Cinematic Futures: Crafting Tomorrow's World with Brad Rochefort - Synthetic Minds Podcast EP07

Welcome to Synthetic Minds where we explore the intersection of science fiction and emerging technologies, illuminating paths forward for today's organizations. Join me, Dr. Mark Van Reemen and my digital counterpart as we delve into thought provoking conversations with visionary thinkers and authors. Together, we examine how fictional narratives mirror, challenge and inspire real world innovation. In this podcast, we aim to equip you with the insights and foresight needed to navigate our ever evolving technological landscape. Through engaging discussions, we uncover how the speculative worlds of science fiction can inform practical strategies in business and beyond. In today's episode, we delve into the world of filmmaking and script writing with Brad Rochefort, a storyteller whose narratives challenge our understanding of technology, identity and society. Brad is not only a seasoned writer but also a producer known for his insightful forays into speculative fiction and films. His work includes the critically acclaimed short film the Holdout, a festival favorite. Exploring themes of time loops and personal redemption, Brad's unique approach combines a deep understanding of societal trends with a creative vision that captures the essence of future possibilities. His upcoming projects, like the feature length script Zip Code, about the inventor of the bionic eye, showcase his knack for weaving compelling stories around cutting edge technological advancements. Today we will explore how Brad's narratives provide a framework for understanding potential future technologies and their implications on society. Join us as we uncover the power of storytelling in shaping our perceptions of technology and the future.

Thank you for coming to my show, Brad. It's such a pleasure to have you here.

Thanks for having me, Mark. Great to see you.

Perfect. Well, let's dive straight in. Maybe you can give a little bit of your background and most importantly, the one or two books that you are most proud of that you have written.

Sure. So my background is that I'm a professional writer. I studied at the University of Southern California in their MPW Master of Professional Writing program after degrees in business and writing and rhetoric. So I combine a creative approach to a worldview that's sociological and business driven, but towards feature films. Which is to say, I aim to make commercially successful feature films that have a take towards society and the way that the future shapes and changes us and the way we shape and change the future. The, the story that I'm going to mention today is Zip Code, which is a feature film franchise. I wrote two of the screenplays for so two feature film screenplays that I wrote and as you understand, these things take a long time to develop. Right now I've got that on the, the film development platform, Filmio, where I think I've got, I Don't know, four or five thousand fans on that platform for this sci fi story about the inventor of the bionic eyeball. I conceptualized that in 2008. So I know we're going to talk about envisioning the future. I actually set out as the exact task of envisioning as far as I could, into the realistic future. We could talk about that. Another science fiction project that I did was the Holdout. The Holdout was a short story that became a short film that played in New York, London, Italy, online, and Central America. And it's the story of a man who lives his life again and again in almost like a purgatory cycle. That's the subtext, but it's a sci fi romance.

Nice. And so you mentioned the bionic eye, which I think I'd love to hear more about that. Is that sort of your common theme from a technology perspective? Is it AI? Is it broader? What is your common theme?

When I conceptualized of the story, I was looking for inspiration. And in those days, the Internet was, you know, 2007, 2008 era. The Internet was filled with a lot of hidden gems, a lot less commercialized websites and a lot more, you know, blogs that were just beautiful expressions of self. And I came across an artist who had lost use of their one eyeball and they decided to go cyborg. And this is, this is like an actual person blogging their experience. So they had their eyeball, which was no longer functioning, removed. And instead, you know, some people would have a glass eye. They installed a webcam to give that 5 foot 8 perspective, and they were going to give a blog from the perspective of their eyeball.

Wow, that's crazy.

Yeah. So in my mind, almost like a bolt of lightning, like, I. I vividly remember the moment of inspiration where I kind of asked the ether. I was like, I want an idea. And before I could even say I want an idea, out of my. My mind's mouth came like the bionic eyeball. Because I was so inspired by it. It just, it just hit me and I was like, that is the idea. And so I took the natural extension, which is not a webcam in your eye. It's the. It's the, what they call the wetware of hardware, firmware, software. And wet is like bionic of blood and tissue. It was what happens when the eyeball connects with the body. And so I went to a conference in San Diego called spee. It was the Society for Professional Instrument Engineers. So this is at the San Diego Convention Center. It's a Big annual conference for professional engineers and their occupation is to create the tools, instruments, software and connectivity to that does photons. Which is about the, the brainiest stuff I've ever heard in my life. But it was optics and photonics and I had researched that this person might be there and I sought out, met and talked with a man by the name of Wolpert and he gave me his slide deck that he was creating a bionic eyeball with DARPA at the time.

So it was actually already reality. It wasn't even science fiction. It sort of already became a reality.

Well, yeah. However, what DARPA was doing in 2008 has yet to realize in the commercial world. So they were aware that this was 15 years behind. So the idea came to me, I sought out a scientist who was doing it and like by a lot of coincidences met them in person and they were very kind and shared with me what they were doing. And I translated that into a scientific fiction story that expresses societal anxiety towards technology and through a dramatic thriller releasing the anxiety we might have towards that new technology.

Nice. So basically what you do is what you did is you sort of extrapolated of how in 2007, 2008, people there was pre Google Glass, so we didn't have that, which sort of caused a lot of outcry in the world. So you sort of extrapolated how society might respond to someone with a bionic eye that could record everything that's happening. I think that's just sort of of course what science fiction writers do, they take to the present and we extrapolate into the future some 100 years, some 10,000 years. But my question that I'm very interested in to understand is, and I think a lot of organizations that I work with are also could benefit from that. How do we do that? How can we envision a far flung future that is still grounded in today's reality and therefore we can anticipate and maybe strategize towards that future. What are your tricks there?

That's a great question mark. I would say it's like asking a weightlifter what's his trick to lifting weights is they do it often and they do it slowly and they do it bit by bit. So in those days I was browsing perhaps 300 websites a day. And I know that because I like stats and data numbers. I know you're a stats and numbers and data guy. So I had my Internet history and I just created, you know, a calculation that I browsed about 300 web pages a day and I was a voracious reader and I consumed a lot of language at like, the subconscious level. And when it felt that it was easy to read, it felt like that person was expressing themselves in a way that other people had validated. And when it took more clumsy, long syllable words to say, I thought, that's not ready yet. Because language, people help other people along the way. When someone tells me something, I often give it back to them in very simple, easy language, I'll say, oh, so it's like this very succinct sentence. It's very short, very easy to say. Make a little bridge between people's ideas and people's audience. And when you read things that are about to happen, the language gets easier. Language is a very big indicator, the number of times you tell someone something, the easier it is to say, I tell you about my zip code franchise because I've talked about it for 10 years. It just rolls out the tongue. Bionic eyeball. That's the story. When I first conceptualized it, I had a lot of clumsy words.

Yeah, that makes sense. And if you think about the future, and we talk in different communities a lot about the future, where do you see the future heading? Where do you see that? With everything going on in artificial intelligence and everything that's happening in spatial computing and in robotics, how long before we have this robotic eyeball, bionic eyeball, that can see night vision, and we can implement in our brain and actually connect to our brain? How long before we end up in the future that you have envisioned in 2007?

Good question. So the way that 2024 is taking shape changes that answer what I know about evolution. Part of what we studied at USC is Darwin and evolution, very intentionally to. Towards the way nature influences us and we influence nature, the nature of influence itself. And evolution happens at fuel or food and iteration. So when the fuel or food changes, I think there's a, you know, a number of sociological books that show you in parts of the world's history and geography where beef was prolific or chicken was prolific, or. Or the grains that we ate shifted, the body shifted, right? The brain grew. And the same goes for animals. When the flora and fauna have access to abundant resources, they start to evolve. And so the digital equation to that is if you have 200 million robots, right, you have an abundance. And when you change their firmware or their programming, you're changing their fuel and evolution will start to happen. Not innate robots evolving themselves. That to me is novel science fiction and not grounded in reality. But when you have someone Like Elon Musk, who has the funding and resources to own and operate or at least oversee or have access to the data. Probably that's more the likely case. Someone like Elon Musk will have access to a unique data, access to many millions of robots. What he might do is say, what if we put cameras in the fingertips? Why do I need to have cameras up here in the eyes? Let's put some cameras in the fingertips and then I can always have a distance to object. So once I say, now I have a distance to object, I can eliminate the focal lens. Well, this is like a giraffe that doesn't have to reach its neck too far for the trees and it goes, you know what? I'm not going to grow anywhere. I'm going to stay at this height. These trees are all mine, baby. Right? And I'm going to be the tallest in the savannah. So those kinds of evolutions where you change the focal lens of a camera and you position it so it's always the same distance from a moving object, like a Boston Dynamics robot that always kept its camera, you know, this far away from the object. I've got my hands out five or six inches apart. If you, if you create that and then do that across 2 million unique individual robots and then collect the data on, on millions and millions of data points, those data points become almost like a Darwinian evolution. And the engineers who stand to financially profit from doing so will evolve the way the robot interacts. And when you do that, you have the data that human beings would require. I would never feel comfortable putting a product inside of me that wasn't rigorously tested. There are some very novel people out there who currently have the brain implants. I've seen some of those demonstrations in person where about six years ago they were wearables, they weren't implants. Mark, what's your experience with seeing people with that kind of technology because you're more tuned into the terminology of it?

Well, I have tried brain computer interfaces, a wearable couple of years ago, and later it was bought by Snapchat, which I thought was a very interesting combination. And I thought it was, it was, it was amazing because I, all of a sudden, within minutes I was able to control my computer, which was a fascinating experience to be able to do that. However, I was very happy it was a wearable and it's not like a fixed implant that I cannot take out. And obviously for, you know, we've seen it with Neuralink, the 29 year old man who had, I think a Diving accent, I think, and that is a different story. But if you are a healthy person, I would not want something to be in my brain which I cannot take out my, you know, and not having any idea where the data of my brain is going to. And I think, you know, that is sort of this topic side of I think also which, you know, science fiction writers often explore is especially for example, cyberpunk is trying to explore the dystopian sides of these technologies. And I think you can write pretty good stories on the implications of having neural implant that you cannot take out and that will record all your, all your thoughts, maybe intervene in your thoughts, maybe intervene if you are saying something that you know the government doesn't want you to say and prevent you from saying it. And so these are all sort of the topic ideas that we can easily come up with, which I think is, is we want to, we want to stay away from, from that. But then, you know, what I think is interesting is that we can envision those futures and the so called futures thinking approach where we envision multiple futures and ideally as diverse as possible. And that's of course what science fiction writers do. I think that can be very valuable and should be very valuable for large organizations, especially when we move so fast. What's your idea around that? And do you think that science fiction writers could play a role within organization or should play a role within organizations? Maybe you should have a chief science fiction officer where you have dedicated resources on trying to understand where we're heading as an organization, not in just the next quarter, which is obviously the main thing that's happening. But you know, 10 years, 20 years, 30 years from now, because you know, these large organizations, they are big tankers that take, take a while to, to change direction. What are your thoughts around?

Great question, mark. I'll tell you one of the projects that I work on, I've got three partners in the project. One of them worked at NASA and had top secret clearance on satellites. One of them, I won't, I won't say names, but one of them has sold as an agent a very big television show that was probably the most popular show on television about 10 years ago. And another one has a show on one of the top two or three streamers that is one of the top sci fi shows. So it's a very serious project with people who take it seriously. And we've been talking about creating a sci fi show. We've been spending about a year thinking exactly what you said is what can we picture out 20 years from now. And things were moving so fast as a 2023 and 2024 technological reality, that we had to keep shifting what it was we were talking about. What anchored it in reality is something I learned in my undergraduate studies in business, which I guess some of your audience is going to have the similar education. The best part about studying business different from chemistry or physics or a specific science. Specific science takes you down a very specific laneway. And the course curriculum tends to be narrow but broad within that bandwidth. A social science degree like business or sociology or combination of them, allows you to take a foothold of history and philosophy in a way that seems more broad, more universal to the word university. And what I took included some world history at a few different levels. What I learned from some very brilliant people in world history is that a lens you can use to approach any situation is the step approach, which is that society, technology, the economy and politics are the four drivers of change. And when you use that lens, it's not always applicable, it's not for every situation. And yet it's valid to take that approach and say, will this change society? Will technology change this or will this change technology? Will the way the economy moves affect us, or will what we do affect the economy? And will politics affect us, or will we impact politics? And so even though technology is in the technology, it's sort of like saying, will quantum technology change the technology we're about to create? Will the change in quantum technology change the economy or will it move along steadily? So when I see AI part of the analogy, I, I've put on LinkedIn posts and talked about in groups where you, you've been a participant is the idea of castles. When you learn in history about the power of the world, you can put the analogy of castles out there. England has a castle, France has a castle, and then each continent has their equivalent, and each major country has their equivalent. And then you say the world has become globalized in the last century, largely after the Industrial Revolution. We're in a technological revolution. So the powers are shifting, the economic forces are shifting, and what you have are trillion dollar castles. And is that a good thing or a bad thing? It's just what is. And so you have the search engines, you have the software, you have the hardware, you have the manufacturing companies for chips, et cetera. And these are trillion dollar companies. The number I like to give is if you had a million dollar a day lawyer and you engaged them every single day in defending your patents, in a year you could spend $365 million and in three years you could spend a billion dollars and in 30 years you could spend $10 billion. And in 300 years you could spend not even a fraction of what a $3 trillion company has that they could engage a million dollar a day lawyer for hundreds of years and not even flinch on the money. So the size of a trillion dollar company and their ability to wield influence on society, technology, the economy and politics is almost unfathomable unless you dedicate time to really going, what does this actually mean to be that large? That they could go out and get many hundreds, thousands or many millions robots and study the way that the robot body changes and then translate that to a wearable or to an insertable technology. So when you talk about a corporation having a science fiction writer in house, I think that's a really novel idea. I think you might call that like a chief future officer or a chief futurist. And at that the ability to say what might happen goes through those lenses of society, technology, economy and politics. Part of the storyline of that story I mentioned is the idea that there's the potential for a global monopoly on satellites. When you look at Elon Musk and he's launching all of his satellites, it's not likely that he will create a global monopoly and take on a James Bond villain style approach to life.

You never know with Elon Musk.

Well, you know, I do believe he's good natured and I do believe he's well intentioned.

I agree, I agree here with you.

Yeah, I think you would. And even though you could, you could rightly argue that perhaps the best of intention people slide down a track, I think that Elon Musk will gravitate back towards positivity. I don't think that that's the future. And we tried that for like a year with some very intelligent people who are successful in their careers in Hollywood. And we kept going back to like, it's not a believable narrative and we had to shift the narrative until it became believable. So that is a science fiction approach to science future or science reality is to say like would, would an audience of 10 million people tune into this and just believe it as a matter of fact and not. And not have that be the interesting science fiction twist that's just like the world that we live in is that the rich people got evil. And you're like, I don't know that I believe that. Did the rich people get greedy? Perhaps? Did they get evil? I don't think so.

But, but isn't it so that. So, so, so. Sorry to interrupt you, but isn't it so that. That you know, what the population or the 10 million views of the show believe is realistic is very difficult because especially today, we're living in an exponential time. So the example of the million dollar lawyer versus the trillion, that sort of exponential growth that we're talking about, and exponential growth is very, very difficult for humans to grasp. We're not made to think exponential, we're made to think linear. But we'll be going through an exponential future at the moment. At least that's how I think, because with all the convergence of all the different technologies. So how can we then grasp, how can we grasp the future? How can we as an organization create this believable future? But that's still futuristic enough. And what kind of signals do we need to use? You share often the latest insights that you come across of what's happening in the AI space, for example, and these are all signals of what's happening within the field, within the space. How can organizations craft that far enough future, which employees would believe in is still realistic enough, but still can guide the organization to maybe a different direction?

Great question. What comes to mind is an analogy for yoga, right? On a very easy level, yoga is about balance. And if you've ever gone to a yoga class, you learn that you're not as strong as you thought you were, and your balance is not as good as you thought it was. If you study it long enough with the right people, in the right environment, you learn to see the world as part of being balanced. So your foot stands firmly on the ground. The heel of your foot, the ball of your foot and the toes all produce an even distribution of weight upon the ground. That's like the financial distribution of a company. You want to make sure that you're not completely balanced on one financial point, on one geographic point, on one specific product or service, because the slightest fingertip touch might tip you over. And when you try to take a step, which is progress or pivoting or development or research or change, right, You've got two feet, the solid foot and the moving foot. I think if you view the potential future through those lenses of society, technology, the economy and politics and, and say, if I took one step forward, am I secure, right? That that foundation of do we have the finances, will we have the resources, will we have the human resources? And then is it likely to happen? And then you say, will society accept this, right? If all of a sudden you just shipped a robot from Amazon to everyone's door and said, this robot now cooks your breakfast. Throw the toaster away. This is a joke from John Daly on the Daily Show. He talked about the AI and the toaster, right? So if you just ship that, there might be a pushback. So society might not accept that. And there has to be a believable acceptance of society. And that's not something you should greatly push. But people will push it, right? Someone's going to push it. And the same can be said across the other categories is that are you able to make a firm landing? Can you really picture it? Can you picture Amazon and Google and Apple and Meta and all these companies at that trillion dollar level? Can you picture them allowing your company to do that without any kind of competition? They're just going to watch you make the money you want to make and they're not going to compete with you at all. You have to really picture that and go. Does Google care about ketchup bottles? Probably not. So you could go out and say we're going to make the best ketchup bottle in the world, but with technology and you go, I don't think anyone wants to catch up on our ketchup bottle. But there's other technologies where Google and Apple will catch up in a day, pun intended, right? They're, they're going to go, oh, I'll watch you do that for six weeks or six months or, or three quarters or a year and a half and then we're going to put a thousand people on it for 10 months and do 10,000 months of research or, or.

They just buy it. And just like Apple just recently bought another French company for on, on device large language models. So we can definitely see something happening in that field. But then again for the smaller organizations, big tech here, that makes sense. Big tech is almost all powerful nowadays and has the capabilities to do the research and to envision the future and then actually build the future. I think for the smaller organizations that's a little harder because they might envision the future, although they're probably just busy running the shop know and therefore they're not steering the company in a certain direction. How, how can even smaller companies, you know, start to envision a future that's, that's far out, far further away and maybe should they do this to begin with or do you think as a, from a, as a creative person, do you think that that's not, you know, you don't bother, you know, envisioning your future. Just focus on your day to day job. What's your idea around that, well, I'll.

Use the yoga analogy again, which is that you should be aware of your firm footing. What is your firm footing? If you have some kind of fiduciary responsibility to a group, if you have that financial responsibility to a bank or to a set of employees or to a set of shareholders that you say, you know, we're responsibly using the money and the resources that we have, how far can I get in one stride, which is one research cycle, one development cycle, you know, one financial cycle, and say, how far can I reasonably get that? It's not a leap? Because once it's a leap, it becomes financially irresponsible. In other decades, in other industries, the leap was not that risky. All right? And there are, you know, our friend Roy Vella will tell you that there's a 70, 20, 10 rule that 70% of your resources are towards the core financial benefits of the company. 20% to, you know, smaller steps and 10% to the leap. Try that 10% leap, right? As a ratio, as a broad strokes rule of practice. So when you take looking into the future and you say you're a small or medium sized company, how much into the future should I look? You should look to the high water mark of your industry and say, where does it get dangerous? And look to the low water mark or go, where does it get dangerous? Where is there a resource that I know that is too low or a resource that I know is too high? And spend time thinking about it in terms of analogy. The things that you've been looking around at in your life will come to you. Today I mentioned yoga because I've done yoga. I've mentioned an undergraduate degree because I've done an undergraduate degree. I've mentioned stories I've written because I've written stories, conferences I went to. That's what interests me. So the I learned this from Dan, like in the reticular activating system is very simply, you talk about something and all of a sudden you see it. Your friend gets a new car. And that car model is everywhere. Someone gets a new item and you go, I'm seeing it everywhere. It was always there. You've just told your brain that you like something or you're aware of something and it will come to mind. So the best advice I can say is your business interests and the amount of stride you can take successfully overlap somewhere. And then your personal interests overlap. And in that overlap, you can find a stride that suits your company. Sometimes it happens on the subconscious level and you have to open yourself up to that, that you're not making financial moves on subconscious advice. You're opening yourself up to influence at that level of what you're interested in. So you go, okay, I don't even know why I'm gravitating towards that, but I feel pulled towards, like this news article, not this million dollar investment, just reading up on something.

But that makes total sense to me. And what resonates with me is that I think what sounds for me very important is the concept of storytelling and trying to figure out what that is and what that leap is or what that next step is. I'm a keynote speaker, so I'm a storyteller. And whenever I share my insights, I do that in the form of stories that people can relate to. And from that perspective, I think stories about the future, about the future that maybe as a company we want to envision can be very, very useful because all of a sudden that future becomes tangible and then we will almost automatically gravitate towards the future. If we envision this future, whatever that is, whether that's a year out or 10 years out, we start to gravitate towards the future. We start to do whatever is necessary to do that future. Now, we might not end up in that, the exact future that we envisioned 10 years ago, but at least we have ended up probably somewhere completely different if we hadn't done this exercise. How can organizations become better at storytelling? Because, you know, often, you know, doing strategy making and everything, but involving the story, which is so important in human history, is done a lot less. How can organizations do that? From your experience as a creative writer?

That's a great question. You know, I've got my, my book here, the Secrets of Screenwriting, which I think I mentioned to you. I used a framework for, I don't know, six or so years that I created based on a shelf of books that I've read about storytelling to understand how audiences understand a story. And one of the things that happens when you tell a story is, and I recommend businesses find someone like myself who tells stories and knows how to tell stories. Different from branding the way your image appears. You know, when I think of branding, I think of a cattle rancher literally taking a hot iron and searing that logo into the side of the leather or the, or the side of the cow. As it is, it's not marketing, which is, you know, if you picture 300 years ago an open air market, someone has a barrel of apples and they want you to come to their barrel of apples, much like today's Apple computer wants you to come to their barrel of phones, you know, that's gathering people towards the market. But the story you're telling is different. When you tell a story, whether it's in feature film, which is to audiences of millions or tens of millions or hundreds of millions, it's about the broadest audience you can get. When you're telling a story in business or in feature film or otherwise, you want to get people to ask the same question about, you know, 30 minutes into a movie or a fraction of the way into any good story. You. You want everyone to ask the same question. So in Armageddon with Ben Affleck and Bruce Willis and Liv Tyler, we all ask the same questions. Will the meteorite hit Earth? We're all asking the same question. Will the meteorite hit Earth? You're watching Jurassic Park. You're all asking the same question as will they escape the dinosaurs? Right? At first it's will the dinosaurs escape? And then, will they escape the dinosaurs? Your brain goes to a lot of different parts of the story inside that major question, you know, but will Luke Skywalker stop Darth Vader? Is the question of Star wars, right? It's not, will they run out of fuel? It's not, will they outrun these people? It's not any of the sidesteps. The big question is, are they going to blow up the Death Star? Are they going to stop the bad guy? Are they going to save the princess? These are core questions. So your business story has that shared question we're asking, right? Which is like, will it feel good? Is it for me, can I have it? Storytelling, when you're. When you're starting to tell a story, has three doorways that you can walk through. It's the past, the present, and the future. The past is what happened. I call it the state of misfortune. It's what happened that you don't like that's influenced the problem now. So something happened before that's brought you to this problem. The present. You know, some people call it the inciting incident or the dramatic situation. The present is something is in a state that emotionally doesn't sit well with the audience, with. With the people in the story. There's a. A thing that might happen, right? And then there's a desire. People have desires, and we understand stories through desires. Stories are inherently emotional, right? I want something I can't have, or something's about to happen that I don't want, right? And because of something before, I don't know if I can make it happen. That's A story. And we're all looking for the same answer to the same question as what's going to happen next. And when you tell stories in a business, you have to get very creative about the way you tell that. But like let's take it for example, an electric car. Well, the state of misfortune is that, you know, we have to save the earth and that old cars have not protected the earth. Right. And then the, the future oriented part of that story is if we continue to use oil based fuel, well, this bad thing will happen. And the desire I might have is to feel like I'm part of that solution.

So do you think that organization should tell only positive stories or should they be realistic and also tell very negative stories of what can go wrong with the business ten years from now? Taking the signals, incorporating signals that they see around them.

I'm gonna say on instinct, I don't feel businesses are obligated to anything other than the truth as long as it's true and not deceptively true and not true.

But science fiction stories are not necessarily true. They, they are the imaginations of what could happen.

Right. But science fiction writ large on the screen for tens of millions of people is announcing itself as a fiction. There's no, there's no deception. You know, you're entering into a world of make believe. If it was a car commercial, General Motors or Volvo or BMW puts out an ad and they portray what seems to be reality and is possible. As long as I grasp that this is like a future envisioning of what the car could be, I'm very comfortable with that. You know, if they say imagine tomorrow's car today, that's okay. And if you say here's where it could be, that's a great imagining.

But aren't we then moving towards more the, the marketing side of telling stories to sell product? I would more actually more interested in, in have the internal story, you know, the story that doesn't go out to the consumer, but the internal story of, of, of that we tell the employees of, of what could happen with the organization 10, 20, 30 years from now and, and how do we get there? I think that's sort of a different story than the marketing story that you're referring to.

Yeah, that's a great point. I think I touched on that and then I got really interested in the answer to the other question. And what you're taking is where I wanted to go. So yeah, that other story, the internal story, and thank you. The internal story deserves more reality. Absolutely. The internal story Deserves stark truths. And one good example of that I saw in the news yesterday was an example of two politicians speaking towards unionizing in the American south in the auto industry. So a particular international automaker had their workforce attempt to unionize. And when you unionize, you change the economics of the company, the wages change, the human resources change, and by inference the profit margin changes. So when the profit margin changes, you might in fact relocate unintentionally, the manufacturer might relocate out of that area. They say if the legislature on the map is here, maybe the plant won't be there anymore. So one politician at the highest level commended the efforts of the unionization. But on the more regional level, the politician said, go. I don't know if you're aware of what you've done. And it seemed harsh. But as a, as a student of business, I think, I think that that person was being kind. He's saying, look, he's like you're as a worker in a unionized or non unionized environment so close to the situation that, that you might not see the macro, the zoomed out, you know, global perspective, which is they don't owe you a regional plant of that international automaker, they don't owe you that. They might move as a financial responsibility that they have to the shareholders. So if the internal story is true, right? And not deceptively true. If the internal story is true and says like, look, this is where the world is moving. As everything we've researched, we know that our bandwidth for profit margin is here. And if we exit this bandwidth, we exit the region. As long as it's not fear mongering, as long as it's done with good intentions. I support that because it's true. There are people who wish that the regional area kept the international manufacturing, whatever the region and manufacturing is. That's very true that someone says, boy, once it came it was good and once it left it wasn't. I wish we'd have kept it there. So yes, if there's an internal corporate story that says the question we're all asking is can we stay here in this region? That to me is a responsible use of storytelling that might benefit the jobs of the people as they are. Great question.

But if we look at then if you want to move a company to a certain direction.

The future.

Doesn'T just happen to us. I believe we have agency in imagining and then creating the kind of future we want to live in. So that applies to any organization. If you want to become X with your organization, you can envision that 1020 years from now and then you gravitate towards that. A bit of a personal question for you then. What's the future that you would like to see? And then how can we get there?

The future that I want to see is Safe Quantum. Safe Quantum. I feel like Quantum is at the point it's unstoppable. The number of research facilities on the planet that are creating something towards safe and stable Quantum is probably greater than the average person might think. I think if you were very much in the know, what I just said would make you chuckle and you'd say, oh, Brandon markets, it's already there, right? I think there's people who know that it's in its fullness currently, that it's being developed to, to happen internationally at a financially beneficial level. So it's like, how do I get this to everybody so that I don't cut out my old profit for my new profit? So I think safe Quantum is the next place. I know there's, there's layers of the password where people say, once we reach a quantum computer that's publicly available, consider all passwords gone. I say, yes, that's probably true. And yes, and by the time we get there, there will be a password solution. And it's unlikely that a meaningful number of people will meaningfully be dispositioned because I don't know what are they going to do? Get your Netflix password. Like if your bank becomes secure, if your personal resources become secure and your identity becomes secure through the same technology that it could have become unsecure, and if it becomes secure through those measures that the, the passwords to websites that are seemingly insignificant, they'll follow suit and closely behind, there'll be an economic force to, to push that forward. So I don't have fear towards Quantum. I just have an awareness towards it that it's, it's as far away now as the AI we have in 2024 was eight years ago. And you know, eight years ago you had an almost good enough iPhone. I'm trying to think of some specifics from eight years ago, but eight years ago feels so homogeneous to right now. You know, it's a long time, but it's not because, you know, the laptop right here is from about eight years ago and the laptop right here, they feel about the same. So when quantum computers arrive, that might be a pivotal shift. It might take a lot of conceptual grasping of not only what that even means, Quantum just means small, it's really small, but also in, in multiple states at once. And so look for more stories to Use the analogy of Quantum. And when you start to notice more television stories, more movies, more books, more songs that feature the words of Quantum, that's the writer's bellwether, that quantum is happening because all those artists have been influenced. So if there's a cultural touch point, if Taylor Swift starts singing about something and she mentions some words along that way, well, she's been influenced by it. Which means that where she travels, that has, you know, found it into her radar. And Taylor, if you're listening, I don't know if you're interested in Quantum. Maybe you are.

Maybe we'll see a Quantum song at some point in the future. Sure.

Right. Because while we're recording this, we're about four days into her latest album, which is great. So when you start to see those words pop up in articles and songs and movies and in places that you didn't expect, then you can say, all right, I bet you it's about to take root. It's really about to get.

So I think it's. Sorry to interrupt you, but I think, if I understand you correctly, it's very much about, again, the signals, what is happening. And as an organization, we need to follow the signals to understand what's going on and what's happening right in front of our eyes. I think, you know, I think it's safe to say that both you and I, we have a curious mind. You know, we are. We are, I think, quite curious into what's happening in the world and where. Where we're going. How important is curious curiosity for organizations? Is it a crucial skill, you think, in this. In this rapidly changing times?

I will be careful about this answer because my grandmother used to say, curiosity killed the cat. So curiosity plus action. Be very cautious about curiosity in and of itself. Be very generous with. Be generous with your curiosity. You know, take time to learn about the world, to learn about what's happening, to learn about what's possible. And as best as possible, with one foot firmly planted. Be open to stepping somewhere new. Be open to the power of being wrong. But one of the best things you can ever do is to have been wrong about something. Because when you learn you were wrong about something, you can fix it. There's. There's any number of business stories of corporations and leaders who were wrong. There's a. A video clip of the head of Microsoft about 10 years ago who scoffed at the iPhone. And so about 90 seconds is very funny because, you know, through the lens of time, we. We know that the Microsoft phone largely does not exist, and the iPhone is largely the, I don't know, the 40% market share with Samsung, 30 or 40% each. Most people have an Android or an iPhone. So there are always people who, there will always be scenarios where people in positions of influence were wrong about something. The best thing you can do is be curious about where you're wrong so that you don't become that 90 second video clip 10 years later where people get a good chuckle out of it because you said, oh, that'll never happen, or that'll certainly happen. So curiosity is good. Curiosity plus action. Be cautious especially. I mean, that just makes sense.

Yeah. Yeah, fair enough. Well, I think that's. That's a great way to, to end this, this, this episode. Before we go. What, what new stories are you working on? What new science fiction. Is there a new science fiction story coming out? A new book coming out anytime soon? What. What are you working on?

Well, the story I mentioned, you know, about the world of satellites. I think it's very interesting what will happen with the ability to interconnect satellites that surround the globe. Can they interact with each other? Can they create like a, like. I don't want to say too much. I don't want to give away the story, but there's something there.

Well, that sounds. I'm very looking forward to reading this story. Thank you very much for coming on the show, Brad. It's been an absolute pleasure.

Oh, thanks for having me, Mark. So much fun.

Thank you, Brad, for this enlightening conversation and for sharing your fascinating insights into the world of science fiction and its implications for future technologies. It's clear that your work not only entertains but also provokes thought, challenging us to consider the deeper implications of the technologies we might one day take for granted to our listeners. I hope today's episode inspires you to think more critically about the technology narratives we engage with and. And their potential to shape our future. Brad's work reminds us of the importance of thoughtful storytelling in crafting a future that is both innovative and aligned with human values. Remember to subscribe to the Synthetic Minds podcast for more discussions that explore the intersections of technology, ethics and future possibilities. I look forward to continuing this journey with you where science fiction meets science reality. Thank you.