Alvin Toffler's 1970 Future Shock described rapid change as "shattering stress and disorientation." Today's world combines that pace with Adam Tooze's "polycrisis," where multiple global crises amplify each other. The speaker, born in 1970, argues we need more meetings to handle the complexity.
So here's the next thing I'm hoping that we can agree on. And the question is, um, that this is a fast-paced world. Is this a fast-paced world? How are we dealing with that? And I'd like to introduce you, if you never have met the person before or heard of his name, Alvin Toffler. Um, he wrote, um, this incredible book called Future Shock, and he said future shock is the shattering stress and disorientation that we induce in individuals by subjecting them to too much change in too short a period of time. Shattering Stress and Disorientation. And he wrote this book in 1970. We jumped ahead because it was so exciting. In 1970. Now, the reason I remember that specific year is because that was the year that I was born. So I have now aged myself completely. But Again, in just my lifetime, in just your lifetime, we have created so much more data, and we're experiencing so much future shock and polycrisis. So this is Adam Tooze. About 3 or 4 years ago, he came up with this expression called polycrisis. It's a situation where all the individual crises around the world, when they get together, it's more than the sum of their parts. It really is a very, very complex and dangerous situation. So you put those 2 things together, you've got a future shock and polycrisis. That is pace and complexity. And yes, I wrote a book about that because I found it really interesting, and it's available on Amazon. So yes, things are too fast-paced. I think we can all agree on that. We're good with that. So then the next question I want to know if we can agree on is that we should have more meetings. Should we have more meetings?
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