SPOS #946 – Frederik Pferdt On How To Live Future Ready

Hey, it's Mitch with just a little update on my new venture, ThinkersOne. As a reminder, we've built a way for organizations of all shapes and sizes to buy bite-sized and personalized thought leadership video experiences from the best thinkers in the world. So what's changed? Well, we've realized that we need to make these thought leaders much more accessible. So when you head over to thinkersone.com, you will see that the pricing is very reasonable. Go and check it out. And all of these experiences are at least 15 minutes of pure brainy goodness. Now you can bring world-class authors, speakers, academics, captains of industry, and more into your everyday meetings or gatherings. It's really simple to use, and it's such a unique way for business leaders like you to buy completely personalized video content. You can book these thought leaders to pop in live at your next meeting or have a thinker record a presentation just for your team. Or even as a great gift for clients. I'm really proud of the lineup of thinkers that we have. We've got great minds like Tom Peters, Rita McGrath, Michael Bungay Stanier, Whitney Johnson, Mark Bowden, Dori Clark, Jay Baer, and so many more. So if you're looking to add insights, energy, and big smarts to your next meeting, corporate event, an offsite, a lunch and learn, even as a gift for that client, I know that you're going to love this. I invite you to head over to thinkersone.com. And check it out. Now back to the show. Well, hey there and welcome to episode number 946 of Six Pixels of Separation, The ThinkersOne Podcast. My name is Mitch Joel. It's Sunday, August 25th, 2024. Let's get on with the show. So who are you and what do you do?

My name is Frederik Pferdt. I'm the author of a new book called What's Next Is Now: How to Live Future Ready. I'm also Google's first and former Chief Innovation Evangelist, and I teach at Stanford University. And, uh, yeah, excited for this conversation.

Yeah, happy to connect you. I was going to say, you're not a big achiever, Frederik. You kind of just sit back in the world. Seems like you, uh, really enjoy being active in the space. I'd love to start with just a better understanding of where that passion and interest comes from.

Yes. So I've probably dedicated parts of my life to have a different relationship with the future. For me, that was always fascinating that you think so often about the future and sometimes it's exciting, sometimes it's really scary. And so I wanted to have a better understanding how that relationship actually plays out and how I can change that relationship too. And so I, I learned many things in my life from many different people I was able to work with or spend time with. And the one thing that struck me is that the future is not something that happens to you. The future is something that you make happen. And that for me, as a reframe, is a very powerful insight. And so what I'm now trying to do is help people to also make use of that to change their relationship with the future so that they have less anxiety about what's coming next and have a little bit more agency probably and control of what they want to happen next. And this has been like a very rewarding work for me because I'm just very grateful that I can do that and spend time not just thinking about the future and a better future, but help people to figure out how we can build a better one.

Yeah, we probably have many mutual friends because I've done so much work with Google over the years. In fact, when I was looking at your biography, I was almost surprised that we hadn't connected. And I was always interested in the evangelist division of Google. One of my good friends is Avinash Kaushik, who was one of the analytics evangelists. And coming in as the first chief innovation evangelist, tell me a bit about what that role was. Was it something you brought to Google? Was it something they were looking for and sought someone like you out? How does that come to be? And I'd love to know what you're thinking between the moment you're hired and then you got to go in and do this thing.

Yes, I think I started a little bit of a movement. We saw many evangelists emerging after I created this role. So seeing a need in the company and the organization for someone to really train people in specific ways of thinking and being, right? So giving people a chance to. Practice empathy, this notion of 10x thinking that we like to use, and also help people to experiment and try things out, taking risks. So I'm super glad that I was able to focus on a specific need that I saw in the organization and then creating a role that I hope filled that need, right? So imagine kind of like I started 12 and a half years back. Now it's 14 and a half years. I left 2 years ago. And in my first couple of months, I traveled to about 27 offices in the first 18 months. And what I tried to do is to really figure out how do people innovate? How do people literally create the future? And when I visited those 27 offices, I met with hundreds of Googlers around the world and I discovered something fascinating. And that is that there is no Google way to innovate. It just doesn't exist. And so the Googlers I met were driving innovation, but they did not have a particular creative process they followed or work in a specific type of environment or even had tremendous resources or access to resources. But what they did have in common was a very distinctive future-focused outlook. And I believe that, that perspective I observed in so many of these innovative Googlers is the secret to igniting the potential. The future represents. And I call this a future-ready mind state. And so finding that changed everything for me, and I hope for many others too, because I then built a curriculum around that, that really supported the development of innovative solutions across the company. And the goal was really to be able to train employees at every level from every corner in the company to solve any problem using that future-ready mind state.

So that the evangelist role for you was more internal? Because I know with Avinash and the analytics, he was definitely doing that as well, but he was also very client-facing. There was a fun thing where he was trotted out to the clients to get them to think about that. Did you do both of that as well?

On my journey to kind of like help as many employees as possible to tap into their creativity and use that to build some of these world-changing things that more and more people started to use it, and now it's part of our lives. What I always found were other people that really were excited to then become an evangelist themselves and train others in their teams, in their organizations, and so forth. And so I was fully focused on the culture and the organization and the people inside Google. But obviously, when you help shape one of the most fabled creative cultures in the world, you get a lot of calls from others who have an interest in learning from that, applying that in their own organization, in their own teams, and so forth. And I never turned those calls away. I always felt there is something that we can share that we've tried, even things that didn't work out. We made mistakes or things that didn't help to create that culture of innovation. And I was always very open to share that with other people. And I think that's something where I then spend half of my time probably internally and then half of the time working with incredible organizations like the UN or startups from around the world and others to really help them to use what we've learned in their own work.

I'm curious about the title as well, this ability to be an innovation evangelist. My gut would have told me that you need a very strong bench of technology and how technology works. And in a reading about you, it felt more of your area being in the creative process, even teaching at Stanford here at the D School, which is a different school than perhaps the business school or the tech and programming side or engineering side of things. Is it surprising to you that the tech isn't the first component of what we talk about when we say innovation?

And even the future, if we talk about the future, most people have that image in their mind that it's about technology. It's about robots and flying cars. And all of those technology advancements that we see. And this is really interesting. Even nowadays, if we use the word innovation or the future, we mostly relate it to AI or technology. And for me, that was never the case because I felt that how people innovate and how people build the future is not through a specific technology or using specific technology. Or applying specific technology to a problem, but it's about their state of mind. It's about how they think and how they basically are. And a lot of people refer to this as a mindset that people need to have in order to come up with these ideas and execute these ideas. And I'm sure you're familiar with the concept of a mindset because it refers to the attitude that is determined by your history, and these other formative factors that have shaped how you interpret and respond to literally everything that comes your way. And for me, a mindset tends to be fairly fixed and hard to change because it's again based on your deeply ingrained beliefs. If we put it that way, when someone tries to convince you, Mitch, to change your mindset, you are going to have to work pretty hard to break down this mental framework and change it in order to replace it with another one. So for me, I moved away from that notion of a mindset towards a mind state, which is a kind of a lens that influences really how we perceive the current moment and the present. And for me, it's the same way as our pupils in our eye get bigger and smaller to adapt to the amount of light in our environment. Your mind state fluctuates based on the content and the context. Of the moment. And for me, that mindset is something we can control, which is easy to change and easy to adapt. And it's again, fluid and dynamic. And I think it's a very powerful way of thinking that really helps you to change the way you think in the moment. And if we use that, we can say that how to innovate and how to build a future is not about technology, but it's about your mind state. And if we change that narrative, I think we can actually see that everyone can then innovate. Everyone is able to build their own future and determine what's going to happen next. And I think if we change that narrative, I think we have something very powerful.

It's really interesting to hear you say that, and I raised an eyebrow when I read that in your book, in particular because we have so much love or admiration for Carol Dweck and the idea of a fixed or growth mindset. And here you are saying, well, maybe we need to have something else. I'm sure you're familiar with her work. How do you differentiate between the two and why this idea of a mind state versus a growth mindset?

Yes, absolutely. I'm a big fan of Carol's work, and we had a conversation about that too. She's at Stanford too, and I just admire her work and that she was able to put something out into the world where you see it now showing up in curriculum at school, right?

In some conversations we have with our kids. It's everything.

Exactly. It's in the workplace. It's in, in every organization. You hear people talking about a mindset. And at the same time, I think the work has been so incredibly powerful that she put out in the world. And at the same time, I think what we also need to do is figure out ways to help people to train our mindset and to change it and to be able to adapt moment to moment. And for me, again, that perception you have in any moment that determines how you experience the present, which is my definition of a mind state. Is, I think, built on the work Carol has been doing. So it's not a contradiction. It's not something where I said, this is something better or this is something different. It's basically a build. So it's a yes and to the work Carol has been putting out into the world, which I think is incredibly useful and incredibly helpful. Again, because then we're changing the narrative from the future and innovation is all about technology towards it's something else. It is something in how we think.

Let's talk a little bit about the state of innovation and creativity. You teased out the word artificial intelligence. I've been in this space a long time. I occupy similar spaces in terms of what I'm called for, for my expertise. I always said that I am a very optimistic person who thinks about the future. I might have a little dash of cynicism lately, which is just the natural instinct. Maybe you can beat it out of me in this conversation. I'm open to that as well. But talk a bit about this creativity and innovation, because I'm trying to think back to even the early '80s when I was around, when desktop computers first started coming in and we started seeing creativity really expand as people had more and more access to these tools. I would think at this moment in time where we see all these generative AI tools, you would think how much more expansive we could be with this and how much more incredible it'll be. And if anything, I find myself somewhat on my heels being surprised by the fear. I find myself being surprised by people feeling that it's suddenly going to replace us. And I even am surprised by the divisiveness of it. You have on one side a group of people saying that it's guessing based off of historical information and it's a pretty good web interface, but it's not that great, to other people feeling it could even destroy everything we know about knowledge work and creativity. I'd love to hear your perspective on it. And I'm curious if you are equally surprised. I really thought this is just opening up creativity at such a voluminous and powerful level, it would be so welcome. And yet here we are.

Yes, you're making great points, Mitch, here. I think, again, many feel anxious and even uncertain about the future. That's just how we think and feel when we think about the 10-year, 20-year, 30-year horizon of the future. And the challenge we all face is really that our minds are looking for certainty. And if we don't find certainty, we feel anxiety. And so we spend a lot of time worrying about the future. You mentioned a couple of examples. We worry that AI is going to replace us. We worry about AI is going to do better writing or better design, whatever it is than we. Everything, yes. Because our minds again crave that certainty and our brains are wired to make this feel uncomfortable. But for me, that discomfort is also a call to action to engage more proactively with the future, meaning the future is not something that happens to you, as I mentioned, it's something you make happen. And what I mean by that is that the future is something you create by the choices you make today. And if you choose to use AI, if you choose to engage with technology and leverage it in a way that supports you, that helps you to accomplish what you want to accomplish, I think you have something very powerful. And for me, it comes back again to this notion of, do you see the opportunity and how can you find the opportunity? And so if you go back in time, let's take a time machine back to November '22 when OpenAI—

6 months ago.

Yeah. Launched ChatGPT. How did you feel in that moment? How did you respond? Were you open? Were you curious? Did you experiment? Did you have like empathy? What did show up in that moment when you suddenly had a powerful AI tool at your fingertips that helps you to do some creative work? And when you talk to people, many people responded being closed, looking for the dangers first, looking for the downsides and so forth. But again, if you choose to what I call use some of these dimensions of a future-ready mind state, for example, openness, being curious, ask the right questions about it, and start to experiment with it, you can find many, many opportunities with those technologies and those tools. And it's the same if we go back like the time machine again and go to March 2020, or specifically March 16th, 2020. When the pandemic started? How did you respond in that situation? Were you closing down? Were you afraid, scared, or were you open and tried to experiment with working from different places, engaging in conversations differently with people, being in lockdown and so forth? So it's those two moments, if you want to reflect back, where you can really check in with yourself and say, like, how do I respond in times of change? How do I respond when things go in a different way? And you can choose your response. And if you respond openly with curiosity, also with optimism, with empathy, and you like to experiment, I think everyone can find better opportunities then in these times of change.

But do you not see instances where there's an overriding negativity to the thing that started it, meaning we're aligning in this type of way of looking at it, COVID with AI. It's interesting that you said that because in my brain, I would've aligned AI along with we had computers and then we had mobile and then we had internet access and then we had e-com, like all of these things that we really have demonstrated while some people might've had fear or were scared of it. These seem to have created things that are more at scale or might impact a greater group more than others. There's something interesting there that I'm still not sure I understand why AI was and is currently still being lopped into the destructive negative versus even people when they were talking about the advent of the internet and how pervasive it came. There was talk about it being so disruptive to the economy, but everybody saw this greater big potential. And I'm wondering if the things that we're talking about, the reason they're being perceived this way is because it hits that personal individual so much harder. Meaning it's one thing to say, oh, like we're automating something, but it's another one. It's knowledge work. Like that seems to be the pillar here that's making people's brains snap and go into wires.

Yes, and it's just our negativity bias that is actually built into our minds, in our brains. And the negativity bias always helps us to find the most negative news. They find the most threatening arguments that people are making, and we are looking for those. And we are building ourselves, or we are crafting a picture for ourselves that is protecting us. That's the mechanism the brain uses to basically protect us. And so how the negativity bias works is that we are always looking for the things that could be potential dangers. And we can do a, a brief exercise that demonstrates to you how that negativity bias shows up. If you want to close your eyes for a moment, and I give you 4 equations and you just tell me what happens. 2 3 5. 3 3 6. 4 4 9. 5 3 8.

You can open your eyes again. So what happened? I definitely went, his math is off, but I'm curious why he's saying that.

That was where my brain went. Exactly. Most people felt like at the third equation, oh, there's a mistake. There's something wrong. And so we immediately spot that mistake and we are very good at that. And that is something that helped us in the past to survive when we were in the bushes out hunting and gathering. We needed to think that way. We needed to spot the danger and needed to find what's wrong in the environment. Does smell off or like what does smell Can you smell potential danger or can you see potential danger or hear any potential danger? So we are really, our senses are tuned towards the negativity and the potential dangers. And that's still true when it comes to AI. The first thing we're looking for is like, what's the threat here? What could potentially go wrong? So we're looking for that using the metaphor again for that third equation instead of looking at the 3 correct equations, say like, hey, you know, 75% of those were actually correct. It's fantastic. And it's the same with new technologies or everything that's new. We mostly look for the downside and the flaws. And this is just super fascinating to me because I think differently. I'm trying to look for the opportunities first, for the possibilities and say like, hey, this is new. Let me give it a try and see how I can use it for. So experimentation for me is the only way you can actually find out very quickly what works and what doesn't work. What are some of the potentials that you can see and how can you learn as fast as possible about the possibilities?

I was thinking about an article I read fairly recently in McKinsey that was an interview with Johnny Ivy. Formerly of Apple in the design team. And Johnny said that the creative process is fabulously unpredictable and a great idea cannot be predicted. And I was thinking about this quote because I'm lying it against what you're saying. And I wonder if there's something interesting in there because often when it comes, especially with these generative AI tools, when I talk to people and show them what it can do, the general sentiment is, oh, we could, we have this weird human thing that nothing could ever be as creative as us. Something could ever be as smart as us. We will ultimately be this. And if I think about just the 4 mathematical examples you gave, I wonder if we did that equation in relation to something like generative AI, if we wouldn't go, well, 3 of the 4 are actually wrong on this one, that it's not just the one that we have to think about. Do you wonder if sometimes there might be situations where we have to think a little bit differently about it because of the implications?

Or are they all similar? Yes. Let's talk about implications and future consequences of these things for a moment. But before we do that, I want to come back to that quote. When it comes to creativity, we also hear Steve Jobs saying creativity is just connecting things or connecting the dots, which is a very famous quote. And for me, there is something in addition to that. Connecting the dots and connecting things is a powerful way of defining creativity, where you take two ideas and basically try to find how they could work together to create something new. There is something in addition, which is collecting the dots first. So the more you trying to use your senses to collect dots in terms of like new information, new ideas, experiences, learnings, and all of those things, you just increase the likelihood of the dots you can actually connect later on. The more dots you collect, the more likely it is that these dots can actually connect later on. And so investing not too much time in trying to connect as many dots as possible, but first investing time in collecting dots. And that means you look for new information, you're experimenting, for example, with AI so that you can generate some learnings and then eventually you can connect dots and connect ideas. And that's something everybody can train and learn is collecting dots by talking to other people, listening to different ideas, to different opinions and so forth. And if you go on this journey to collect as many dots as possible, again, you're going to increase your creativity because then again, the likelihood of connecting the dots will actually increase too. And so that's something very powerful. And you talk about future consequences and seeing what can happen down the road. I call this predictive empathy, meaning that you're trying to look into the future and see what potentially can happen as a consequence if something becomes part of our lives. Let's say you are looking for self-driving cars becoming a reality, and we see that might happen pretty, pretty soon. What are some of the consequences that you can think of if that becomes a reality? We're definitely going to have less accidents, right? That's for sure. But a consequence of less accidents will be also that we're going to have less organs that can be donated. A consequence of that might be that a black market for organs might actually emerge. So you could see, you can play this kind of like out and look at a consequence and then the consequence of that and the consequence of that. So you look at first order, second order, third order consequences. And this is fascinating because then you're trying to really look at the edges of what potentially can happen. And if you do that exercise, you basically trying to, what I would say, like empathize with the future where you're trying to really understand the future on a deeper level. And that's something everybody can do. And then if we have a fuller picture of what are some of the consequences that we don't want to have, and how can we prevent them, or some of the consequences we definitely want to have, then you can start with your actions today and your choices to see what can I change today to not move towards a world where some of these consequences might emerge.

There's something so scientific-y about this conversation too. This idea that it's such a privilege to be able to spend time thinking about the future, like that in and of itself. Is a new concept, that our ability to create technology that could propagate a healthier future is a new concept. I always laugh about the idea of speed too. Things are always getting faster. And I think back to being a little kid, and isn't that always the thing where it just feels like things are going faster? But maybe everything's just going at pace and we just say these things as a way to shake things up or to create more market for other people. Do you ever do these mind-thought arguments with yourself? Because they make me crazy sometimes, but I enjoy having them. I'm like, is anything going faster than it used to be? I don't know. I feel like when we, in the early days when the computer was introduced, things are going to get much faster. You know, BBS is an internet. We always say this as, and then it has to be true and that has to shift markets in some way.

It's strange to me. Yeah, it's a fascinating thing to think about. And I don't have an answer for that. It's a perception thing. Perceive things to be faster. When I ask my kids, how do you perceive school is going probably at the moment, they probably don't perceive it as something that's going very fast, right? They probably perceive it as something going very slow. And at the same time, we see that new things are emerging quite fast, or at least we have that perception of it. When you go on a silent meditation retreat, for example, you think that things are going very slow.

It's a perception that we have, probably. You made the comment that I'm— it's spinning in my brain. I want to talk a little bit about this collecting the dots versus connecting the dots. And again, I'm obviously very stuck on artificial intelligence, and I'm— I love just the philosophical conversations about and the implications of it. And I'm thinking, well, the system that we're building is pretty good at collecting a lot more dots than humans might be able to collect. And it might be a lot better at connecting those dots too. And then is this a competition? Is it something where we will realize that humans or certain individuals have, as Rick Rubin would call it, this taste that others don't have? And that taste is, it creates some type of market. Have you thought that through? Does that make sense? If I were to say what the system can probably collect the dots and connect the dots better than any human can.

Would you disagree with that or how would you feel about that? I think for me, technology is helping probably a lot with collecting some of the dots, right? But at the same time, we have to use our senses to do that and probably even more as we rarely pause nowadays and take in a smell or a taste or really listen to something. We hear a lot. But when are we listening? And it's the same for a touch or kind of a sensory experience. You can train that. And I think we are seeing a movement towards that with meditation being one of the practices that is now increasingly popular amongst people where you are literally trying to fine-tune your senses to really start to listen to something and hear that for a longer time. But also trying to observe sensations that you can feel. And that is very powerful if we do that more and more to really start collecting dots in a way that we use our senses more and not just rely on technology or AI to give us some information or give us some insight and so forth. But coming back to the human and the ability we have to actually use our senses to collect more dots.

You lay out 6 concepts that we need to really embrace to understand or have this mind state, which is very powerful. One is radical optimism, unreserved openness, compulsive curiosity, perpetual experimentation, expansive empathy, and dimension X. And we'll get to dimension X because that's the one that maybe most people will be able to put their own definition against. And it made me realize towards the end of reading What's Next Is Now that maybe ultimately the thesis is that we should not worry about the future. I mean, at all, that if you could deploy these 6 things, that ultimately the present becomes so much more expansive that you're really not going to even think much about what's coming next. I mean, that sounds like a direct state of mindfulness or something that would be the ultimate result of spending your time with Headspace.

Yes. Thanks for sharing that insight that you had while engaging on these or with these 6 dimensions I call of a future-ready mind state. And for me, the equation is pretty simple. It's the choices you make equals your future. And the future is, you can choose in the moment. So whatever choice you make, let's say you choose to share some kindness with someone. If you choose to send someone a lovely message, if you choose to eat healthier, if you choose to work out in the moment, whatever it is, that determines your future. And as soon as people, what I say, bring the future close, I think we lose the anxiety of the future, because then we actually choosing the future in the moment. And there's some fascinating research that has been done at Stanford from some of my colleagues. It's called the Future Self Research Project. And what they've done is they asked 20-year-old students if they could imagine themselves in 10 years in the future. And the students were like, yeah, we can totally see ourselves. I'll probably have more money and a better car. Then they were asked to picture themselves in 20 years from today. And they said, definitely we can see ourselves. Maybe we have a family, a good job, we are in a relationship, and maybe also we have a house. But when they asked, and here's the interesting thing, the students to imagine them in 30 or 40 years out, the picture got very blurry and fuzzy. They couldn't describe anything about where they might be or what they might be doing. They had no image at all. And so what they've done is they put VR headsets on these 20-year-old students and projected their much older versions of themselves so they could see how they look basically in the future. And after several minutes, and you, you'll like that, the image of their future self was shown to them. After a couple of minutes, the majority of the students basically said they intend to pay more attention to their health. They want to save more money for retirement, actually double the amount. And they had a couple of other decisions and choices they want to make right now that leads to a better future version of themselves. And that is very powerful because then you're literally trying to empathize with your future self. You're trying to understand who you're going to be in the future. And that influences your choices and decisions in the moment right now. And so for me, doing visualization exercises and imagine your future self is something that everybody can do. And I do it myself because that helps me to make better choices in the moment, which also then creates a little bit less anxiety about the future because I take control of what future might be unfolding.

It's probably the exact remedy for dealing with anxiety and panic. It'd be the exact same remedy type of idea, that idea of bringing what you're thinking closer to what is. We call it grounding. We would call it being in the moment.

That is ultimately the idea of understanding the future. Absolutely. Yes. So what I'd like to do is bringing those two things together. I think there is power in being in the present and appreciating the present, and at the same time thinking that the present really determines my future. And so whatever choice I make in the present will determine what's coming next. And as soon as you start living by that philosophy or principle or those practices, you see that you actually have less anxiety about the future and probably a little bit more excitement about the future because you're taking control of what's gonna happen.

How did that play out at Google? It seems to be a company that's constantly speeding to what's next and trying to live in a world of competitors saying things like move fast and break things, or competitors saying things like only the paranoid survive. And here you are trying to have them and clients still understand these concepts.

How welcome were these ideas? Yes. So I have 14 people I feature in the book. They all worked with me at Google and I was able to I've coached some of them and trained some of them in these practices as well. And they've all built remarkable futures for themselves professionally and personally. And just reading those stories is something that just gives you the confidence that you can also do that and you can also be in charge and in control of your future. And so by sharing these stories, I really intend to inspire people or to give them a chance to say, like, I can do that too. I can be in control of my future and I can not just imagine my future, but literally choose the future in the present moment and doing that. And I apply these things to my own life. So I left Google 2 years ago because I was in a job, as you can imagine, which is truly fulfilling. It's probably the best thing you can do with incredible talented people, bright minds in a culture where ideas are celebrated and and so forth with a mission that is truly timeless. And at the same time, I felt comfortable and I felt that I'm not learning that much anymore and I want to be in charge of my future. So I left and that was my choice. And I left with a smile on my face because I knew that whatever I'm going to step into is something that I am going to choose. And if I choose something and be open about it and be optimistic about it and be curious about it, like writing this book, and I experiment, I have a good opportunity to create a better future for myself and hopefully for others too. And so I really wrote this book as well as a guide for myself to always go back to and say, first, I can be inspired by these people that I wrote the stories about. And at the same time, these practices are really helpful to engage in because they literally help you to become more optimistic, more open, curious and show more empathy for yourself and then eventually build a better future.

So we have an outcome of what happened when you left, which is the book What's Next Is Now. But I'd be curious, based off of what you're saying, are you back at that level where you're learning as much as you want, or how did you reconnect with that? Especially once you're removed from an environment where there's so many things happening and you're on the inside seeing not only, again, what's happening within the different product lines at an organization like that, but even the clients that are also showing you where they're going. So I'd love to know how you've reconnected with this learning and what else you're doing beyond obviously the output of a book to keep that learning rolling.

What do you think?

How did my learning curve look like after I literally took the first step out of Google? If I think about my life and how I did things like that, it wasn't that different because of the environment. It was really my own curiosity, my own reading, my own exploration. These conversations, people say, why do you have a podcast? And my answer is because I can corner people like Frederick and spend an hour trying to go through what we're probably both thinking about worlds and concepts. So I never let my job get in the way of my education, much in the same way I probably never let school get in the way of my education., but I was never in a place where I didn't feel like I wasn't learning, if you know what I mean, because I always had that on my own that I was doing with or without the work.

Absolutely. Yes. And so my learning curve increased incredibly, right? Again, it's not that I was not learning, but you catch yourself doing things sometimes the same way you've done them like last week. And I wanted to really dive into the unknown and I've never wrote a book. I didn't know how the publishing process works and everything related to that. I needed to start learning again. And this was quite exciting, I have to say, because yeah, you wake up and you're going to learn 100 new things that day for sure, which is exciting. That's the way I want to wake up every morning to be able to dive into the unknown and at the same time go to bed in the evening and say, I've learned a tremendous amount of new things.

And that's exciting. Something I don't often get to talk to people about, so it's exciting to have this conversation, Frederik, but it's true that my day is very much waking up and thinking, what am I going to learn today? Who am I going to speak to? How are the conversations going to go? But also the privilege and flexibility to finish this conversation, have a light lunch and Maybe read something on my Kindle or maybe go back and do another interview or that flexibility has helped me tremendously. But I say that also from a place of privilege where I can afford to do that. I don't have to do quarterly reports or deal with a boss or deal with a team right now.

It's a real privilege to have that in your life. Yes. And you're describing that beautifully as something where you move away from preparing for the future in a way that you're predicting it and trying to tell yourself stories about what could happen in like 5 or 10 years. But really, you go about your day actively shaping it and crafting it in a way that you say, I can read something, I can have a light meal, I can engage in conversations, and that helps me to learn. And that is something that you have control over. And that is very powerful. Sometimes we feel that the future is controlled by others, other institutions or other people or other things like technology, but it's not. You're in charge and you have more control than you think about many things, right? At least about your next choices you can make. And that's what I want to help people to realize is that don't think about the future as something that is controlled by others. Think about the future in a way that what you can control and what you can decide in the moment. And as soon as you shift that thinking towards that, I think you're going to wake up with excitement. You're going to wake up and say, yes, today is the day where I want to make specific choices.

And that will lead to an exciting future. I don't know how old you are. You seem younger than I am, but I am curious about as you get older and as you mature, I'm finding it in my age that it's harder to fight the cynicism, that it's harder to fight the anger. Even we live in a very divisive world. I see the hate, I see the wars, I see the anger and the perspectives and how they're manipulated, the media. We could go down and down a treasure trove of things that are a sense of negativity. And at the same time, it's hard for me to say that they're fake or they're easy to dismiss or to ignore. I find that as I get older, it's harder to say that. So that's why I jokingly referred to myself earlier as a future optimist as well. But I have this dash of cynicism with me. How do you deal with that? How do you handle the fact that as we get older and we see things for our kids and other injustices, I think it is harder to just turn a blind eye and be that I'm still the optimist and I'm running forward in a positive way.

I fight that every day if I'm being honest. It's a good question. When I think back to my younger years, there was always this question around what do you want to be in the future?

Yeah, I still say that sometimes, Frederic.

I'm like, what do I want to be when I grow up? Exactly. Yes. What do you want to be? And I never had an answer for that. And nowadays, I think I'm okay with that. And I accept that because I rather ask people now, and specifically my kids, how do you want to be in the future? Because that allows them to not think about a role or a position or a job or whatever it is they want to do in the future. But they develop specific qualities they want to show in the future. And if you think about yourself, how do you want to be in the future? That's also the legacy you leave behind. That's how people will talk about you when you're not around anymore. They will not talk about Mitch was a whatever job description you want to give yourself, but they will talk about you and say like, he was a very curious person. He was a very open person. He was very empathetic. He was compassionate. He was kind. He was loving. And so if you move towards these things and tell yourself like, hey, how do I want to show up today? You can choose to be angry. You can choose to hate. You can choose to do all of those things, but you can also choose other things. You can choose to be loving. You can choose to be more kind and you can choose to be more open and more curious. And that's what I want to see people choose. And if more and more people choose that, I think we're going to see a better future for all of us.

Yeah, Frederic, I agree. I'm just seeing a bit of a different trend these days, and that's perhaps where that disillusionment is coming from.

Yeah. There are a lot of things that we think we can blame for our future. We like to blame institutions that are failing us. We like to blame politics, the education system, other people, tech organizations, whatever it is. We like to blame them for where we are at the moment. But how much have you control over these things? You definitely can vote, which I highly recommend doing. So you can execute your influence over that. You can choose an education system and say like, okay, I can influence the teachers and I can put my kids into a school that I like and so forth. But you can choose for yourself how you show up every day in every moment and what choices you make. And if you choose curiosity and openness and optimism, I, again, like I tell you what's happening next is going to be better. And so stop complaining about what you can't control. I think that's a waste of time, literally, like, like why talking about something that I don't have control over, or even watch the news and get all this information about what potentially could happen or what's something negative that it's going to be shown to me where I don't have any control over. You should watch the news in a way that look for the things that are interesting to you and where you can make a difference, where you can say like, hey, I can go out there and I can help solve this problem. I can help solve this crisis. I can help someone else who is suffering or needs my help and then do that. But don't waste your time to follow all the negativity that's going to be shared with you and choose to be open, curious, optimistic, empathetic yourself.

I want to talk about something we didn't talk about yet. It's something very present. It's something that we're both impacted by tremendously in the work that we do, which is hype. This idea that forget the past, forget the future, but we do live in moments where we feel that we talked a little bit about AI and artificial intelligence kind of being the one now. I look back and think very closely, it was this idea of NFTs and non-fungible tokens. And I think about that, And my hype deflator for, as somebody who speaks about this stuff, was always we have an abundance of digital assets. Perhaps digital assets should have a scarcity model to them, which would be more representative of the real world. And I was very excited about all of that and might even still argue that I still am, not necessarily in terms of ARK and what happened on the crazy side, but we see these things every day and we're asking people to parse and make decisions off of that present. How do you inject what we're talking about in these six dimensions into things that are now, not potentially happening? And how do we deal with hype and being overwhelmed by just the current state of seeing it, not wondering, is this going to be real or not, but just feeling it in the now?

Yes. I want to help people to make a hype out of radical optimism. Openness, curiosity, experimentation, and empathy. If we hype that, again, that's going to be great. And I think we're going to see a better humanity, better human beings.

But I think the people who are hyping things are using those things to hype them, right? They're having a radical optimism. They're saying this is going to be the future. They're leveraging a lot of these things. Everything could be weaponized.

We know that, but that's kind of the thing.

Why don't we create a hype, for example, for meditation? I think we did.

Did we not see Calm and Headspace get massive billions of dollars in venture capital? Fantastic.

Yes.

And I think there's a benefit to that. Yeah. So, and again, like people can choose what hype they want to follow. Again, that notion of experimenting is a very good way And probably the only way that helps you to figure out what does that trend do to me? Is that something that is useful? What can I learn here? And I'm experimenting with everything you can imagine. I experiment with different ways of building your morning rituals. I experiment with different technologies every day. I experiment with different ways to communicate. I experiment with everything you can imagine. Because I wanna learn as quickly as possible what works for me and what is helpful for me. And so when people share trends and they have opinions about specific things, you can have an opinion too, great. But the better opinion is formed through experimentation and trying things out because that gives you a real insight into like how this thing actually works or how this approach or process or practice actually is helping you. Tell me the one thing that made you think differently. Many things like our conversation made me think differently. So thanks for that. I think the biggest thing that made me think very differently in the past was a 10-day silent meditation retreat that I've done where there was no external input that helped me to think differently. It was basically all internal. And realizing that, that you have everything inside and trying to sit with that for 12 hours each day for 10 days in a row without talking to someone, without writing anything down, without reading anything, without your phone, without anything is very powerful because it changes how you think and it changes not just how you think, but who you are. And if you want to try that out, highly recommend it because for me, that's the next frontier of how we can actually change our thinking and in a way that is beneficial to us.

I love that. The new book is called What's Next Is Now. You also have Next Letters.

Let people know where they can find out more about the book, your newsletter, all that stuff. Yes, you can find me everywhere basically in the internet. Again, the book is called What's Next Is Now: How to Live Future Ready. My name is Fredrik Veard, and so yeah, excited to start the conversation with people around the present and the future. Not so much about the past, as this is gone and we can't influence it anymore, but I think we have a choice about how our future will unfold.

Thanks so much for your time, Fredrik. Thank you, Mitch. Smells on the air, see there, it's crushing. The final impression, stains on the paper where words fell like water. On earth, all the changes that never did matter. I think it's beginning to freeze here. Caught in the rage and the fire of things, all the brightness that burns me. I'm fumbling through like a child in the dark. When the nakedness comes, I am shocked by the color, the glorious way your skin comes alive. And I never thought we'd make it back So soon might be nice, but I knew you'd be your own destroyer. Comes a time, and I never thought I'd make it up to you. Yeah, please forgive me. How could we escape all the bitterness piled upon bitterness, held in the face of the things that I don't understand? Intellectualize over and over this helplessness suits us. Funny how quiet has slipped to our corners, worn all our edges The way you were watching, breathing and baiting, wanting and warming, and cautiously waiting for some simple signal to creep across your conscience, uncover redemption. And oh, did I mention I carried you down to the St. Lawrence River? The banks running dirty, the water's beginning to freeze here. It's winter by morning and I'll freeze here. It's winter by morning, yeah, yeah, comes alive. And I never thought we'd make it back so soon. Might be nice, but I knew you'd be your own destroyer. Of the time, and I always thought I'd make it up to you. Saw on your face such a curious, great desire I let go your hand, was desperate to hold you again, but you're sinking too deep in the water. Smarted myself and so easily gave up what I wanted. Solid by morning, what I wanted. It's winter by morning. Yeah, yeah. Come to life, and I never thought we'd make it back so soon. Might be nice, but I knew you'd be your own destroyer.

And I'll freeze here.

This winter bite won't end.