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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