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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