and disgust at some of the things that I see in the world. And it's not like, this is a terrible crisis that has happened, how do we respond and take care of these people? It is, These people have decided to make those people's lives hell on earth, and they don't care. I've discovered when I think about evil— I know, I'm sorry for those of you who are new, this is— I don't normally start this philosophically, but I need to. This is my webinar. I need to say what I need to say. I've been thinking about how we portray evil on TV and movies and things like that, and evil is always the devil, and it's red and black and sometimes gooey and lots of sharp ugly teeth and glowing eyes. Evil does not look like that. Evil is in a pinstripe suit sitting around a boardroom table talking about the cost of caring for human lives versus replacing those lives with somebody else. Cost-benefit analysis of another human being's life. That is the world that we're living in. So this presentation started and was scrapped, started and was scrapped. I've got tons of notes and images, and then I thought, I just, I don't want this to be about all the horror. I want this to be about us finding a way to articulate what it is we'd like to see in the world. And that's what futures thinking is about, and that's what manifestos are about. How do we think the world should be? How do we even begin to think what the world should be like? And how do we articulate that? How do we start to work with that? So let's work through some ideas so we can get a bit of an understanding of what it is we're dealing with. And thank you for your patience listening to my explanation. For those of you who joined while I was talking, I was just saying I don't normally start so philosophically, but I wanted to just position this particular presentation so that we can understand what it is we're dealing with. So let's start nice and easy. What is a manifesto? It's a way of looking at the world, and there's a man called Jeff MacDonald who's done some initial work which was quite interesting, and he defined 4 types of manifestos. So a manifesto is a document that says this is how we want the world or our part of the world to be, and these are the steps initiatives we're going to put in place. This is who we're going to lobby to support us. This is where the money's going to come from. This will be the benefits of it. The world will look like this when this manifesto is done. And sometimes it is aspirational and you are always moving towards it but never quite achieving it because human life is messy. For others, it is very intentional and they have political, financial, and military power behind them to make that a reality. But we're just starting nice and easy right now. 4 types of manifestos. The first one is a goal. This manifesto says we want to achieve this particular goal. That manifesto could be eradicating smallpox, you know, eradicating something that is bad in the world, and that's the goal. And all the forces of that group of people is going to be towards reaching that particular goal. It could be a list of things like we'd like to see these things happen when we When we redesign our education system, we want to be able to include this. We want to be able to create opportunities. We want to prepare young people for a world that is changing. So it's a list. Another one is a set of rules, religious manifestos, like these are our rules. And it's not about religious freedom. It's not about I want the freedom to practice my religion and you have the freedom to practice your religion. It's you have the freedom to practice my religion the way I say it, or you are eradicated from this equation. So it's a set of rules, or it could be a global manifesto. This is what the world should look like. But at its heart, it is a manifesto, a blueprint of how we think society should be. Now, as I was wrestling with this topic and trying to come to terms with that without naming too many things specifically, without trying to you know, unpack any specific manifestos. First of all, as a side note, I had the most fascinating conversation with ChatGPT trying to unpack this, and Chat's got a character that, you know, it speaks to me in, and the minute we got into this political conversation, it became very, very much like a junior lawyer, very analytical, very just talking about facts. nothing else. And so then we unpacked that, and what the AI was saying is that it doesn't— it's not allowed to explore, advocate for one thing or another. It can only talk about the facts and what those facts will mean and how critics respond to it, which is very interesting. But we carried on debating and exploring and trying to find different ways of expressing what these manifestos should be like. And eventually I came up with very broadly— try this button— 2 types of manifestos. We have expansive manifestos. It's a future of doubling. There are more rights, more inclusions, more agency, more opportunity in this manifesto, this picture of the world. And then we have restrictive manifestos that are halving. They're reducing, the rights, the access, the agency of some people, of most people, but they're reducing that for the benefit of one group of people. So let's unpack that a little bit because I think when we look at any manifesto like this, there's a couple of times when as we grow and develop in our thinking, we discover that something we learned as history and as fact when we were younger and less analytical and cynical, and we just accepted those things to be true. And we get encountered with them every now and then in our grown-up life, and we go, oh, that, that's wrong. But then you want to stop and pause for a minute because futures thinking is a critical assessment of an issue. You cannot just accept everything at face value. You cannot just trust media at face value because we know that it's been manipulated. We don't want to throw out everything that we read or see, or anything that scientists say, just because there are some things that are wrong. So it actually— there's a lot more responsibility on us to be critical about it. So with, with these explanations of an expansive manifesto or a restrictive manifesto, you will see my opinion about how I believe manifestos should be drafted. I don't know what is important to you. I'm hoping that the people that I work with when we look at futures thinking are thinking of expansive manifestos, because there are some people that I don't work with because their view of life is contrary to what my view of life is, and that's just normal. So let's look at what an expansive manifesto looks like. An expansive manifesto says society becomes stronger When more people are safe, when more people are seen and able to participate fully in society. And we see that very often. We have universal rather than selective rights. We seek to widen participation and representation. We frame dignity and safety as shared human goals. We advocate for increased transparency and accountability. We emphasize interdependence, and we are aligned with preferred futures that value human potential and collective flourishing. And a preferred future— we'll get into some of that terminology shortly, but we're looking at that where it is painting a picture of this is the future we would prefer rather than some other. When more people have a stake in the future, the whole system becomes healthier. A few examples would be the Freedom Charter here in South Africa. When more people in this country can participate and design the future that we want for this country, the system becomes healthier. Of course, it's still flawed. Of course, there are still problems. Of course, there is still all the stuff that you get with politics and capitalism and, and greed and And racism. But the Charter says this is the direction we're going in, and we've moved very far in that direction. The world that my children went to school in is not the same world that I went to school in in South Africa. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Savidoya movement in India and Sri Lanka— these are our statements saying this is how we want to be self-determining. All the indigenous programs, the women's manifestos, emancipation manifestos, all of those are expansive. It's let's include these people in society. They're not second-rate citizens. They're not less than the dominant group in power. On the other hand, we have restricted manifestos, manifestos that are designed to specifically control. So these come about when, and they say that their claim is society is safer and stronger when a specific group holds control and when we can control and determine what those other groups do. And these kinds of manifestos emerge during periods of fear, instability, rapid change. They promise a return to order. They promise a return to purity, to tradition, to the way things ought to be. And the way things ought to be in the past is when that group of people had more power. And as the world has become more expansive and inclusive, the privilege that those people have had has reduced, and they want to go back to it. And so they sell the lie to everybody else that, that history, that season was better for everybody. So now we're going to take everybody back there, but you're going to behave and go the way we tell you to do it. Okay, so we want to focus on, for a restrictive manifesto, on exclusive rights, on the fear or nostalgia as organizing principles. Nostalgia is such a powerful weapon wielded against people without them realizing what is happening. These manifestos seek to constrain participation or representation. They prioritize obedience, uniformity, conformity. They justify power concentration as necessary for stability to win the war against imagined threats. They treat difference as a threat, not as a resource. When rights shrink for any one group of people, they eventually shrink for all. So when you start seeing one group of people being targeted and other marginalized groups not standing up for that group, that system eventually comes for them as well. So our examples in South Africa, the apartheid era manifestos, What the Afrikaner Broederbond and others designed as the perfect society in South Africa restricted and denied human rights to the majority of people living in this country. The Cultural Revolution directives in China did the same thing. Obedience to the leader, obedience to a system, absolute conformity, no space for dissent or discussion or exploration as we're doing now. any of those ethno-nationalistic or religious manifestos, anything that's talking about purity and restoration. We're restoring some furniture at the moment, that's fine, but any of the kind of restoration is we want to go back to a time when you weren't allowed to do that because that suits some people. That's what this kind of manifesto will look like. The impact of this is We got fragile, brittle societies, declining innovation, fear-driven governance, higher social conflict, reduced international legitimacy, long-term economic stagnation, and that rights erosion spreads beyond the initial target group to other people as well. All right, so let's just start with a blank slate here, and now we're going to look at a futures tool. The Futures Cone. I really enjoy using this cone. I see Anne on our call today, and we have a— I have a coaching program called Future Coach Sandbox where we do this kind of thing, where we play with tools and ideas so we can work out how to craft a better future. And Anne is in that group. And the first thing we're looking at this month is this Futures Cone. I think it's such a powerful model to look at the future, to be able to, to play with these ideas, because very often when we talk to people and we say, oh, but it could look like that, they say, oh, that's, that's ridiculous. The world doesn't look like this. But this is a lovely way to frame it. But the very first important thing to understand about a futures cone is that small little point right at the end on the left-hand side of the screen, because that is our moment in time. We are all right now in that little tiny point. And where we go in the future from now, how we operate, how we think, the decisions we make, what we support, who we support with our votes, and who we support with our money determines where we're going to end up in that big oval at the end. And if you're just happily living your life and moving along and you get to a certain point and find yourself up at the top and go, this isn't the future I imagined, I didn't sign up for this, this isn't what I like, it's really hard to move from in that big circle, to move from one place to another. But you can do that shift very easily right now in the small point. So we can change direction right now about how our world will move by making decisions in this moment about how we act and what we learn and what we— how we engage with this world. So the very first circle, right, our at the top is preposterous. This is a future that is preposterous. This is like fantasy science fiction, but the really, really good science fiction that is out there. Aliens and intergalactic space travel and Star Trek and all those things and holodecks and moving people between things with the transporter. This is preposterous. And when people say, oh, you're being naive, or you're being foolish or silly and they try and dismiss you, it's because they think that what you're talking about is a preposterous future. There are some, okay, there is a fiction out there, but there are also some preposterous futures that have turned out to be horrendously real. I don't know if any of you watched that dystopian young adult series called Hunger Games. It's just a story about wealthy people dividing the rest of the world up into these different regions. I can't remember what they're called— districts— and getting 2 people to volunteer or be volunteered from each of those districts. And then they put them into this life or death situation. Whoever wins by killing other people and surviving gets to get a whole lot of bonuses and prizes. and cool stuff and then go home and be a hero and not have to drudge like the rest of the world. Preposterous. In reality, however, I'm appalled to discover that there's a thing called the Sarajevo Safari. So when the city was surrounded by military, there were people and snipers shooting in on the citizens just trying to live their daily life. that wealthy people from other countries paid to go there and hang out with the rebels to get a chance to shoot human beings. That's preposterous. And that's not a story. There is a movie about it. The Italian government is investigating and suing people right now for that. That is the world we live in. And that preposterous nature is appalling. So we got to do something. Okay, so I'm going to move from preposterous to what is possible. These are things that might happen. These are things how the world could unfold, whether we're talking about technology or morality or government, these things could happen. Our next circle in starts to look at what is plausible. All these things could happen, like we could have flying cars, or we could have, you know, other kinds of vehicles that are fitted with drone technology that can move around. So it's not a flying car, but this is far more plausible to have a vehicle that can, can be flown rather than a flying car. It's more plausible. All right. And then we have what is probable. This is like, this is very clearly the direction we're going in. These are things that are happening, and we can see the trends and the trend lines, and, and all the analysis and everything else shows us we're going in this direction. And very, very often it's easier to kind of identify for a smaller subset. So it's easier to say this is a probable future for my business or for Cape Town or for that industry. It's a lot more difficult to work out the probable future for a country or a region because there are way more factors involved and, and some factors actively working towards creating certain things because they have a manifesto. And now we want one too. Alright, so that's where the future is going. There can also be a little kind of a smaller circle there saying, you know, projected. This is like, you know, our Q2 results tell us that this is where we're going to be at the end of Q3. So a little bit narrow, we won't worry about that. However, we do have this one. This is our preferred future. This is important, and it's all center because it could cover some of those other things, and we're not going in that direction until we decide to go in that direction, until we make that green circle the center of our focus. We're aiming towards that, and we're going to analyze and assess everything else that happens to get us towards that future. So let's unpack that a little bit again now, just looking at each one. So our first one here is we want to explore the possible futures. What future could exist regardless of probability? We might ask the kinds of questions that say, what changes in society, in technology, identity, environment, could shape tomorrow? So there's, what are all the factors that are influencing how things are going to go in a certain direction? If nothing was impossible, what kind of world might emerge? What edgy ideas, what fringe concepts, what new paradigms could we explore, or alternatives? Then we can move on to Okay, my animation is doing its own thing today. We could now look at considering our plausible future. So what futures make sense given what we know today? So we can play with all the fantasy, but if we're trying to understand where we're going already by default, then what makes sense? And now we're looking, we're narrowing it down, we're focusing on the trajectory of things that are already happening and the data that we already have. If you're looking at health statistics, if you're looking at population statistics, there's really good data there that show you pretty firmly where we're going, what that plausible future is. And now we want to look at, in terms of our preference, what possibilities align with real trends and forces that are already shaping the world. So can we take advantage of a trend and a trajectory, or do we want to try and counter it? What scenarios are reasonable? How do we extrapolate what we're seeing now? What will that look like in the future? So we're not playing with fantasy, but we're looking at things that are pretty practical and then just trying to work out what that means into the future. How might our existing systems evolve? And now we're looking at different scenarios that allow us to respond. So if you create 3 scenarios of utopia, dystopia, and middle of the road, we normally just hang around in middle of the road. Utopia is like, oh, fantasy, that's never going to happen. And dystopia is, we don't want to think about that and dwell on that. So, and shame, it's for other people, for other parts of the world, not this part of the world. We're nice, we're here in the middle. But sometimes the middle that we find ourselves in is very much pointed towards a dystopian future for the world or the part of the world that we are in. There are people living right now where the middle of the road is an absolute utter hell of a dystopia now in reality, people today. So we got to change that direction. We, we got to see what is happening. Does it make sense? And, and how can we shift that? Then we can confront the probable futures. Apparently not. Try that again. Probably in my future I need to practice a little bit more with my animations. What futures are most likely if we do nothing? If we just think, wow, this was a hectic webinar today, and we carry on and do things that we're going to do, what is going to happen? in your part of the world, in other parts of the world, to people groups. Let's make it really, really personal. If you do nothing today, what is probably going to happen with your health? I visited a doctor yesterday, so now it's like on my mind, all the lecture from the doctor, and I can choose to do something, but she's given me a picture of what is very probable, and if I want to change that, then I have to take some action. If I do nothing, this is what it's going to look like in the future. So it's uncomfortable. This is an uncomfortable one because it forces us to face a very probable future and then say, yeah, I'm okay with that happening, or I'm not okay with that happening, but I don't want to do anything. So I'm not gonna have to construct for myself a really good set of lies to deceive myself about why I'm not doing anything. Or maybe just get drunk. Or I'm gonna have to do something. I'm going to have to say something. I'm gonna have to vote. I'm gonna have to stop buying. I'm gonna have to start buying. I'm gonna have to stand up. I have to draw a line in the sand and then draw that line all the way through until it's, you know, it's a road in the gravel, and I say this far and no further. Or it's just going to happen because I do nothing. And then here's our preferred future. Preferred. Okay, so what future could exist regardless of probability if this is what we actually want? This is the future that we're really looking at. And now we need to choose, design, we need to stand for something, we need to say, what are we consciously working towards? What principles and values guide us? What will be included or protected? What responsibility will we take? Now we're really taking ownership because now we're moving the world towards that particular direction. I'm going to go back to that very big outer circle though, because that's the preposterous future, and there are some preposterous things happening right now. It's absolutely bizarre. But if the unthinkable is happening already, then why don't we just go ahead and think other unthinkable things that are better? So what futures might seem absurd but could liberate us from limited thinking? What futures seem absurd because we have been conditioned and trained and taught to believe certain things and to behave in certain ways, and now we're going to challenge that? We want to do something vastly different. These ideas feel impossible only because our imagination is constrained because we think, oh, you can't challenge the system, the system's too big. What could our future generations look back and say, you know, if you'd only started doing this back in 2025, the world would be so different right now, but you didn't. Now it's easy. There are lots of things that are easy to do in November '25 that were very difficult to do in January '25 and were impossible last year in 2024. The world of artificial intelligence and technology and access to information and research, there are things we can do today that are, wow, absolutely science fiction impossible just 24 months ago. So let's look into the future and say in 24 months' time, what might seem impossible now could be a reality then. But if we start taking action, we can actually get there instead of in 24 months, maybe in 12 months' time. We can actually do that. That's the point of futures thinking. All right, so those are the futures cone kind of areas that we can look at and the challenge to how we embrace and design them. But when we go back and look at somebody else's manifesto, we want to be able to test it. So here is a 4-part test of any manifesto that you read, any charter, any, you know, this is how we do things here soft page on a landing on a website. Here are the 4 tests. Does it represent inclusion? Is it including people or excluding? Will more people thrive with this particular set of rules and intentions or not? Is there agency? Does it increase the choices and autonomy a person has over their own body? Or does it restrict them? Any minute now we'll learn what the 3rd test is. It's dignity. So does this manifesto protect and honor humanity and those with the least power, or does it dismiss them? When people are in power and they can do anything, can they share that with people who don't have the power to, to contradict them? And as a futures test, does this manifesto broaden the set of possible futures or narrow it down? Because any negative exclusionary manifesto reduces the number of possible directions we can go into the future. in the direction of that particular group of people. So a broad, rich, more just, expansive future, or as you run through those 4 test questions, does it narrow it down? Is it more excluding, more controlled? Is it restricting? And this is about not even about religion or about politics. This is about the systems that are designed, the ethics, the future consequences, It's not about people and parties. It's about what we accept and how we're going to allow the world to unfold. I love that 4-part test. I think that's really important, and I'm not going to go into a section to show you how to draft your own conscious manifesto, and there's a couple of stages here. I will send at the end of the day, I'll send a summary of them so that you can go through that. So don't stress about trying to write the notes now if you, if you just want to think about this. All right, so this is a blueprint. We get to sit down and imagine. I love the idea of blueprints. I find them absolutely stunning. And when I was in high school, I did technical drawing to matric, to the end of my school years. I just, I love the kind of, there's an idea and you can represent it on paper in a certain way, and in your imagination you can pick that object up off the paper and you can turn it around and see it from different directions, all in your imagination. That's what a blueprint is, this picture of a future that somebody is designing very intentionally. Now let's do that for, for ourselves. And I know the world is really big, so let's start with our own personal conscious manifesto about how we will appear in the world. On this call, there are thought leaders, there are professional speakers and trainers and coaches and counselors. people who talk to other people about how to manage a certain part of their lives, how to think about it, how to deal with it so that their future could be better. And as we, as we do that kind of work, we need to know what is our manifesto. We need to know what our values are, what we stand for, what we accept or do not accept. So very, very first part, let's go. Core intention: what future am I consciously choosing to move towards? What does that look like? Is it meaningful to me? In a world full of noise, I choose a future where people can be heard and seen. The purpose that guides my decisions is to make as much money as possible and to get all the power, or the purpose that guides my decisions is to see people who had no resources and access to have that opportunity? So those are the kinds of questions. Stage 2, unshakable values. What principles are non-negotiable even in uncertainty? And that's really difficult. What are the values that you live by? Not the ones that just kind of roll off the tongue because you think that they're like— I saw an exercise once where somebody was trying to get people ready for a firewalking exercise. exercise, and everyone was told to stand up and chant their 3 highest values. And everybody stands up going, joy, peace, family, love, joy, peace, family. I'm going, you're just reciting the words that you think you're supposed to. What really, really moves you? I love my family, but I've discovered that my family or family itself is not one of my highest values. There are other things, and that's how I run my family. That's how I raise my children with those other values. So we really need to understand what they are, because it shifts how we work, who we work with, who we will refuse to work with. Stage 3, line in the sand. This is what I will refuse to participate in. I will not normalize. I will not enable. When people put their pronouns into their social media profiles, they're helping to normalize different gender identities. They might be very happy being seen as a man and identifying as a man, and nobody questions whether or not they're a man. But when they say, I am a man and my pronouns are he/him, it means that somebody else who is a they/them feels a little bit more safe because that space has been normalized for them. Having said that, I haven't done that myself. There is still something I'm debating. So line in the sand, I will not contribute to a future that looks like this. I will intervene when I see that. Where will you intervene? Where will you put yourself in a little bit of social reputational potentially physical danger to say, no, that's not happening. Stage 4, expanding commitments. How does my preferred future enlarge participation, dignity, agency, and connection? Stage 5, responsibility to others. What duties do I have to those with less power or fewer resources, choices? We have a future, a responsibility, a role in change in the future? Can we articulate that? Can we understand what our access, our privilege, our positioning allows us to do for people with less power? And will we take advantage of that, or will we just enjoy the privilege that we have? I commit to protecting the dignity of— what does that look like for you? Stage 6, how will you practice? How would you embody this manifesto for you daily? What does it look like? How do you check your alignment to something? And when I drift, how do I return to, to the center? How do I come back to what I believe in? Because we're messy, we're going to make mistakes. We're going to sometimes take the easy way because we just, we need to. But how will we come back to our manifesto? Stage 7, my partnerships. Who am I building futures with, not just for? So we, we work with other people. I stand in partnership with these kinds of organizations. I learn from these kinds of people. I amplify the voices of those kinds of people. I was, I was headhunted, approached a while ago. to potentially stand for a really significant job in the South African sort of nongovernmental space, but really prominent. And I was blown away that I had even been identified for this. And I went through some very curious recruitment processes to get to a certain place. And then actual real South African politics got in the way and I never got that position. But I learned so much. But in the early part of the negotiation, Part of the question was, the person who's talking to me, who's championing me for this, is a Black man, and he's working with a board of people who are predominantly Black. And he says, the question keeps coming up when I talk to them about you is that you're a white woman and they need to know if they can trust you. And so we talked about this 2 or 3 times in different meetings. And then eventually I said to him, what does trust look like to you? What does trust look like to them? And so he sat back and he thought about it and he says, are you for the cause? And I said, I'm for the cause. I don't even need to debate that. I know what I believe. I am for the cause. And that was it. We were like, we were completely aligned from that moment on. other things happen because it's the world that does. But, um, but just understanding that, that, that alignment between the two of us— I am for the cause, and now he knew what I was about, and we didn't have to define the details because that, that commitment was so central to, to what we're looking at. So who will you work with? The people who are for the cause that you're working with, or other people that you that are not. All right, stage 8, your legacy. What future conditions will exist because of this manifesto? Start with your life, with your legacy, with the people that you work with, your families. What future conditions will exist for them? And as you grow and develop this, this cognitive and courageous soul exercise on defining your manifesto, for the world, it will start to expand, but it has to start somewhere that's a little bit smaller. So, okay, I'll share those steps with you later on, but we could ask at this point, what is my conscious futures manifesto? Because I've talked about this a lot, and, and, but I haven't necessarily spelled it out, and I haven't done all these steps myself. So this is a, a litmus test to myself as well as, you know, from today can I define very neatly what my manifesto is. I wrote a book a few years back when I first became a futurist. Thank you, Anne, for pointing me in that direction, by the way. And I wrote a book called Future's Alchemist, and we were looking for a foreword for it. So my husband sent it to a colleague of ours, Dr. Graeme Codrington, who's a very well-renowned and respected futurist. And Graeme read my book, And then sent me a personal note and then sent Richard the foreword, and he put that in. And in it he said, this is Charlotte's manifesto. And that was the first time I realized that I can get a little obnoxious about saying, no, this is how I think the world should be, and judging people who don't, who don't want to make a better world. So I do have a futures manifesto. It's the entire book. It's The Conscious Futurist. book that I wrote and the keynote that I do. It's about the implications of the 2 trends where we're either artificially creating scarcity for profit or embracing the abundance of the world. It's the other trend there is about a binary world where things are right, wrong, yes, no, black, white, religious, not religious, or fluid. And we're in a fluid world. Why shouldn't we be able to express this. I believe in inclusion. I believe in abundance. I believe in dignity. I believe in co-creation, and I believe in transcendence. These are my values, and these are how I raise my children, with agency, with craftsmanship, looking at people who create beautiful things because they believe that that is what they're called to do. So it's messy, but those are the values that, that I live by. But let's just— we're just gonna close now with just a few kind of theoretical questions for you to imagine. If you look at a world that is possible, we imagine a future, future where what happens? Maybe an economy rooted in care and regeneration and dignity. We could look at a possible future, a plausible future where we anticipate a future for emerging identities and systems and technologies. Probable. When we draft a probable future, we refuse to accept a future where there's extraction and exploitation and exclusion. When we look at a preferred future, we commit to creating a future where wisdom and innovation are equal forces, where we're not trapped. And those preposterous futures, we dare to believe in a future. We dare to believe in a future where these things are possible, where profit and capitalism does not strip the dignity of the people in the wealthiest countries in the world. The future is in your hands, and you can define it today, or you can default to somebody else's version. But when you start to define it, that is the start of your