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Bonus Episode: Navigating the Age of Chaos, Featuring Bob Johansen · Humanity Working

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_01: Hi everybody, Paul here.
• 0:02
  SPEAKER_01: Welcome back to Humanity Working.
• 0:05
  SPEAKER_01: A couple of bits of housekeeping before we get started today.
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_01: First off, our guest, Bob Johansson, is back to talk about his new book, Navigating the Age of Chaos, and it's a terrific book.
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_01: But unfortunately, during the podcast, Bob was having some construction work done, and you can kind of hear it in the background, particularly on my questions as it's coming through from Bob's speaker.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_01: We did everything we could to pull it out in post, but there are still still a few bangs here and there.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_01: I'd urge you to push through that because Bob has really got some really interesting things to say on the podcast, and I don't want you to miss that.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_01: Secondly, if you haven't got yourself a copy yet, just a reminder that my new book, The AI Ready Human, is out and available in pretty much any online bookstore.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_01: So go grab yourself a copy.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_01: All right, with that, let's get on with it.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_01: Today is a bit of a special day on Humanity Working.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_01: We have our first uh three-peat guest, Bob Johansson.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_01: So welcome back for the third time to the podcast, Bob.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_02: Great, great to be with you, Paul.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_01: Um and uh there was a very specific reason why I wanted to uh to invite um Bob back on.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_01: Bob's co-written a book um called Navigating the Age of Chaos.
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_01: I'm holding a copy up here for those who are watching on uh watching on YouTube.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_01: Um and my goodness, it is really, really thought-provoking, really, really interesting, and for me at least, um creates a framework which improves my understanding of what is going on uh in in the world around us.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_01: Now, Bob and I spoke about Banny at a high level in the uh in the last um podcast that we did together, but Bob said, hey, we've got this coming.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_01: Why don't we come back and talk about these themes in a bit more detail?
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_01: And that's exactly what we're gonna do today.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_01: Now, just to kind of give you a little bit of a flavor as to the nature of the conversation that I'm gonna be having with Bob today, it's gonna be framed a little bit similarly to how the book itself is.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_01: So the first part of the conversation is gonna be really dealing with um with Bany itself and and and what Benny is.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_01: So if you've never heard of Benny, uh don't worry about it, we're gonna uh we're gonna get into that.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_01: Then the second part of it is sort of really centered, gonna be centered around responses to that.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_01: Now I mentioned that right up front because for the same reason that that that they mention it in the book itself, that first part of the discussion can actually be kind of uh kind of difficult.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_01: We're gonna be talking about some um some big and kind of uncomfortable themes, but but do not worry, we're gonna get from that into how we can uh how we can respond to some of these uh some of these things.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_01: So with that said, let's get let's get straight into it with really just what what Banny itself is for people that are new to the podcast or didn't hear our previous conversation.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe we'll start with Duca and then move on as to as to how that thinking has evolved uh into Banny.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_01: So because I know that you've been involved in this stuff for for many years, Bob.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_01: So start with Vuka and then explain how your thinking and the thinking of the Institute for the Future has evolved into what we call Bani today.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_02: Sure.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_02: So both VUCA and Bonnie are ways of framing the future.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_02: And the idea of framing is is really important because if we frame the future accurately, it helps us become more future ready.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_02: It helps us try to make sense about what's going on.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_02: If you frame it incorrectly, uh, then it's very hard to prepare.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_02: And it's like you're fighting the future.
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_02: Now, I use the term VUCA for many years since 9-11.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_02: It was actually coined in the late 1980s at the Army War College.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_02: I am not a military guy, but I just happened to be at the War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, the week before 9-11.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_02: It was introduced to that term.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_02: VUCA was really good as a frame for the future until just the last couple of years.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_02: And what it did was help us understand that the future will be volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_02: And in my teaching, I I then started teaching at the Army War College, and I still do.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_02: I teach the new three-star generals on their first week in Washington.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_02: And I've I've flipped that positive and have a whole framework around positive VUCA.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_02: But then we've realized just in the last couple of years, that VUCA isn't VUCA enough for what we're about to experience.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_02: And that's why my colleague Jamey Cashio coined the term Bonnie actually in 2018 for brittle, anxious, nonlinear, and incomprehensible.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_02: And the big shift between VUCA and Bonnie, the big shift is in VUCA, we used to assume that if only we had the right data, if only we had the right experts, we'd be able to understand what's going on in the external world.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_02: In a Bonnie future, we no longer make that assumption.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_02: There'll be things going on in this external world that just don't make sense, that we don't understand.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_02: But we have to decide anyway.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_01: I think there's a power to that because the assumption that if we just know enough can often lead to the idea of, well, let's find the people that appear to know the most about this, do exactly what they say, and then everything will work out okay.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_01: Um and and that's caused challenges uh in responses to a whole bunch of different things.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_01: Like for example, you know, the activities that might happen after a major war for rebuilding and and things like that.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_01: Let's just hire a bunch of people who theoretically under have enough knowledge to understand how to make a society work in a part of the world that we really are not, that we don't know a great deal about, make a bunch of changes and then expect it to work out perfectly.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_01: And of course, we've seen in multiple occasions that that's um that that's not happened.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_01: Um so there's sort of like a in a sense, there's a humility that is embedded within uh Bany that helps with the power of it, right?
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_01: Um so thinking about Bani versus VUCAR, are we are we effectively saying that Vukar is no longer realistic as a framework for uh for thinking about the world?
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_01: Is VUCA still being used extensively in in many organizations and if so successfully?
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_01: Where where are you at on the sort of like is is is VUCAR dead or is just is Bani just more more effective now?
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I would say Bonnie is just more effective now.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_02: Um VUCA's not dead.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_02: It still is reasonable.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_02: We're still facing a world that's volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_02: And the positive VUCA that we developed, vision, understanding, clarity, and agility, that's still very relevant.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_02: VUCA just isn't enough.
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_02: So we're trying to get people's attention now to realize that this future is going to be even more chaotic than what we anticipated when the VUCA term was the best frame we had.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_02: Bonnie's a more accurate way to prepare for what's coming.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_01: There's quite a lot of examples in it, the reference back to the Second World War, for example.
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_01: And I found myself thinking, well, hang on, that was a that was a very banny time in in many ways.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_01: So is today really different to periods in our history that have been, if you like, VUCA Plus?
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it is.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_02: It is.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_02: And you you can draw similarities, and you know, I certainly wouldn't argue with that, beginning from the fact that as humans, we all have to die at an uncertain time.
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_02: You could say, well, that's VUCA, or you could even say that's kind of Bonnie in a way, too.
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_02: So it's not like it's a completely different frame, but there's there are significant differences.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_02: If you look at what's happening with global climate disruption and the phenomenon around global climate disruption, we've never experienced anything like this at a at a planetary scale before.
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_02: That's just unprecedented.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_02: If you look at technologies like artificial intelligence, even the designers of the best systems don't know exactly what they're doing, uh, don't know exactly what's going on.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_02: So it's much more bonny than it is VUCA.
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_02: Um, look at the connectivity we have now and the potential for cyber terrorism, for cybercrime, for cyber war.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_02: That's unprecedented.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_02: We never had anything like that ability before.
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_02: So sure, you can call, you can say that there's similar to the past, but there's something different.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_02: And that's why we changed.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_02: Because Abani says, Whoa, don't assume that what you did before will be enough to prepare for what's coming.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_01: In relation to that, I'm struck by some uh conversations that I've had with um employees in the workplace about not just what's going on in their lives, but how they're feeling about what's going on in their lives.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_01: A if Bonnie is anxious, right?
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_01: That it's a um that this is this isn't just what's happening, it's it's it's the effect that it's that it's having on it.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_02: It's the effect.
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_02: And as we talk about Bonnie for new audiences, they immediately want to talk about anxious.
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_02: Uh so because everybody's anxious.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, if you're not anxious, you're not paying attention.
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_01: I'd reference it back to a movie title.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_01: I call it the it's the everything, everywhere, all at once uh world.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_01: The anxiousness is not just about one thing, it's about everything, short, medium, long-term stuff all coming at us all at the same time.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, that's right.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_02: That's right.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_01: So you've so it's a that in terms of how people even like once they're presented with the framework, how they res how they respond to the to the I do, I do.
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_02: And that in the first four chapters, we essentially make that point about pointing out all the things that are going on in the external world and all the things that are going on in the external world simultaneously, which make it even more bizarre and more uh chaotic in in that sense.
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_02: So it's really important, I think, to realize that.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_02: Now, anxiousness in itself, being anxious, that's not necessarily bad.
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_02: We reference in the book uh Robert Rosen's wonderful title, Just Enough Anxiety.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_02: And what he what he argues is that anxiety itself is not bad.
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_02: It's chronic anxiety.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_02: It's the kind of anxiety that shuts you down, that makes you so you're not prepared.
• 11:58
  SPEAKER_02: And what we talk about particularly in the chapters on anxiety is how the impact on kids.
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, and if you believe the current research, particularly young men are particularly anxious and particularly unprepared for this kind of future.
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_01: There's one there's one specific example that you quote in the chapter on the anxious part of Vanny, and and it's uh it's the climate issue in Europe.
• 12:28
  SPEAKER_01: You talk about the fact that, for example, Europe and certain parts of uh of North America are today warmer than you might expect.
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_01: And that as climate change accelerates, there's the potential for that to be disrupted.
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_02: Jamee, the lead author, is really our climate expert.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_02: Um, Angela is the on the ground expert uh with examples of the Bonnie future, the way it's already being experienced in parts of the world and particularly climate impact zones.
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_02: I'm kind of the resident futurist, the resident social scientist looking at this.
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_02: So my take on that is what you've got is a phenomenon that's larger than anything we've had to deal with global climate disruption, that is creating situations.
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_02: The term we talk about in the book is hysteresis, uh climate hysteresis, where even if you do the right thing, it may take years or even decades to see the impact.
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_02: So this really deals with the nonlinear aspect of Bonnie, that we can't assume that things will happen in a linear in a linear way where cause and effect will be sequenced in the way we expect.
• 13:43
  SPEAKER_02: The challenge is how do you how do you deal with a situation where things are so complicated that actually nobody fully understands them?
• 13:53
  SPEAKER_02: You still have to decide.
• 13:55
  SPEAKER_02: And what we talk about in the Bonnie Positive chapter around nonlinear is the necessity that we learn to improv in situations like this where we know as much as we can know, but we're humble, as you said at the beginning.
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_02: Being humble in this world, it's really important to be some combination of strong and humble and well read and prepared to the extent you can without taking it too seriously.
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_02: So uh the example that you're talking about is just one of those humbling examples that requires us to be ready, even though we don't know exactly, we don't know exactly what we're going to be ready for.
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_02: And even if we do the right thing in those cases, it may take a very long time for us to understand whether it was right or whether it's wrong.
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_02: So it's it's a very frustrating time in that, in that regard.
• 14:55
  SPEAKER_02: And it's um it's also, I think that leads to the kind of polarization that we're in, where there's a lack of trust in anybody that's different from us, and it's easier to blame others uh than it is to take responsibility ourselves.
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_02: And there are just things we don't understand, but we have to decide anyway.
• 15:15
  SPEAKER_02: And it's it's interesting.
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_02: When I began my career, I worked um closely with Proter and Gamble and some of their top people.
• 15:23
  SPEAKER_02: They had what they called the 80-20 rule, which is you've got to decide when you have about 80% of the information you wish you had.
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_02: Well, you know, that was a long time ago.
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_02: Now we're in the 60-40 rule or the 50-50 rule, or worse yet, the 40-60 rule.
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_02: And yet, as leaders, we have to decide anyway.
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_02: So those are just examples of the kind of future-backed challenges we're we're facing.
• 15:49
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and I think what really uh really struck me about that that one example um was there's a there's a delta pop up between even in areas where with people who consider themselves to be reasonably well informed about some of these topics, um, there's a there's a delta between um the magnitude of the challenge and people and and people's general under understanding of this.
• 16:20
  SPEAKER_02: Well, and our ability to respond.
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, yeah, precisely.
• 16:24
  SPEAKER_01: There's some interesting things you talk about in the book as to you get to a point, particularly when things feel incomprehensible, that one of the responses to it is for us in a sense to ignore it or to or to um or to look for simpler answers than the than the reality that's there.
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah, exactly.
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_02: Well, it's uh you know, it's a hard topic.
• 16:48
  SPEAKER_02: Uh this idea of thinking about the future isn't easy.
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_02: And if you're dealing with futures that are threatening, you know, the way the military deals with that is what they call war gaming.
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_02: And it's basically creating scenarios, scenario planning.
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_02: The original war gamer was a guy named Herman Kahn in formerly at Rand, and then in the 1960s.
• 17:10
  SPEAKER_02: And he wrote this classic book called Thinking About the Unthinkable.
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_02: Thinking about the unthinkable, and it was mostly about the impact of a thermonuclear war.
• 17:22
  SPEAKER_02: Um, people don't like to think about the unthinkable.
• 17:26
  SPEAKER_02: So, so it's it's to me, it's it's not surprising.
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_02: It's just something that we've got to deal with and we've got to figure out how to open up because now there are the kind of climate disruption scenarios and possibilities that are real enough that we should be thinking about them.
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_02: But in a way, our future selves are the strangers we know best.
• 17:52
  SPEAKER_02: You know, we're we don't want to think about our future selves.
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_02: What'll it be like when you're 10 years older, 10 years older, or 10 years older, and then think future back?
• 18:02
  SPEAKER_02: That's what wealth managers ask us to do.
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_02: You know, well, how long do you think you'll live?
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_02: And how can you back off and plan that way?
• 18:11
  SPEAKER_02: Um, we can't even do that at a very systematic level.
• 18:14
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, some people are better at it than others.
• 18:17
  SPEAKER_02: But when you deal with things like global climate disruption, including the specific issues like you raise, or you deal with something like another related topic, uh, not necessarily related, but it could be related, is thermonuclear war.
• 18:31
  SPEAKER_02: You know, the chances, the chances of the nuclear war are higher now than they were 10 years ago.
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_02: And yet very few people are talking about that either, or or or planning for that.
• 18:43
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I've got a theory about that, and so I'd be curious to get your thoughts on it.
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's directly and implicitly linked to what Banny is.
• 18:53
  SPEAKER_01: And and and and I think that there is a I think there is an element to Banny, which is that everything, everywhere, all at once thing, that is in itself creating a form of cognitive overload.
• 19:07
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 19:07
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm a child of the I was born in 71, and I distinctly remember I'm living in a period of a great deal of uncertainty around potential nuclear war, and we would all talk about the you know, you know, the four-minute warning, and and it was very much in the popular culture.
• 19:25
  SPEAKER_01: You had songs like two tribes, you had the you had these various, you know, movies that would uh that that came out that people that that people saw, and we were worried about it.
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_01: Teenagers were worried about it, people were think we're thinking about it all the all of the time.
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_01: But in a sense, we we had the it sounds like very odd, but we had the luxury to be able to worry about it because that was the thing to worry about.
• 19:49
  SPEAKER_01: But now we've got all of these different things.
• 19:52
  SPEAKER_01: We were not simultaneously worried about that and the breakdown of democratic structures in our own countries.
• 19:58
  SPEAKER_01: We were not simultaneously worried about that and climate change.
• 20:01
  SPEAKER_01: We were not simultaneously worried about that and the breakdown of global supply chains or or whatever it is you have to see.
• 20:08
  SPEAKER_01: Now we've got so many things to be worried about, we wind up not being as worried about any of them and more generally worried.
• 20:16
  SPEAKER_01: Do you think that's sort of right?
• 20:18
  SPEAKER_02: It's it's sort of right.
• 20:20
  SPEAKER_02: And it's basically why we're giving people a language to describe that feeling, uh, the Bonnie language, and we're giving them a way to flip it positive.
• 20:30
  SPEAKER_02: And I hope we can talk more about that we're gonna get it.
• 20:32
  SPEAKER_02: Because really, the the this is uh a very positive book.
• 20:36
  SPEAKER_02: It's a a positive book in really threat threatening times.
• 20:40
  SPEAKER_02: But we do start with why, why it's reasonable to be worried, why it's reasonable to be anxious, why we need to think future back to begin to make sense out of this stuff.
• 20:54
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 20:54
  SPEAKER_01: So let's go straight into that.
• 20:56
  SPEAKER_01: The uh what what you call in the book Banny Plus.
• 20:59
  SPEAKER_01: Um and for those people that are watching on YouTube, I know you've got a little book mark.
• 21:04
  SPEAKER_01: If you could just hold that, uh, hold that up.
• 21:06
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I I don't know if it's even going to be readable if I hold it up, but um, but it it basically means in a brittle world, you've got to be bendable, but with resilient clarity.
• 21:18
  SPEAKER_02: In an anxious world, you've got to be attentive, but with active empathy.
• 21:25
  SPEAKER_02: In a nonlinear world, you want to be neuroflexible with a kind of practiced improvisation.
• 21:33
  SPEAKER_02: And in an incomprehensible world, you want to be interconnected with an ability to think in a full spectrum way, not get stuck in labels or categories from the past.
• 21:46
  SPEAKER_01: These are these are ways in which we can behave in a banny world, but you're not making the argument that these are solutions to the to the banny world.
• 21:56
  SPEAKER_01: These are not ways to unscramble an egg, right?
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, exactly.
• 22:01
  SPEAKER_02: There are more responses.
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_02: So the the challenge, first of all, is to try to make sense about what's going on to the extent you can.
• 22:09
  SPEAKER_02: And then the second thing is how do you flip it positive?
• 22:12
  SPEAKER_02: How do you take something negative and flip it positive?
• 22:16
  SPEAKER_02: So that's what chapters six through nine are all about.
• 22:19
  SPEAKER_02: And we do that from an organizational point of view, from an individual point of view, and then from a personal psychological point of view.
• 22:29
  SPEAKER_02: So we drew from the research of Judith Moskowitz at Northwestern, who is focused on how you can help people cope with medical uh challenges, tragedies, really things like a partner with dementia or a terminal cancer uh diagnosis.
• 22:47
  SPEAKER_02: And what Judith studies is what are the methods of psychologically coping, not in a way that solves the problem, because we're not going to solve Bonnie.
• 22:56
  SPEAKER_02: We just have to figure out how to live with it and to the extent possible, flip it, flip it into something positive.
• 23:03
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, we'll put a link to her work in the um in the show notes.
• 23:07
  SPEAKER_01: Um it's very powerful stuff.
• 23:10
  SPEAKER_01: In fact, we um we've used it a little bit ourselves.
• 23:13
  SPEAKER_01: And and I think the I I think the most important aspect to that is that this helps us understand that there is a almost if you're like starting from the individual, what is what is the degree of resilience that I that I need in order to be able to deal with the reality that I have?
• 23:32
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and you're better off, you know, this is a principle of gaming, really.
• 23:36
  SPEAKER_02: The um I visited the national training center for the US Army in the Mojave Desert, and their goal is to create simulations that are harder than real warfare.
• 23:48
  SPEAKER_02: So basically, you're in a game that lasts two weeks, 24 hours a day, um, and many people are killed without having to die.
• 23:58
  SPEAKER_02: You know, so it's really first person learning.
• 24:01
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and if you're in a situation like that, or if you can play a game, one of my colleagues, Jay Dunnigan, says um, you're better off to be surprised in a game or a simulation than you are to be blindsided in reality.
• 24:19
  SPEAKER_02: So what you want is to prepare yourself for this uncertainty so you expect it.
• 24:25
  SPEAKER_02: And if it turns out things are not as uncertain as you thought, you get extra credit.
• 24:30
  SPEAKER_02: You know, you're you're you're ready anyway.
• 24:33
  SPEAKER_02: So it's better to simulate, it's better to improv, it's better to game out that future, and then practice how you can respond.
• 24:43
  SPEAKER_01: Bob, do you think this creates a change in how we should think about certain aspects of simulation?
• 24:50
  SPEAKER_01: There's a couple of situations in the book where you talk about the idea that people had a honed practice response to something, and that because they were in a non-linear situation, yeah, they had to kind of like have the judgment to in the moment throw out what they had previously learned and behave differently.
• 25:14
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, so um airline airline pilots uh get severe training um that does prepare them.
• 25:23
  SPEAKER_02: We tell the Tammy Joe Schultz story in this book, but we could tell hundreds of others where you've got pilots who were trained on simulators to respond to crises, um, and then they get into a real crisis that isn't exactly the same, but it's close enough that they were prepared in a way they would not have been prepared before.
• 25:47
  SPEAKER_02: And and here I think um, you know, I was expressing my concern about young people earlier around anxiety.
• 25:54
  SPEAKER_02: One of the things that I think is gonna help is many more young people now are growing up playing video games.
• 26:00
  SPEAKER_02: And depending on what games they play, they're gonna be more ready for this Bonnie future.
• 26:06
  SPEAKER_02: And I admit many of today's video games are too sexual, too violent.
• 26:10
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, that's true.
• 26:12
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, but still, that medium of gaming is going to be the learning medium of the future.
• 26:18
  SPEAKER_02: And you can see that in places like Khan Academy, uh, where they're using simulation, using gaming for learning.
• 26:26
  SPEAKER_02: All good organizations are going to be doing that 10 years from now.
• 26:29
  SPEAKER_02: And the kids are going to be more ready for that than we are.
• 26:33
  SPEAKER_01: On that topic of young people, there's the Coach Eck uh story, which is just such a which is just such a compelling story.
• 26:42
  SPEAKER_01: It involves obviously young people's uh young people's responses.
• 26:46
  SPEAKER_01: And I think it I think it captures almost as well as anything how one can respond as an individual, but also how one can influence others at times that feel as doom-ridden as is humanly possible.
• 27:03
  SPEAKER_01: So I wonder if you could talk about that a little bit.
• 27:05
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, that was such an amazing situation.
• 27:08
  SPEAKER_02: And Coach Eck was not trained in gaming the way that an airline pilot would have been or an army officer was, but he was.
• 27:17
  SPEAKER_02: The one thing he had was he had been he had been trained as a monk, as a boy.
• 27:24
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, and that did help.
• 27:25
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, did help.
• 27:26
  SPEAKER_02: But this is a case where uh he was a soccer coach and the soccer uh team as a celebration went into a cave as a recreational activity and got trapped in the cave.
• 27:38
  SPEAKER_02: And the cave was dark, the cave was wet, and they didn't know if they were going to get out or not.
• 27:44
  SPEAKER_02: And they eventually got out.
• 27:46
  SPEAKER_02: But we tell uh remarkable stories in there about how he kept those kids oriented and kept himself oriented, even in a world of wet darkness.
• 27:57
  SPEAKER_02: It was very scary, very scary situation.
• 28:01
  SPEAKER_02: But he set up a routine that was really important uh to keep people steady and keep people engaged.
• 28:08
  SPEAKER_02: He had a kind of calmness, a sleep cycle he set up.
• 28:12
  SPEAKER_02: Basically, he tried to simulate um ways of creating enough normalcy that people could, the kids could stay oriented uh and keep some sense of hope.
• 28:26
  SPEAKER_02: And they made it through.
• 28:27
  SPEAKER_02: It was pretty, it was really a remarkable, remarkable story.
• 28:31
  SPEAKER_02: Then you know, those are gonna be really different kids.
• 28:34
  SPEAKER_02: I'd be really interested to see what kind of careers they have, what kind of lives they had.
• 28:39
  SPEAKER_02: But talk about being future ready.
• 28:42
  SPEAKER_02: You know, they're gonna be they're gonna be more ready for a for a Bonnie future than a lot of people who grow up in a more protected way.
• 28:50
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 28:51
  SPEAKER_01: I'll tell you, Bob, just as an aside here, um the book I read immediately previous to to uh reading this book was Lord of the Flies.
• 29:04
  SPEAKER_01: Oh and it and it it struck me just how like Coach X behavior and how those kids managed was was if Lord of the Flies is a parable as to what how you do not want to respond and behave to a value world, then Coach X was a uh was a parable as to how you do.
• 29:26
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, really.
• 29:31
  SPEAKER_01: Throughout this uh throughout this book, and and you do talk about the um you talk about the fact that stories are actually a very important part of how we go about.
• 29:49
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know if making sense is right to say, because Banny is incompetensible, right?
• 29:55
  SPEAKER_01: But but but it's how we nav stories are a very important way of navigating this, right?
• 30:00
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
• 30:01
  SPEAKER_02: Stories are a very important way of making sense.
• 30:03
  SPEAKER_02: I think that's a good way of saying it.
• 30:05
  SPEAKER_02: So the latest neuroscience on storytelling suggests, and there's fMRI data now to document this, the latest research suggests that our brains are wired for stories.
• 30:15
  SPEAKER_02: If our brains don't hear stories, they make them up.
• 30:19
  SPEAKER_02: They make them up.
• 30:20
  SPEAKER_02: So stories are just how we integrate, how we sense-make, how we bring bring things together.
• 30:27
  SPEAKER_02: So um the best leaders are always great storytellers.
• 30:32
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 30:32
  SPEAKER_01: And of course, the best leaders also bring clarity to uh to situations, even when they are confusing.
• 30:43
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, we we call it clarity stories in the book.
• 30:46
  SPEAKER_02: You want resilient clarity stories, and you keep repeating that over and over again.
• 30:51
  SPEAKER_02: And Kochak did that in the cave.
• 30:53
  SPEAKER_02: He had a story of how they were gonna get out, and he helped people imagine what it was gonna be like when they get out, and they told the story over and over and over again.
• 31:04
  SPEAKER_01: The full title of the book um Navigating the Age of Chaos, a sense-making guide to a banny world that doesn't make sense.
• 31:13
  SPEAKER_01: The uh the the author in me was like, this should be called clarity amidst chaos, or something along those lines.
• 31:22
  SPEAKER_01: It's really interesting, isn't it, how clarity in the true sense of the word, something we discussed in our in our last conversation, actually, Bob.
• 31:31
  SPEAKER_01: But clarity in the true sense of the world word is extremely different to the concept of certainty, especially when you're dealing a world with a world that is inherently uh chaotic.
• 31:45
  SPEAKER_02: That's right.
• 31:46
  SPEAKER_02: That's right.
• 31:46
  SPEAKER_02: So you what you want is clarity of direction, but flexibility of execution, and you can't have certainty.
• 31:55
  SPEAKER_01: Bob, just as to kind of finish this up here, um you do mention in the book, and I was struck by it myself, so I love that you you call it out.
• 32:07
  SPEAKER_01: You say that there is a there's a sort of difference in scope between the nature of the challenges and the nature of the responses that are there in Banny Plus.
• 32:21
  SPEAKER_01: Um I'd love you to talk a little bit about how that how that difference, right?
• 32:27
  SPEAKER_01: The difference between the the scope of the challenges and the and the nature of the responses as we see them right now, um, that difference, how that's affecting how people are responding to the framework and and what they do in in practice on a day-to-day basis.
• 32:44
  SPEAKER_02: But it goes back to what you were commenting on earlier, you know, why are people ignoring these giant looming issues?
• 32:50
  SPEAKER_02: And I think a lot of the reason is we're we're just frustrated and saying we feel kind of helpless and alone and isolated and small in reference to these very large, large issues.
• 33:04
  SPEAKER_02: The research on this, including the Judith Moscovitz stuff that we talked about a moment ago, um, the research suggests that if you're faced with a very large issue that threatens you, that frightens you, you're always better off doing something than you are nothing.
• 33:24
  SPEAKER_02: Even if the something is very small.
• 33:26
  SPEAKER_02: So, for example, you you hear about an awful earthquake in some other parts of the world, and you feel helpless.
• 33:34
  SPEAKER_02: You empathize with the people, but you don't know what to do.
• 33:37
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so you just go to bed um and compare that to you see the same thing, you feel helpless, you don't know what to do, but at least you send money.
• 33:49
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 33:49
  SPEAKER_02: The difference between going to bed and sending money is dramatic from a psychological point of view, because at least you're doing something.
• 33:58
  SPEAKER_02: At least you're doing something.
• 34:00
  SPEAKER_02: Now it's not going to mean that you're solving the problem uh because you're so small again, but you're at least you're doing something psychologically.
• 34:08
  SPEAKER_02: So it's empowering.
• 34:10
  SPEAKER_02: And and to me, that's what the Bonnie book is all about is that we're giving people a language to talk about what they're experiencing and prepare them for what they're going to be experiencing over the next decade.
• 34:23
  SPEAKER_02: But we're also giving them a way to empower themselves, to flip it positive.
• 34:29
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 34:30
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that was my takeaway.
• 34:31
  SPEAKER_01: And I think the other thing that I would add as well, just from a personal experience of reading of reading this, I mentioned that the part of the difference between Banny and Vukar is is the difference in scope and scale and all that kind of things happen happening at once.
• 34:47
  SPEAKER_01: But the very fact that the responses are in quote smaller um allows you to be able to say for this specific challenge that I feel uncertain about, this specifically is my response to this specific challenge.
• 35:07
  SPEAKER_01: It allows you to it, it's it's it's kind of strange in a way, right?
• 35:11
  SPEAKER_01: The very small is the is the manageable response that you have.
• 35:14
  SPEAKER_01: Because you can't say, I mean, maybe if you're president or something, maybe you can you can you can think about it differently.
• 35:24
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know.
• 35:25
  SPEAKER_01: But as an individual, um, you can't say, well, here are the 17 different ways in which the the world is is going to part, and here's my response to all of it.
• 35:38
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 35:39
  SPEAKER_01: So but what you're but by cook by keeping those responses more personal, and I love that in the book that you have these these different layers of resp of response, as it were, but by helping people understand what their personal response is, yeah, then it becomes, in a sense, you're you're making them manage unmanageable more manageable.
• 35:58
  SPEAKER_02: That's right.
• 35:59
  SPEAKER_02: That's right.
• 35:59
  SPEAKER_02: And I use the story in the book about a very simple psychological technique that I just learned a few years ago, keeping a gratitude journal.
• 36:09
  SPEAKER_02: You know, and and you know, being a futurist can be really hard.
• 36:12
  SPEAKER_02: I've been doing this a long time, more than 50 years now.
• 36:15
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, and this is the most frightening 10-year forecast I've ever done.
• 36:19
  SPEAKER_02: So I I've faced this myself, you know, and it's uh it was harder for me to sleep while I was writing this book with Jamee and with with Angela.
• 36:28
  SPEAKER_02: It's really a challenge.
• 36:30
  SPEAKER_02: So I started keeping a gratitude journal.
• 36:33
  SPEAKER_02: And every day I just write in the journal, I keep it in the kitchen, and as I walk by, I write down things I'm grateful for.
• 36:40
  SPEAKER_02: It's remarkable how that act of writing down, and I think doing it longhand is better than typing it.
• 36:46
  SPEAKER_02: I think keeping it in a journal is better, and I kind of keep the page so I can now look back at the earlier journal pages too.
• 36:54
  SPEAKER_02: It's it's really powerful to keep simple things like gratitude journals.
• 36:58
  SPEAKER_02: And we have a lot of those in the book.
• 37:00
  SPEAKER_01: You mentioned that the in a sense the book is is much more hopeful than than what we spoke about at the uh at the at the first part of our conversation.
• 37:09
  SPEAKER_01: Um and I think that's right.
• 37:11
  SPEAKER_01: I think that um there's there are some really, really practical elements that are in here.
• 37:17
  SPEAKER_01: And and I I'll tell you one takeaway, very similar to yours, but one takeaway that came from me from reading it was looking after your physical health is something that I completely get and understand, uh, as something that will probably lead me to lead a longer and more uh and better life.
• 37:34
  SPEAKER_01: But I realized that that both myself and many of the people around us don't have that same discipline when it comes to maintaining and looking after my mental health in the same way that I do my physical health.
• 37:49
  SPEAKER_01: Not as a oh, things have gone horribly wrong, I need to respond, but as a here's how I actually keep myself healthy through uh through this uh through this period.
• 38:01
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 38:01
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that I think that's really that's one of the most powerful reasons why the why the A is so is so important here.
• 38:08
  SPEAKER_01: If we can like the anxiety, it is not unusual to feel bad about this stuff.
• 38:13
  SPEAKER_01: Here are some of the activities that you can perform, like the Gratitude Journal and uh and others, that help you maintain um your health and vitality through the uh through this set of challenges that we've got.
• 38:28
  SPEAKER_01: So I want to I want to thank you for that.
• 38:30
  SPEAKER_02: Good.
• 38:31
  SPEAKER_01: Wonderful.
• 38:32
  SPEAKER_01: All right.
• 38:32
  SPEAKER_01: Well, that is a great place to leave it.
• 38:34
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you again so much, Bob.
• 38:36
  SPEAKER_01: Keep writing, keep talking, keep talking about interesting stuff, and maybe we can have you as a four-peak guest sometime when you've got something new to talk about.
• 38:44
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, well, I just signed a contract for a new book uh on faith in the future, and it'll come out in late 2026.
• 38:52
  SPEAKER_02: So maybe we'll come back and talk about that.
• 38:54
  SPEAKER_01: That sounds perfect.
• 38:55
  SPEAKER_01: All right, thank you so much, Bob, for joining us.
• 38:57
  SPEAKER_02: Take care.
• 38:58
  SPEAKER_02: Good to see you.
• 39:01
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• 39:04
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• 39:10
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• 39:13
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• 39:21
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