by Ian Khan | Feb 10, 2021 | Ian Khan Blog, Ian Khan's Blog, Podcast
Rodrigo Nieto, Defense Futurist in conversation with Futurist Ian Khan
In this episode i speak with Rodrigo Nieto, also a co-contributor to the recent book “After Shock”.
Bio
Dr. Rodrigo Nieto is a geostrategist and defense futurist focused on the consequences of the accelerating pace of change in homeland security and policing environments. He is a research professor at the National Security Affairs Department and at the Center for Homeland Defense and Security at the Naval Postgraduate School and has also worked as a certified facilitator and instructor for the Command College for the California Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training (POST) and former instructor at the Executive Academy of the Emergency Management Institute. He is also a faculty member of Singularity University.
Dr. Nieto has a Ph.D. in Geopolitics from the French Institute of Geopolitics of the University of Paris. He holds a J.D. from the State University of San Luis Potosi, Mexico.
For more than a decade, Dr. Nieto has taught hundreds of high ranking law enforcement, military, and homeland security leaders how to create and execute strategies to transform their agencies to meet the requirements of rapidly changing environments and threat profiles. As an innovation expert and an academically trained geostrategist, he has built a reputation as an expert on future threats to national security and policing and how to confront them. In the course of his research, he studied the geographic conditions that affect the security ecosystem of the U.S. perimeter, conducting terrain research on every mile of this important and conflictive territory.
Dr. Nieto has multiple publications describing the adaptation capacities of global organized crime, the public policy challenges of innovation and intrapreneurship in government and homeland security, asymmetric warfare, and cybersecurity.
Dr. Nieto has been recognized as one of the top 5% performing faculty members at NPS and had the honor of winning on two occasions the NPS LCDR David L. Williams Outstanding Professor Award.
His native language is Spanish and has bilingual proficiency in English, full professional proficiency in French and intermediate knowledge of German.
As an aviation enthusiast, he holds a private pilot certificate.
About After Shock
The world’s foremost futurists reflect on 50 years of Future Shock—and look ahead to the next 50
Contributors include:
Alan Kay
Aaron Frank
Adrienne Mayor
Alexander Mankowsky
Alexandra Ivanovitch
Alisha Bhagat
Amy Zalman
Anders Sorman-Nilsson
Andra Keay
Andrew Curry
Andy Hines
Anita Sengupta
Anne Lise Kjaer
Aris Persidis
Aubrey de Grey
Barry O’Reilly
Barry Vacker
Bill Davidow
Bill Diamond
Bryan Alexander
Byron Reese
Carlos Osorio
Carver Mead
Cat Tully
Cindy Frewen
Clem Bezold
Daniel Burrus
Daniel Levine
David Brin
David Guston
David Krakauer
David J. Staley
David Weinberger
Deb Westphal
Diane M. Francis
Donna Dupont
Eleanor “Nell” Watson
Eric Daimler
Erica Bol
Erik Qualman
Fotis Sotiropoulos
George Gilder
Grady Booch
Gray Scott
Hannes Sjoblad
Harish Natarajan
Hazel Henderson
Helen Messier
Ian Khan
Ignacio Pena
Jack Uldrich
James Canton
Jane McGonigal
Jason Jackson
Jason Schenker
Jay Gambetta
Jeff Eisenach
Jeffrey C. Bauer
Jerome Glenn
Jerry Fishenden
Joe Dispenza
Joe Tankersley
Joel Garreau
John L. Petersen
John M. Smart
John Sack
John Sanei
John Schroeter
Jonathan Venn
José Morey
Kaitlyn Sadtler
Kirk Borne
Klee Irwin
Kris Østergaard
Lisa Bodell
Maciej Kranz
Martin Guigui
Martin Rees
Maggie Greyson
Michael Tomczyk
Michel Laberge
Mick Ebeling
Moon Ribas
Naveen Jain
Neil Jacobstein
Newt Gingrich
Patricia Lustig & Gill Ringland
Paul Saffo
Paul Stimers
Po Bronson & Arvind Gupta
Ray Kurzweil
Rebecca Costa
Richard Browning
Richard Slaughter
Richard Watson
Richard Yonck
Rodrigo Nieto Gómez
Rohit Bhargava
Ross Dawson
Ruth Miller
Sanjiv Chopra & Pankaj K Vij
Sohail Inayatullah
Sridhar Mahadevan
Stan Rosen
Stephanie Mehta
Steve Waite
Tanya Accone
Terrence (Terry) Sejnowski
Teun Koetsier
Theodore Jay Gordon
Thomas Frey
Timothy Chou
Vikram Mansharamani
Wolfgang Fengler
Zoltan Istvan
Publication Details
ISBN Print: 978-0-9997364-4-9
ISBN eBook: 978-0-9997364-5-6
Full Transcript : hi friends welcome to the Ian Khan show and you’re watching and listening to aftershocks special episode in this episode and the series I interview contributors to the recent book aftershock. My guest today is Dr. Rodrigo Nieto Gomez and he is a geo strategist and defense futurist who’s focused on the consequences of the accelerating pace of change in security environments and governance. He’s also professor at the Naval Postgraduate School and a faculty member of Singularity University. Let’s be with Rodrigo.
Rodrigo. Welcome to the Ian Khan show. Thank you so much for joining us. And we are here doing an aftershocks special episode. How are you Rodrigo? Very good. Thank you so much for the invitation. It’s been certainly an interesting time. And it’s probably an interesting time to be talking about the issues of Future Shock right now. Absolutely. And one of the things that is so profound and Future Shock is that it has talked about a lot of things. But I think it didn’t talk about many of the things or many aspects of our life. And let’s talk about that right now. I want to know who you already go tell our audiences? Who are you? You’ve done so much. I want to see how you see yourself. Thank you so much. Well, I work for the Department of Defense of the United States of America government. As you can hear by my accent, I’m Mexican born. So I was born and raised in Mexico, I studied law there became a NAFTA lawyer. So a lot of my companies were either Canadian or American companies that were working in the NAFTA zone. These was around the time in which we were seeing an increase in this bureaucracy in America that we call Homeland Security, I got more and more interested on that side of things a lot less on the commerce and trade aspects. So I ended up doing a masters and a PhD in geopolitics at the French Institute of geopolitics of the University of Paris, in France. After that I moved to America, I and since then, I’ve been working for the Department of Defense on the intersection between Homeland Security, what we call home security, or security, and innovation and technology, adoption. Amazing. There’s probably so much knowledge in your mind, it’s going to be impossible to take it all out. But we’re going to talk about some of those things. Nothing confidential, though. So let’s talk about aftershock. I’ve read your piece, I’ve read your piece amongst all the other interviews that I’ve been doing. So I read everybody’s piece. And then I interview those folks. And your piece is one of the longest one of the most profound, and one of the most timely ones because it talks about the red tape, it talks about policies, it talks about all of these things that the bureaucracy that we’re facing in current times and was Alvin Toffler able to predict it. And if not, where are we going with this? You’ve written a lot you’ve written about, you’ve written about the congressional hearing that Mark Zuckerberg had, and and what the response of the Congress was, and many, many other things, our relationship with cell phones and devices and technology, how do you? What is your current vision of the world right now? Well, that’s an interesting question to ask right now, right? So we are all socially isolating, although we shouldn’t be using that term anymore. A good friend of mine, a police chief of the beat from the Bay Area told me we shouldn’t be describing these social isolation, we are physically distancing each other because we need to in order to slow the growth of COVID-19. But we should be connected more than ever before we need to support each other. Right. And in that regard, I can see how technologies like the internet are becoming the backbone of societal interaction, at least in the developed world, the developing world is a different story. So the world today is very different than the one that we have a month ago, right? If we would have had this podcast at the time, and that’s probably one of the issues about future shock is that it can surprise you in ways that you don’t anticipate. And bureaucracies like Homeland Security and the things that I work are built in theory to respond to events like these one, how well does response was, well, that would be a matter for many articles analysis of the future. So right now, what I see to answer your question is a world that is more and more dependent on scientific and technological revolutions. We are all praying for one particular innovation like COVID-19 vaccine, we want to get there as fast as we can. And we’re seeing the ramp up of innovation effort, like we’ve never seen, probably since Second World War. So we are single minded, we are dealing with the dramatic consequences of an event like this one. And I don’t think that we will go back to what we were before COVID-19, I think that we’ll come back to something that will be different, hopefully better. Absolutely. And I completely agree with you and I appreciate your comment. I have the same thoughts and feelings about the current era that we’re going to I also believe that humanity is undergoing a very big stress test. This is a test we didn’t call out for but it has happened because of the consequences of us living in a very complex world. It’s a world with free flowing trade. commerce flights, millions of flights taking over every single day. We’re very connected. The world today is very, very, very connected in all senses. And maybe that’s one of the reasons why the virus has spread the way it has. And it’s spreading. In today’s era, we are also very much isolated from each other because of technology. We are all glued to our technology or our devices. But we’re still interconnected. Such a different proposition. How do we fight something? What is happening right now? It’s Yes, at a inventing a sure is great. But behaviorally, what should we do in order to avoid any of this in the future, and this goes to the point that I tried to explain on that article, there is an effort to build a bureaucratic infrastructure around this idea of Future Shock, and sometimes that construction might be aiming at the wrong thing. And I specifically point out that some of our immigration fears that we saw in the first half of the 21st century, and that have to do with less technological and more demographic changes, right, the fact that some of the global north demographic composition is changing with the influx of people flip from the global south, and we saw the bureaucracy created, but right now you’re completely right. So the ultimate goal in the next two years is going to be the creation of a vaccine that allows us to respond with the most definitive kind of answer that modern medicine can give abroad. But before that, we have what I think are at least three stepping stones, right? So the aggressive non pharmaceutical interventions that we have right now, and p is epidemiology call them, these what you and I are doing right now, when you’re staying at home, away from your loved ones, with the sacrifices that that implies you’re doing a non pharmaceutical intervention. And it’s a really important one, because the only low hanging fruit that we have that doesn’t require science and technology, we can do it now and doesn’t require more innovation. Even there, though, you see immediately how innovation place right? So you see how in this talk about future certainly or time horizons went from strategic plans for 10 years to strategic plans for 10 weeks, right? So and even there, we’re getting them wrong. But we need rapidly solutions to making sure that people can have a job and keep working either from home or those need to be physically somewhere I mean, what is happening with that and lack of N 95 masks, all the thing hospitals, but also in the fields, where farmers are picking up the fruits and vegetables that were ordering online, we need to rapidly innovate to make that viable, we need to make a society, at least in the short term that is viable under these conditions, right? Just here in the United States, you you’ve seen the unemployment numbers, it’s 12 million people without a job like this. That’s not sustainable, right? So society will adapt. And in this case, government infrastructure and big corporations, foundations have to do as much as we can to make sure that in this short term, we have the tools that we need to do so and then their next steps, right, like regular testing public health breakthroughs, until we get to that vaccine. Absolutely. You’ve talked a little bit about things such as Uber, Airbnb, the evolution of all of these newer, and I’m literally looking at the book, all of these newer technological changes that have changed how business is conducted, what is your outlook on how do these things change society? How do they change our behavior? Is that something that you’re trying to tie in with your article as well? And yeah, as well, and you just, I mean, you just said, this is a stress test. And I think that’s a beautiful thing, a beautiful way of thinking about this, we probably should come out of this pandemic crisis with a new structure, part of the bureaucracy I talk about part of that is just new ways of doing business, almost with a switch. And so you can flip the switch and go into pandemic mode and not collapse society, the process, right, so there should be a way the same way. Every summer, we all migrate to beaches, and every winter we move into holiday season, every time that an outbreak in the heavily interconnected world that we have appears there should be a way hopefully, regionally and globally, but to be able to lock down that part of society and that lockdown doesn’t mean necessarily the destruction and obliteration of jobs, or companies, etc. Over instacart in America don’t have you have it in Canada, so all of the grocery shopping apps, they have become the lifeline of our society, right? So especially in urban environments, when we’re asking people to isolate them, these are the services that now we assumed are keeping our society alive. So it’s not only a stress test, it’s also an A B test. We have the 1918 namic as one example. And then we have the 2020 pandemic as another one. And one thing that has changed is that we have the internet and we have internet platforms on top of them. So I can assure you that after these jobs that are associated to activity that can be performed even without the colocation in an office space are going to be more coveted within your organization. He’d be more interested in a job like that, seeing what you’ve seen and being through what you’ve been through if you knew that a job can be performed from home, and it’s pandemic proof, let’s say or, or pandemic resistant, so that those changes, I think will be with us, even after we’re out of pandemic COVID-19. Hill. Yeah, I think from people perspective, people will find, first of all, I find there’s different types of people and their reactions are very different with respect to something like that, I’m seeing a lot of people who are doing nothing about the pandemic, they are, they’ve either been laid off, or their business as businesses have suffered, and they’re just waiting for things to open up, many of them will close the doors of their business forever. Have some of them are waiting for government aid. Like there’s a category of people who are unable to do anything about this at all, they can’t move. And it’s really unfortunate that it is the situation that they’re in, there are some who are trying to struggle who are trying to pivot or trying to find different means of doing things. And there’s some professions that have in job titles and jobs and roles that have really become busy doctors and nurses and frontline healthcare staff. And in one way, you know, when you stretch something, a balloon, or an elastic band just stretches things in a different way and puts tension and pressure in different places. That’s what’s happening. I think we’ve just been stretched like a string or a rubber band. And we’re trying to figure out where we are going to come back when this elastic band comes back again. But yeah, it’s I’ve spoken to literally 10s and hundreds of people I’m doing a few different things, live streams and conversations and calls is just completely different situation. Some places some markets are completely shut down, what have you seen in terms of shutdowns with respect to COVID-19, and it being maybe a new normal, as many people are seeing is this how we should live separate from each other? I don’t think that in the long term, if we’re talking more than two or three years, this will be the case this too shall pass. Right. So now, if for all of us who had the blessing of still knowing our meaning, or grandparents, many of them went through difficult things like that either a second world war, or my parents, my grandparents went through the Mexican Revolution that killed the big percentage of the population in Mexico. And you could see how even after decades of that their behaviors were adapted to that they would finish the food on their plate, they would know that not everything. And I think some of that will happen now. So I don’t think Americans will come back to what they were before. And that might be we are seeing more innovation in certain fields, companies that were reluctant to adapt the digital transformation strategies have done more in two weeks that they’ve done in 20 years before and businesses that were not the multi channel, for example, restaurants that were so successful that they wouldn’t even take takeout orders. So they are struggling and those who were already on the internet and take phone calls and delivered and were Luber eats only were more resilient. So one of the things that we’re learning is that multi channel matters, because one channel shuts down, you still have the orders to be able to keep functioning, continuity of operations, continuity of government, the government’s who are able to immediately jump to one SAP or assume with all its privacy flows that it might have, it’s been a lifeline for many specialty small governments that wouldn’t have the budget to immediately set up their own video servers on their own. So Cloud computing is showing us how much we can sustain operations even in a level of disruption like these one. And frankly, I mean, this is gonna make a big difference. My favorite restaurant, my favorite sushi restaurant doesn’t deliver on the internet, my second favorite DOS, guess which one has been taking all my money during this pandemic? So taste is just one factor. And in this case, companies that learn I think that they can succeed under extreme conditions, we’ll learn lessons that they can carry forward. That’s what bureaucracies do when they do it. Well. Absolutely. I want to read something from the book. This is part of your essay, and quote, the global society reacted with Future Shock or risk symptoms to this accelerated pace of technological change with what the media has now labeled as the tech lash. The tech lash is nothing other than a backlash against future shock. What exactly is this? What exactly is a tech lash? Yeah, so you might remember, right? So around 2018, right, we started to see these very big anti technology narrative or politics before right it had to do with the quantum analytic scale scandal for Facebook. But it also had to do with the issues of the lack of job security or quality of jobs around the gig economy or the platform based economy. gig economy is a pejorative term in itself. So when you start to see that probably the first 1015 years of the 21st century where time of all for Silicon Valley like companies and I’m using Silicon Valley here as an IBM not not as a place high tech companies that accelerate that can scale very rapidly. We know what companies were talking about by 2018. We were having what others are calling a tech lash, right? That a counter policy movement of people who felt that these companies have flown too close to the sun, that their ovaries was affecting us that they were changing society too soon. Right. So this is Alvin Toffler. One, one that their changes were so fast, they were moving fast and breaking things, and that we wanted to hit the brake and the way society hits the brake is through asking for regulation. It puts pressure on political entities. And we’ve seen this one, for example, in Germany or Singapore, where Uber is not allowed anymore to operate the way it wants to operate. And that tech lash was the story regarding technology for 2018. That story’s a little bit on the backburner right now, because suddenly, we need them. Right. And we need what they give us. We’ve seen the conversation, right, we see that some Amazon workers are asking, and probably the right for better protective equipment. And we’re seeing that instacart shoppers are being treated as heroes, because they’re the ones who are allowing urbanites to socially isolate. But I think that we have transitioned from thinking that this is bad as a element of the economy, to thinking of how do we make it better, but right now they have become essential workers. Right. So that’s a big change. Absolutely. Thank you, Rodrigo. I love it. Tell me a little bit about there’s so much going on. So I want to encapsulate our conversation into actionable points. For our listeners, whoever’s watching this video, hoping that they are able to create a change in their life business organization future because of our conversation, what would be maybe say the top three things that you would suggest anybody to do? What should they do about the filter to be bright, though, some of these are going to be trite, and they probably have heard them before, it’s just that the context has changed. One is gentleman psyche, right. So if you don’t like change, you’re going to like irrelevance even less. So right now we don’t have the luxury. And therefore, change is unavoidable. So if you can find a way of making this change work for you, this will matter. Secondly, and this is there are many people who have said this, but it also matters. Don’t let the crisis go to waste, right? This is a stress test. And sadly for you, you didn’t plan for it, and you didn’t want it, but you have it. And you’re seeing now where the failure points of your organization are located. Right. So this is an opportunity if you survive, and hopefully you will, if you can fix those failure points, you will come stronger out of this one. And third, remember what matters, right? At this point, this might be forcing us to reevaluate our loved ones or relationships. Also, those who have been in the startup world know that nine to five is a luxury we don’t have when you are building a startup, it’s okay. It’s a phase of your life. But at the end, the things that matter are the people you can hug and we’re missing them right now. Right? So So work balance matters to be successful. Absolutely. I completely agree. I always tell people that change will disrupt you interrupt you or help you grow. And it’s how we use the impact of change, because it’ll keep on happening. Different kinds of change will always happen in your life. Rodrigo, thank you so much for this amazing conversation. where can our viewers and listeners find out more about your work? So yeah, thank you so much. I’m on Twitter. I’m on LinkedIn, and also www Rodrigo Nieto gomez.com. It’s probably I should update it, because I haven’t been a while in the middle of these. But all of that is available. And of course I answer as much as I can to come in for through all the platforms already. Thank you so much, Rodrigo. We really appreciate your time. Thank you for being a contributor to aftershock. And aftershock is available on amazon.com. Thanks to our friend john Schroeder, who’s put it together and brought us all together under this one platform. Rodrigo. Have a safe time. I wish you and your family all the best. And we’ll definitely be in touch and connect soon. And I really appreciate it. Thank you so much to you and all your viewers. Thank you. Thank you. Hey, friend, this is Ian Khan. If you liked what you saw on my video, then please subscribe to my YouTube channel and be inspired every single day with innovative content that keeps you fresh, updated and ready for the future. For more information also visit my website at Ian khan.com
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by Ian Khan | Feb 10, 2021 | Ian Khan Blog, Ian Khan's Blog, Podcast
John Sanei Futures Strategist in conversation with Futurist Ian Khan
In this episode I interview John Sanei, fellow Futurist and one of the world’s best futures strategists and motivational speaker. John and I are also co-contributors to the book After Shock.
Bio
John Sanei comes alive at the intersection of human psychology and futurism, and uses his truly unique perspective to discover elegant ways for his global audience to build the clarity and courage needed to approach the future with confidence.
Not only is John Africa’s first Singularity University faculty member and a lecturer at Duke Corporate Education, he is also an Associate Partner at The Copenhagen Institute of Future Studies – the only person on the planet to hold these three positions.
His rare ability to combine his fascination with emerging technology and its impact on society with a clear understanding of the way memories and stories influence our reality has seen him share the stage with several world-renowned speakers, including Simon Sinek, Yuval Harari, Nassim Taleb and Robin Sharma, amongst many others.
John expresses himself through regular columns, radio, TV and podcast appearances – he also hosts The Expansive podcast – but is best known as a prolific author and dynamic speaker on technology, quantum- and neuroscience, and business strategy.
He has 4 best-sellers to his name, and he was also the only African invited to contribute to After Shock, a collection by the world’s 100 most prominent futurists, and a contributor to 90 Rules for Entrepreneurs: How to Hustle Your Way to a Business That Works, and The Book Every Business Owner Must Read.
John’s passion for writing and personal development also prompted him to create Future Self Academy, an online platform that helps people to enrich their perspectives by taking author-led online courses based on their favourite books.
Visit John at https://johnsanei.com/
About After Shock
The world’s foremost futurists reflect on 50 years of Future Shock—and look ahead to the next 50
Contributors include:
Alan Kay
Aaron Frank
Adrienne Mayor
Alexander Mankowsky
Alexandra Ivanovitch
Alisha Bhagat
Amy Zalman
Anders Sorman-Nilsson
Andra Keay
Andrew Curry
Andy Hines
Anita Sengupta
Anne Lise Kjaer
Aris Persidis
Aubrey de Grey
Barry O’Reilly
Barry Vacker
Bill Davidow
Bill Diamond
Bryan Alexander
Byron Reese
Carlos Osorio
Carver Mead
Cat Tully
Cindy Frewen
Clem Bezold
Daniel Burrus
Daniel Levine
David Brin
David Guston
David Krakauer
David J. Staley
David Weinberger
Deb Westphal
Diane M. Francis
Donna Dupont
Eleanor “Nell” Watson
Eric Daimler
Erica Bol
Erik Qualman
Fotis Sotiropoulos
George Gilder
Grady Booch
Gray Scott
Hannes Sjoblad
Harish Natarajan
Hazel Henderson
Helen Messier
Ian Khan
Ignacio Pena
Jack Uldrich
James Canton
Jane McGonigal
Jason Jackson
Jason Schenker
Jay Gambetta
Jeff Eisenach
Jeffrey C. Bauer
Jerome Glenn
Jerry Fishenden
Joe Dispenza
Joe Tankersley
Joel Garreau
John L. Petersen
John M. Smart
John Sack
John Sanei
John Schroeter
Jonathan Venn
José Morey
Kaitlyn Sadtler
Kirk Borne
Klee Irwin
Kris Østergaard
Lisa Bodell
Maciej Kranz
Martin Guigui
Martin Rees
Maggie Greyson
Michael Tomczyk
Michel Laberge
Mick Ebeling
Moon Ribas
Naveen Jain
Neil Jacobstein
Newt Gingrich
Patricia Lustig & Gill Ringland
Paul Saffo
Paul Stimers
Po Bronson & Arvind Gupta
Ray Kurzweil
Rebecca Costa
Richard Browning
Richard Slaughter
Richard Watson
Richard Yonck
Rodrigo Nieto Gómez
Rohit Bhargava
Ross Dawson
Ruth Miller
Sanjiv Chopra & Pankaj K Vij
Sohail Inayatullah
Sridhar Mahadevan
Stan Rosen
Stephanie Mehta
Steve Waite
Tanya Accone
Terrence (Terry) Sejnowski
Teun Koetsier
Theodore Jay Gordon
Thomas Frey
Timothy Chou
Vikram Mansharamani
Wolfgang Fengler
Zoltan Istvan
Publication Details
ISBN Print: 978-0-9997364-4-9
ISBN eBook: 978-0-9997364-5-6
Full Transcript : Hi friends, you’re listening to the Ian Khan show and this is an aftershock special episode. I’m speaking with a co contributor to the recent book aftershock. And it’s all about the future. It’s all about what else is there to come. Today I’m speaking with John Sanei, who is an author, speaker and trend specialists who’s fascinated with what it takes to activate the foresight needed to create an abundant future. JOHN is a writer. He’s an author, and really well known across futurist circles. Let’s speak with john, welcome to the show. I have with me today one of the most renowned future as they have been falling for a long time. And here we are part of Aftershock that was put together by a friend john shorter. I have with me today, john sanei, all the way from South Africa.
JOHN, welcome to the show. How are you? Wonderful, man, thank you so much for having me on. So we all undoubtedly are stuck right now, not just travel. That’s a small part of what happens in everyday life, but in expressing ourselves and doing what we do best. And that’s helping other people understanding the future helped create the possibilities. How’s life for you in COVID-19? How has 2020 been for you, and then we’ll talk about aftershock. Well, how’s 2020 be? Well, I gotta be honest, like everybody else, total surprise, if anything else. But once the dust settled from the shock of what is going on around us, and for the first time as humanity experiencing anything like this, I have found the space to be my most creative yet, I’ve had time to think like never before, I’m very fortunate to be able to have assessments around money and food and environment to keep me in a good state of mind, but really just started writing really fascinated with how things are changing how much more we can help people in a new world, because with any sort of crisis of this magnitude is always a renaissance that comes out of it and to be part of the Renaissance and help as many organizations to restructure, but what’s coming. So I’ve had, I’ve had a fascinating time researching and watching and learning a whole bunch of new things, because I’m sure you’ll agree that much of the work that we did before COVID-19 has become kind of irrelevant, because everything now has to come with a perspective of what COVID-19 has bought us as humanity. Absolutely. And let me tell you, I really find COVID-19 to be a big refresh. It’s like, you know, you press the press those refresh buttons and everything kind of goes back to a different normal that we didn’t know, I kind of agree with the fact that everybody’s calling this the new normal. I don’t feel this as a new normal because we’re in a state of chaos and chaos never stays forever, traditionally, and we haven’t seen it but I think we’re just going through a transition. It’s it’s a leveler. It’s a wake up call. It’s all those things that help us think more. Oh, you know, 50 years ago, Alvin Toffler wrote Future Shock and I have it somewhere near right behind me. And then our friend john Schroeder came along and said, hey, let’s put together another book called aftershock, which is 50 years after Toffler wrote his book, he talked about the future 50 years ago. I mean, it seems like a light year ago right now, uh, given how that progressed in the last 1015 years. And Toffler wrote about many different things. He didn’t write about pandemics a lot, but change, change, change is happening. And that’s what’s happening. Right, you practice. Change your I’ve read your essay in here as well. It’s amazing. I really love the insights that you shared. Tell me a little bit about how did you end up you know where you are today? And what was your journey, if you will over the last couple of few decades? Sure. Great question. I think I’ve always been an early adopter, I’ve always been able to see a trend just before somebody else was that was just the way I’m inclined, I’m always looking for the fresh the new. And so that was very easy for me, that part of it. And so I could connect these sort of invisible dots that other people couldn’t. And in my in my book foresight, I talk about the fact that interior designers have a skill set that can connect looks and feels to make a place look like a home, I don’t have that skill. And a great hairdresser can look at your face and say look, the best haircut for you would be I don’t have that skill either. But my skill is this early adoption skill that I’ve just always had. And I did really well with it until I was about 28 years old because I utilized the skill to invest and become an entrepreneur and opened up many businesses and became very successful. But I fell into the trap of not changing my world and staying constant with what I was doing. And in that process, lost track of the market and went bankrupt. And so I moved from this early adoption personality to one that was just staying safe because I started making money and I didn’t want to rock the boat too much. And now we’re talking back in 2007 2008 2009 somewhere around there. And then when I went through my bankruptcy at around 30 years old, I became really depressed and it depressions of weird thing because you don’t realize you’re often depressed because it happens so slowly. And what happens is that your group of friends around you acts like you do you shame and blame everything around you don’t really take responsibility and that’s kind of what depression is. And so I find myself circling this. I don’t know this like shoot of feeling bad for myself and being angry for what had happened. You can imagine a 30 year old guy whose life is built on his persona in businesses. Cause and that gets taken away. Who are you? I mean, you really just nobody. And you have to reinvent. And so I went on a very clear path of self discovery and that process, because I’m just the type of guy that I am, I’m incredibly ambitious and driven. And so I really dive deep into self development and came out of it on the other side with a clear understanding of victim Victor money consciousness, self value, projection, the five laws of creating anything you want from intention setting to allowance to law of attraction, so and then I started diving deep into neuroscience, because I wanted to understand how it could even get more powerful as a beam of creation. And what started happening is I realized that if I combine human psychology, neuroscience and the future, you start getting a really beautiful mix. Because what I think what usually happens is we tell people about the future, but they scared of it. And they’re fearful. And the reason that is, is that they stuck in the old psychology, they stuck in their memories of their past successes. And so if you understand neuroscience, we can untangle your past in order to create a real clean slate to create into the future with you combine that with categorizing, and conceptualizing the future in a cool way. People then develop trust, they develop clarity, and they make decisions now with much more ease rather than being stuck in paralysis of analysis. Yeah, so rightly said, I love how you put it together. You know, it’s really like, you know, you give somebody a box of Lego pieces, and you tell them go and create what you want to create. And I face this many times when people ask you to face this many times as well. But when people ask you with that tone of voice, so what does a futurist do, and they’re expecting that you’re going to say, Well, I look into my crystal ball every night, and then the nonprofit, but it’s not about that, it’s about being able to tick that box of Legos and saying, well, this, these are the possibilities. And there could be many possibilities, you can build so many different things. I really believe that people have access to those Lego blocks of their life, and they know their blocks more than anybody else. So well, but they don’t use it, they just feel confused that, hey, I can do nothing with these blocks, because I don’t know what to do with them. And that’s what you see, you know, that lack of clarity means that I’m so stuck in my past that cannot identify with a new version of myself and my new capabilities. And so what happens is they Lego boxes in their memories that have been created a Lego box of the future, so they don’t have clarity of what the new GPS coordinates are. And I often talk to companies and personal people in companies and say, Look, instead of doing a to b, a to do list created to be list, who do you want to be? How do you want to show up? And what sort of world do you want to be? And if you don’t have those GPS coordinates, how you know, you ever arrived, I made a video a little while back, and I said, why is it that most people can describe their next holiday in more detail than they can describe the future that want to live? And so like, if you don’t have that clarity, what do you think is going to happen? You’re going to be stuck in your past. And so yes, that’s my unique flavoring. Like if you had to think about a chef, but like Indian and Persian and Argentinian food that I’m putting together. And I guess the way I tell my stories and the way I do that, as I like to combine those two, you know, for people to take responsibility for the creation of the future rather than avoided. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Now you’ve written quite a few books, you’re obsessed with writing you love writing, which is amazing. So we’ll talk about your some of your upcoming books. But I want to read something that you’ve written in, in aftershock. And this is about really adding to what you’re just saying. So you know, the quote is, hindsight is useful when you’re looking for patterns. But a familiar past is only ever going to give you predictable ideas. And that’s of no real use in our unreasonable, unfamiliar future. And that’s what you’re exactly talking about is, you know, using the past hindsight foresight, you’ve written about the hindsight foresight, help us understand what these are, what is hindsight, what is foresight, I decided to describe foresight differently in our perspective. And what we have as human beings is four perspectives. We have hindsight, plain sight, insight, and foresight. And so people move between these different sites based on different aspects of their lives. So hindsight is obviously somebody who’s more focused on who they were than who they need to become. There’s a great quote from Dr. Joe dispenza, is also in the book. He says, Are you more focused on your memories of your past? Or are you more focused on the future that you want to live and most people are stuck in the hindsight and business owners are doing what they used to do just a bit more efficiently. And that’s not really what you need, right? So they can’t break away from that, because not even aware they’re doing then you get plain sight and people that live in plain sight are the ones that are stuck into Newtonian science from last century. And Newtonian science is one principle, that reality is objective. And outside of you, quantum science is not proving the exact opposite. It says that reality is subjective, and it’s inside of you. And people that suffer from Plain Sight are the cynics. They don’t believe there’s a better future because of their own old patterning, and they don’t want to have the opportunity to take responsibility to want to project in the new quantum science research that’s been proven. And then you get insights. And I think the biggest problem we have in the world today is people with insight and what insight is people with incredible levels of knowledge clever people that are focused on being experts at yesterday. rules. And if you look at the rules and the people that run the world today, what are they they’ve been trained in great universities and worked in corporate since the 80s. They in their 60s and 70s. And they’re excellent at the rules of yesterday. So they have incredible left brain power. But they’re not adaptable. Because people that live in the expert world is so experts in what they do, they can’t be adaptable. It’s focused on what they’ve known. And so what you get is you get foresight, which gives you this ability to be adaptable, flexible, and optimistic. And the two characteristics that I found through interviewing people around the world was they were one curious and two wise curiosity means a follow up shines brightest for me, what makes me most excited, what gives me access to most of my energy, what makes time disappear, what wisdom is, is healing your past. So you’re not expecting and channeling different stain patterns over and over and over in your life, where you focus on accomplishment, not purpose. And so many people are accomplished, but never reached their purpose. So they’re miserable in their high paying jobs with their fancy cars. So what you want for the human of the future is somebody with foresight, adaptability, and flexibility that’s curious and wise. And in this way, you can now be the superhero of the future, because now you’re adaptable naturally, and you become highly specialized in your skill because you love it. And so I use myself as an example. You know, I’ve never studied anything that I’m teaching. This is all self taught, all based on my own fascination. I in fact, never even went to university and I lectured universities based on my own curiosity and wisdom. Incredible. You’ve written in the book in aftershock as well. And you mentioned Alan Watts, who said, it’s, you know, a person who’s wise always unlearned, you’ve got to be able to uninjured. And when the glass is full, I mean, what do you put in it? people’s minds are so full of news media, tick tock YouTube videos. And so how do you how do you, you know, expect the world around you to be different when you’re not putting in that effort that inputs? I think it’s really important that people procreate, they actually take action towards building this better tomorrow that they want and that they’re envious off, whether it’s money, it’s fame, it’s health, it’s whatever, whatever. You just have a direction. Yeah, it’s, yeah, but remember, compound interest is created from helping you just helping yourself through the process. It doesn’t have any compound interest, because it’s just you, me, me, me, me, me, me. Yeah. And so I think really, the future is about this collaborative pneus. Instead of competition, we should be cooperating, we have a very intelligent consumer and the more intelligent he or she becomes, the better solutions, we need to have a better solutions abroad through cooperation or competition. So I really think that this COVID reset is a wonderful opportunity for us to develop a new way for us to interact because we’ve got an abundance of a lot of things in the world. And I’m sure you know, Jeremy Rifkin, his work around the zero marginal cost society where many things become free eventually. So now that we’ve got this abundance, how do we restructure, and that’s what fascinates me most is that really hard to collectively dream about what we can create, I’ve seen some really nice and progressive governments, especially in the UAE, progressive, because they do a lot of things that are different. And I was part of an exercise with one of the departments or agencies to understand the rule of transportation by 2017, to 070. And that’s the centennial anniversary of the UAE. And so, you know, we finished that exercise, and somebody else was running it as part of it, though. And it’s really nice to see that governments are thinking 5060 100 years from now, what are the possibilities, they’re not going out and building that right, the second, but you at least got to have an idea of where you’re headed, why you’re headed that way, how you’re headed that way. And then you can make decisions based on that know, both from an individual perspective, as well as from an organizational perspective, it’s important to have a clear direction on where you’re going. That’s what I wanted to say, what were you gonna look at one of the great things about Dubai and why I decided to live there was that city doesn’t suffer from any legacy thinking. It’s not London, it’s not New York, it’s not any of these cities that are so caught up in their past successes. And you know, in London, it’s like, No, son, that’s always how it’s been done. We’re not going to change anything here. And you get that overtone that sets the tone of what’s expected in that city. And Dubai has no past, it is starting on a clean slate. And that’s why I love it so much. There’s an energy of anything is possible, then it’s a wonderful place to live. And for the moment, it’s a hub that connects me to everywhere else. But let’s see how everything actually resets off the COVID and see what happens after that and what sort of travel restrictions we’ll have. Yeah, I mean, personally, I’m just expecting maybe a couple of months off, complete lockdown, and hopefully things will will get start getting better. Let’s talk about your books, your writing a lot. As I said before, you mentioned before we got started, tell me a little bit about your journey as a writer and helping others understand the future, especially through your new series that’s coming out. Well, thanks so much. You know, I failed school. I wasn’t really good at school and English was one of the worst subjects. And what I started to realize is I became so impassioned and so enthralled what I could when I was researching and I was in automatic risk funds and almost was, you know, like feng shui as a great principle. It says, in order to bring anything new into your life, you need to get rid of the old. And it was almost like I had this massive brain release after writing my first book. And what it did was it got me ready for more information, it almost like was such a download of information that was sitting inside my head for so long. And so I decided to make one of my presentations into a book. And that’s how the journey began. And I work with a copywriter, because I’ve got a lot of ideas going on and a whole lot of different subjects. So I have a thinking partner, that is a much better writer than me. And so we share and talk and share and talk continuously. And I’m writing and voice noting, and then it comes into a book format, and we chisel and chisel and chisel away. And then it becomes a book and also every book that I’ve written, and I’ve written three books in the last three years. And what I’ve decided to do is write a book a year, because what it does, it forces me to become a researcher and really fascinated at something because the best way to learn something is to teach it. And when I put myself under that sort of pressure, I really get new information, new stories and new uptake on my brand and what I’m thinking about the audience. So what I was doing before COVID-19 was writing my fourth book, and unfortunately, COVID-19 happened. Fortunately, it happened. And I decided that my fourth book wasn’t that relevant because not everything needs to be framed at COVID-19. And when I settled into my parents farm and took a couple of days to breathe, I realized this urge to want to get something out was really strong inside me. So I started writing a trilogy. And the reason I’ve decided to write a trilogy of ebooks, and again, why I’ve decided to write an E book is because I think things are changing at such a rapid pace, who’s got time to write a 30 40,000 page, I mean, 30 40,000 word book right now and things are changing, waiting for it to print, etc, etc. So I decided to write future now future how and future next and future now is about the mental state that we need to have in the now to develop the future. Future. How is about the new economic system that I’m suggesting that I’m starting to see, and many other sort of people around the world are talking about a new economic system, a new capital, and the 14th century saw the devastation of the black plague. And after the black plague, it triggered the end of feudalism. And feudalism, then by it ending started the Italian Renaissance. So I think we have a perfect situation to reset our economic system. And then future next will be the next trends that I’ll be tracking, which are changing minute by minute. So we know we in the process of writing those three at the moment. Excellent. I love it. JOHN, you’ve got so many different ideas. You’ve worked with so many organizations, you will have so many organizations. And of course in addition to what you’ve done already aftershock with joins you and me together and 50 other Aha, I think all of us together into creating a body of work that will live for a long, long time. And the more we are scientists, many of them are not even into foresight, but they do things that are really radical. And it’s really nice to be in a group of people who do this because it keeps us stimulated is a huge privilege. For me, I’ve got to be honest, you know, I must have taught guides, I see people like you and doctors that are like, wow, I’m so like chuffed to the gentleman. So it’s really great for me. It’s my honor, I am honestly humbled at every conversation that I have, as part of my podcast, I want you to give our viewers the formula, the formula that you think is going to help them succeed, help them unlock their potential have a better financial life, health, wealth, wellness, whether it’s reading a book a week, what like what are the subtle things people can do to create change, like literally the action points of the habits that they should build? What’s your take on it? How do you think people can change their tomorrow? Look, our state is who we are how we perceive and project into reality is actually who we are. We like to think we somebody else. But if you know we’re not coming at the day with the right states, we just aren’t ourselves to our full potential. So the way I go about it is I break my life down in emotional, physical and mental. And throughout the day, I have two meditation pitstops one when I wake up in the morning, and one before I go to sleep, it’s killed my social life. But that’s a whole other story. It’s also I also journal quite extensively. And that takes care of my emotional, emotional state, and I have a coach and then when it gets to mental states, I break up my day into what am I learning? How am I growing? And when am I chilling, so that I have a very clear distinction between three aspects of my day. And that keeps me active. And ultimately, and finally physical. I do 220 minute workouts a day because I really want to be able to have the most focus and the most sort of flexibility in the way I think. So all of that together. The most important thing I think we need to do is become curious about why we here on earth. And as Mark Twain said, the two most important days of your life or when you’re born and when you find out why figure out why you’re here, get busy getting curious with that topic, add value to the world and watch your life become magical because when you become unique and authentic in what you do, the energy you have access to is endless. your creativity is endless. And all of a sudden you become a specialist in what you do just based on your fascination with the sun. People pay for you to travel around the world and tell them stories. I mean, what sort of life are we living? It’s a fascinating world that people get paid to do that. And lucky as that we do, but based on curiosity and making sure that your emotional, physical and mental state are focused, absolutely, I want to make it clear to everybody that it’s a lot of work to, to do that initially, when you’re even getting started, it looks impossible. Like when you tell people to do these things, it just seems like so much to do that, oh, I don’t want to do that. It seems like so much work. And I don’t want to read and I don’t want to put I don’t want to start journaling. But once you overcome that initial hump, you’re over the, you know, the first speed bump, then things become smoother, you get into a free flow state, it becomes a part of your life. And that’s why people like yourself, and many other you and me and all of us, we travel a lot, but then it’s part of our life, and it becomes the new normal for us, or we speak at events or where you’re writing a book, The first book is the most toughest, it’s it’s just impossible. First Book, and then the second one is your third one, it becomes a little bit more easy. Yeah, I think what happens is that your discipline is created. Once you’ve decided who you want to be. If you haven’t decided who you want to be, then you’ll always be lazy, you always need motivation. You always snooze your alarm clock. But once you’ve decided who you want to be, and you work backwards from that, you up five minutes before your long podcast, you’d look forward to your journal, you look forward to your meditation, because you’ve got a long term view of what you’re trying to achieve. And again, it becomes clear that the more clarity you have, or who you want to be, it becomes easier. So whether you’re a futurist or a teacher, or a physical fitness person, just is a human thing that’s required, you know, and so this is something I take my clients through a lot, you know, it’s like the emotional perspective, as well as the future sort of categorization and context. Yeah, absolutely. I put a lot of emphasis on actually doing the thing that will take you forward execution of your ideas, and you’re putting the pen to paper when it’s writing the book. And I think is just one point that is so undermined and people don’t people think and they dream and they believe and they want all these things, but they don’t actually, you’ve got to act, you know, stumbling ball fail forward, Les Brown, and so many other people just say just feel free, just do the thing that you need to do. Tell us a little bit about one final thing. Where can people find you? Where can they look up your work? Where Where can they buy your books, or have access to them? Do you have a mailing list, people can sign up towards something? Yeah, thank you so much. Out of the seven and a half billion people in the world. I am the only johnsonii I mean, what are the chances of that? And so I’m the only johnsonii and Google and on Facebook and on LinkedIn, it’s Joe HN, sh and Ei and I’m constantly sharing information that I’m researching. I find it solidifies better into my mind when I make a vlog about it or blog about it. So y’all please follow me on any of those my books are available on Audible on Amazon on Kindle is a mailing list, you can join all of the above just look forward to sharing as much as I can and adding as much value as possible already. Thank you so much on Sunday. Thank you so much for being part of the show. And aftershock aftershock is available on Amazon, as far as I know, and please grab a copy of this. Everybody was watching this. It’s really an incredible read. And you can also read about what john thinks and how he thinks right here in this book. Thank you so much, john, you take care and we’ll talk again. Thank you, john. Thank you. Hey, friend, this is Ian Khan. If you liked what you saw in my video, then please subscribe to my YouTube channel and be inspired every single day with innovative content that keeps you fresh, updated and ready for the future. For more information. Also visit my website at Ian khan.com
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by Ian Khan | Jan 30, 2021 | Ian Khan Blog, Ian Khan's Blog, Podcast
Deborah Westphal is on the Ian Khan show. It’s such a pleasure to speak to someone who has worked so closely with Alvin Toffler and Toffler Assocates. This episode is a special After Shock episode and Deborah’s insights have been so exciting.
Bio
Deborah Westphal is a passionate humanist who has guided our era’s top minds and leaders to challenge biases, ignite ideas, and build connections and resilience for a secure and sound future.
Her career spans more than 30 years, government agencies and Fortune 100 companies, and virtually every continent. Alvin Toffler tapped her as one of the founding members of his eponymous consulting firm. Through her work, she has guided notable organizations including Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Marriott, U.S. Air Force, Baxter International, Bayer, Heinz, Microsoft, Koppers, PPG, DARPA, National Security Agency, Loral Space Systems, NASA, Qwest, Verizon, and Westinghouse.
Deborah’s empathetic and thought-provoking style helps readers spot patterns that signify future risks and opportunities. She’s a sought-after speaker and writer who provided the Foreword to After Shock.
Deborah is a world traveler who enjoys time with her son and running in the mountains. Find her at deborahwestphal.com.
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by Ian Khan | Jan 30, 2021 | Ian Khan Blog, Ian Khan's Blog, Podcast
Vikram Mansharamani is on the Ian Khan show. I am very excited to have Vikram on the show where he shared some key insights and future related ideas.
Bio
Dr. Vikram Mansharamani is a global trend-watcher who shows people how to anticipate the future, manage risk, and spot opportunities. He is the author of the recently-released THINK FOR YOURSELF: Restoring Common Sense in an Age of Experts and Artificial Intelligence and BOOMBUSTOLOGY: Spotting Financial Bubbles Before They Burst. He has been a frequent commentator on issues driving disruption in the global business environment. Vikram’s ideas and writings have also appeared in Bloomberg, Fortune, Forbes, The New York Times and a long list of other publications. Linkedin twice listed him as their #1 Top Voice for Money, Finance and Global Economics and Worth has profiled him as one of the 100 most powerful people in global finance. Millions of readers have enjoyed his unique multi-lens approach to connecting seemingly irrelevant dots.
Vikram is currently a lecturer at Harvard University, where he teaches students to use multiple perspectives in making tough decisions. Previously, he was a Lecturer at Yale University. In addition to teaching, he also advises several Fortune 500 CEOs to help them navigate the radical uncertainty in today’s business and regulatory environment. He has a PhD and two Masters degrees from MIT and a Bachelors degree from Yale University, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. Vikram lives in Lexington, MA with his wife, daughter, son, golden-retriever, and two cats, one of which he believes may be clairvoyant.
Visit Vikram on his website at www.mansharamani.com
Thanks for watching this video! Please do subscribe to our channel.
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by Ian Khan | Jan 30, 2021 | Ian Khan Blog, Ian Khan's Blog, Podcast
World Bank Chief Economist in Finance, Competitiveness & Innovation, Wolfgang Fengler, joined Ian Khan on the Ian Khan show. Discussing the current state of the world and the future. Wolfgang Fengler is the World Bank’s Lead Economist in Finance, Competitiveness & Innovation. A native German, Wolfgang has been a staff member of the World Bank for more than 18 years, during which he lived in four continents: First in North America working at the World Bank’s headquarters in Washington DC, then in Asia as a Senior Economist in the Indonesia office, followed by Africa, where he served as the World Bank’s Lead Economist in the Nairobi office. Finally, he moved to Europe as part of the senior team of the World Bank’s new hub in Vienna. Wolfgang published extensively on social and economic issues. He also co-authored “Delivering Aid Differently” (with Homi Kharas, Brookings) and “Africa’s Economic Boom” (with Shanta Devarajan, Foreign Affairs). Wolfgang also spoke at TEDx Vienna and launched population.io (endorsed by Bill Gates) as well as worldpoverty.io, two real-time big data models. The German weekly DER SPIEGEL called him a “big data virtuoso.” Prior to joining the World Bank, he set up Africa Consulting, LLC, and was a Fellow at the Research Institute for International Relations. Wolfgang gained a PhD from the University of Hamburg (Germany). Wolfgang loves travelling and sports, especially football. He was the football commissioner at the International School of Kenya and organized the “Nairobi Mini World Cup”, one of Kenya’s largest football tournaments for kids.
For more podcast episodes visit www.IanKhan.com
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by Ian Khan | Jan 30, 2021 | Ian Khan Blog, Ian Khan's Blog, Podcast
About Sohail Inayatullah Professor Sohail Inayatullah
/sə’heɪl ɪnaɪʌ’tʊla/, a political scientist, is Professor at Tamkang University, Taipei (Graduate Institute of Futures Studies) and Associate, Melbourne Business School, The University of Melbourne. From 2001-2020, he was Adjunct Professor from the University of the Sunshine Coast, Australia. From 2011-2014, he was Adjunct Professor at the Centre for policing, counter-terrorism and intelligence, Macquarie University, Sydney. In 1999, he was the UNESCO Chair in European Studies at the University of Trier, Germany.
In 2016, Professor Inayatullah was awarded the first UNESCO Chair in Futures Studies. In 2010, he was awarded the Laurel award for all-time best futurist by the Shaping Tomorrow Foresight Network. In March 2011, he was awarded an honorary doctorate by Universiti Sains Malaysia, Penang. He received his doctorate from the University of Hawaii in 1990. Inayatullah has lived in Islamabad, Pakistan; Bloomington, Indiana; Flushing, New York; Geneva, Switzerland; Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; Honolulu, Hawaii; and Brisbane and Mooloolaba, Australia. Inayatullah is the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Futures Studies and on the editorial boards of Futures, Prout Journal, East West Affairs, World Future Review, and Foresight.
He has written more than 350 journal articles, book chapters, encyclopedia entries and magazine editorials. His articles have been translated into a variety of languages, including Catalan, Spanish, Urdu, Hindi, Bengali, Italian, Japanese, Russian, Indonesian, Farsi, Arabic, and Mandarin.
Inayatullah has also written and co-edited twenty-two books/cdroms, including: What Works: Case Studies in the Practice of Foresight; CLA 2.0: Transformative Research in Theory and Practice (2015); Questioning the Future: Methods and Tools for Organizational and Societal Transformation (2007); and, Macrohistory and Macrohistorians: Perspectives on Individual, Social, and Civilizational Change (1997).
His latest (2018) book is Asia 2038: Ten Disruptions That Change Everything. Visit Sohail at https://www.metafuture.org
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Full Transcript : Hello friends and welcome to the Ian Khan show. You’re watching an aftershock special episode today I’m interviewing Richard browning, who is the founder and chief test pilot off gravity industries launched in March 2017. His dream behind gravity industries was to reimagining of human flight and the elegant partnership between the mind body machine and exploiting bleeding edge technology.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
Let’s hear from Richard browning. Richard, welcome to the Ian Khan show. I am so excited to have you here. And you’re one of the trailblazers today a lot to talk about. Tell me what’s going on right behind you what’s happening right now? Yes, very topical. So my wife and I, we are building these, they are virus masks. So in other words, they’re sort of the personal protective equipment masks. There you go perfectly demonstrated. And we are 3d printing the structure, the supporting structure in that printer there. And then there’s a bit of a manual process of punching the holes and constructing them. So yes, on a bank holiday Friday afternoon, we are not slowing down in our production of the things. I love activity. Oh my god, I love it. And I love this is a very environmental interview, you’re in your environment, you’re doing the thing that you do. And that makes it so much more interesting. Now you started your career. Let’s talk a little bit about your early career. You started as an oil trader, you worked in the oil and gas industry for about 1516 years. It’s a very different industry. But I’m guessing inside You were always who you are right now. Correct? Um, yeah, I think so. I think yeah, I mean, in summary, my career in the industry in the industry with some What if I’m really honest, driven by, I suppose the opportunity to build a financial safety net, and I suppose build enough of a cushion really, in hindsight to then go after more of my passions later in life. My childhood was an interesting journey. And it led me to, I suppose, a highly value building that security safety net that a career like that would do it, what I’ve gone on to do with gravity is I guess, a lot closer to my heart in terms of going on that journey of building, making, creating and taking on an unusual, barely possible challenge, and hopefully dragging it over the line. I love that process, despite the fact that most of the time you fail. Yeah. So yeah, it’s all about building that safety net. Really, in hindsight, not that I really thought about it at the time. Yeah, well, now with gravity, you’re doing something really incredible. It’s just it’s just so different. It’s just so incredible. You it’s a very innovative thing. You’re breaking boundaries of thought of perception. This is somewhat you know, what happened in the first flight ever, that we had this huge mental block that it couldn’t be done. And then human flight took over? The first flight took a close the process of kind of going through those initial phases of failure, which I’m sure you went through, tell us a little bit about your journey of starting off with the idea of gravity, and then doing those tests where you failed. Yeah, so the inspiration was from a number of different sources, really, one of them was from my time in the British Royal Marines reserve, UK division of the military that called the Royal Marines. And there’s quite stringent physical mental tests to get through that sort of same flavor as the navy seal and a process. And that taught me a lot about human capability. So the whole process of seeing a challenge mental or physical, or both physical challenge, and then believing that you can overcome those obstacles and realizing that the human brain and body is an amazing machine that can be adapted to fulfill quite a ridiculous range of often quite challenging tasks, if you really, you know, focus on it. And I took that as I suppose past the inspiration. The other part came from my childhood that when I grew up, I used to go fly model gliders with my late father, he was an aeronautical engineer, and most of my family from the world of aviation, and actually helicopters as well. And I suppose I sort of married those two things together and came up with this hypothesis that I wonder if you could employ the human brain from a balance of control point of view and the body from a strength point of view and tackle the challenge of human flight in an entirely different, seemingly illogical, crazy way. And genuinely for no reason other than the joy of the challenge. I just thought, wouldn’t it be kind of neat, if you could, instead of leaning on to this desk here, you can’t see I’m leaning on this desk, they’re feeling the support the desk provides my hands, if you swap that out for the momentary support that a former propulsion from a jet engine or a propeller of some kind will give you then I knew from my training that I could support my bodyweight in a variety of different kind of gymnastic positions. So well, doesn’t that mean, I can then kind of support myself as I lift off the ground. And just for the pure joy, the challenge, how far can you go with that concept? And that was really it. You know, I’m just trying to do a couple of things by asking you these questions. One is really a break. The idea that sometimes we just cannot do things in today’s time where COVID-19 is out there are just facing an unprecedented kind of a change that we’re dealing with. And I think life and success and breaking through something, a barrier is all about overcoming that fear of change or coming through it or somehow surpassing it and learning from experiences you’re talking about is also dealing with a lot of change, because you’ve constantly got it reiterated. So that was your initial journey, starting off with the idea of the concept and then bringing this to fruition. I know you’re doing a lot of test flights. I’ve seen you at a few expos, you’ve done a lot of face to face interactions with people where they’re actually able to see you I saw you flying off a ship somewhere as Well, in the middle of the ocean by belief, are you going to a phase of helping people understand this as a reality right now? Where are you where you want to be where you want to be? I mean, what what ended up happening we after back in 2016, when I about eight months went from the idea to actually first flying this, I got a phone call, when we then launched, the company came up with the name, gravity, the brand gravity as a sort of package within within which to sort of share this with the world. Because a few people have come to see it, it kind of lost their minds more than I’d imagined. And I thought, well, let’s just experiment with sharing this with the world and just throw it out there and see what happens. And we launched it with Red Bull and Wyatt, both of those brands were very valuable in terms of propelling us in the desired direction. And within a week, I got a phone call from Chris Anderson from Ted, who said, Can you come and do Ted 2017 in Vancouver? And could I fly there, bearing in mind, I’d not even flown outside of the farm yard test zone we’d been using, I still said yes. And thought, gosh, that’s a great privilege. I’ve been a huge admirer of TED talks for years. And on the way there, I stopped off in San Francisco to accept an invitation from Adam and Tim Draper, who I didn’t really know who they were at the time did a demonstration in their VC carpark the boost VC carpark. In fact, I’m wearing one of Adam’s old t shirts, as opposed to be seen as it happens and landed the very first demo, you know, anywhere I packed it all into to check in suitcases to take this thing the other side of the world from the UK and Tim and Adam lost their minds and wrote me a $640,000 deal on $100 bill that’s pinned to my lab wall back over there. And that was the beginning of the journey that said, Okay, this is starting to have impact. And then a week later did Ted and did a talk there on the same day as Elon Musk, and hope and they did a demonstration in front of everybody, including Richard Branson, and that kind of crowd and yeah, it’ll work. Adam Savage was my ground crew, impromptu ground crew on the day, it was just as ridiculous fairy tale, really. And then since then, we’ve leveraged events quite significantly. So we’ve now done 103 separate events in 30 countries. In fact, if I just swivel my camera slightly, so those are some of the lanyards out there that I can see that we’ve ended up collecting, and they’ve been a gift really, because you know, to get up to five TED Talks now, and all these events all over the world, including a dozen different military events flying around aircraft carriers, and the kind of things you’d never imagine we get asked to do. The benefit of all of these has been to be able to battle test the equipment in front of different audiences in different environments, at different altitudes in different locations. You name a desert, or a sea or city or, you know, I mean, when I say altitude, I mean, like Johannesburg, and the mountains in Arizona, both of them are about 6000 feet, and we float in there, which has a major effect on the gas turbine. So we flown in all sorts of different locations. And in front of live audiences often quite, you know, high end, folks, we’ve flown from Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk, and Jeff Bezos as well. So in fact, I actually have to pause on that one. That’s one of the one of the victims of the virus that was an event we were supposed to be doing that’s now on pause that will come back again live, but that kind of caliber of people have seen me fly and then you know, and also got equally excited. So what an amazing opportunity to kind of poll people’s opinion that when you bring something so new to them, what’s the first thing that springs their mind? Are they excited? They you know, do they want to buy one? Do they want to have a go at training to learn to do it? Do they want to go and watch a race series with these things? I mean, all of those are the things we’re getting on and doing. And also most of these events have paid us a lot of money. So we’ve generated all our own revenue since that first drapery event, and it’s all gone plowed back into the r&d. And we got a decent team of people and built that major, you know, momentum and patented it all. And yeah, it’s been quite an unusual last three years since we launched. That’s incredible. It’s such an incredible journey. And I’m glad that it’s, you know, you’re exposing everybody’s being exposed to this radical idea of of just taken off and flying and imagining what to do with it. Now in terms of an organizational structure, you know, we see you flying with the suit, Richard has the suit on he’s flying up in the air, what is the team that works with you? How many people work on this every day? Like how do things work, I’m trying to help. I’m trying to help our audiences understand there’s a structure behind things, you know, you’ve got to be able to take deliberate structural steps in order to create a business to be successful to do whatever give us an idea, whatever you can share with respect to what kind of a team backs you up and doing this. Maybe it was a fairly solo journey when I first developed this, but then very quickly, I’ve collected a wonderful bunch of people around me which are in their own ways in IE all of their specialism is vastly better than me, which is exactly how it should be very much enjoy that support. So I have gone to the engineering is a couple of relatively recent graduates in their mid 20s. They’ve been out of academia now for two, three years, but they are complete Mavericks in the sense that they can turn their hands to anything but technically and academically, they’re excellent but also they’re the kind of people that you know, you get a tire blowout on the way to an event and they will work out how you can improvise, you know to solve it when you realize the jack is missing from our fairly old event vehicle for instance, or we’re in the mountains of Arizona for the GoPro shoot I mentioned Arizona already. We’re wondering why even the lightest of the three of us are getting off the ground and we can work out all the different measures we can take including taking the odd cover debris covers off the engine off the engines to help them with airflow and the very meager airflow, just that episode small amount to help boost the thrust. And you know, they’re the kind of people that can really think on their feet. But even better than that, those are two of my best pilots as well. So we’ve ended up with this really neat team from a technical point of view and there is a broader group beyond the three core of us so they can do so much whether it’s filming some cinematic sequence or editing some wonderful pieces. To the media or flying or doing a piece to camera further news or coding a canvas control system for a new experimental suit or indeed doing additive sympathetic CAD design for the latest suits, you can kind of vaguely see one sitting back there, all of that structure is 3d printed now, so gone sort of rich, deep capability, not quite savant level capability from so my team, but they are, they are a master of a number of different skills and very close and intimate to the evolution of the suit. So from the technical point of view, those guys are core, I’ve got a couple of folks on the commercial side and events side, there’s two women who are been again with me from right from the beginning, who have gone from everything from organizing shipping containers to go to Bermuda for our race series that was postponed, and we’re supposed to be going live two weeks ago, but to organize how you do all that, to getting my equipment out of any one of the 30 countries around the world, if there’s been a last minute hitch from a technical point of view, or so, you know, it is a really eclectic bunch, often from quite varied backgrounds that bring together a whole range of skills. But often, Oh, those skills overlap in a positive way, which means that they can fill in for each other and have a deep appreciation for each other’s domains. That’s quite key as well. So really, to answer your question, the core team has about half a dozen, and there’s a wider group of 12 to 20 spread around the world that often do kind of part time support for us. I mean, there’s people like the former director of the F 35 development program as a former chief test pilot, so why to team you know, it’s we’ve been so privileged in having such amazing people like that reach out over the last three years, and just with this almost childlike urge to be part of this journey. But again, a massive win for you know, what is effectively it’s still a small business. Absolutely. Now tell us about maybe perhaps a time when things didn’t go the way you wanted to. And I, whenever I see your videos, you’re flying over a city or flying or whatever, like, what if the suit stops working for whatever reason, it just stops tell us about maybe a time when something of that sort happened, or you were like, Oh, my God, what’s happening, but then you came out of it just first to understand what the experience is gonna be flying up in the air. So our ethos is quite clear at this. So innovation is all about failure. To be honest, it’s all about going and stepping out doing something that hasn’t been done before. And critically, learning from all the mistakes and being able to get back up again from failure. If you go and decide you’re going to build 1000 horsepower jet suit and you have a go with version one, fire it up and go to 200 feet, and as you say, learned the hard way that there’s a problem with what you’re doing. But you’re not going to get to have another go if you’ve got up to 200 feet. So our ethos is very clear, take the risk, but very quickly analyze what is the worst that can happen if that risk manifests. And if that risk means that you’re not going to be able to recover from a physical injury or death, obviously, financial impacts that you can’t recover from or a reputational impact because you’ve you know, you’ve been stupid the number of times I’ve looked at an event and I’d be flying around for an audience. And I’ve seen like a bus go by, you know, 200 meters, 300 meters, the other side of the event, and I thought, you know, it’d be really cool to go and land on the bus, surfer bus and then come back again, probably go quite viral. But you know, a quick sense check, you know, and I’m not 20 anymore, is, am I really going to be allowed to go and do many more of these events. If I could build a reputation for being fast and loose with you know, the respect for the event organizers will know so it’s reputation financial and most critically safety. If we can’t recover from a risk manifesting in any three of those areas, we don’t do it. So you’ll notice that we don’t fly massively high. I mean, even overwater we you know will fly 30 4050 feet over water. But in every instance we analyze if you got a failure at that moment, can you get back up again and it’s it’s a subtle difference from some of the other flying devices you see out there we always assume the worst we always assume that they could get a completely unfathomable failure and therefore for instance, our race series is all going to be over water and you know, for that reason that it means it keeps it safe. In fact, actually your question is very opportune because on our YouTube channel, gravity industries We are now going back through the archive and pulling out lots of clips including we haven’t published it yet but an episode that’s going to be entirely focused on fails on my keynotes I do all over the world I cover these and they always end up being the most popular part of the talk and we’ve kept all the fails all the crashes you know, no one’s ever hurt themselves, but they look quite quite spectacular and dramatic and they are they resonate I think a little in some people’s minds with those clips that you see in the first Marvel Iron Man film of where the Downey Jr. character is smacking into the walls of this wonderful man cave. Some of them are a little bit like that but not quite as dramatic incredible I know you’re very busy Richard and and you’re doing you’re printing something right now you’re in your workshop I don’t want to take all If Your time’s right. I do want to ask you about the future we’re connected together because of our good friend john shorter you know you’ve written a piece in in aftershock. And Alvin Toffler wrote the book 50 years ago, 50 years ago, I can’t even imagine 50 years ago, I’m not 50 so it’s like so full so back for me, same for you probably and what did Topher see back in the day, and he could predict and he could say, Hey, this is what will happen to the world. it’s mind blowing. Incredible. I want to ask you, what are you seeing emerge out of your work in the next 15 to 20 years? What kind of a world you see happen, what kind of cities do you see while you’re doing well, I mean, I’ll tackle the obvious question that might be in some of the listeners minds around you know, I do I harbor an ambition that everybody’s going to be flying around in jet seats, and taking a School and go to the shops and get seats when we’re allowed out. Maybe it’s a good way of socially distancing? And the moment you know, and the answer is no at the moment because they are you know that that machine, there are the six sitting around, there’s another one down there, they are all 1000 horsepower, they produce about 115 122 decibels of sound, you know, a bit like a very high end motorbike, they can be safe if you know what you’re doing with them. But if you don’t, then there is the opportunity to hurt yourself quite readily. So hence, we train people properly and all that sort of stuff. But you know, it’s not as simple as just jumping in a car turning the key and going. However, the very first motorcars were considered noisy, smelly, and inefficient. And we’re joked, compared to looking at the incumbent technology, which was a horse, look where that technology’s got to. So our focus is training clients doing events, and particularly building our big race series, which everybody will hopefully enjoy the content from, when we’re allowed out to Bermuda for the belated event that happened a couple of weeks ago, I think we can reinvent a whole new form of Marvel esque aerial Formula One, if you like a contour around water, air locations all over the world. Anyway, that’s another story. If a byproduct of all of that evolution and all of that public awareness, and things like battery technology hugely in enhancing, then maybe a new very raw form almost Da Vinci form of flight, which means I can put on the absolute minimalist amount of equipment and then just go anywhere in three dimensional space. You know, I think we’re about the closest out there to delivering that. So maybe that could evolve into more of a mainstream thing. So that that’s, that’s in terms of personal mobility and flight. You know, I’ve got a watching brief, but it’s not our focus at the moment more broadly, I mean, to answer your question, I think actually, this current trauma around the virus is probably going to teach us more about where the future is going then than anything, I think the fact that so many people are getting so familiar with communicating like this, I think that’s going to change society hugely. I think we’re going to end up with people not shopping, when you know, rafts of the more elderly generations and now all online online shopping and talking to their grandkids online. And I think it’s going to accelerate is from really a decade over 2020 to a position where people are going to reevaluate, why do they physically need to go on holiday physically need to be next to their work and physically need to live in a certain location in a dense, crowded, expensive city, I think we’re going to shift probably to become a physically more lonely community. But then that’s the onus is on the technology to make you know, this interaction we’re having now feel ever more real, you know, better resolution, better voice, the fact that I’m, I have to look up here at the camera, when really, you’re there. And I’m here, you know, all of these subtleties, which I know in the corporate world, I remember in BP that we really need video conferencing systems that would even actually remove the peril access aspects to video conferencing. So I thought it’d be my best guess of the answer. I think the way that we interact as human beings, whether it’s for work or leisure is gonna change and this the virus lockdown is shining a light on on where we’re gonna go, for better or worse. Thank you. Do you think from a technological perspective, if you look at some of the must have absolutely necessary things you need for slung suit to use is probably fuel that you’re using. But what about different technologies? I don’t know. What about battery technology? What about nuclear power, just like Stark uses it? Yeah. So I’ll just touch on the nuclear thing for a minute. So I often stand on stage and talk about jet engines, you know, gas turbines, which is what we use being about the most energy dense form of propulsion out there. And to be clear, I mean, an engine that takes fuel and produces X amount of thrust for y mass. So you know, the little engines we use are about two kilos, or what four or five pounds and they put out 22 kilos, or more like 50 pounds of thrust, that ratio is insane. Now they do consume a lot of fuel to make up that gap there. But I got stopped once in a talk where somebody actually did afterwards in the in the question, say, actually, you’re wrong. The most energy dense engine, if you like, is a nuclear reactor, they do tend to weigh an awful lot, but put out an astronomical amount of power as well, anyway, no, I don’t think I mean, if you could get Gosh, if you could crack cold, you know, fusion, so fusion rather than fishing, if you could crack fusion, and somewhere long down the list of things you can do without often mainstream power generation, for no waste, and no real fuel consumption? might be the miniaturization of it. And then maybe, yes, you’d had another big leap towards the Tony Stark world. But no, I mean, a long way off. I think, unfortunately, about battery technology. Yeah, so so more realistically, is battery. So we built somewhere in the background somewhere, I can’t think where maybe there’s an example of a bit of a electric turbine up there, we have built an electric version of a jet suit, and it uses big electric ducted fans, they are electric motors, you know, with electric fans on them and with a big bunch of LiPo batteries. And it is tough because the energy density of a lithium polymer battery is about 60 times worse than fuel. So jet fuel or diesel or gasoline. So in other words you need let’s say, for a pound or a kilo of jet fuel, you need 60 pounds of battery to contain the same energy which is a real pain. So we have just about got off the ground we did in a quite amusing way. We solved the problem slightly by just making the pilot very, very much lighter. So I use then one of my kids, they’re now 11 and 13. I used at the time my nine year old on a safety tablet to be clear, and he managed to bounce around like he’s on the moon with this big electric noisy fan thing. It was more of a line in the sand marked where we are now and as people like Mr. Musk, advanced down the route of electric cars and everything else Electric including claims there will be an ever increasing number of options out there, and we’ll ready to Hoover those up as they come. But for now, it’s tough. It’s really tough to beat diesel or jet fuel and gas turbine incredible. Richard, well, I want to let you go because I know it’s time give us some parting advice on how do you think bigger than your circumstances? How do you create something larger than life? Is it I think about a process to this? I think that there’s a number of things I throw out there. So one is think like a child, you know, you are you haven’t been out of you at school and it you know, college and whatever, you know, silly things, just, you know, lining up in your mind, you know, how I don’t know looking at something, thinking how it looks like an animal or wondering why, you know, some street light doesn’t quite line up with the edge of your windowpane when you’re glancing out of the window, not listening to us, you know, we’re always told to shut up and look at the textbook and listen and tell you know, regurgitate what you’ve been taught. Actually, all the big breakthroughs are staring out the window and thinking in a way No one’s ever thought before. They’re taking inspiration and letting those ideas just lurk around with each other in your mind in a way that no one else has been mad enough to imagine. It doesn’t say on the guidebook, you should go and put a jet engine on your arm. And there’s a lot of good reasons why you think it’s going to tear your arm off and the gyroscopic momentum and the fact that you know it’s going to flail around like a hose pipe and all these things. Actually, there’s good physics reasons why they don’t but the conventional received wisdom was that they would be impossible. Well, actually, if you just step out there and go and play in a safe way and cover off those risk rules. Just get out there and think like a child and play and explore and imagine and let your imagination go crazy. And then work out how quickly and realistically you can get off the idea into actually testing the concept. You know, a little secret over there is there is a baby carrying rucksack back stuck to some plywood with some door hinges. And I can’t tell you any more than that. But that we’ve I was flying that 24 hours ago. Wow. And it’s using door hinges and plywood and because Okay, we’re three years in we’re you know, certainly on paper, a multi million dollar company, having been seen enjoyed by millions of people around the world. But that does not stop us from going and using plywood and door hinges to test the new generation of suit which is frankly insane compared to what we do now. And the key to that, like I say is not being afraid to go and safely test new concepts still amazing, incredible. Richard, I can’t thank you enough for being part of the income show and the podcast and being a contributor on aftershock. We definitely will keep on following your progress and seeing your amazing work. Thank you. Thank you for being here. Thank you very much. I’m just really good to hear like hey, yeah, it’s sitting here as well. There you go. All right. Say thank you very much to you then. Thank you. It’s been a pleasure you take care. Bye. Bye. Hey, friends, this is Ian Khan. 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