Latest / The Innovation Show / Navigating the Age of Chaos Part 1 with Jamais Cascio And Bob Johansen

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Navigating the Age of Chaos Part 1 with Jamais Cascio And Bob Johansen · The Innovation Show

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  Kyndryl.com Imagine a history book.
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  Looking back at the period from 2015 to 2025, what would be the core story?
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  The theme of the chapter?
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  The relentlessly lingering COVID-19 pandemic and the political backlash
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  against vaccinations, perhaps?
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  The most significant cross border war in Europe since World War ii?
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  In parallel with catastrophic and horrific violence in the Middle East,
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  the weakening and potential collapse of an almost 80-year-old alliance?
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  The seemingly sudden rise of generative artificial intelligence technologies?
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  With an impact on everything from employment to dating
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  to political stability?
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  The rapid spread and empowerment of oligarchy and authoritarianism,
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  and the simultaneous breakdown of democratic norms?
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  The acceleration of climate, emergency with its succession of fires,
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  storms, and hottest years ever?
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  So far!
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  The metatistic growth of economic inequality, both within and
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  between nations or the Corddyceps like infection of social media
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  into every facet of our lives?
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  Now, how about all these things happening at the exact same time?
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  Today's book offers a language to make sense out of a world that
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  is changing in ways that the old terminology can no longer capture.
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  The B.A.N.I. framework.
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  Brittle, anxious, non-linear.
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  Incomprehensible is that new language.
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  Brittle.
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  Recognize fragility and systems and strategies to build resilience.
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  Anxious, address widespread anxiety and empathy, and attentiveness.
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  Non-linear.
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  Navigate unpredictable scenarios with adaptive thinking.
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  Incomprehensible, find clarity in overwhelming complexity.
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  And then there's positive BANI.
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  Reframe the chaos into actionable opportunities for growth.
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  It's a pleasure to welcome back friends of the show, previous guests
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  and authors of navigating the Age of Chaos, a sense-making guide to a
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  BANI world that does not make sense.
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  Bob Johansen, welcome back.
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  Thank you.
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  Thank you.
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  Jam Cashio, welcome to the show.
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  I'm
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  glad to be here.
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  It's great to, have you, man.
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  Last time we spoke, , you were writing this and we were doing a preview as well.
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  So congrats on getting it over the line.
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  It's been a while.
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  It
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  It's been a while.
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  In the, so before we started, , I thought we'd give a bit of context.
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  First of you two guys, how you know each other and how the book came about.
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  well, let's see.
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  Bob and I have known each other now for getting close to 20 years,
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  because he and I met through the Institute for the Future where I've
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  been a research fellow, a research
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  and a then later a distinguished fellow, and Bob was your president for a while.
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  And now is currently a distinguished fellow as well.
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  But basically we've worked together on a number of projects
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  I always look up to Bob because he's one of the few people
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  taller than me at the institute.
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  So
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  but in reality I greatly look up to Bob and the work that he's done, the
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  expertise and frankly the empathy that he shows, not just for, the
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  planet, but also for the people that he works with on a day-to-day basis.
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  I was really looking forward to getting a chance to work with him on this.
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  And here
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  we go.
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  And I have to add to that as well.
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  'cause I told you off air as well.
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  Bob was very kind to me when I wrote my first book read it also encouraged me,
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  said, you know what, you're a sense maker.
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  Keep doing what you're doing.
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  So from both of us, Bob, respect to you, brother
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  Thank you.
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  and Bob, what about your interactions with Jamais over the years?
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  So Jamais is the best scenario writer I've ever worked with.
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  So the tasks we do together have often , involved scenarios.
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  I have in my previous books over the last 20 years, used the
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  term VUCA a lot for volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous.
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  And I'm not a military guy by background, but I just happened to be at the Army
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  War College where that term was coined.
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  I just happened to be there the week before nine 11 and was introduced to
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  this term vuca, which for me was an excellent way to frame the future.
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  For a period of time.
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  And I began then teaching there.
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  And I still teach there.
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  I work with the new three Star Generals.
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  They read the same book we're gonna be talking about.
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  And then we talk about strategy and talk about leadership.
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  And when Jamais introduced me to the BANI concept that began a dialogue.
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  And I must admit at first I said, why do we need this?
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  You know, we've got, we got vuca, enough.
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  But then I've realized, and this is really important, I've realized that VUCA VUCA
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  enough for what we're about to face.
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  Hmm.
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  That's for sure, and I have a little quote here that actually speaks to that.
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  You said in the book, the ability to act now to achieve a consciously intended
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  but currently unrealized outcome goes at least as far back as early homo sapiens.
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  Cognitive scientists refer to this as causal cognition, a recognition
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  of cau and effect processes, and the ability to make usable forecasts as
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  to future results or present actions.
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  It appears to have evolved around the same times as our ability to throw
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  with accuracy at a moving target.
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  Both of these are abilities that no other primates have, including
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  our closest relatives that chimpanzees, bonobos and gorillas.
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  The ability to imagine the future is intrinsic to what makes us human.
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  But this is the thing.
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  This is why we struggle when patterns are not repeatable.
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  And this is a nice segue then to how VUCA became not VUCA enough.
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  And as you say in the book, RIP Vuca
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  well, I first came up with the BANI Framework in 2018 and it was part of
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  a larger presentation I was giving to Institute for the future on the future
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  of trust in the international system.
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  And I've done a lot of, I actually have a graduate degree in international
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  politics, and so I've been deeply immersed in the, in theories of international
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  relations for quite some time.
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  And there's a persistent
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  persistent idea that the international system is anarchic, which means
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  that it has no top-down authority.
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  But a lot of people confuse anarchy and chaos.
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  And over the course of this talk, I really tried to tease out why they
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  were different, but also why we were increasingly moving towards chaos.
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  You know, what I was seeing in 2018 was a world where the
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  technology was getting weirder.
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  Where the the politics, this was two years into the president 45.
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  And it was already getting really weird.
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  And it just seemed like it was time for some new language.
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  And I have to admit, there was polite applause in the audience when I gave that
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  presentation, except from the Brazilians who loved the idea because it spoke to
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  what they were already experiencing.
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  And so COVID hit and people encouraged me to make the BANI idea public, I
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  wrote the piece on Medium in April.
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  2020 the folks in the developing world were far and away the first
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  to, to see the value of the BANI framework and to understand really
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  what it felt like and what it meant.
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  So, and that's one of the key differentiators I
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  think for BANI versus Vuca.
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  That BANI is a really looks at what it feels like to live in a world of chaos.
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  It has a very human centered approach.
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  You know, what is this experience of living in a chaotic system?
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  And, what we'd also found with VUCA is that there was an assumption, a
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  kind of basic unexamined assumption.
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  That if only we could find the right data, if only we could find the
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  right expert, we'd actually be able to understand what was going on.
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  And it's important to realize VUCA was coined in the late 1980s,
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  so it was a post-Cold war term.
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  It was a time when we were much more optimistic about
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  science and about technology.
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  Then right now we realize we're still heavily committed to technology
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  and science, but it's much more of a mixed blessing than it was then.
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  We were really optimistic in that period compared to where we are
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  now, where in the BANI framework.
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  What I've realized and what caused me to wanna write this book with Jamais is
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  that the BANI Framework, does not assume.
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  We'll be able to understand what's going on, but we still have to
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  have the sense-making ability to act even if it doesn't make sense.
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  Right.
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  That kind of dilemma that we're dealing with and the conversation
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  that led to this book was, I still remember the conversation Jamais and
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  I talking about, well, how do we use BANI Framework not only as a way of
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  describing what we're experiencing now, but flipping it positive?
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  I think it's important to say as well, Bob, you said about that, do we need this?
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  When you said that, do we need this?
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  But again, people won't understand what, it's just an acronym.
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  And what I felt was, I remember that quote by Wittgenstein, which is the limits of
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  my language are the limits of my world.
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  And that as we evolve, so too must our language and I think it's important.
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  I'd love your you to share that piece before we get into it.
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  Exactly.
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  So, yeah, Wittgenstein's kind of the root of this concept, but it goes into
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  people like Irving, Goffman at Penn talked about frames theory and framing.
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  We have no choice.
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  When we think about the future, we have no choice but to have a frame.
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  The only choice we have is whether it's conscious or not.
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  And one of the big lessons from our work at Institute for the Future is if you
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  frame the future correctly, it draws you toward a more preferable future,
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  and it helps you be more future ready.
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  But if you frame the future inaccurately, or you pretend that you don't have any
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  frame, you're just not gonna be as ready.
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  You're not gonna be as able to pursue your preferred future.
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  So really the beginning of BANI is framing, how do
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  you wanna frame the future?
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  And we think this is just a dramatically better way to frame the future
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  than what we've had pre previously.
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  One of the things you say, Anja, I love you.
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  To expand on this, I thought of this as a positive interlude because there's studies
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  done on people that when you go, do you want the good news or the bad news first?
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  With those studies, 78% of people gimme the bad news
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  first to get it outta the way.
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  So with this book, less than half of it is written in BANI which is the difficult
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  to read, and it is difficult to read part of the book because it talks about
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  a lot of crises we have had, but also that are coming our way regardless of
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  what we do and how, in a way, I thought of that concept of the Red Queen race
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  that we're running faster and faster to stay still, because no matter what
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  we do, we've gone past the point of no return with a lot of these things, and
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  that was difficult for someone who.
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  For me, I try to live in the positive side of things, but it was difficult
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  and I think this is one of the things you say, and this is why this paragraph
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  stood out, you said, the most difficult part of thinking about the bounty
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  future is not letting the intensity and abundance of the chaos turn into fear,
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  anger, or , anticipatory capitulation.
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  It's easy to look at the scope and scale of the chaotic forces we'll be grappling
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  with and decide it's all too big.
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  Too overwhelming, just too much.
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  Honestly, you may well be right to think that way.
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  The hardest part of doing foresight work, whether as a profession or just as a task,
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  is taking in the multiplicity of risks and absurdities without seeing everything
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  as doom, And I thought that was important because both of you working as futurists,
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  working with the Institute of the Future, you've given many, many talks , and part
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  of that futurism is to call out realities.
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  But often , you're framed as a doomsayer instead of a gains sayer.
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  And I thought we'd call that out early on in our conversations.
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  Well, I do get, people do often refer to me, even at Institute for the
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  Future, refer to me as a doomsayer.
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  It's because I. I dunno, maybe I'm just make it sound so
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  beautiful with my lovely voice.
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  But it really is a, I do try to approach this not as a sense of, you know, not
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  from the perspective of, you're doomed.
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  It's all going to end soon.
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  But really from a sense of, okay, we're doomed.
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  What are we gonna do about it?
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  You know, it's this, this is it.
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  Stating the, the challenges stating these not as, as
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  catastrophe, but as ongoing challenges, you know, they push us to get better.
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  that's the.
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  Challenge and that's what motivated us.
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  The reason we reached out to our co-author, Angela Williams is to try to
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  look for on the ground examples because as Jamais said, there's parts of the world
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  like climate impact zones, like war zones, a number of parts of the world where.
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  BANI's already here.
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  It's just not evenly distributed around the world.
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  And we brought in Angela.
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  Angela is the first woman, the first African American to be
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  the CEO of United Way worldwide.
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  So she has a global perspective.
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  She's an ordained minister.
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  She's also a military person.
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  She's also a lawyer by training.
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  So she has this rich background of service and of on the ground experience,
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  and that's what we were looking for.
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  So what Jamais and I were providing were the future back view.
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  What Angela provides is more the present forward view, and then we've
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  got a whole chapter on leadership.
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  We've got a whole series of four chapters on flipping BANI positive.
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  So the goal, our goal was to give people a language, a new frame, and a
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  language that helps them describe what they're experiencing and what they're
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  likely to experience even more intensely over the next decade and beyond.
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  But also, and this is really important also, how can you engage and flip
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  this into something positive?
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  It reminded me of the, the usage of BANI, and you talk about, well, it helps
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  because it gives us a seed for narratives.
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  It gives us a way to just frame them, and it reminded me of the Einstein quote that
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  he said, if I had 60 minutes to solve a problem, I'd spend 55 minutes on the
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  question, five minutes on the answer.
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  Yes.
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  Because the understanding why BANI is important is also under
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  important, how to understand B.A.N.I. plus the positive B.A.N.I. side.
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  So, let's get stuck in, because as I said, 78% of the people want the bad news first.
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  We'll get stuck in, and I thought what I'd do is I have a little quote on each
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  of the, , the four letters, the acronym, and I'll tee that up and then we'll dip
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  in and outta the chapters of those in part one for those who are joining us.
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  For the two parts, we're gonna do BANI, and then we're gonna
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  do BANI plus as part two.
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  You really need to understand BANI to understand what BANI Plus is about.
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  So let's get stuck into brittle.
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  So in a brittle world, what we believe about the reliability of systems,
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  technologies, and people fails us.
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  We imagine that the world around US works as described only to find out that we've
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  come to rely on fragile monocultures, inter interdependent entanglements, and
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  even hyper efficient process in which everything must always work exactly right.
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  And this goes back to that idea that we're trained to hope for a good
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  future when that doesn't pan out the way we thought we are anxious
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  and we struggle very, very badly.
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  So let's get stuck into brittle.
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  Brittle is the idea that things can look strong, can even function well
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  until they fail catastrophically, and it's a very abrupt shift.
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  It's not that kind of gradual graceful failure , that we hope to
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  see is when something breaks down, it's just everything's plugging
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  along and then suddenly it blows up.
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  And we've seen this happen a number of different systems, both at a
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  small level and at a global level.
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  We saw a lot of it coming out of COVID with with trade routes
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  and supply chains breaking down.
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  We see it happening with democracy around the world.
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  Systems that we have come to rely upon just seem to stop working.
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  Sometimes it's because they're overstressed.
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  Sometimes it's because it's the underlying technologies or
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  underlying conditions have shifted.
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  Sometimes it's just because we try to be super efficient.
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  That's actually one of the something I've been paying a lot of attention
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  to over the years is just that tension between resilience and efficiency.
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  You have plenty of systems out there that we have pushed, just in time
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  manufacturing, we have pushed and pushed and pushed to make sure that
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  everything runs just as tight as possible.
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  And when it works, it works beautifully.
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  It's really profitable, when it fails, it fails catastrophically, you know,
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  one piece go, comes in late, one factory breaks down, and suddenly
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  the holds, the whole system blows up.
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  Similarly we see with the use of monocultures,
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  monocultures are very efficient.
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  And we see that, you know, people growing stands of trees that are all
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  clones of the same, not just the same species, but the same individual.
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  Because that individual has the best wood pulp or whatever.
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  That's great.
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  That means every single tree is coming out with the exact right kind of material
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  until that one bug shows up, that fungus or the bacteria shows up and it wipes
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  out the entire stand of trees because one particular individual was happened
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  to be vulnerable to that infection.
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  And the idea that we need to be means being less efficient
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  is anathema to a lot of people.
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  Because it asks us not to be as profitable, asks us not to
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  be as quick, but it make, it asks us to be more reliable.
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  And so we have a system, systems growing around us physical and metaphysical.
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  That are so dependent upon everything working correctly, so
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  dependent upon everything, working
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  that any along the way ends up being something truly, truly dangerous.
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  An example we use in the book is the CrowdStrike incident from
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  2024, you know, because this one particular security system failed,
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  they actually failed in doing a small update to the security system.
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  that had a cascading effect of bringing down literally millions
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  of computers around the world.
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  And these computers were not just, accounting devices, they were used to.
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  Control the National Health Service.
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  They were used to schedule flights.
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  And so you had literally tens of millions of people around the
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  world unable to get an ambulance, unable to get to get their flight.
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  And this is something that costs it, it costs billions of dollars though
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  the outage was for just about a day.
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  But it actually also cost lives all because somebody didn't do an update quite
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  right on that's, let's little change that little blip, little piece of brittleness
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  cause the entire system to collapse.
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  And we've seen this time and again, and this is something that, , like I said,
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  I've been writing about brittleness and resilience for quite some time
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  and that was one of the drivers when I first talked about BANI is just seeing
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  these kinds of collapses happening.
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  Society as a whole, not just American society, but global societies,
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  just not doing anything about it.
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  And it's lot of frustration went in the, to the creation of BANI just
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  because, like I say, sometimes I feel that I'm going to have on my headstone.
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  I told you so,
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  it's just this feeling that these things are breaking up and
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  we're not willing to look at it.
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  And so BANI was an attempt to make people look at it.
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  , I think it's so hard when you think about things like infrastructure.
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  It's so hard to think about how to prepare for things going wrong because we spend
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  so much of our effort trying to figure out how to make them as fast as possible.
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  And the vivid story that I think of about Brittle is the Francis Scott
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  Key Bridge over Baltimore Harbor, where it was a beautiful, expansive
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  bridge and it looked really strong.
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  But there's very little attention in the us paid to bridges anymore.
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  I mean, they were, they were really cool when we were
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  building them, but maintaining them, it's just not a priority.
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  So we've got all these, sometimes very pretty and they look very strong bridges.
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  But when the cargo ship Dolly rammed the Francis Scott Keybridge, it
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  didn't just break, it shattered.
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  It shattered.
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  And, and we're surprised.
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  So we've got so much infrastructure like that in the US and it
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  isn't just physical structure.
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  It's conceptual infrastructure, maybe even things like democracy that look strong.
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  But they're not as strong as they look.
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  And right now we have relatively little incentive to think future back.
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  So part of
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  Right.
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  Jamais and I are doing is saying, Hey, we gotta think future back in
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  order to be, to be more prepared for what we're about to face.
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  So I don't know if you remember in the the Iraq War in 2003, 2004.
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  Condoleezza Rice was the National Security Advisor she was asked about
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  whether or not they had plans for what to do if the particular offensive or
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  particular strategy failed, and she looked aghast to be asked that question.
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  She said, it is irresponsible to think about failure when
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  you're trying to succeed.
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  Hmm.
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  And that just struck me as both horribly wrongheaded entirely emblematic of the
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  conventional wisdom in in America in particular, in the west in general.
• 24:03
  I think that kind of thinking around planning and scenarios and recognizing
• 24:12
  the possibility that things aren't gonna turn out the way you want them to.
• 24:16
  For me, it reminded me of the Irish potato famine in the 1840s because
• 24:22
  Yes.
• 24:22
  the story is we had one, one type of potato, we had this Irish Lumper
• 24:27
  potato, and 150 types of species of potato exist in places like.
• 24:32
  South America, they planted various types in case one of them got taken down that
• 24:36
  the whole thing didn't get taken down.
• 24:38
  So that came to mind.
• 24:40
  As I read, as I read about Brittle as well, which is I mean it's, this
• 24:45
  is, it's, it's not nice reading about this thing 'cause it makes
• 24:48
  you question a lot of things.
• 24:49
  And to your point about, and I'm picking up some of other Bob's, other books here
• 24:54
  for those people who are just listening to us, the leadership, new leadership
• 24:58
  literacies and full spectrum thinking.
• 25:01
  And Bob talks about that idea of future Back.
• 25:03
  And also Jamais writes a lot about scenario planning.
• 25:07
  And one of the things that came to mind was there was a book written by
• 25:10
  JFK called Profiles in Courage and like a book that very few people have
• 25:15
  read because it's about political figures who made choices that were
• 25:20
  not popular, but really important.
• 25:23
  And it reminded me of stuff that you talked in the book, like the Spanish Flu,
• 25:26
  because I saw an interview with Obama and, and he, it was actually a speech he
• 25:31
  was giving and he said, we need to put in place structures for the Spanish flu.
• 25:36
  And nobody listens to those things because we want short term returns on things.
• 25:42
  Not nobody, it's like, it's like insurance policies.
• 25:46
  You're like, see if I can get away with getting, without getting insurance Policy
• 25:51
  is actually sometimes people's strategy versus, well, I better put it in place.
• 25:56
  I'd love you to expand on that because it's, it's that decision to make
• 26:00
  these really important decisions.
• 26:02
  And this goes for organizations as well with innovation.
• 26:05
  Do I keep squeezing out every penny today or do I try and plant
• 26:09
  a few seeds and hopefully some of them will come on for the future.
• 26:13
  I did a a custom forecast for a very large insurance company, the CEO of a very
• 26:18
  large insurance company a few years back.
• 26:22
  And if you think about the whole idea of insurance it's indemnification.
• 26:29
  after something bad happens, and most people in most societies
• 26:35
  nowadays, we're gamblers.
• 26:37
  And the fact that gambling is taking off in the US in ways
• 26:41
  that it never had before.
• 26:42
  I, it's not just a coincidence, but it's very worrisome because it's like
• 26:46
  we're willing to gamble our future.
• 26:50
  When we did this custom forecast, we were suggesting to the insurance company.
• 26:54
  Well, how about if you not just play the indemnification game?
• 26:58
  How about if you play the preparedness game?
• 27:01
  And the readiness game?
• 27:02
  So instead of ensuring a house if the pipes break you
• 27:08
  put in sensors on the pipes.
• 27:10
  You know, so that if the, if a leak forms, the sensors pick it
• 27:14
  up and you never do have a flood as compared to gambling the risk.
• 27:19
  And, and it, it's, it's really a different business model.
• 27:23
  But to me it makes a lot of sense.
• 27:25
  Where you try to figure out, well, how do we avoid bad things happening
• 27:29
  and turn that into a business.
• 27:31
  It could be a very profitable business to be prepared, but,
• 27:35
  but it's, just not used to it.
• 27:37
  We're gamblers, , and if you're a conscientious gambler,
• 27:42
  you get an insurance policy.
• 27:44
  If you're a crazy gambler with an addiction, you just take the risk.
• 27:49
  In many ways insurance does really exemplify a lot of what we're talking
• 27:54
  about, not, and not just with Brittle.
• 27:57
  One of the aspects of insurance is that it is designed to spread the risk
• 28:03
  Hmm.
• 28:04
  among many, many people.
• 28:05
  So it's not just a case of I'm saving up money just in case there's an accident.
• 28:10
  It's I'm getting involved in a system where I pay into this in, into this
• 28:15
  pot is available to everyone else in the system in case there's an
• 28:19
  accident or in case there's a problem
• 28:23
  And the more people you have in the system, the more resilient, the more
• 28:26
  robust it is because there's still a limited, still going to find that
• 28:32
  there's a lot more people who are getting by just fine than people who are
• 28:35
  suffering and under most circumstances.
• 28:39
  so we have.
• 28:43
  A lot of resistance to many of these ideas in in the United States in
• 28:47
  particular, but I think more broadly in the west in general it to push back is
• 28:54
  because we're, we're rugged individuals.
• 28:56
  We're trying to push back.
• 28:57
  We, we are in control of our own lives and, and when in reality we are far more
• 29:02
  resilient, far more able to continue in a healthy way we are connected with others.
• 29:11
  And so the, you know, when we're, I know we're jumping ahead a little
• 29:16
  bit, but one of the, the positive body ideas is interconnectedness is
• 29:21
  the counter to incomprehensibility.
• 29:24
  But that interconnectedness really is a very large concept and it plays
• 29:30
  into so much of what we are talk about, we're talking about in the
• 29:34
  world of BANI the brittleness aspect.
• 29:38
  We are far more brittle when we are isolated.
• 29:41
  We are much more resilient when we're connected.
• 29:45
  Well said, well said, and it.
• 29:47
  It's a nice segue actually for the next part because it's one
• 29:49
  of the reasons I think that the B.A.N.I. + side is so important,
• 29:53
  and a lot of them are about you.
• 29:55
  They're about you as a person.
• 29:57
  It's not just about organizations and the world being, B.A.N.I. plus it's actually
• 30:02
  us as individuals because one of the biggest things that we see is a huge
• 30:07
  uptick in many, many illnesses of despair.
• 30:12
  And , I hadn't heard about this term before.
• 30:14
  The diseases of despair, and this is the A of BANI, which is anxious.
• 30:19
  And you say, in an anxious world, our belief about our ability to
• 30:22
  shape and control outcomes faces increasingly complex technologies
• 30:26
  and ideologies built to deceive us.
• 30:29
  Revelation of that loss of control can mean hopelessness and despair.
• 30:33
  At the same time.
• 30:34
  Our media hijacks basic cognitive processes to make
• 30:37
  us consume more, click more.
• 30:39
  We start to see every decision as potentially disastrous.
• 30:43
  And the more we learn about the world, the worse it all feels.
• 30:45
  Political systems, economic systems, environmental systems, the dynamic that
• 30:50
  makes the world work are running amok and our illusion of control is gone.
• 30:56
  And I mentioned to you both, I'm writing a book at the moment and one of the
• 31:00
  reasons I'm writing 'em is 'cause of this.
• 31:01
  'cause I lectured to students and I've seen flickers of this
• 31:06
  anxious world from those students.
• 31:08
  And then on top of that, we see a huge amount of depression and worse
• 31:13
  with younger generations as well.
• 31:15
  So maybe you'll take us through anxious , and it's probably one of
• 31:18
  the more difficult chapters to read, anxious, but we have to cover it.
• 31:22
  It was painful writing that chapter.
• 31:25
  I don't know , if you felt that pain as well, Bob, but for me it was,
• 31:29
  yeah.
• 31:30
  you know, the examination of what people are going through , the on the ground
• 31:37
  results of these mechanisms that, once again are designed to, to carve out as
• 31:45
  much short-term profit as possible, in most cases, mechanisms that are intended
• 31:51
  to people the sense of illusion of power, but actually make them powerless.
• 32:01
  It is just so demoralizing to think about that kind of stuff.
• 32:05
  And you know, we try to be upfront with people in the book that this is not
• 32:10
  gonna be an easy chapter to read because so much of it feels directed at us.
• 32:17
  And in fact, you.
• 32:19
  One of the, I had a lot of conversations with people in the production of the book.
• 32:24
  I had a lot of conversations with people around the world who've
• 32:27
  been using BANI in their work.
• 32:30
  far and away anxious is the one, is the, the part of BANI that, that most
• 32:36
  quickly and deeply resonates for them.
• 32:40
  You know, they can see that happening as, and it's especially bad with younger
• 32:44
  people, but it's not just younger people.
• 32:48
  You know, we see these kinds of diseases of despair happening with with older
• 32:54
  middle aged adults who are rec, who recognize that everything they've
• 32:59
  put their life into is meaningless.
• 33:02
  Or, you know, they've been fooled all along.
• 33:05
  You know, there, I think there's a persuasive argument that one
• 33:07
  of the reasons why particular political pathologies have held on
• 33:13
  so, so tightly in the United States because of people being unwilling
• 33:20
  admit publicly that they're wrong.
• 33:23
  they've, and they've been wrong and they've been fooled.
• 33:27
  And so you have on top of that a
• 33:33
  a whole technol technology base that is predicated upon triggering
• 33:38
  our, you know, eliciting our most I immediate response to things.
• 33:44
  And it turns out that for a variety of good evolutionary reasons, our brains
• 33:49
  respond more, more quickly to fear and, anger than they do to joy and happiness.
• 34:00
  And so you have these systems that are built to elicit that, to trigger
• 34:05
  that anger response because it makes you click, it makes you respond, and,
• 34:12
  know, like springs, clicking things, makes them, makes the recipient money.
• 34:18
  And I don't think it is an intentional evil so much as it is a
• 34:23
  logical consequence of how we have constructed our socioeconomic system.
• 34:29
  And we don't get, dive deeply into that part in the book.
• 34:34
  really wanna focus on what it feels like and what we can do
• 34:38
  to alleviate that feeling or at least to moderate that feeling.
• 34:43
  But really important to remember that.
• 34:47
  This is not something that is be, that is happening completely organically.
• 34:51
  It's because it is happening because there is it, somebody is profiting from it,
• 34:59
  whether it's profiting economically or profiting politically, profiting socially.
• 35:05
  And this sense of being of having that control taken away, of having that
• 35:12
  power taken away of ha of not having any good choices left, that is such a
• 35:19
  pervasive feeling globally, that it is in many ways, I think is the heart of
• 35:27
  at least the first half of the book.
• 35:30
  As you say, it's the engine , of BANI and , the,
• 35:33
  Yeah.
• 35:33
  concept of if it bleeds, it leads, came to mind here as well, which
• 35:37
  is a concept from the media.
• 35:39
  Bob, I saw you taking a few notes there.
• 35:41
  I'm sure you were, organizing your thoughts.
• 35:45
  Yeah.
• 35:45
  It's so interesting as we reflect on this just to say what are the
• 35:49
  things that, that touch people?
• 35:51
  And, and I think this notion that she may just mention of no good choices
• 35:55
  left, that's the root of anxiety when you feel like you have no good choices left.
• 36:03
  So part of what we're trying to do in this book is to help people
• 36:09
  give them a safe place to realize that's what's going on.
• 36:12
  And then secoKyndryly in the body, positive, figuring out
• 36:15
  how to give them choices, how to flip those negatives positive.
• 36:21
  And the good news is there's lots of.
• 36:23
  Lots of resources to do that.
• 36:26
  It's just the resources have not been brought to bear in the ways that
• 36:30
  they need to particularly for kids.
• 36:33
  And actually if you read the research carefully, it's particularly for
• 36:36
  young men not just young women.
• 36:40
  And it's a, it's just a fascinating and sometimes tragic dynamic of anxiety,
• 36:46
  the way it's applying to a number of different people across the age
• 36:51
  spectrum, across the business spectrum, across the intellectual spectrum.
• 36:56
  Bob, I know I'm jumping ahead.
• 36:57
  BANI Plus here, but with the a you,
• 37:01
  hard not
• 37:01
  to, it's,
• 37:02
  yeah, yeah.
• 37:03
  Well, I, I, yeah, you're trying to keep I'm trying to, I'm trying to balance
• 37:06
  out a little bit of, of the anxiety here, but another a is Alan Watts and
• 37:12
  I share your love of his work, and I I still listen to him and he encourages
• 37:16
  me so much listening to his work.
• 37:19
  And the reason I, I share that is he wrote about anxiety in the sixties and he
• 37:25
  wrote about anxiety in the sixties as if it was a B.A.N.I. time then, and I, and
• 37:29
  I just wanted to point that out because.
• 37:32
  Every period has its own version of this.
• 37:35
  Every, every generation has its own period of this.
• 37:38
  We, we, we don't know, well, we, we didn't live through the forties,
• 37:43
  through the war wartime and in a way that should, that should be kept alive.
• 37:49
  There's a term in, Germany, a Jewish artist put across Germany, these
• 37:55
  little stones called StoplerSteiner.
• 37:58
  And what they are, they're stumbling stones.
• 38:00
  And on each name there's written the, the name of a Jewish person who was
• 38:05
  murdered in the concentration camps.
• 38:08
  And, and he said, it's not about shame, it's about a reminder that these, we
• 38:12
  need to remind ourselves of these times.
• 38:15
  But on the flip side and the positive side.
• 38:18
  I also wanted to say something that, that Jamais opened up,
• 38:21
  which was that we are resilient.
• 38:23
  This resi, we are resilient.
• 38:25
  We, at one stage there was 20,000 pairs of mating humans left on
• 38:29
  the planet, and we came back from these near extinction moments.
• 38:34
  So we have got it in us, but we need a wake up call
• 38:39
  yeah, it was interesting and startling as we were writing.
• 38:43
  It was making me remember, I went to divinity school before I did my
• 38:47
  PhD and studied world religions and Alan Watts, the Zen Buddhist Mystic
• 38:52
  of the time was one of my favorite authors exploring Eastern religions.
• 38:59
  And he wrote this book called The Age of Anxiety, and it was the 1960s, you know,
• 39:05
  so I, still have, when I do talks, yeah, there's usually in business audiences
• 39:11
  in particular, there's one person who rather snidely after I've introduced
• 39:17
  BANI says, oh, this is nothing due.
• 39:20
  We've had this all the time.
• 39:21
  And, and you know, there's some truth to that, there's some truth to that argument.
• 39:26
  So I always have to be patient and have to listen to it.
• 39:30
  And yes, at some level, let's just start with vuca.
• 39:36
  Life is a VUCA world.
• 39:38
  Life is volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous.
• 39:41
  And it always has been beginning from the fact that we have to die.
• 39:45
  We all have to die at an uncertain time, you know?
• 39:48
  So that's vuca.
• 39:50
  Yes.
• 39:50
  Okay, let's get that aside.
• 39:52
  But if you read these first four chapters, there's something different, heb here
• 39:57
  happening around BANI at a global scale with climate disruption, at a technical
• 40:03
  scale with artificial intelligence in a connectivity with cyber warfare.
• 40:09
  The kind of downside of connectivity.
• 40:11
  There's stuff happening now that yes, echoes the sixties and echoes
• 40:17
  life itself, but this is different.
• 40:21
  This is different and it's gonna take a different mentality to engage with it.
• 40:27
  It.
• 40:27
  One thing that that we say early in the book is that pretty much every one of
• 40:33
  the issues that we talk about, you know, in the book and people have spoken about
• 40:38
  more broadly around BANI, things that we've thought about, that people have have
• 40:43
  gamed out, have written, written policy papers on, very rarely in combination.
• 40:51
  We're so accustomed to thinking about these as isolated issues
• 40:55
  that we sometimes forget just how
• 41:00
  they can get.
• 41:01
  You know, it, this, they basically become the ways of expediating the, their,
• 41:08
  the other problems that are going on, making them worse and worse and worse.
• 41:13
  You know, you can't deal with, and you can't deal with
• 41:15
  climate without thinking about.
• 41:17
  You know, what's hap what we're doing with AI or with, with computers in general,
• 41:21
  you can't think about surveillance without thinking about demographics.
• 41:27
  All of these things that are, each one of them a crisis become in combination,
• 41:35
  and more.
• 41:37
  You to that, that in many of these cases there are no solutions.
• 41:45
  There are only sets of responses.
• 41:50
  Some better, some not, some not so good, but none of them perfect.
• 41:56
  And you know, so that for me is what makes this era, know, worthy of give being
• 42:02
  given its own
• 42:02
  Yeah.
• 42:03
  It's the fact that , these things are happening simultaneously,
• 42:06
  which is the real challenge.
• 42:08
  You know, it reminded me of there's the famous story of a guy called Clyde Beatty.
• 42:11
  He was the first ever lion timer for not getting famous, for
• 42:15
  not getting eating in the ring.
• 42:18
  And, and his, his trick was, he was the guy who discovered the value of the chair.
• 42:22
  And we held up the chair, the line fro froze.
• 42:25
  And the reason the line froze was because it tried to focus on all four legs of
• 42:28
  the chair at once and it didn't have the cognitive capacity to deal with that.
• 42:31
  So it saw them as four separate threats.
• 42:34
  And I, I thought of that.
• 42:35
  I was like going, I dunno how many legs of the chair are pointing at us today.
• 42:39
  But the human capacity is seven plus or minus two.
• 42:42
  A famous paper by George Miller.
• 42:44
  And I think that's part of it.
• 42:46
  If you're a leader of a country or a leader of an organization, there's so
• 42:50
  many things to deal with simultaneously.
• 42:54
  And by the time it's like the hybrid, by the time you, you lop off the head of one,
• 42:58
  it doubles and you have this other two things to do over there and it's nonstop.
• 43:02
  And, and that's I think what BANI, what I related to with BANI because I
• 43:07
  was an early user of BANI as well, or it helped me frame my own thinking.
• 43:12
  But I wanted to bring it to one thing, and this'll show you a bit of the
• 43:16
  nerd that I am, and I think I'm in good company here, two fellow nerds.
• 43:21
  But I remember it was one of the Batman movies, the Remakes, where
• 43:25
  Batman Begins or something like that.
• 43:26
  And what happened was at one stage he turns the world into echolocation.
• 43:33
  So he taps into everybody's mobile phone and he basically echolocate somebody.
• 43:38
  And it remind, I, it came to mind when I read your brilliant idea here from
• 43:42
  2004 of participatory Panopticon Jamais.
• 43:47
  I love that because I, I was thinking.
• 43:51
  I remember this happening.
• 43:52
  I remember the first time I saw a guy, I was playing rugby at the time.
• 43:55
  It was a guy in France was playing for this club to lose in
• 43:58
  France, and one of the guys had an iPhone and he, he, somebody had
• 44:03
  recorded him out on a night out.
• 44:05
  And I was like going, Ooh, that's dangerous.
• 44:07
  And, and you wrote about this in 2004, three years before
• 44:11
  the iPhone hit the stage.
• 44:13
  Big time.
• 44:13
  So let, let's share a bit about this because this doesn't help, because
• 44:17
  that plus gen AI and then where we can actually generate things that didn't
• 44:22
  happen, including the deep fake stuff.
• 44:25
  And we're only on the cusp of how good that's getting.
• 44:28
  Right, right.
• 44:30
  I, I first wrote about the participatory panopticon, which is really fun to say.
• 44:35
  First wrote about the participatory panopticon in 2004.
• 44:39
  gave a big talk on it in 2005.
• 44:43
  It.
• 44:43
  The idea was that we are moving towards, or at least at that time, we are
• 44:48
  moving towards a world where everyone can carry around an always on camera.
• 44:55
  And that just, at the time, that was just a mind blowing idea.
• 44:59
  Now it something that everybody has in their pocket.
• 45:03
  And it is something that we didn't think about or very few of us were
• 45:08
  thinking about the consequences of what happens, not just to , the technology,
• 45:13
  the infrastructure, and not just happens to, not just what happens to
• 45:16
  our economies, but what does it happen?
• 45:19
  What happens to our relationships, whether, whether political or social.
• 45:24
  What does it mean when you can record everything and can do so
• 45:29
  easily and can do so without being, it, being even being noticed?
• 45:34
  And this isn't just the surveillance from cameras being put up
• 45:38
  everywhere in shopping malls.
• 45:42
  It's the surveillance SOUS, the the, the bottom up.
• 45:47
  Watching that comes from having cameras everywhere.
• 45:54
  And, you know, it let, what leapt out to me at the time was that there's a
• 45:57
  real serious political development that, that was beginning, that the ability to
• 46:03
  record people and document what they say.
• 46:07
  And I went on with that in my own writing.
• 46:10
  I, I wrote about something that I called trying to be clever.
• 46:13
  The part decepticon, which for those of you who recognize the transformers robots,
• 46:19
  it was the bad guys, the participatory
• 46:21
  decepticon.
• 46:22
  I told you you were safe in fellow nerds.
• 46:25
  yep.
• 46:27
  What happens when you have all of these technologies, but you also have
• 46:31
  the ability to make believable things.
• 46:35
  When you can deceive people easily and convincingly, you know, one of the
• 46:41
  things that that you get is a world where you can't believe anything, and people
• 46:46
  sometimes call that the Liar's dividend, not so much that you're trying to make
• 46:50
  people believe something that's wrong, something that's false, you're trying to
• 46:55
  make them doubt something that's true.
• 47:00
  And that is, I wrote about that years ago.
• 47:04
  But I think it's something that we're all facing right now and it's
• 47:08
  very much part of the A in BANI.
• 47:11
  It's very much part of a world where we can't trust our systems because it is so
• 47:18
  easy to create the illusion of something good, something bad, something weird,
• 47:26
  and have that be completely believable.
• 47:29
  We may come up with little tells, you know, little hints like, oh look, they
• 47:32
  have a lot of M dashes, so it must be, it must have been written by chat, GPT.
• 47:37
  The reality is that even if that is the case or was the case, that's
• 47:41
  gonna get eliminated pretty quickly.
• 47:43
  And every case, the things , that we create to be, that allow us to
• 47:48
  make up new realities, increasingly able to make those realities
• 47:54
  utterly immersive and convincing.
• 47:58
  And that is , a real serious dilemma because, it really underscores,
• 48:02
  one of the core arguments of this whole book is that you certainty
• 48:06
  is dangerous in the body world.
• 48:08
  Believing yourself to be certain about something is you are
• 48:12
  putting yourself at enormous risk.
• 48:14
  Clarity is a lot more important than certainty.
• 48:17
  I have loads more on, a, on anxious, but I'm gonna keep going.
• 48:21
  One of the A's was the A MOC, which, oh man, YEESH that really, that
• 48:27
  really nearly tipped me over the edge.
• 48:29
  That was a tough one to read.
• 48:30
  And I'm not gonna go there.
• 48:31
  I'll leave that for people who get a copy of the book to read that.
• 48:35
  So we're gonna move on to non-linear and in a non-linear world, you
• 48:39
  tell us basic beliefs about cause and effect no longer seem true.
• 48:43
  Disproportionality is the rule whether in scale, scope, or time
• 48:48
  key systems grown under the weight of imbalances of power or wealth.
• 48:53
  Enormous efforts seem to elicit minuscule results while haphazard online videos
• 48:58
  or viral jokes shake up corporate boardrooms and international markets.
• 49:03
  COVID-19 was an object lesson in non-linearity, but ended up being
• 49:07
  so enmeshed in political struggles that we risk another pandemic being
• 49:12
  even worse, whatever illusions we held about predictable systems and
• 49:16
  reliable outcomes are well gone.
• 49:20
  This is another difficult one.
• 49:22
  Not as much so as anxiety, but let's give your take on non-linear.
• 49:28
  Nonlinear is actually a term for mathematics, but we're not using it in
• 49:32
  that way necessarily here, you know, it is this, idea of disproportionality, of
• 49:37
  disconnection between cause and effect.
• 49:41
  The process that led me towards including non-linear in the original
• 49:47
  BANI formulation is something called climate hysteresis, which is a lag,
• 49:52
  a measurable lag between changes in greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere
• 49:58
  and changes to and precipitation.
• 50:03
  So you can add stuff to the atmosphere and it will be five to 10 to 20
• 50:10
  years depending on, you know, all sorts of little fiddly details.
• 50:14
  But five to 20 years until you actually see the consequence.
• 50:18
  But it also means you can take stuff out of the atmosphere.
• 50:21
  You can stop adding stuff to the atmosphere, and conditions will continue
• 50:27
  to worsen for five to 10 to 20 years.
• 50:32
  On top of that, it's the recognition we have to recognize that our climate system
• 50:37
  is such that even if we stop putting out any greenhouse gases into the atmosphere
• 50:44
  right now, eliminate all human emissions.
• 50:49
  Even after that time of continued warming for five to
• 50:53
  10 years, it doesn't get cooler.
• 50:56
  We stay at that higher temperature.
• 51:00
  A lot of people think that if you stop doing something
• 51:03
  bad things will get better.
• 51:05
  Well, all we're talking about doing right now with our climate plans, you know, COP
• 51:09
  30 in Brazil, this last week everything we're talking about simply just stops
• 51:15
  making things worse as the ultimate goal.
• 51:18
  None of it is around making things better.
• 51:22
  And so we have in this nonlinear, in this underlying condition of nonlinearity
• 51:29
  in so many of our systems where the effort that we put in, the changes
• 51:34
  that we make are completely out of balance with the results that we get,
• 51:38
  the consequences of those actions.
• 51:41
  sometimes it's be we put in a lot of effort and get very little.
• 51:45
  Sometimes we put in a small amount of effort, an accidental change,
• 51:50
  and we see enormous consequences.
• 51:53
  Bob and I have done some work in the past around organizations that are looking
• 51:58
  at their, the future of advertising.
• 52:00
  there is a cliche in that world of, 50% of all advertisements are effective,
• 52:06
  you just don't know which 50%.
• 52:09
  And, but that is in many ways, a lesson in, in non-linearity.
• 52:13
  You can't tell which, what action you take that's going to
• 52:17
  have the effect that you want.
• 52:20
  It's, you have to make guesses, you have to play out scenarios,
• 52:24
  but you can't be certain.
• 52:26
  And so non-linearity is a really an attempt to underscore the
• 52:31
  lack of certainty, , the lack of
• 52:37
  clarity as well about how a cause leads to an effect.
• 52:43
  And, and so.
• 52:45
  The danger of nonlinearity is of course, you put in a lot of money and
• 52:50
  effort and time into something and get no result or little result, but
• 52:55
  it's also very much the potential for putting a lot of effort or making some
• 53:00
  serious changes to your life and not seeing a result for a period of time.
• 53:06
  So I talk about climate hysteresis.
• 53:08
  I immediately saw that not only was it a geophysical issue, an issue around climate
• 53:13
  and environment, it was a political issue because the changes that we asked pe we
• 53:18
  would ask people to make in order to get down to zero human emissions, the enormous
• 53:24
  changes of, you know, essentially stop eating beef entirely around the world.
• 53:29
  Stop eating ranched meats of most types stop driving cars or at
• 53:35
  least driving as much stop using, doing international air travel.
• 53:39
  Least using it as much.
• 53:41
  All of these things changes to our lifestyles that many of
• 53:44
  us would see as a detrimental.
• 53:47
  Seeing, you know, seeing as degrading our lives if we can't
• 53:50
  travel, if we, if we can't have a, a nice juicy steak or hamburger
• 53:57
  and then nothing gets better.
• 53:59
  In fact, things keep getting worse.
• 54:01
  You've made, you've asked us, you've forced us, you've, you've convinced us
• 54:05
  to make all of these massive changes to our lives and it didn't seem to matter.
• 54:12
  keep getting worse.
• 54:14
  And so there's a lot of trust that gets, that gets ripped away kind of environment.
• 54:19
  Non-linearity is very hazardous to trust because you think you know what the
• 54:25
  outcome's going to be and you're wrong.
• 54:30
  Or you don't even imagine that there's gonna be an outcome.
• 54:32
  You think it's just a casual comment.
• 54:34
  I mean, the whole,
• 54:37
  jD van and couch joke that were happening in during the election in 2024 about as
• 54:44
  somebody made an offhand joke on Twitter.
• 54:48
  was really just an offhand joke that snowballed so quickly so that even without
• 54:57
  having mentioned the details, I would say that 90% of your argument of your audience
• 55:01
  knows exactly what I'm talking about.
• 55:05
  The,
• 55:08
  the dangers.
• 55:08
  So the risks around nonlinearity are from that, that level of unpredictability and
• 55:15
  the inability to rely on our expectations.
• 55:19
  And we forget just how much of our lives revolve around the assumptions that
• 55:26
  things will turn out the way they have in the past, can't make that assumption.
• 55:31
  the line
• 55:32
  that I come away with is lines themselves are a danger.
• 55:40
  We should do fewer lines and more cycles.
• 55:44
  So as futurists we always talk about foresight, insight, action.
• 55:50
  The kind of old fashioned predictive futurists were thinking in lines and
• 55:54
  saying, well, where's, what's the prediction of what's gonna happen?
• 55:57
  Well, you can't predict the future, but you can cycle foresight, insight,
• 56:01
  action, and keep developing your thinking.
• 56:05
  But basically, if you think about the BANI world, lines are dangerous, circles
• 56:11
  are much better and much more powerful.
• 56:14
  I love that.
• 56:14
  Love that.
• 56:15
  Bob.
• 56:16
  You know, when I was, when I was reading about this, I was thinking about the
• 56:20
  things like Walter Mischel's Marsh.
• 56:23
  Test the marshmallow experiment and the the
• 56:26
  Yeah.
• 56:26
  Yeah.
• 56:26
  delayed gratification and how that even breaks down when, when you have
• 56:33
  hysteresis that you have, oh, I push the lever here and this thing will happen.
• 56:37
  I, I, I'm actually good at delayed gratification.
• 56:40
  I know it's gonna eventually happen.
• 56:42
  Then you're like going, no, no.
• 56:43
  You keep pushing that lever for it to stay at zero.
• 56:47
  And you go, oh, is that worth it for me?
• 56:49
  And I thought of it.
• 56:50
  There's a great guy we had on the show, and I know your two empathy lovers.
• 56:54
  There's a book called The Age of Empathy.
• 56:56
  Frans DeWaal wrote that book, a brilliant, brilliant book and, and was on the show.
• 57:01
  And he, he talked about how these macaque monkeys, and they got the monkeys to
• 57:07
  do jobs, these two monkeys, and they paid them in grapes, but he'd pay one
• 57:11
  of the monkeys in a, with a stone.
• 57:14
  And the monkeys rejected it.
• 57:15
  They'd throw it away going, cr, this monkey's going crazy.
• 57:18
  Because fairness was so important, and I thought it, all those things came to
• 57:22
  mind about this, like you say, social media hijacks these ancient forces,
• 57:26
  these cognitive forces that we have.
• 57:29
  Like if it bleeds, it leads, but also this doesn't work for those people who have
• 57:36
  actually realized that cause and effect, it actually doesn't work in a BANI era.
• 57:40
  And that that also is difficult.
• 57:43
  That effort is for what?
• 57:45
  And, and it made me think of organizations and how organizations, if you're a leader
• 57:49
  and you're kind of going, oh, you know what, I'm only two years to retirement.
• 57:52
  Do I really wanna do this big transformation effort?
• 57:55
  And then you go, well, they're human and politicians are human.
• 58:00
  What do they want to be known for?
• 58:02
  Do they want to do that work?
• 58:03
  Because it's a huge personal effort.
• 58:06
  It's huge personal effort, and usually at the expense of your own energy,
• 58:09
  your own health, your own family.
• 58:11
  So there's so much happening here.
• 58:14
  That's psychological as well.
• 58:15
  Cognitive part of this is massive.
• 58:18
  Well, I want to jump into something you said just a few seconds ago is that
• 58:23
  cause and effect don't work actually.
• 58:25
  Cause and effect do sometimes work.
• 58:27
  And that unpredictability the danger because sometimes cause and
• 58:34
  effect works exactly as expected.
• 58:35
  And if you go into it thinking that I'm gonna do this and it's not gonna have a
• 58:39
  result, you might be sorely disappointed by finding out that Yes, it does.
• 58:45
  And so it's that the inability to reliably predict to talk about, you
• 58:53
  know, so we actually, one of the, that's one of the things that, you
• 58:55
  know, that Bob and I and the foresight world in general, the professionals,
• 59:00
  really try to avoid the word predict.
• 59:02
  It's a bad word.
• 59:05
  Because it implies, it implies certainty and it implies, as Bob
• 59:09
  says, it implies a linear linearity.
• 59:13
  And we talk about, we like to talk about forecasts because forecasts, we
• 59:17
  all, we generally as associate with weather and you know that weather
• 59:22
  forecasts are never 100% right.
• 59:25
  But they point you in the right direction, hopefully.
• 59:28
  And so that's what we try to do with our work is we're not gonna be 100%
• 59:32
  right, but we want to be, well, as I say, we wanna be usefully wrong.
• 59:36
  That is, we want to be able to, you know, give you a sense of where things
• 59:40
  can be going so you get a better picture of what your options, the
• 59:45
  wider set of options that you have.
• 59:48
  It's a great point, and you're right about this.
• 59:50
  Is that.
• 59:51
  If, if, if I do something, I actually don't know if it even paid off or not.
• 59:55
  That's the other thing I was like, I don't know what Lever worked.
• 59:58
  It's like that.
• 59:59
  It's like you, you mentioned betting Bob.
• 1:00:02
  It's like in, in the slots where you pull the thing, the
• 1:00:04
  magic of maybe, did it work?
• 1:00:06
  Will it work?
• 1:00:06
  Maybe, I don't know.
• 1:00:08
  And then you're like, sometimes you, when you go, I didn't
• 1:00:10
  even pull the lever that time.
• 1:00:11
  Like I don't know what happened.
• 1:00:13
  So I, I thought we'd move on.
• 1:00:15
  I thought there was one term I thought was really important and the origin
• 1:00:18
  of it was going right back to the 12th century with King Henry ii, which is St.
• 1:00:23
  Stochastic Terrorism.
• 1:00:25
  And you, you know, you mentioned Vance there, so it came to mind.
• 1:00:32
  Yeah, stochastic terrorism is a relatively recent term for very old phenomenon.
• 1:00:39
  know, we talk about, he mentioned King Henry will no one rid
• 1:00:42
  me of this, turbulent priest.
• 1:00:44
  And he didn't actually call for any of his nights to go off and
• 1:00:47
  kill Archbishop Thomas Beckett, they took that from his statement.
• 1:00:53
  Staca terrorism means the statistical likelihood that somebody will respond
• 1:01:00
  to an ambiguous statement in a way, that can be seen as terrorism.
• 1:01:05
  So saying something along the lines of, we don't like that, and
• 1:01:10
  folks out there with guns might have something to say about that.
• 1:01:14
  Not calling for anyone to do anything awful.
• 1:01:17
  might even follow up by saying, but of course, no one, none of you would do that.
• 1:01:22
  It can still be that trigger.
• 1:01:24
  And if you're talking to enough people and you say things enough times in a
• 1:01:28
  particular way, there's an increasing likelihood that somebody will act and
• 1:01:34
  so stochastic terrorism is this idea that you can instigate a
• 1:01:40
  terrorist act without actually calling for it, simply by implying
• 1:01:44
  that there may be a benefit from it.
• 1:01:48
  And I think we are, we see that quite often.
• 1:01:51
  It's actually, it fits nicely with the anxious of how we generate
• 1:01:57
  make use of cognitive processes.
• 1:02:00
  You know, people listen for, they leap to their own conclusions
• 1:02:04
  about what you really meant.
• 1:02:06
  And so we keep putting out statements that sound like they
• 1:02:09
  imply more than they're really saying because people respond to that.
• 1:02:15
  And this just makes the, and in a world where you can communicate with
• 1:02:18
  everyone else on the planet, it gets really dangerous and you do that.
• 1:02:23
  and we see a lot of gaslighting of truth, speakers, and ostracization of them.
• 1:02:30
  And they just give up.
• 1:02:32
  I mean, journalists, we see it all the time.
• 1:02:35
  You know, they're targets of, this type of thing.
• 1:02:37
  But we'll move on to the last one 'cause we wanna finish the BANI and
• 1:02:41
  part one, which is incomprehensible.
• 1:02:44
  And you start this by saying, in a incomprehensible world, we hold
• 1:02:47
  onto less and less understanding of why we get certain outcomes,
• 1:02:51
  and they're all interlinked.
• 1:02:53
  As you'll see, our world reveals itself to be unthinkable and senseless and absurd.
• 1:02:58
  We build tools to help us think only to find out that they lie to us.
• 1:03:02
  We make life-changing decisions driven by ephemeral whims and trends.
• 1:03:06
  We are overwhelmed by information without any consistent method of finding meaning.
• 1:03:12
  Any capacity we have to think about the future is undermined relentlessly
• 1:03:16
  by chaotic fire hoses of dubious facts and confusing pseudo patterns.
• 1:03:21
  Our illusions of understanding.
• 1:03:24
  What is going on?
• 1:03:26
  Get ripped away.
• 1:03:27
  Beautifully written, but not such a beautiful concept.
• 1:03:33
  Well incomprehensible.
• 1:03:35
  When I, when I first started talking about BANI more publicly.
• 1:03:40
  I got a lot of pushback at first around the idea, the
• 1:03:43
  phrasing of incomprehensible.
• 1:03:44
  It's kind of, it's almost insulting to me as a human being to imply that I can't
• 1:03:48
  understand something or that human beings couldn't understand something, and that's
• 1:03:53
  not what it, what incomprehensible means.
• 1:03:55
  We're not talking about not being able to understand what is happening.
• 1:03:59
  It's all about not being able to understand why.
• 1:04:02
  You know, these are situations where your response is in many cases a
• 1:04:09
  less polite form of what the heck.
• 1:04:13
  And we see examples around of this where things just don't make
• 1:04:17
  sense, at least to many of us.
• 1:04:20
  There is a wave of gen Z driven protests around the world that have actually
• 1:04:27
  brought down one government already.
• 1:04:30
  Are threatening a couple of others, all in the developing world that are
• 1:04:34
  centered around a particular anime.
• 1:04:38
  All of the symbolism, of the, the clothing that the protestors wear,
• 1:04:42
  the signs that they hold up are centered around a particular anime.
• 1:04:47
  And I'm blanking on the name of it (One Piece) and I'll come up with it in the
• 1:04:49
  middle of our conversation later on.
• 1:04:51
  But it is a fairly popular anime, but it's anime.
• 1:04:56
  And yet it has become the unifying factor, the unifying symbology for
• 1:05:03
  literally millions of people are around the world a mechanism of protest
• 1:05:10
  and a mechanism of political action.
• 1:05:13
  And that's the kind of thing that falls into the incomprehensible
• 1:05:16
  is what the hell is going on here.
• 1:05:20
  And it is, we see this time and again with all of these different
• 1:05:24
  developments, you know, why?
• 1:05:27
  The US Centers for Disease Controlled just today changed their website
• 1:05:32
  to say that, there's no evidence to support the statement that
• 1:05:37
  vaccines do not cause autism.
• 1:05:43
  That kind of thing is just third.
• 1:05:48
  And, so when we talk about incomprehensibly, we're talking about
• 1:05:52
  these absurdities, we're talking about the things that are unthinkable,
• 1:05:56
  that we just don't want, we can't wrap our heads around, you know, the,
• 1:06:00
  possible consequences of nuclear war.
• 1:06:05
  We just passed the,
• 1:06:09
  80th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
• 1:06:15
  Nearly everyone who witnessed that is dead.
• 1:06:20
  We, and we will, over the course of the next couple of decades.
• 1:06:24
  Lose everyone who has ever seen an above ground nuclear weapons explosion.
• 1:06:30
  We've we're losing that, that visceral sense of reality and We
• 1:06:36
  have a really bad special effects.
• 1:06:39
  I don't know if you saw Oppenheimer, but the version of the nuclear, of the
• 1:06:43
  atomic bomb that blew up at the beginning of Oppenheimer was ludicrously bad,
• 1:06:47
  The AI will get better and better.
• 1:06:50
  yeah.
• 1:06:50
  Oh yeah.
• 1:06:50
  Right.
• 1:06:52
  Well, you know, the point being that
• 1:06:57
  there are so many things that are happening that are so overwhelming
• 1:07:01
  or so ridiculous are so just,
• 1:07:09
  unthinkable, absurd wrong that it gets very difficult to, well, to do
• 1:07:16
  anything, to make any kind of realistic plans to make any kind of realistic,
• 1:07:23
  have any kind of real, real thoughts about where to go next in our lives.
• 1:07:27
  It when there's so much absurdity happening around us, and then you add
• 1:07:31
  to that stuff like, you know, the AI being put into everything, but Microsoft
• 1:07:40
  just has just enabled copilot and every version of Windows, but they keep it
• 1:07:44
  turned off because they're warning that turning it on might, might pose
• 1:07:47
  a security threat, but they still put it into every version of Windows.
• 1:07:52
  Every copy of Windows.
• 1:07:56
  What?
• 1:07:57
  Yeah, I, the the incomprehensible is the one part of BANI that, that
• 1:08:04
  renders me unable to speak coherently.
• 1:08:06
  For those people who couldn't see Jamais there, he, he's, he's, he's
• 1:08:10
  showing his frustration on screen.
• 1:08:13
  Bob, you were gonna come in there.
• 1:08:15
  it's just a puzzle.
• 1:08:16
  I mean, you're, and the whole emphasis on why it's it may be
• 1:08:21
  different for each of us depending on our beliefs and our values.
• 1:08:26
  But certainly for most of us, we have these moments of bewilderment.
• 1:08:33
  That's what this is about.
• 1:08:35
  This will bridge into, I think, discussion, the positive BANI what
• 1:08:39
  we're teaching here about this is that even if you have this feeling of,
• 1:08:43
  I don't know what's going on, still are reasonable things you can do.
• 1:08:49
  probably won't correct the problem, but they'll certainly have the
• 1:08:53
  possibility of making it better.
• 1:08:56
  And they'll certainly have the possibility of you being more able
• 1:09:01
  to cope, more resilient yourself.
• 1:09:03
  And just to link back to the word Jamais used early, this is all about resilience.
• 1:09:08
  This is really a conversation about resilience.
• 1:09:12
  Beautiful.
• 1:09:12
  And I think it's a nice way to, to bookend on this episode as well.
• 1:09:16
  There's a, a few things that came to mind as well, and I think this is
• 1:09:19
  the whole idea of having an acronym like this, like vuca, like BANI is
• 1:09:24
  to help you make sense of things.
• 1:09:26
  And
• 1:09:27
  Yes.
• 1:09:27
  I, it reminded me of so many movies.
• 1:09:29
  I, you know, the, the Incomprehensibility, when I watch something like that movie
• 1:09:34
  Don't Look Up, which is about climate change or, or, and actually about just
• 1:09:38
  craziness, about mining, mining the planet and mining an asteroid as he comes for
• 1:09:43
  the pla for the planet to blow us up.
• 1:09:46
  And then zero Day, I don't know if you saw that Robert De Niro plays an ex-president
• 1:09:50
  and it's actually about CrowdStrike.
• 1:09:52
  That's what it's about.
• 1:09:53
  It shows what happens when there's a cyber attack that takes out everything,
• 1:09:57
  even for seconds and how many people die.
• 1:09:59
  And I think, you know, there's a, there's a.
• 1:10:03
  An intention behind making those movies is just to wake us up because maybe the
• 1:10:08
  person making the movie is going, you know what, this is incomprehensible.
• 1:10:12
  Why, why is nobody listening to me?
• 1:10:14
  And I know a lot of people, and you guys are those people as well, trying
• 1:10:18
  to get people to see that future and hope you're wrong, as you said.
• 1:10:22
  But I love to quote this, my fellow countryman, George Bernard Shaw, said, all
• 1:10:26
  progress depends on the unreasonable man.
• 1:10:29
  And you two are unreasonable men.
• 1:10:31
  And we're grateful, grateful that you are as well.
• 1:10:35
  Last question is, where can people find you?
• 1:10:37
  And don't forget, we're gonna come back, we're gonna do a part
• 1:10:39
  two, which is the B plus, which is the, in a way, the antidote to B.
• 1:10:44
  But where is the best place to.
• 1:10:48
  Well actually right now there is a, I have, I put together a website called
• 1:10:52
  age of BANI.com, age of BANI, which includes connections to all three of
• 1:10:57
  the authors, our bios, as well as videos that we've made explaining BANI in more
• 1:11:02
  detail and a link to where divided book.
• 1:11:05
  But but you can reach us through age of all three of us through age of BANI.com.
• 1:11:09
  And Bob Institute of the future work.
• 1:11:11
  You're still firing away, working with lots of organizations,
• 1:11:15
  Oh yeah, so Institute for the Future is also a link for both of us.
• 1:11:19
  But to get more background to buy the book is the website that Jamais
• 1:11:25
  mentioned, and you can put a link in that.
• 1:11:27
  That'd be great.
• 1:11:29
  all links, all stuff we talked about will be there.
• 1:11:32
  And it's an absolute pleasure.
• 1:11:34
  Thank you for joining for us, part one of Navigating the Age of Chaos,
• 1:11:38
  A Sense making Guide to a BANI world that does not make sense.
• 1:11:41
  Jamais Cascio.
• 1:11:42
  Bob Johansen, thank you for joining us.
• 1:11:44
  Thank you.
• 1:11:45
  Thank
• 1:11:46
  you.
• 1:11:47
  Thank you for joining us for navigating the Age of Chaos.
• 1:11:50
  It is thanks to our friends at Kyndryl.
• 1:11:54
  With a unique blend of AI powered consulting, built on unmatched
• 1:11:57
  managed service capability.
• 1:11:59
  Kyndryl helps leaders harness the power of technology for smarter
• 1:12:03
  decisions, faster innovation, and a lasting competitive edge.
• 1:12:06
  You can find out more at Kyndryl.com.
• 1:12:09
  And don't forget, check out the Kyndryl Institute at.
• 1:12:13
  Ton of thought leadership from brilliant speakers, brilliant thinkers from
• 1:12:18
  all over the world, many of whom have been guests on the show, and you can
• 1:12:22
  find them at Kyndryl.com/institute.