Richard Browning, The “real-life Iron Man” In Conversation With Ian Khan
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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