How ‘smart’ investors are killing your future – and theirs too

As I sat at the second ever Systemic Investing Summit in London in March, among 180 hand-picked global wealth holders and controllers, philanthropists, academics and industry practitioners, one disturbing image kept coming to mind.

While we discussed innovative financing models and systemic approaches to capital deployment that could save humanity from collapse, I couldn’t shake the thought that the world outside was still arguing about the seat colours on a runaway train.

Our society and life as we know it is that train and it’s thundering across the countryside. In the luxury carriage up front, politicians furiously debate the colour of the seats and legislation about proper etiquette in the dining car. They’re forming committees to determine if the train’s lights should be replaced with more energy-efficient options while occasionally glancing out the window to smile at people waving violently as they pass.

In the next carriage, investors huddle around performance reports, celebrating as their numbers climb. They order champagne to toast their cleverness, each imagining how their peers will applaud the next article they write about the rigours of their investment process.

Philanthropists occupy the third carriage, earnestly discussing how to improve conditions in the sixth and seventh carriages, drafting mission statements and impact reports about their commitment to carriage equality and the environmental sustainability therein.

Academics fill the fourth carriage, publishing papers about the train’s historical significance and theoretical maximum velocity, arguing over whether the train’s current speed is unprecedented or merely unusual.

The London Systemic Investing Summit

In the fifth carriage, tech founders are glued to their screens, designing algorithms to disrupt the experience of the people on the train. They build virtual reality so passengers can experience imaginary landscapes, convincing themselves and trying to convince others that they’re designing a better future for everyone aboard.

Scattered throughout are a handful of engineers moving urgently between compartments, carrying charts that show dangerous conditions ahead and worrying calculations about the train’s acceleration. They knock on doors, interrupt meetings and plead with everyone to sit with their data and to hear what it says.

The politicians thank them for their input before returning the floor to their honourable friends. Investors glance at the data then message their group chat to orchestrate the shorting of railroad stocks, before posting on LinkedIn about how they each saw the crisis coming because they’re ‘contrarian thinkers’. The Philanthropists invite grant submissions for better warning systems and promise working groups to develop frameworks for evaluating the proposals against their existing impact reports.

The academics welcome the engineers’ reports, noting that with a more robust sample size they could publish the data in a peer-reviewed journal — each from one of their 129 individual perspectives.

The Tech executives ask the engineers to build an API for the data so it can be integrated into large language models, promising to “circle back” after their current fundraise, but probably also the next.

Behind them all, in increasingly crowded conditions, sit everyday citizens. Some press their faces against the windows, watching the landscape blur past at alarming speeds. Others argue about which carriage has the best view or the nicest coloured seats, and who has the right to use which of the toilets — all of which are the same.

Most simply trust that someone, somewhere, up front they assume, must be driving the marvel of engineering they’re aboard.

A few desperate engineers push to the front of the train, to warn the driver about the sharp curve ahead, to alert them that their speed is dangerously high. They reach the last door, breathless with urgency, only to discover what no one on the train had realised — not the politicians drafting etiquette laws, not the celebrating investors, not the philanthropists with their mission statements, not the academics with their calculations, not the tech founders with their future visions, not even the citizens with their faith in the train — the driver’s compartment is empty.

It has been for miles. The train is now accelerating on its own, approaching a sharp curve no one is prepared to navigate.

This affects you, me, and all of us

This is not just a colourful metaphor. It is our stark reality — one affecting each of us regardless of our position on the train. The global polycrisis we face  —  converging catastrophes in climate, biodiversity loss, economic inequality, and democratic decline — is not being meaningfully addressed by those with the power to change our course, including those who believe they’re insulated from the consequences of the coming catastrophe. 

The Stockholm Resilience Centre reports we’ve crossed six of the nine planetary boundaries maintaining Earth’s stability, including climate change, biodiversity loss, and land-system change. These aren’t abstract markers  —  they represent the guardrails of humanity’s safe operating space, and we’re beyond them. Systems collapse is here.

We saw the effect of this play out in real time during the 2023 global food crisis, when simultaneous climate-triggered crop failures across four continents drove food prices up 43% in a single quarter. Investment firms holding agricultural futures celebrated their windfall profits, while 300 million people faced acute food insecurity. The market mechanisms that were supposed to create stability  —  as free market advocates so readily fall back on  —  failed catastrophically. And, that’s just one example. 

The finance industry offers us a terrifying glimpse of what’s to come when it collapses.This sector, which employs less than 1% of all people, is now equal to 25% of global GDP, and extracts $430 per year from every living person on Earth—in a world where over half of all people survive on less than $5.50 a day.

While global GDP has grown 7x since 1983, the financial sector has expanded 25x, creating a civilisation destroying $3.4 trillion annual profit – more than the entire GDP of Italy – which is distributed every year to just 3% of the population who own the finance industry through stocks.

This extraordinary growth has occurred in the absence of any evidence of benefit to the real economy.

Lord Adair Turner, former top UK Financial Regulator, says the industry’s expansion hasn’t grown the broader economy—it’s extracted rent from it to fuel its own growth. As he stated more bluntly in a 2019 address to the Institute for New Economic Thinking: “Much of what takes place in financial markets is rent extraction, not wealth creation. It is a zero-sum game that is extracting value from the real economy rather than adding to it.”

The London Systemic Investing Summit

It’s created unprecedented social inequality and barriers to prosperity that regulation alone will never fix, nor will business as usual.

The industry, which extracts from all people for the benefit of just 4% of us, is set to grow in size 7.4% per year in the next 3 years alone, meaning that by 2028 it will be 23.4% larger than it is now. With the global economy set to grow just 10.2% in the same time, the finance industry is growing at a pace 129% faster than the economy.It is the single largest and most damaging force that exists on earth today when it comes to the prospect of humanity surviving. 

The existential threat from the finance industry alone, as just one example of pending systems collapse, parallels the urgency captured in French Senator Claude Malhuret’s recent address about current geopolitical challenges: “The task of our generation is to defeat the totalitarianisms of the 21st century.”

In our economic context, this totalitarianism takes the form of an extractive finance system that concentrates wealth while depleting the social and ecological foundations that sustain us. Just as Malhuret called for Europe’s “moral rearmament” against external threats, our economy requires a fundamental recommitment to values beyond profit, beyond maximisation, and at the complete exclusion of extraction  —  the very thing it’s built on today.

Senator Malhuret said we must convince public opinion despite weariness and fear  —  similarly, we must overcome business-as-usual inertia in private equity, venture capital, philanthropy and institutional investing despite mounting evidence of imminent systems collapse that according to Indy Johar of Dark Matter Labs, more than 7 billion of the world’s 8 billion people will not survive.

The stakes could not be higher

Systems collapse isn’t a distant threat  —  it’s beginning now. The evidence surrounds us: the WWF’s Living Planet Report documents a staggering 69% average decline in wildlife populations since 1970.

Scientists in Science magazine have identified multiple climate tipping points triggerable at just 1.5°C of warming  —  a threshold we’re rapidly approaching, if we haven’t already crossed it. All this against the reality that our economic, social, and ecological systems are interconnected in ways that render our current isolated interventions completely ineffective.

Across multiple domains — from finance to food systems, from energy to education — we see the same pattern: extractive practices concentrating power and wealth while undermining the very foundations these systems depend on. This extraction is a cancer expecting to kill its host yet somehow continue living, and it’s everywhere — in almost every investment decision made daily by people deploying capital. 

Some experts forecast civilisation collapse within my lifetime, which will surely end within 60 years. But the tipping points come much sooner.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change gives us less than seven years to halve global emissions before we trigger irreversible climate feedback loops.

The Bank for International Settlements warns of a financial system shock by 2029 that will make the 2008 crisis look like the foreword to War and Peace. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization predicts that soil degradation will reduce global agricultural capacity by 30% by 2035. These aren’t distant concerns — they’re this decade’s emergencies, as the 2023 food crisis proved.

If we were to visualise these converging crises on a single graph — plotting the exponential curve of financial extraction against the declining curves of biodiversity, soil health, and social cohesion — the intersection point would be unmistakable and alarmingly close.

Such visualisations already exist: the Stockholm Resilience Centre’s ‘planetary boundaries’ dashboard glows red in six of nine critical areas, while MIT’s updated Limits to Growth projections show industrial output peaking before 2030.

The Stockholm Resilience Centre’s planetary boundaries charts

Individual and economic agency is eroding at record speed as living costs rise, creating a devastating feedback loop: pushing vulnerable populations into poverty, with a growing middle class following, while amplifying large asset holders’ wealth.

The latest Oxfam report, Survival of the Richest, confirms this: the richest 1% captured nearly twice as much new wealth as the bottom 99% combined over the past decade, with concentration accelerating during recent global crises. Political polarisation, fuelled by wealth inequality, now threatens democratic institutions and market economies — a fact substantiated by the V-Dem Institute’s Democracy Report showing democracy declining globally for the 17th consecutive year, as if anyone needed confirmation of what we all see.

Meanwhile, the AI revolution promises to dramatically deepen this divide, triggering the largest and most destructive wealth transfer in human history.

Any investment you make, any startup you back, any venture you follow that doesn’t specifically address how to limit, stop and reverse extraction takes us one step closer to the total collapse of the society we all need to survive — including you. 

It’s no coincidence that heiress Abigail Disney recently said any wealthy person who cannot share their wealth “is kind of a sociopath.” It may discomfort you to think that anyone holding wealth who isn’t actively deploying every cent toward preventing societal collapse might be mentally unwell. But how else should she describe people who are equipped to slow the train, standing in the driver’s compartment with their hand on the brake, who fail to pull it?

The consequences are no longer limited to the marginalised. Make no mistake: unlike climate change, where some believe wealth can insulate them, systems collapse affects everyone — even those at the front of the train. For when it derails, first-class will fall just as hard as the rest. The physics of collapse don’t respect wealth or status.

A call for systemic investing

The presence of a small but interdisciplinary delegation at the Systemic Investing Summit highlights that transformational change through collaboration is possible, but requires fundamentally rewiring our approach.

As Sarah Teacher, co-CEO of the Impact Investing Institute, noted, “Systemic investing is a sophisticated, complex approach to impact investing — one that recognises the power of combining impact strategies with deep collaboration, centering the system outcome above all else” — including, much to most leading impact investors discomfort, profit itself.

The London Systemic Investing Summit

This shift requires moving from isolated, project-by-project solutions to orchestrated, systemic interventions. It demands polycapital approaches, combining different funding and financing types — virtually unprecedented today — to drive meaningful systems change. Most importantly, it requires centring human outcomes above financial returns. Some experts, like author Graham Boyd, argue this cannot happen unless we change how companies incorporate, to in no way treat the company as investors’ property, or even its employees.

While the challenges are immense, promising models are emerging.

For instance, the Buen Vivir Fund, launched in 2018, has pioneered a new approach where investors and communities co-create terms and share both risk and returns. Their initial $1 million investment has catalyzed multiple successful community enterprises in Latin America and led to the development of governance systems that place ecological regeneration at their core. Unlike conventional impact funds that maintain traditional power dynamics, the Buen Vivir model has proven that truly transformative finance can deliver both tangible returns and systems change simultaneously.

The Summit’s opening address delivered a stark reminder of the impact of unimaginable change. As poet and narrative expert Ashanti Kunene stood before the gathered wealth-holders, she stripped away the veneer of financial abstractions with her words about the world we know today: “I am the mother of every market you have ever and will ever build” she said of Mother Earth, laying bare the fundamental truth that our economic systems rest entirely upon the foundation of life itself—the earth, human bodies and natural resources. “

Long before there were markets, before there were stocks, before there were banks, there was the land, the river, the sun,” Ashanti reminded us. In that moment, the illusion of finance as a self-sustaining reality shattered, and you could feel it in the room.

Profits, markets, investment strategies—these are human inventions, social constructs we’ve created. They hold no inherent value without the bedrock of living systems we are destroying.

Ashanti challenged the assembled privilege directly: “You who are the most powerful, are you truly able to share your power and privilege, a sharing that is required for systems change?”

Her poem demanded we recognise Mother Earth herself, with a reminder of why such recognition matters to us all: “She, Mother, Earth, Womb from which we all come, Tomb to which we will all return.”

Ashanti reminded the Summit that centering human outcomes above financial returns isn’t just ethical—it’s logical, and vital to our survival – and by ‘our’, I mean yours and mine. She reminded us that we’ve inverted reality by placing our invented systems above the living systems that sustain them and us. When the financial system extracts without regenerating, it ultimately destroys the very foundations upon which it depends.

As Ashanti profferred, there is surely no future without the Earth that makes all human endeavors – including finance, business and profit – possible.

The ultimate investment paradox

Whether you’re a venture capitalist seeking the next unicorn, an impact investor balancing returns with social good, a private investor managing family wealth, or simply contributing to your retirement savings: Your current investment strategy is fundamentally self-defeating.

The hard truth is that your entire investment portfolio will go to zero unless you radically change your approach. Author and physicist Graham Boyd believes most investment portfolios will drop to zero between 2030 and 2040. Under that scenario, in less than 15 years, most people with what they consider wealth today will no longer have any. 

When food systems collapse, as we’re already witnessing, when supply chains disintegrate, as during COVID, when social contracts unravel — what will your carefully cultivated 8% annual returns be worth? Have you calculated the ROI of investing in a society that no longer functions? What’s the value of your portfolio in a world where supply chains have collapsed and basic needs cannot be met? The empirical evidence is clear: continuing to make investment decisions primarily based on profit in a collapsing system is like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic while calculating their optimal rental price.

The NASA-funded HANDY model demonstrates how current trajectories of resource depletion and inequality mirror patterns preceding every historical societal collapse. What does this collapse look like in human terms? It means parents unable to feed their children as supply chains break down. It means hospitals without medicine or electricity. It means formerly middle-class families suddenly homeless as financial systems implode. It means violent competition for dwindling resources. It means you not being able to get to work, if you have work, without someone attacking you on the street to steal what you have.

The mathematical models predict these outcomes with cold precision, but each data point represents real human suffering. The sobering 50-year validation of MIT’s 1972 Limits to Growth models shows we’re tracking their “business as usual” scenario, which projects systemic decline beginning in this decade.

The greatest investment paradox of our time is this: to save your portfolio, you must stop investing via ordinarily incorporated companies that are simply pursuing profit. You must replace the funding of extraction and start investing to transform the systems that will otherwise destroy the value of your portfolio entirely. This isn’t idealism — it’s the most hardheaded, pragmatic investment strategy possible amid converging crises.

I can hear the objections already: ‘But systemic investing will hurt our short-term returns.’ Yes, it will — in the same way that slowing down before a curve hurts your average speed but prevents a fatal crash. The data shows that investors who adjusted their strategies before previous systemic shocks — like those who divested from fossil fuels early — outperformed over time. ‘But it’s too complex to implement.’ Complexity is not an excuse for inaction when the stakes are existential.

I recognise that most investors and investment committees are acting according to what they genuinely believe are rational, fiduciary-responsible decisions. They’re following established models and frameworks, doing exactly what their training taught them to do. The problem isn’t individual malice — it’s collective blindness to how fundamentally the world has changed around these models.

Some may reasonably question whether systemic investing alone can solve problems of this magnitude. It can’t — no single approach can. But what systemic investing provides is a critical leverage point that can catalyse and amplify other necessary changes in policy, technology, and culture. Without redirecting capital flows, other interventions will lack the resources to scale at the pace required.

The truth is that continuing business-as-usual investing is the only risky strategy when all evidence points to systems collapse.

This is inherent to portfolio theory itself. As Graham Boyd says: “Every portfolio investing according to Modern Portfolio Theory, or its variants, is exposed to little-known unprotected downside risks (the Ergodicity error). To compensate within a company portfolio, the only lever fund managers have is extractive practices. To change, to have systemic investing, requires ceasing to invest via a portfolio approach. Instead, we must invest in the entire system.”

Ignorance is false security

For those feeling secure in their position, believing the status quo serves them well, that wealth will save them, I offer this stark reality: the business-as-usual approach is a mirage of stability in a rapidly destabilising world. Your quarterly profits, market share, competitive advantages — all rest on systemic foundations that are crumbling in real time. The things that make you feel safe, your assets and wealth, have no value at all if these systems collapse, and it’s your current investments that will ensure that outcome. 

How many quarters of growth do you think remain when topsoil is depleting 13% per decade? When freshwater aquifers are being drained at eight times their recharge rate? When inequality has reached levels that historically precede violent social upheaval? Why are you even using the word ‘profit’ any more when someone’s standing at your front door with a match, ready to burn down all that you’ve built?

The UN Environment Programme reports our global material footprint has more than tripled since 1970, with resource extraction accelerating far beyond population growth — a trend that cannot continue on a finite planet.

As Illinois Governor JB Pritzker warned in his recent State of State address, “There is a whole industry of backseat bellyachers…who make a profession out of rhetorically tearing down… and suggesting that if we would just enact one of their magic bean fixes we would never face another difficult year. But… there are no magic bean fixes.”

Let me be brutally honest: there is no “opting out” of systemic collapse. No hedge fund clever enough, no gated community secure enough, no farm isolated enough, no technology advanced enough to shield you when fundamental systems fail.

The Bank for International Settlements has documented how global financial systems’ interconnectedness has increased their vulnerability to cascading failures — creating systemic risk levels far exceeding those before the 2008 crisis.

There are no escape pods. You cannot buy them. They do not exist. 

When ecosystems crash, supply chains collapse, and social contracts disintegrate, we will all feel the impact — regardless of our position on the train. Governor Pritzker captured this perfectly: “Tyranny requires your fear and your silence and your compliance. Freedom requires your courage.” The same applies to our economic and ecological systems — their transformation requires your collective courage, not silent compliance with destructive and extractive practices.

Tools now, not more theory

Now, a rebuke of my own community – harsh, but necessary and true.

I believe it is the job of those of us working in systems change to create tools that ordinary people, irrespective of their place on the train, can use today to create better prospects for tomorrow. We cannot ask those in fear of today, without the privilege of the knowledge we have, to prioritize our fears of tomorrow when we’ve given them no tools to help prevent its arrival.

Or, as Kasper Benjamin Reimer Bjørkskov, says “We cannot expect those who are simply trying to survive to engage in deep introspection about systemic problems.”

The world doesn’t need more theories, white papers, or summits. We already have the theory. It is incumbent upon us to engineer practical tools that people can use to engage in the work needed for our collective survival. We can no longer ask others to change systems when we’ve completely failed to engineer a way for them to do so. That is our job. We are the engineers. Humanity will surely fail if we expect others to do what we ourselves could not. And it’s time we stopped hiding from that.

As someone who moved from paramedicine to financial services because I saw the system creating the problems I was trying to solve, I understand the allure of symptomatic relief. But when a patient is hemorrhaging, a story about bandaids will not save them. We need radical intervention.

Any business, investment, or policy that doesn’t fundamentally address systemic issues is now actively reinforcing a doomed trajectory. Incremental improvements and “doing less harm” approaches, like impact investing itself, are completely insufficient when we’ve already passed multiple planetary boundaries.

We need transformation. Not improvement. Not reform. Or, we’ll die.

Tomorrow’s tools: a pathway to action

Every stakeholder in our society now faces a binary choice. You are either working to transform the systems driving us toward collapse, or you are, through action or inaction, accelerating humanity’s journey toward collapse.

The choice is yours, but neutrality is an illusion. “Business as usual” is not a middle path — it is an active choice to accelerate toward the curve. Every investment prioritising extraction over regeneration, every policy favouring short-term growth over long-term resilience, every business model externalising its costs onto our society and planet — these are not neutral decisions. They are active choices to keep the train accelerating toward humanity’s doom and you must consider your role in them. 

There are five concrete actions everyone can take to become part of the solution through systemic investing:

1. Map key organisations: Find people doing systems change work, including: Dark Matter Labs, designing civic infrastructure and financial mechanisms aligned with long-term public good; the TransCap Initiative, incubating systemic investing models for landscapes, cities, and supply chains; and TWIST, a community deploying capital for systemic transformation. Key players also include FEST, supporting financial ecosystems for systemic transformation; the University of Zurich’s Center for Sustainable Finance and Private Wealth (CSP), aligning private wealth with sustainability; and the MIT Sloan Sustainability Initiative, integrating systems innovation into business and finance. Other influential actors include The Impact, a global membership community of families committed to aligning assets with values; the School of System Change, training financial practitioners in systemic methods; Reos Partners, facilitating large-scale finance-related transformation; and Systems Change Lab, tracking and supporting global financial shifts toward systemic impact. 
2. Map the systems in your life: Develop visual maps identifying connections between system elements and precise intervention points. This isn’t abstract theory — it’s a practical diagnostic tool revealing where your actions can have the greatest impact. If your portfolio is heavy on Agtech or food production, look at what most threatens agricultural systems and deploy capital reversing those threats, and do it without expecting a return unless you want your existing investments to go to zero. If you’re heavy on fintech, investigate threats undermining the entire finance system and invest in solutions. Or, if you don’t know where to start, perhaps it’s best to liquidate those assets now and invest in projects proposing new foundational systems. Your assets are going to zero. You might as well control the timing and have a stake in the new value systems. How to tell your investors? Start with the truth — their investments are already worthless and they’re likely just years away from everything they’ve built burning to the ground as the systems they depend on collapse. 
3. Build strategic portfolios, regardless of size: Instead of isolated investments subject to reductionist mandates excluding required solutions, create portfolios working synergistically across asset classes to transform systems. Think beyond risk-return to synergies-return optimisation, leveraging multiple capital forms (financial, social, intellectual) toward a shared goal. If your investment committee isn’t actively asking “does this investment accelerate the collapse of our society by extracting profit to grow our portfolio?” — you’re probably not building a strategic portfolio. If the words “profit” or “return” aren’t considered alongside “extraction,” you’re likely setting fire to your future as investors and as humans. If you’re still sitting in investment meetings in 2025 where people discuss performance or profit without discussing systems change, you might as well jump out the nearest window now because you’re setting fire to the building you’re in. For organisations doing things right, look up TwinRiver Capital and speak to Ilse Treurnicht. For exemplary private investors, seek our Katie and Brian Boland at Delta Fund in Seattle and listen to them like your life depends on it. For Australian actors taking necessary steps, look beyond the impact investors sponsoring impact summits to those doing hard, introspective work — Danny Almagor and Berry Liberman at Small Giants Family Office exemplify true leadership in this space. ReGen Melbourne is also taking important steps worth emulating, with CEO Kaj Löfgren a great person to learn from. 
4. Support backbone organisations and significant ventures: Fund coordinators bringing stakeholders together around shared objectives, and do it not for profit, but because not doing it will bring about our end. These organisations and people create collaboration infrastructure across sectors and build bridges between diverse actors working toward common goals that we need for our survival. If you meet someone who speaks of systems change, and has the skill necessary to link even two previously unrelated people together, and can get them to work collaboratively, give them your money, and ask for nothing in return. They are the people that will save us, and they aren’t doing it to get rich. If you only give your money to foundations, because that’s where the tax deductions lie, you may as well throw all your money on the ground now and run away from it, because that’s what you’re committing to tomorrow.  
5. Deploy catalytic capital without strings: Use current philanthropic or foundation dollars to de-risk and unlock commercial capital for systemic transformation. This isn’t just about grants — it’s about strategically blending different capital types to create entirely new financial mechanisms driving sustainable change. Does the structure confuse you? Great. Does it blur the lines between charity and business? Great. Does explaining it make everyone on the investment committee uncomfortable? Now we’re talking progress! For every $1 of concessional capital in blended finance, an average of $4 in private investment is mobilised globally, according to blended finance research. Start allocating dollars sitting in foundation accounts. If you’re serious about preventing societal collapse, aim to deploy every cent and close your foundation within 5 years — as Lankelly Chase Foundation and others are realising. After all, what’s the point of a foundation in a world where its assets are worthless? What’s the point of even establishing a foundation if you won’t use it to prevent a world where it and its capital source is worthless?
   

Lastly, the financial system will be the battleground between those displaced by AI and technological disruption and those benefiting from it, so I firmly suggest outsized focus on solutions there.

But this is just one of many systems undergoing radical transformation. From food systems to energy networks, from education to healthcare, we are witnessing the simultaneous destabilisation of multiple systems essential to human life and flourishing, so look to the systems you’re already invested in, and find the levers you can fund to prevent their collapse, or invest in solutions we’ll need once the collapse comes.

Just take the damn wheel

The emptiness of the driver’s compartment is not just a crisis — it’s an invitation. An invitation to step up, take responsibility, and initiate practical transformations needed to navigate the challenges ahead.

Kane Jackson and Erinch Sahan in Oxford

Ask yourself: When the train hits the curve, how will you justify inaction to those around you? Will you say you didn’t know? That you were too busy looking at performance reports, trying to find the next Google or OpenAI? That you thought someone else was driving? That nobody told you? That you were too insignificant to change the outcome?

History will judge harshly those who knew about the coming curve but chose to remain seated. For those unmoved by historical judgment, perhaps the fear of losing everything you cherish and having to fight to survive and feed your family will be motivation enough…

Tomorrow’s leaders will be those courageous enough to step into the drivers compartment today. Not next meeting, not next week, next month or next year. Today, you must ask:

Are your investment returns more important than your future? More important than your survival? More important than your child’s life? Are they more important than humanity?

Senator Malhuret said, “In history, the freedom fighters have always prevailed. They are beginning to raise their heads.” Governor Pritzker urges us, “gather your justice and humanity… do not let the ‘tragic spirit of despair’ overcome you…”

This is now our only hope — that enough brave people will recognise the urgent need to step into the driver’s compartment before it’s too late, to take the wheel, to be okay with the uncertainty of driving something they’ve never had to drive, and know that trying to drive towards a future we can survive matters more than how we do it.

The time for business-as-usual is over. The time for systems change is now. And you — yes, you — have a role to play in that change.

If you think you don’t, I pity you. You will be thanked for nothing, especially by your children — who will be left an entirely uninhabitable society. As yet may we all.

The train is still moving, the curve still approaching. Every hand that grabs the controls changes our course. Every extractive investment abandoned, every regenerative system funded, every act of courage by investors like you adjusts our speed and direction.

Those of us already in the compartment need you there, now.

We have to slow the train. You, and me, and all of us.

• Kane Jackson is the CEO and Co-Founder of Maslow, a social enterprise startup working at the forefront of systems change to turn the finance industry into the world’s largest collective benefit utility. He was recently invited to attend the Systemic Investing Summit 2025 in London. The full poem referenced above, delivered by Ashanti Kunene, can be watched here.