Foresight inspiration can come from anywhere, and Disney's hit film Encanto is a great example. The movie is a tale of an enchanted family with a painful secret: Bruno, their prophetic uncle, has become a sore subject for the household and villagers alike due to their negative view of his visionary gift. What can we learn from Bruno's prognostications, his exile, and the lessons learned by his family? You may be surprised to discover that Bruno isn't the only futurist in Casa Madrigal!
Foresight inspiration can come from anywhere, and Disney's hit film Encanto is a great example. The movie is a tale of an enchanted family with a painful secret: Bruno, their prophetic uncle, has become a sore subject for the household and villagers alike due to their negative view of his visionary gift. What can we learn from Bruno's prognostications, his exile, and the lessons learned by his family? You may be surprised to discover that Bruno isn't the only futurist in Casa Madrigal!
[00:00:00] Yvette Montero Salvatico: Have you seen it?
[00:00:03] Frank Spence: I assume you mean the movie Encanto?
[00:00:06] Yvette: Yes, of course.
[00:00:07] Frank: I can't miss it because if you're watching TikTok or social media, there's just thousands upon thousands of people singing the song We Don't Talk About Bruno or maybe one of the other famous songs from the movie. I've seen it in every version you could possibly imagine, every thematic realization and adaptation that you can possibly imagine.
[00:00:28] Yvette: It's crazy to think that, of course, now his name is escaping me, the Hamilton author.
[00:00:35] Frank: If you hadn't said, "His name is escaping me."
[00:00:38] Yvette: I know.
[00:00:38] Frank: Lin-Manuel.
[00:00:39] Yvette: Yes, so here he has another amazing breakthrough hit with the music.
[00:00:43] Frank: He's just one hit after another.
[00:00:47] Yvette: I know.
[00:00:47] Frank: Basically, he wake up in the morning, say a few words, and it would be a Broadway play.
[00:00:51] Yvette: I know, it's pretty amazing. I have seen Encanto. I saw it repeatedly during the holidays because, unfortunately, we were under the big quarantine.
[00:01:05] Frank: We don't talk about holidays. [laughs]
[00:01:06] Yvette: We don't talk about holidays, we just talk about COVID. Of course, if you haven't seen Encanto, for us, for our family, my parents are Cuban, but my younger brother married a woman who's from Colombia, so especially exciting for us and my nephews to see a film set in Colombia with a family, which, not unlike my family, large and boisterous. That was fun for us.
[00:01:41] Frank: I saw a bunch of articles and stuff just saying kids were seeing themselves reflected in the movie.
[00:01:49] Yvette: That's right, I saw that.
[00:01:50] Frank: For the first time ever, it wasn't a white pale and stale. There's nothing wrong with white people, but they ruled the world. They colonized the world.
[00:01:58] Yvette: I know a few nice ones. The present company included.
[00:02:01] Frank: Yes, there's a couple. Thank you.
[00:02:03] Yvette: No problem, my pleasure.
[00:02:04] Frank: No, it was great to see this representation and kids were looking. As a matter of fact, I was watching the Winter Olympics which just started and they had this great commercial, it was like these young girls, the BIPOC see themselves in some of these new, I believe. Anyway, getting off track a little bit.
[00:02:20] Yvette: The film, if you haven't seen it, it's really amazing. There's some really deep themes around immigration and migration and people having to flee their homes, that's how the film opens up with the grandmother of the family just having two small infants, twin children. I think they were fleeing, and unfortunately, her husband doesn't make it through, but there's a miracle and there's a candle that continues to light.
Not only does it help them get past and get free of the people that were pursuing them, but it creates this amazing casita, and then it gives them all these amazing gifts. We won't really spoil the film, but the title or one of the breakout, I think, hit from a song perspective, from a music perspective is We Don't Talk About Bruno.
[00:03:23] Frank: Yes, very catchy and I think very emotional. You'll cry a lot during this movie if you haven't seen it before, or at least shed a tear, and especially that part where the husband doesn't make it because it's a lot about immigrants and border crossing.
[00:03:40] Yvette: What is it about Disney that they kill the parents right away?
[00:03:45] Frank: Yes, they always kill the parents. That man's parents died, that's what made him sad.
[00:03:50] Yvette: Jeez.
[00:03:50] Frank: [crosstalk]
[00:03:51] Yvette: Again, we won't talk just about this movie, well, kind of we will, but we'll bring it back to foresight here in a minute.
[00:03:58] Frank: I think we will because we really want to hone in. Obviously, as we started the show off, you heard the music on Bruno.
[00:04:04] Yvette: That's right. By the way, welcome to The Wicked Opportunities Podcast. My name is Yvette Montero Salvatico.
[00:04:10] Frank: Yes, that's right. My name is Frank Spencer, and we're so glad that you're with us for this year of 52 as we're just sharing all of these insights on how to get features done, how to do foresight, the ins and outs of doing foresight.
[00:04:22] Yvette: I like the year of 52.
[00:04:24] Frank: The year of 52, it's a year free.
[00:04:26] Yvette: It's a year free.
[00:04:27] Frank: 52 weeks.
[00:04:27] Yvette: It's our newsletter.
[00:04:28] Frank: The podcast is 52. It's a year of everything.
[00:04:31] Yvette: It's a year of everything.
[00:04:32] Frank: We've been making a joke in the office, it's like it also is the year of no. [laughs]
[00:04:37] Yvette: Because we're so busy because there's so many people taking advantage of the year of free.
[00:04:41] Frank: It's great, it's fantastic, and it's been exciting to see so many people taking advantage of the year of free and we want there to be more and more.
[00:04:49] Yvette: In this collection of the Wicked Opportunities Podcast, we are tackling probably one of the most substantive wicked problems and that's the wicked problem of foresight implementation.
[00:05:00] Frank: That's right, yes. It's sort of our whole year, but especially in this particular episode because Bruno really represents. I think even people who don't know foresight very well, they saw this metaphor of what it means to think about the future, talk about the future, and how people feel threatened by that.
[00:05:19] Yvette: Really quickly, again, if you haven't seen the film, Bruno's character, his gift is that he's able to see visions of the future.
[00:05:29] Frank: That's right.
[00:05:30] Yvette: Because of his gift, he's actually excommunicated from the family, and they don't know it, but he's living within the house in solitude away from the rest of the family.
[00:05:42] Frank: I saw this great TikTok where somebody did Bruno's perspective inside the wall as they're singing the song outside the wall. We don't talk about Bruno and you can hear it really muffled.
[00:05:51] Yvette: It's real muffled.
[00:05:54] Frank: [muffled talk] and he's like, "Oh," he's crying inside with the rats.
[00:05:58] Yvette: I'm sorry for anyone who is sick of the Bruno song because this podcast probably isn't for you, and we'll catch you next week. Every week, we're tackling another approach or another angle on how we can democratize the future in the field of foresight because that's our mission. If you've been listening in the last couple of weeks, we've talked about situations we've had with our clients, we've talked about situations we face with prospective clients. Today, we want to take a little bit different tact and talk about what's represented here in popular media with this character of Bruno in this film Encanto.
[00:06:38] Frank: Which certainly applies to your work and our work with clients. We've seen this before, we've been Bruno, we are Bruno, and we try to avoid Bruno as well, all three of those things. We'll talk about how that really relates to our specific and technical and practical work.
[00:06:54] Yvette: We really believe that in many ways, Bruno is representative of many organization's attempts at planning for the future. It's really interesting because, again, if you haven't seen the film, he really talks almost like forecasting the future, and there's some great examples. He told me my goldfish would die and he did, but that's what goldfish do, they basically die.
[00:07:22] Frank: They don't live very long.
[00:07:23] Yvette: No, and there's a part where he is talking to his sister on her wedding day, and he insinuates that the weather may not be so good, and it turns out there's a hurricane on her wedding day. Now, again, there's a bit of a nuance here because her gift is creating the weather.
[00:07:42] Frank: Oh, it's interesting.
[00:07:43] Yvette: She gets real mad at him, but in reality, but I just was struck about how much our organizations really start to go down this official future path.
[00:07:56] Frank: That's right, and especially to have Bruno on stage because if you really go back and watch the film a couple of times, Bruno was very popular in the town. His popularity started to wane when they were like, "Don't tell me what's going to happen."
[00:08:09] Yvette: Yes, when the guy that was like, "You told me I was going to lose my hair, and then I went bald." That is 70% of men.
[00:08:13] Frank: Yes, and he was, "You're growing older. Are you growing older?" He was that Prophet on the stage. Then eventually, you're like, "I don't want to hear from this guys anymore because they tell me-
[00:08:27] Yvette: Bad news.
[00:08:28] Frank: - bad news," right. This is what I don't want to hear.
[00:08:32] Yvette: It's so interesting because really, it's a great example of how people really avoid the future because it's unknown, it might be bad.
[00:08:41] Frank: Literally getting rid of Bruno was like getting rid of intentionally thinking about the future. Of course, we're going to talk a little bit about the nuance of how he had visions and how relatable that is to foresight work, but yes, getting rid of him, putting him behind the wall with the rats. Does anybody relate to this? [laughs]
[00:08:58] Yvette: This might be therapy for us. In another podcast, we'll talk about when we were set into the dumpster with the rats. No, that actually didn't happen. Anyway, yes.
[00:09:08] Frank: Right. yes. Did you just Bruno us?
[laughter]
[00:09:10] Yvette: Did you just Bronu us? That's going to be a new term. It is really interesting to see how in the film, their reactions to his prophecies, and ultimately, we say that he was exiled, he really left because he felt that he wasn't contributing and he felt badly, and he didn't want to continue to have these visions and create conflict within the family because his vision started to get progressively worse in terms of what could happen to the casita and to the family.
[00:09:48] Frank: Right, but again, they were only reflecting things that he saw. I love this idea where we don't want Brunos around this, we want to have this very official linear future. The truth of the matter is the more linear we are, the more brittle and fragile we are. We try to avoid the Brunos because we feel safe in avoiding it, but in reality, it makes us more brittle and fragile. I had made a note here and I think it really relates to what you're saying too, that if you actually pay attention to Bruno's deeper prophecies, especially, and again, I don't want to ruin anything if you haven't seen the movie at all.
[00:10:25] Yvette: Maybe don't listen if you haven't seen anything. Go watch it, and then come back to this.
[00:10:28] Frank: Spoiler warning, but I'll still try to be non-spoilee here.
[00:10:33] Yvette: Wow.
[00:10:33] Frank: I couldn't get that out, sorry. That his last prophecy or vision was really a lot more nuanced than your goldfish is going to die, and the next day the goldfish died. It's actually a bit of riddle of a mystery to figure out what it meant. The truth of the matter is Bruno's best visions were open, they were dependent on actor agency, they were really guiding narratives that generated possibilities. You'll see this in the film if you haven't seen it. It's the last vision that they figure out was dependent on Mirabel actually. That was who it was, right?
[00:11:16] Yvette: Yes.
[00:11:17] Frank: Actually deciphering this and taking actions and forming it as a guiding narrative instead. That's really the power of foresight, right?
[00:11:25] Yvette: I think, too, there's this weird, who knew that we were going to be analyzing this film like this? I'm sure the folks at Disney didn't think that there would be a foresight podcast all about this film, but what about this idea that the whole Bruno We Don't Talk About Bruno song is how we as the viewer learn about what has happened before? Really, it's about the past, and it also gives you an idea about how the characters in the film, how the family and the community remember that is how things went down.
[00:12:00] Frank: Yes, that's right.
[00:12:01] Yvette: He told me my fish would die, the next day, dead. He said that it was going to rain on my wedding and there was a hurricane. I think what's really fascinating is our relationship with the past is often this belief that it is fact and I remembered it exactly and only the future is what is not yet written, but in reality, there's as many pasts as there are potential futures.
[00:12:26] Frank: That's a great point. Our friends at the Greek Futures Agency in the Greek government have done a lot of work this past year. I remember seeing it on LinkedIn about there being multiple pasts. It was a very popular several posts that they put up about this because they built a model showing the cone of possibilities, but they showed it backwards as well. They said just as many alternative futures that there are, there's that many alternative past. People were writing saying like, "No, that's not true, there's one past," and it's like, first of all, even if there were literally one linear pass, we don't perceive it that way.
Across the world we perceive different pasts. Now the truth of the matter is there's different starting points in the past, different perspectives in the past just as many as there are open futures. I think that makes a great point because the way that we interpret the past directly affects the way that we will see the future. That's why we see different futures around the world because we see different traditions and different ways of knowing and different perspectives and ways of traveling.
[00:13:23] Yvette: It's all about the narrative. How they shaped the narrative of his prophecies because your point is valid in that his final vision was much more elaborate and-
[00:13:36] Frank: Nuanced.
[00:13:36] Yvette: - and nuanced, but I would argue that probably his first visions were too.
[00:13:41] Frank: Possibly so, right, yes. That's how we thought.
[00:13:41] Yvette: That the only way that we saw those were through the perspectives of those characters. Through how they had processed it and remembered it and perhaps worked through their own trauma. We saw the final vision play out through Mirabel, who, interestingly enough, is the only character that doesn't have a gift, but she probably has the best gift of all, which is the gift of empathy and the gift of really understanding the other characters and the casita and all that.
[00:14:11] Frank: Gosh, there's a whole angle we could go down there that we didn't put in our show notes, but she really was a great receptor for foresight. Like you want to find the Mirabels in the organization.
[00:14:22] Yvette: Yes, you do. That's who you want, you want those change agents, the ones that are curious, the ones that maybe don't believe they have a gift, but you're going to unlock this ability within them.
[00:14:32] Frank: She was like, "Oh my God, Bruno's vision was the butterfly and the thing, and then life came back and I was able to." She really took this multiple perspective of the future, not the linear, brittle official futures that our leaders want. She was able to say, "This is the future we can form out of Bruno's visions." I'm doing the air quotes here. Rather than saying, "You said my goldfish was going to die and the goldfish died and that was the end of it."
By the way, there's a whole, I think, comment we want to make on that in just a minute, but like Yvette said earlier, goldfish don't live very long. Baked in this also is Bruno just telling people, if you don't change things, then this is what will happen. Your goldfish is going to die. You're probably overfeeding it.
[00:15:15] Yvette: It's so interesting because he was saying, this is what happens, this is the official future. Again, we're comparing it back to organizational attempts at long-term planning is that they just tend to extrapolate the past, and then really set down that official future, and it does become, in many cases, a self-fulfilling prophecy because we're blinded to any other option or potential. In the film, obviously, the mistake that they make is they believe that they no longer have agency in the future because he's, what's the word? Propheti--
[00:15:52] Frank: He was prophesying and he was giving them visions.
[00:15:55] Yvette: He was predicting, which we never do in foresight.
[00:15:58] Frank: That's the part I love because I like to imagine that he wasn't predicting. They were the ones that were predicting. They were like, "Bruno said my goldfish was going to die." No, he said if you keep doing this thing, your goldfish will die.
[00:16:08] Yvette: That's the whole point. Even if within an organizational context you think, "We need to have something to guide ourselves. We know these numbers are wrong as soon as we set them." Trust me, I've done, I won't tell you how many five-year plans I did while I still was at Disney and then afterwards. The idea here is that we knew those numbers were wrong as soon as we put them in the system, but we felt like it was better than nothing, but they're actually more dangerous than doing nothing because what it does is create a false sense of security or insecurity if the numbers are bad and it leads to the self-fulfilling prophecy perspective where people feel they no longer have agency.
It's so tricky because you do see organizations and institutions and communities have this really weird relationship often with foresight professionals. It's similar to how people have sometimes felt about the weather forecaster. They get mad at the weatherman or woman, the meteorologist because they've said X, Y, or Z is going to happen.That often happens to foresight professionals. We started off this new collection talking about say goodbye to Frank and Yvette. A big reason why we were shown the door there is because we wouldn't go along with the base narrative, the power trip narrative that was happening in that moment in that organization.
[00:17:31] Frank: I didn't get down and dirty in that podcast, but I remember there was a certain gentle in the room who said, "If you go stand out on the 405," which is a very famous highway in California, in Los Angeles, he said, "If you just stand there and count the numbers of cars that go by in just one minute." His point that he was trying to make was-
[00:17:49] Yvette: Cars will never go away.
[00:17:50] Frank: - look at all the cars that people are buying. Without hesitation, I said back to him, I said like, "What do you think the average year of that car, the make of that car is?" Say we did this job in 2015, I can't remember what the year was, is it a 2015? No, this is a 1984.
[00:18:08] Yvette: Even if it [crosstalk]-
[00:18:09] Frank: People are still driving these old cars, who cares?
[00:18:11] Yvette: - it's so weird to think that I am going take the entire globe of potential consumers and I'm going to boil it down to the ones I can see outside my window.
[00:18:23] Frank: That's just crazy.
[00:18:24] Yvette: I don't think we ever mentioned that. Obviously, we called this podcast We Don't Talk About Futures. No, no, no. Obviously, playing off of We Don't Talk About Bruno, and again, the idea here is we wanted to highlight some of the parallels. Now I think we want to transition perhaps to some of the lessons, right
[00:18:44] Frank: We do, but I want to catch that one piece again too-
[00:18:46] Yvette: Oh, yes, please.
[00:18:47] Frank: - because we said the goldfish died. Remind me the name of the woman, Pipa?
[00:18:53] Yvette: Pepa.
[00:18:53] Frank: Pepa, that was the one that actually had the gift of controlling the weather.
[00:18:56] Yvette: Yes, she was his sister, Bruno's sister.
[00:18:58] Frank: Or maybe not controlling the weather, but her emotions manipulated the weather.
[00:19:01] Yvette: Yes.
[00:19:02] Frank: She said, "It's a perfect day. It was beautiful. My wedding day's going to be perfect." When he said to her, "I sense there is a potential for the weather to be bad," he was really speaking to her attitude, and do then she created a hurricane because she got emotionally distraught over the weather might be bad. She did that, not him.
[00:19:20] Yvette: I know, that's the part. We mentioned it in passing, but I think a big part of why Bruno's gift wasn't well-received or understood was because the community and even his family didn't have the right foresight culture. They didn't have foresight empowered culture.
[00:19:40] Frank: I'm glad you caught that piece too because you could see it in the way that she didn't understand that he was telling her, "Watch your emotions. You're an emotional person." You see that in the whole movie, she's very emotional. She walks around all the time with a cloud over her head. He was simply saying to them, "If you don't change things." Again, they didn't have that culture to receive that. The entire community really wasn't able to understand Bruno's gift and they didn't leverage it correctly. That whole town didn't really have a foresight culture until Mirabel changed things and she was a great receptor for foresight.
[00:20:11] Yvette: Excellent. A little bit about Encanto and the link to strategic foresight. What can we learn? What are those takeaway lessons that are so critical if you are inside an organization attempting to integrate strategic foresight or continue a foresight practice or you're a consultant or a partner within an agency or your own firm and you're trying to help your clients build this capacity? What are some of the takeaways from this discussion around Bruno and Encanto and this idea of thinking about simultaneous multiples as opposed to creating a singular, official future?
That's, I think, one of the critical parts, it's just remembering that we cannot predict the future. If we could, trust us, we would have chosen the winning lottery numbers a long time ago.
[00:21:02] Frank: It would be a great gig if I can actually do it.
[00:21:04] Yvette: Let me tell you, so we cannot predict the future. If anyone is telling you that they can, whether it's through data or some other crazy thing, run. Don't walk, run away from them because, not only is it impossible, it's actually terrible to even attempt to do it because it actually creates a more brittle, fragile environment to attempt to create a brittle, predictive model forward. The only way you would do that is by using history and we know that that's the worst predictor of the future. We could do something better, we can map the future.
[00:21:41] Frank: Yes, and it goes back to the piece that's one of my favorite setup parts, which is Bruno's more nuanced visions, the big one that really brings the casita and the family back together was one that was more a guiding narrative that needed to be interpreted. It was multifaceted. It was filled with possibilities. It wasn't, "Your goldfish is going to die." I think that his final vision, the one where he had put the glass back together, it was multifaceted. It was multiple. If you watched the film and you look at it, you think, "Oh, this is more like a map and less like a prediction."
When Bruno was giving those kinds of visions, the ones that were maps, they were cartography and they weren't predictions or linear prophecies, they were much more powerful, and they were restorative and they were reconciliative. That's what real good foresight does, is it restores, it reconciles, it reframes.
[00:22:40] Yvette: Excellent. We can't predict the future, we map it, and that way, as Frank says, it's much more powerful. Mapping those multiple, possible, and provocative futures helps us become, not just more resilient but also more adaptive, and ultimately, as we saw in the film, more transformative. They were able to transform the family. Although it appeared to be destructive with losing the casita initially, they rebuilt even stronger and on that grounding of multiple futures.
[00:23:16] Frank: Yes, absolutely, so we have to really think in simultaneous multiples. Shifting away from Bruno and back to Mirabel just for a moment, that's what she was able to do. She saw the multitude in the family. In a way, Mirabel, I know we've already said, "Aha." We had a big aha amongst ourselves if you realized that on the show, but thinking about it, she was a good type of futurist too. We talked about the adaptive, the resilient, and the transformative gifts of futures, and I think that we need different kinds of futures-thinkers. Mirabel represents a type of futurist in this movie as well.
[00:23:47] Yvette: Ultimately, maybe it was Mirabel's gift that she had the gift of foresight and that's interesting.
[00:23:53] Frank: More so, in a manner of speaking, was able to bring the family into a new future, a better future.
[00:24:00] Yvette: That's right. That leaves us with our last lesson. If the first lesson is we can't predict the future, we can map it, and we need to think in simultaneous multiples. Multiple futures is our second lesson. The third lesson is build capacity.
[00:24:12] Frank: Oh, I love it because you can imagine at the end of this film, if you get to see it, the community shifts to a new way of seeing their way forward. It's not based on the prophecy of the candle and Bruno's vision and all this. Those are almost mystical in a way, and they shifted out of that to more of about collaboration, cooperation, the community, agency, building the future. It was a different environment at the end of the film. It's one that's much more foresight-friendly.
[00:24:39] Yvette: And much more sustainable.
[00:24:40] Frank: And much more sustainable.
[00:24:41] Yvette: We're constantly worried. If we're thinking that the power comes from outside as from a candle or something else, it could be fleeting, but when we realize it's really within ourselves, that we all have those incredible opportunities, it's really a lot more long-lasting in that way.
[00:24:59] Frank: I know we drifted away from what might seem like traditional foresight really, but if you're a practitioner or you want to be a practitioner or you're inside an organization, you know, you've heard us before say, or if you haven't, you're about to hear it for the first time, that there's all of these elements that go into foresight that don't seem foresight-related on the surface but are so powerful like cooperation and collaboration and diversity of voice because, in the end, the community brought the tools and the stuff to rebuild the house.
They always were just like, "Oh, do the thing for us," but at the end, the community was fully on-board with rebuilding the house and it was all one voice. We know that we need that diversity of strength and thoughts to build better futures.
[00:25:42] Yvette: I love that.
[00:25:43] Frank: That's the culture, building the foresight culture. The whole culture.
[00:25:46] Yvette: Building the foresight culture, right. Again, we've said this previously, you can't outsource the future. Any foresight effort should include capacity building or else, it's just going to be another prophecy about your goldfish dying, and it's not super useful.
[00:26:02] Frank: Have we ever had a client before that said, "Just tell me what's going to happen to my goldfish"?
[00:26:07] Yvette: Not in this many words, but they've pretty much told us, "Just tell us what's going to happen to X."
[00:26:11] Frank: I'm already thinking of a future podcast that I don't want to spoil in any way, shape, or form, but I remember certain clients saying like, "Tell us this. Don't tell us this." We did tell them the second thing and they got really mad.
[laughter]
[00:26:24] Yvette: I feel like all our podcast is going to be the same if we keep going in there.
[00:26:27] Frank: We'll get there eventually. No, it wasn't saying goodbye and forgetting about it. A bit of a different twist, but we'll get to it.
[00:26:33] Yvette: All right, so we've reached the part of our podcast where we do our shoutout and it's always fun thinking about who we want to give a shoutout to. We try to link it to the content of the podcast. Today, we're excited to give a shoutout to Rosa Alegria.
[00:26:51] Frank: That's right.
[00:26:52] Yvette: How did I do? I wonder if I pronounced it well.
[00:26:55] Frank: She's going to write us because she's a wonderful person, and she's going to write or tell us whether we said her-- We were close.
[00:27:00] Yvette: I'm channeling my Spanish knowledge.
[00:27:05] Frank: It's technically a Portuguese pronunciation.
[00:27:06] Yvette: Right, but there's some overlap. Rosa Alegria. Tell us about Rosa.
[00:27:13] Frank: I could say a lot about Rosa because we watch her from a distance. She is one of Brazil's, if not Brazil's top futurist, and we have a great long-distance relationship with her. As a matter of fact, not long ago, she might have nominated somebody for the year of free.
[00:27:30] Yvette: Yes, she did.
[00:27:31] Frank: We're super excited about that, but that's not what we're highlighting. We're highlighting because we try to highlight somebody in the show that really fits the theme, so we don't talk about futures. That doesn't seem to really fit her, but it does in building a foresight culture.
[00:27:46] Yvette: Especially, community-wide.
[00:27:48] Frank: Rosa also works hand in hand with Teach the Future, which is Peter Bishop's organization. Of course, she's part of the organization as well. She wrote on Twitter, I think, this morning. Not Twitter, Instagram, this morning or yesterday. She wrote, "Today, we had the first futurists class with eight classes of elementary one" from a certain school in Brazil. She says, "Futurist literacy officially enters as a subject in the school's curriculum for all elementary-school students in 2022. This is a pioneering course in the world, an initiative of Teach the Future Brazil in partnership with the school and based in Sao Paulo.
Today's class was in recognition of the three times that it was done." By the way, because Teach the Future empowers teachers to do this work of foresight courses in schools, and the teacher was her daughter who also has an Instagram account.
[00:28:47] Yvette: We love that.
[00:28:47] Frank: She says, "A sense of legacy that I'm leaving behind."
[00:28:51] Yvette: Wow, wonderful.
[00:28:52] Frank: We read that and we were super-excited. We saw a couple of months ago that in Copenhagen, I think it was the Copenhagen Institute for the Future, was also doing an initiative there where they were putting future in elementary schools. That is so exciting to see. Building, not just the foresight culture but starting at the elementary grades when we're getting to these children early and building the world of tomorrow. Rosa, we think that is so powerful. We're so excited about that. We hope that the shoutout causes people to call on you and write you up and maybe get more involved in what you're doing there because what a great initiative.
[00:29:29] Yvette: That's right. She's giving the gift of futures-thinking to future Mirabels and Brunos-
[00:29:39] Frank: Brunos and the world.
[00:29:40] Yvette: - and the world and giving people the capacity to, not only be able to think this way but think critically, think in simultaneous multiples, imagine incredible, possible futures and make better decisions in the present to make them happen.
[00:29:54] Frank: Absolutely, so that's wonderful.
[00:29:55] Yvette: Fantastic.
[00:29:56] Frank: It's been great spending time with you guys again, and we got to spend time with Mirabel and Bruno today and always with you, Yvette.
[00:30:02] Yvette: Yes, and next week is a special week.
[00:30:05] Frank: Oh, yes.
[00:30:06] Yvette: We'll be live next week, so if you've ever been screaming into your Airpods as you're listening to this podcast telling us what to--
[00:30:15] Frank: Frank and Yvette, I've got something to add. You left something out.
[00:30:18] Yvette: I know.
[00:30:19] Frank: This is your chance.
[00:30:19] Yvette: It's your chance because it's part of our year of free inspiration. Continues next week with our weekend opportunities live session. We're going live on YouTube, so check that out, reserve your spot, and hopefully, we'll see a lot of you there. Until then, please make sure you're taking part in the year of free. This is our year of free celebration, the year 2022, where we're giving away free tuition to our global programs, free inspiration like The Wicked Opportunities Podcast, and free access to our natural foresight framework, which is now open source. Find out all the information you need at thefutureschool.com/yearoffree.
[00:31:03] Frank: [singing] Now we've talked about Bruno.
[00:31:06] Yvette: We have, yes, and now that song will be stuck in your head for the rest of the foreseeable future.
[00:31:11] Frank: Like an ear worm.
[00:31:13] Yvette: Excellent.
[00:31:13] Frank: Take care everyone. We love you.
[00:31:15] Yvette: Bye-bye.