Eliza Yvette Esquivel on Leadership & Protopia

I first met Eliza Yvette Esquivel at lunch in Hudson, New York. She was visiting a mutual friend. We stayed in touch over the years and grew close over the pandemic when myself, Eliza and Martin Karaffa would meet for regular calls.

She has a long, storied career in brand strategy. She was Chief Strategy Officer at Barbarian, Senior Director, Global Brand Strategy, Management, Naming and Partnerships at Microsoft, and before that VP Global Brand Strategy at Mondelez.

She is redefining the future of leadership towards a Protopian tomorrow, with Love & Order, and helping professionals grow through sabbatical planning, career break consulting with, Radical Sabbatical Consulting using meditation and mindfulness coaching for deep self-discovery and significant change.

Check out her series on Cyberpunk, and The Blue Economy.

All right. So I am not sure if you know this or not, but I start all of these interviews and conversations with the same question, which is a question that I've borrowed from a friend of mine, this woman, Suzanne Snider, who lives in Hudson and teaches oral history. And I love the question so much because it's a big, beautiful question, but because it's so big, I couldn't over explain it. So before I ask, I want you to know that you can answer any way that you want. We're not, sir. You are in total control. Where do you come from?

Ooh, where do I come from? Yeah, that's actually a really good one. Europeans always judge Americans for focusing on "What do you do?" and they actually often say, "Where do you come from?" I like to ask "What are you up to these days?" because it leaves it open. You know what I mean? It doesn't have to be about work or place or whatever.

Where do I come from? I come from Texas. I come from a place. I come from Laredo, Texas. That's where I was born. It's right on the border to Mexico. When I was born, it must have been like, 99 percent Hispanic but in the United States. I think now the numbers drop to maybe 97 percent Hispanic. It was a very specific place and all of my parents' family live there - their brothers and sisters, cousins, et cetera. Very integrated into the community. Kind of pillars of the community.

My parents left when I was three, but all of my extended family remains there. A couple of my aunts have PhDs in education. So they're educators. And then one of my cousins is an architect and one of them owns a cafe. So it's this whole sort of thing about being from a very specific place.

I think a lot of people don't know that about me. I don't really carry my, I don't believe in identity politics. I'm like, "Oh I just don't think it, I'm a human being. I'm not a Mexican. I'm not a woman." You know what I mean? So I don't subscribe to those things. So I don't really talk about that origin story of where I'm from. But since you asked, you can say it that way.

What was childhood like in Laredo, Texas?

I only lived there until I was three, so I have zero idea. My parents moved to Fort Worth, which is also a very interesting place. I don't know if you know the story about Fort Worth, but in the days before any of these places were developed in Texas, there were cattle trails that ran along the semi western border north to south of the United States, go up to Utah, come through the Rockies and all the way down to Texas, and I think even into Mexico. The cowboys would run cattle up and down and stop at these little towns along the way. Some of them would be forts, some of them would be shanty towns to rest and then continue the journey.

There was a fort that they all stopped at, which was called Fort Worth in Texas. But it was a dry fort. It was very Christian and they didn't have alcohol. So the cowboys would stop there and rest, but to go get their joy on, they would go across the river to this shantytown where there was booze and women and whatever. That shantytown is Dallas. And Fort Worth is where I grew up. Isn't that charming?

Oh my God. You've really just exploded my understanding of so much. Certainly.

Yeah. I worked at the Texas State Historical Association in a gap year in university. I was really into Texas history and making sure that everything is recorded. During the time that I was working there, they were digitizing the encyclopedia, taking it from volumes of books and digitizing it. So all of this fascinating history of Texas is available.

How does it feel? What does it mean to be from Texas?

I joke that I'm from "Tex-ass". That's a good joke. Because I did leave. I think Texas is an interesting place because it used to be Mexico, and it was colonized. There's a whole history there that I think most Americans don't know about - why Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California became the United States when they used to be Mexico and what that land grab and power grab was about. A lot of it had to do with slavery, and Mexico was not into slavery.

There were a lot of natural resources that were attractive. People could look it up and be like, "Oh, what happened there," and get into it. Growing up in a place where my parents didn't come to the United States - the United States came to us - and yet I was made to feel other or less than or a foreigner in my own home.

I remember playing soccer in Texas as a very athletic young lady. After our soccer game, there was a water fountain in the park. I went to go drink water and there was a girl behind me. She stopped and then started walking away. I was like, "Oh, you don't want any water?" She said, "Oh, I can't drink after you." Because...

Those are just little stories. I've had many experiences in Texas that were, shall I say, unwelcoming. It's a complicated place. It really is a complicated place, with where it sits on the border and what drives the oil that drives its economy and the culture that is attracted to that.

Living in Austin for 10 years was really cool though, because it was like a liberal oasis and almost the antithesis of much of what I experienced growing up. But yeah, that's what it's like to be from Texas. It's complicated. And you're glad that you're not there anymore.

Do you have, what did you want to be when like young Eliza in Texas, did you have ideas about what you wanted to be when you grew up?

Yeah, actually I wanted to be a poet and a literary critic. That was horrifying to my super right wing conservative father, which is why I had to take a gap year, because he cut me off of university, because I was actually succeeding at those things at university, and he was like, "That will not stand."

Where'd that begin? Where did poetry, how did poetry become a North Star like that?

I don't know. I always just thought everybody wrote poetry when they were 12. I was just like, "Isn't this what we're all doing?" Our ideas. It just, I don't know. It's just something that bubbled out of me.

I later learned, and I didn't grow up knowing this, but as a young adult I learned that I was named after my great grandmother, whose name was Elvira Yanez de Escutia, and she was a poet and a playwright. I had no idea, but I was just this person who was really into that stuff, really into literature, really into creativity, the imagination, but through the word in particular.

My mother had been an artist. She was a photographer and she did stained glass. So I was around that world of art and the imagination while she was in university when I was like six, seven, eight, nine. I would go to the university to watch the art classes or go to the art openings and the gallery. But for me, it was really about the word.

And tell me now, where are you now, what you're up to, what are you up to and where are you now?

Yeah. I made a big pivot to walk away from working for other people for as long as I possibly can. And I've also stepped away from being in the business of helping corporations build wealth and being in the business of advertising or brand or any of that.

I don't know that I'm completely removed from it, but I'm just taking a pause to really invest in my worldview and focus on my own creativity. And so that is why I've started these two ventures: Love and Order and Radical Sabbatical Consulting.

Love and Order is very much focused on future forecasting for leaders and leadership teams, but a very specific point of view on the future, which is the protopian view. And it's really because I feel like we are, as a humanity, at a really critical inflection point where we really need to take the reins of what's happening in the world and not let it happen to us. I have some very strong points of view on that, which we can talk about.

And then Radical Sabbatical Consulting is really born out of the two year sabbatical that I took after I left Microsoft and really spent time taking my hands off the steering wheel of careering and achieving and doing all that stuff. Instead, I went back almost to relive a portion of my 20s where I was just exploring what interested me and getting back into meditation and really going within and living more of an inner-directed life.

I walked out of that two year period empowered in a way that I had not been my whole life. And so I'd like to package that up for people so that they can have similar experiences.

It's been really beautiful to watch and to see you launch this stuff into the world. I'm curious, could you tell a little bit about before and after, you know what I mean? Can you just paint a picture of what was going on with you before you made this pivot or this transition or what made it necessary for you to pivot away from all that stuff and to chart this new path forward?

Yeah. I think I was having a series of unpleasant experiences for years in my career life. I drank the Kool-Aid that a lot of us drink of, "Oh you have to move up in your career and you have to pursue positions of leadership and you have to always be getting promoted or getting that next job." And also I felt a sense of responsibility and duty as a woman of color of, "I want to go as far as I possibly can so that other people behind me will have paved some sort of trail that people could go behind."

I spent a lot of time mentoring and trying to help other not just women, but just other people who were trying to make their way in advertising and marketing and strategy get there.

But the way that I was being treated was interestingly very mirroring my childhood trauma playing out on the corporate stage - being treated a certain way in the corporate world and the business world. And I think for me also, I'm not to be trifled with.

Yes, I know that about you.

Don't mess with Texas. So I think that when those things would happen, there would be a different sort of energy around them where I would really stand up for what was right and like really make it known that these things were unacceptable. I do think that it had a positive effect on the organizations around me and everybody was forced to look at the way that they were behaving or what was happening, but it took a personal toll on me energetically.

I found that over the years what was happening was my creative life force was being eked out of my body and I was assigning all of my energy to this sort of forward trajectory and to the missions of organizations or to solving these problems, and less and less of it was going to my own creativity, to my own personal flourishing.

So really that's hopefully a broad way of saying that's what was happening. That's what was going on. It took me a long time to admit that I needed to just completely not do that anymore. I kept trying to take a break and then go play smaller, which you can see in some of the things that I did in my career after I left Microsoft. I was like, "I'll take this little job over here, I'll go do this thing that I did 12 years ago, so that I can only work nine to five and still have my life," but at the end of the day, it just wasn't working.

And I think the truth of the matter is that probably I'm meant to do something else in the world. I have talents and ideas and creativity and agency and a worldview that is probably needed right now, and so I just needed to make a switch.

Yeah. And I laugh not because I know that you're somebody not to be trifled with, but I feel like I've always gotten the feeling that you're really connected to something strong. You know what I mean? I've always appreciated your sort of openness and your seeking. So it was clear to me that you would be doing good things. So tell me about Love and Order and Protopia. What order do you tell this story about what you're doing?

I'm trying to find a way to make the story simple, and I think that's part of what a solopreneur and entrepreneur goes through - feeling their way through how to talk about what they're doing.

Protopia is a term that was defined by Kevin Kelly, who was the founder of Wired Magazine, some time ago to point at making a stark contrast to the dystopian trend that we were moving toward in terms of our view of the future. And then in 2021, a woman by the name of Monica Bill Skyte (I hope I'm saying her last name correctly) advanced the definition of what it means to have this protopian view on the future.

I really love the way that she advanced it because she brought in two things that are near and dear to my heart, which are creativity and spirituality. The protopian view of the future in short is just an incrementally more positive view of the future, not imagining this utopian world that we'll never be able to reach, but really using your imagination to think about how we as a human civilization, as communities, can thrive and really flourish, and doing it in ways that we can actually make a roadmap and move toward and really keeping your eye on that prize.

Also having the high level of awareness to strip out from your consciousness any of the false programming around the future that we've been fed historically, particularly by science fiction that originated in the 60s and then got picked up again in the 80s with cyberpunk, which I started writing a series about.

Does that make sense? Or is it still really complicated?

No, it's beautiful. It's just like most of the stuff, I feel like you've always been able to make these very intellectual ideas very relevant and connect them to culture.

And some of that stuff is just landing, just layering right on top of my own sort of feelings about how things are, certainly that science fiction. I think Neil Stephenson came out at one point and was chastising the science fiction community that there was no real protopian science fiction.

As we, nobody has done the work of illustrating an optimistic or hopeful view of the future. Number one. And then number two, this just came to me. I was in this community and there was a performance coach there and he was saying that, oh gosh, I'm going to, there's two stats that like 80 percent of our thinking is negative and 95 percent of them are repetitive.

And so we have an innate kind of almost a cognitive pessimism or something in the way that we think. And I wonder, how does that factor into creating what you're doing?

Yeah. I think what's really interesting is that I didn't want to just do future forecasting, but I wanted to do future forecasting for leaders and leadership teams because I feel like it's not enough for us to yes, we are having a crisis of the imagination and yes, we need to invest in imagining these futures and working toward them, but we need leaders to do that.

And the thing about getting into that space and really thinking through what does it take for a leader to really do that got me into looking at conscious leadership and positive intelligence and all of these sort of leadership approaches because at the end of the day, what leaders have to do in order to enact a protopian future is what each and every one of us has to do. And that is, we have to do the inner work.

That's how Radical Sabbatical Consulting is connected to Love and Order. If we are not looking within, if we are not in total awareness of the habituation of our mindset, of the sort of the tapes that play inside of our heads, but also if we're not in touch with our own sort of heart and not emotional heart, but I'm saying spiritual heart, where we really care about the future of humanity, where we really care about humanity, where we care about our own well being, or we can actually care about seven generations ahead, like, why? And also to be honest with ourselves and be like, I don't care. Why are you dead inside?

That's, it's seriously a joke. But I think that what you're bringing up about these habituations and how this negativity connects with what I'm doing is, when I came up with Radical Sabbatical Consulting and Love and Order, I was just like, what do I love doing? What do I want to do? I wasn't really thinking, oh, these lock together.

But then as I've been working through what this is and talking about it more now, I really realized that they are two sides of the same coin. We as a civilization, unless we do this consciousness work, unless we raise our awareness, unless we can honestly move toward a culture of caring, all of these other ideas about solving global warming or facing any of our impending issues, it's not going to land because we're just going to replicate, we're going to replicate a mechanistic, patriarchal, uncaring modality as we're trying to solve the problem.

So it really is about a big wake up call on many levels.

You used the phrase, the crisis of imagination. Can you tell me a little bit more about its particular role? You know me, I'm fascinated with the idea of the imagination and I'm just curious the role it plays and how you think about where we're at.

Yeah, so I lifted that from Monica Bilskyte. She uses that language and it just really set home with me because during COVID, when we were all going in and doing different things than we normally were doing, that's when I was first starting to think about the future. And the question that I was asking myself was like, why are we caught in a loop? Why do we seem to be like in society just living this loop and not really moving forward?

So I started looking into speculative fiction and science fiction writing and all this stuff. And I realized, all of these stories are written by white men. And then I started understanding, oh, actually in the sixties there was Afrofuturism, there was Chicano Futurism, and then I was like, what about globally? What about Asian literature, Latin American literature? Are there futurists, is there a wider lens?

Lo and behold, yes, there is. But in the United States, because of Hollywood and because of what's gone on, there is a very specific dystopian view of the future that we just keep recycling over and over again that assumes humanity won't evolve, that is overly focused on technology, that assumes a patriarchally driven top-down organizational structure and society.

So there are all of these systemic ideas that are baked into these things that we all grew up watching that we've all almost turned into like future porn. Blade Runner is beautiful, don't get me wrong, it is a beautiful film. But we don't want that future.

So the crisis of the imagination is recognizing, hey wakey wakey, we've been eating all of this stuff up. And when we try to imagine a better future, there's no gas in that tank. It's even hard for us to imagine what a beautiful future would look like.

So for me, talking about the crisis of the imagination is the beginning - to basically say, we need to cut the cord to this storytelling that's not serving us. And we need to go within and get into our caring space, raise our consciousness. And from a higher elevated perspective, start to imagine and start to dream together and tell stories together and put those forward so that we have something to look at as a possibility instead of always looking at the problems or living in the worst thing that could happen.

Yeah. How have you been met? How is Love and Order? It's been, how long has it been? What's it been like having this out in the world? And what kinds of questions are people attracted to in what you're putting out?

I think I've been meeting a lot of like minds. There's a lot of people in the design community, systems designers, there's a lot of people in the social impact space who are really turned on by this.

I've had people reach out who are coming at it more from the spiritual point of view, where they've also been going through a similar crisis of feeling like "I just don't want to give my energy to this career trajectory anymore. And I'm feeling all the things that you're talking about and I'm trying to figure out what to do next."

So I think there's been a lot of positive response of like minds. There's a lot of people out there who haven't had it packaged together in this way, but for them, it just really brings it together.

But many of them are like, "But we don't know how to earn a living." And I think there's that. So right now, everybody's forming ideologies, forming community, and really I am not worried because the other thing that we have to recognize is that we are literally creating the future now.

And by that, we're walking into the unknown. Those of us who want to have a protopian view, those of us who want to see humanity flourish, want to survive the ecological train wreck that we're headed toward, want to see a new system of inclusion - because the inclusion piece is really important - a system of inclusion to allow us to have a more human-centric approach to how we build tomorrow.

All of that is, those are nascent ideas to be entering into the existing paradigm. Those things that I'm talking about are like, "Oh yeah, those design people can talk about being human-centric. We're going to put them over there, in their little department. And then when the budgets get tight, we're just going to cut them." It's like those things have been considered electives, auxiliary, and to bring that kind of thinking into the center stage is a new thing. And making it matter.

I really don't think that I'm going to have to make it matter. I think what's going to happen is there's going to be a huge natural disaster. There's going to be some major ecological crisis. And people, it's like, how many do we need to have? But there's going to be something.

I'm not here for the wake up call. Nor am I here for cleanup on aisle nine. I am here knowing that there will be a wake up call, there will be cleanup on aisle nine. And I'm wanting to be in the community of people who are like, "Yeah, we know that's going to happen. And we're here to build the future that we want to live in," knowing that all of these things need to change and we're starting to meet and we're starting to connect and we're starting to figure out how we're going to do that.

I think that's how it's been met. And even one of the exercises that I'm going to force myself to go through is to go on LinkedIn and try and pick 200 people that are working in companies that could actually pay for the services. And I'll tell you that it's hard going because you have to find people...it's not just, "Oh, this company has the potential to be protopian," but "This company isn't built on the old model where it's all that Silicon Valley bro funding and it's a bro culture."

So even the companies that look on their face value like they're protopian, you just dig a little and you're like, "Oh, we're in trouble." So then you have to go looking for who are the more progressive people within these companies that are the ones who are going to be brave enough to step forward and set a new agenda.

And really that's what it is - it's about bravery and the people who have that kind of bravery are the ones who have already succeeded in their career and they have some political chips to play. And they want to play their political chips in the service of humanity and in the service of a brighter future.

Finding those people is what is on my next to-do list and then talking to them and getting their feedback on what I'm doing and how it can be made more accessible and more palatable.

Yeah. I'm curious again about this word, protopia, what are the particular qualities? You mentioned widening the lens away from the sort of the patriarchal science fiction dystopian prison that we're living in. What makes something protopian or how do you craft something that's protopian?

There are 10 sort of principles that I'll rattle off that are the protopian principles that I've identified:

It's human-centric, ethical, sustainable, inclusive, visionary, adaptive, transparent, collaborative, innovative and resilient. Those are the 10 sort of principles.

Now, what I've really been thinking about is if I whittle it down to make it more essential, I think that it's about community - being community-oriented, seeing humanity as a community, like if we're a series of communities of varying sizes and affinities, how do we care for the wellbeing of community.

And then also I'm thinking about the word longevity, because it's another way of talking about sustainability, but making it more human and also recognizing that we want to build things, not just for our generation or for our times, but for future generations. So really that longevity is taking that long view.

I think corporate America and the stock market and everything keeps us in this short-termism. Media keeps us distracted, so we've got a lot of things working against us, which is why we raise our awareness and our consciousness.

But if we do, we get really focused on this is about caring about human beings in community, thinking about human civilization as a series of interlocking communities. This is about the long game. This is about longevity. We're going to be living longer, you know what I mean?

But we also want to create things that endure for generations. So we're not creating a world that the next generation has to clean up. And the next generation has to clean up, which is what we're doing now.

So I would say those two, there's a third piece, which is the sort of the consciousness piece. The consciousness piece is really very important because if we are not, if our consciousness doesn't evolve...it's like, how can we make progress as human beings if our consciousness doesn't evolve?

It just sounds so basic, and you're looking at me like, and it's literally, if we don't elevate our consciousness, then our world isn't going to be elevated. The consciousness piece is really important. And I think it gets left to the side.

So much of what I'm talking about is considered woo peripheral, but particularly the consciousness piece gets left to the side. And for me, that's the thing that I've, I'm putting more front and center. It's like the number one thing is anybody that we're going to entrust to be building our future better be somebody who's like really an awake individual.

Why would we hand that job over to somebody who is not? Think about it that way.

Yeah. Who out there, do you see anybody out there doing this? Is there anybody out there already charting a protopian path or embodying the kind of conscious leadership that you want to create?

Yes, and actually I am going to promote this a little bit because I think everyone should watch it. But PBS just came out with a documentary called "History of Future". And there's a guy named Ari Wallach, who is the moderator of the documentary. He's not necessarily coming out on a protopian platform, but he talks about a lot of some of these similar issues and identifies lots of individuals out there who are doing this work.

But the interesting thing is that it's happening not in a holistic way. It's happening in very niche things. So you've got regenerative ocean farmers over here. Or you have Native American wisdom keepers over there. Or you have people who are looking at the behavioral issues that we have around the way that we have a limited view of time. And so that's why we can't think about the long-term.

So you've got these individuals doing very specific things in their specific lanes. But then you have somebody like Monica Billskyte who is coming out on a platform of "We need to look at the whole picture together."

And there's actually, if I can find it quickly, there's actually an annual event that they have that I maybe, I don't know if I can tag it like after on the podcast, can I, the notes? Yeah. They just had it in Lisbon where it's like more of these design-led people who have this protopian view are coming together in annual conferences.

So I think admittedly it's nascent. There are individual themes like I'm writing about the blue economy because I'm huge on that. Like 78 percent of the planet is water. And when we think about sustainability, we are only thinking about land. What is wrong with us? But also it's like a huge economy waiting to happen, you know what I mean? And an economy that could be driven by sustainability.

So I think that there are a lot of little things happening to the left and to the right, but part of what I'm spending this month doing is doing the research, gathering all of the information and then figuring out how am I going to pull this together in a platform? What's the best way to share this out because it is so disparate and that's the problem.

What needs to happen is that all these things need to be networked and to realize that they're part of one worldview and start working together. And right now it's not totally happening.

Yeah. Can you tell me a little bit about the blue economy? That's the first time I've heard that.

Of course. Oh, wow. Okay. Yeah. Let me just, so the blue economy is basically anything to do with the ocean - sustainability and regenerative energy sources that come from the ocean, but also ocean exploration and technology born out of ocean exploration. That's the broad definition and it has a huge economic scope in terms of its potential.

And I'm just quickly opening cause Charles Gadsden, who founded Born Slippy and I are going to release this article in honor of Ocean Day, which is on June 8th, so we just wrote it, but I'll just read an excerpt here:

"The blue economy encompasses all economic activities related to oceans, seas, and coastal areas, generating trillions of dollars globally. In countries like Nigeria, the untapped blue economy potential is valued at 296 billion, focusing on fisheries, renewable energy, and port infrastructures.

Investment areas include offshore wind, which provides a renewable energy source, sustainable fisheries that help maintain fish populations, marine biotechnology that explores biological compounds for pharmaceuticals, and maritime transport, which is crucial for global trade.

The OECD projects that by 2030, the global added value in the ocean economy will grow to more than 3 trillion, which is approximately 60 percent of Germany's current GDP. By 2030, more than half of the ocean-based industries are projected to see their value rise more quickly than that of the global economy.

Almost all of these industries would see employment growth outpace that in the world economy as a whole."

So to me, the blue economy is like, this is a protopian idea. This is an idea that is about communities, it's about the long-term, it's regenerative, it's innovative, it's visionary, it's a wide open space, it's a way we can create an economy while serving the planet and each other, like what?

And why people aren't more excited about this is really beyond me. If I do anything, I will make sure that people know about it.

And what is the opportunity there? What are you really fired up about when it comes to this protopian blue economy?

You know what? I don't know why. I really don't know why. I get like little bees in my bonnet. There's so many things to be excited about but the one in particular is kelp.

There is this, I'm trying to find, there's like a kelp farmer that is actually covered in the documentary that I mentioned. And I think it's called, no, that's the ocean cleanup. But basically regenerative farming with kelp. It is really cool.

Yeah, it's this guy named Bren Smith. He's an ocean farmer and his company is called the Green Wave. And basically kelp is this micronutrient, but also it can be used to generate energy and these kelp farms can be built off the ocean. You can also use the materials to create bioecological sustainable materials in place of plastic.

To me, something like one simple thing that the planet already provides us, that if we invest in and use in really innovative ways, to me, something like that that's really simple and it's right here off the coast of Connecticut, it's really nearby and also the guy who, this guy, Brent Smith is a white collar fisherman. These are not Silicon Valley "I went to Stanford" exclusive industries. These are industries that are super attainable for the disappearing middle class. So something like that really gets me psyched.

Yeah, it's really beautiful. It reminds, it makes it occurred to me as you were describing the blue economy that I think I'm peritopian, and I'm too exact, I wanna, tell me what they are. I will. I get these in my vomit about I guess social, about our culture, about how polarized everything is, especially in my experience of living in a small town, it can be very challenging, and I have a psychology that really wants people to get along.

And there's this organization called More in Common. And they are a totally unique sort of polling organization. And all they do is they make the things that we agree with visible. You know what I mean? They're really working against this current system that basically just exaggerates the partisanship and all this toxicity. But they really go out of their way to create a protopian vision of, "Oh, look, we actually were more in agreement than you might think."

That's one example. And then maybe that's protopian, maybe not. But then the other one is I'm really fired up about citizen assembly, which is deliberative democracy. Which was introduced to me in this way, and it's all about that word pro, is that we live in an anti-social culture where all of our interactions are anti-social, but who out there is actually creating pro-social opportunities for interaction?

So the challenge really is for us to, we have to create new opportunities for protopian experiences, right? Because they're not going to come. We have a momentum behind us that's anti-social, right? Yeah. Anti-humanity maybe and we need to go way out of our way to create opportunities that bring us together.

How does that all sound? Does that land?

Yeah, that lands. That's, yeah, that's all the only, so you would just be like, "I'm doing this because it's laddering up to this bigger picture that I believe in" is how you would become a protopian advocate. It's "Hey I do these, I value these things because I know they're going to lead to this larger future that is inclusive."

And then the only other thing that I would say, and I feel like a broken record and sometimes it makes me sad to say this over and over again, but for those of you who are listening and for you, Peter, whatever you're doing that you feel passionate about where you feel like it's making a positive difference, please just make sure that in those organizations that there are women in positions of leadership, and that there are people of color. It's not just a bunch of, because like minds can tend to be hegemonic. And just really making sure that you are pushing toward that inclusion because it's really important. Because we're not going to go if we don't all go together. And that means that we need that thinking at the very tip end of the spear.

Yeah. I very much appreciate that. I have one last question.

Sure.

How, it's about the future. You talked about, you used that title of the show, "The History of the Future". And it occurs to me, how has your relationship with the future changed in this shift from brand strategists, marketers, marketing? And how is the future treated and talked about and handled and managed in that world versus how you really want to be thinking about the future now?

Yeah. Okay. Some big changes. Really big changes. One is that so much of the future forecasting in the brand strategy marketing world overemphasizes technology as this essential driving force of the future.

Secondarily, it assumes a consumer-driven society. And so everything is about that and we know how problematic that is. Thirdly it lacks inclusion. There are very few futurists out there who are not the usual suspects and coming from that sort of very exclusionary, male-dominated patriarchal culture view.

So I think those three things have changed radically. And then I think most importantly on the consciousness front, I am coming from a very different place of self-empowerment rather than relegating power and authority outside of myself.

And what I mean by that is when you raise your, when you meditate enough and when you raise your consciousness and you start understanding physics and quantum physics and the quantum realm and the field and all of these things, you actually realize that we live in a holographic universe and we are creating our reality by what we are focusing on.

And I come from now a very empowered point of view about the future where it's no, the future is not going to happen to us. We are going to be creating the future in the quantum field by what we choose to focus on. And if we choose to focus on protopian principles and protopian ideals, then that's the future we will get.

As opposed to this kind of unempowered point of view that I think goes on a lot in the strategy and marketing world where it's somebody's going to come in and tell me what is going to happen. No. You need to get the people together who are making things happen and get them to get on the right page with the right point of view and get them to actually create that future, not have somebody tell them what the future is going to be.So those are some, I'm glad you asked the question because those are some really big issues.

Yeah, absolutely. I feel like we could talk for an hour about each of them, like all the assumptions about technology and what consumerism and all that stuff. It's beautiful. So we're at time. What so for anybody that was really fired up about what you shared, what's the best way to get in touch with people?

Yeah check me out on LinkedIn. There's a link to my website that will take you to either the Love and Order website or the Radical Sabbatical website. Say hi, DM me and I'd love to talk if you're into this stuff.

And yeah, if you go to my Love and Order website, there's a free report that you can get on pioneering protopia. If you check out my business page on LinkedIn, there's a series on cyberpunk fiction that I've been writing, which is very entertaining.

And also as I said Charles Gadsden and I are going to come out with the Blue Economy series starting on June 8th.

Thank you so much. I really appreciate you taking the time and I'm really inspired and excited by what you're doing. So thank you for sharing.

Thank you, Peter. It's always a wonderful time to talk to you.

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