EP 128: Opening Minds through Disruptive Innovation | Sally Dominguez

Welcome to Radical Responsibility, the podcast dedicated to ridding the world of blame and shame, where we explore the issues you care about from a unique perspective. 100% ownership for each and every circumstance we face in life, day in and day out. Hi. Welcome to the Radical Responsibility podcast. This is your host, Lee Maul. And today's episode, I have a conversation with Sally Dominguez, a futurist and an expert on resilience. Her book, Epic Resilience and her model, emotional, physical and intellectual and creative how to do that, how to create that is what she calls the fourth revolution. And she's originally from Australia. She lives in California now. Incredibly dynamic and just really engaging and entertaining and this was a lot of fun. So join me with this conversation with Sally Dominguez. Great to have you here, Sally. Welcome.

Thanks, Blake. Very, very happy to be here.

So I'm really looking forward to our conversation. So I want to tell our audience a little bit about you. So you're originally from Australia, which we can probably tell from your accent, but you've lived in Marin County, I think you told me, for 12 years in the U.S. that's right, Northern California. Right. So Sally Dominguez is a thought leader in resilience and exponential mindset. An inventor, architect and futurist with seven international product awards, Sally pioneered two product categories that are now mainstream and has been named one of Australia's 50s for 50 for the future entrepreneurs in the USA. Sally has over 10 years judging invention, Innovation and Car of the Year awards on TV and in person, giving her a unique perspective and deep understanding of the mental of the mental, bearable discomfort required to work outside expertise and knowledge while breaking new ground. Sally's skill is provoking consistently innovative thinking and others, using her epic resilience framework as a foundation and her adventurous thinking methodology as the strategy. Adventurous Thinking updates design thinking with disruptive tools and the practices of multiple intelligence and frugal innovation. Adventure Thinking is a proactive strategy that uses five lenses, negative space, sideways, backwards rethinking and parkour to ultimately converge and proliferate thinking. It has been used internationally by government departments and educational systems, as well as startups, nonprofits and big businesses around the world. And that's exactly what we want to explore today. That all sounds incredibly interesting because we're facing incredible challenges as humanity on this planet and we're going to need some really innovative thinking and solutions. To use a cliche, we really need to get out of the box if we're going to meet solutions. So that sounds like that's right. Up your alley. So first of all, you know, at this time last year, you know, the lockdown was just unfolding, right? And we were finding ourselves in this new reality. And so I'm just curious at a personal level, what's this year been like for you? What's changed for you? What have you learned? What's it been like?

Pretty interesting. Like many people, I'd imagine anybody that like me works for themselves and is very much an in person kind of worker. I went from maybe traveling four to five countries a month doing massive workshops and talks to absolutely nothing. Full unemployment, stuck in place. And it was, I was show shocked. I mean, I found that such a rude shock that all of a sudden the way that you get inspired, the way that you function every day is completely altered. And so I, you know, went into a brief depression and then thought, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to pivot, I'm going to do what I teach everybody to do. I'm going to get insanely fit, I'm going to change my lifestyle. So I became vegan, went all plant based, a whole lot of stuff. And then I noticed how many people were feeling afraid right now. And I thought, and I'm going to write that book I've been meaning to do because, you know, I had this gap. I had about two months, maybe two and a half. Clearly nothing was going to happen and I wasn't interested in reducing all my work to free except for not for profit. So I decided I would use that time pivot around and work on myself and a book.

Wow, that's really fabulous. It's a fabulous story and just a great example. And I was about to ask you, what did you do to stay resilient? So you talked about getting insanely fit and taking care of yourself, actually kind of. Similarly, I remember reading early on, probably about this time last year, that this would be a good time to take off those pounds you've wanted to take off. Right. So I got serious about that and took off £15 and I've kept it off and I'm still trying to get down to my ideal, ideal weight, which I haven't been at since high school probably.

I'm the same, I'm the same.

Yeah, I'm really focused on the fitness and it makes a big difference. And, and yeah, we've all hopefully found ways to pivot, especially those of us who can work from home and work over zoom. A lot of possibilities have opened up. So your new book, Epic Resilience just came Out. What inspired. Well, you just said what you know, the timing of writing the book. But apart from that, what inspired you to write the book and what does it arise out of it? Does it come out of a years of experience or was it a new kind of just thought storm you had or. Tell us about it.

It's an interesting, it's a combo actually. And you know, you referred Fleet to this massive disruption we're facing. You know, the disruption we're facing has been exacerbated by Covid forcing everything to digitize, right? So everything went online and people were disrupted in that way, also disrupted by having the communications and their connection cut. So, so the longest strategy for the book is that I've been teaching my adventurous thinking strategy. And what I find is when I do say the weekend I do it, Stanford people fly in from around the country. We do this solid weekend, six hour days too. People are always equal parts absolutely exhausted, but also ecstatic. Like they love it, it's dynamic, but they're physically and mentally exhausted. So for a while now, I've been thinking, okay, if I need people to think in this area of variable discomfort, which is possibility thinking, which is how we have the confidence to navigate the unknown without knowledge, right? If I need them to do that, I clearly have to come up with a way for them to be as ready as possible, not as resilient as possible. It's always been a passion of mine, decentralization, resilience. Then Covid came and I realized how much fear there was with people that I've been working with, that I'm friends with, that are smart and really solid. All of a sudden, seeing this fear, couldn't understand it. I thought, you know, out of chaos comes opportunity, come on. And then I realized that, you know, people are so dependent now on Internet, on online, on other people solving the issue. It really worried me that they weren't able to find confidence within themselves to pivot and try other things and control what they could control, right? So I wanted to get rid of the fear. So I wrote the book quickly because I thought right now more than ever, we can't have more fear. It is divisive. It disintegrates trust. We need optimism, we need solutions. We need people thinking both for the climate crisis, for the world in flux, for the fourth revolution that's hit us. We need people to be at their best and thinking at their best. So I've been thinking about this strategy for a while, but I realized it when I looked around and saw colleagues, friends, family, who were almost rendered inert by the changes of COVID And I thought people need something. We need to remind ourselves of how brilliant we each are essentially, and strong.

Wow. Well, that's really fabulous because I think there are such strong tens of negativity and blame and fear and cynicism and you know, if, if we, if we don't have some way of feeling essentially good and confident about ourselves as human beings and a human society, you know, and how, how are we going to be able to like, you know, enter that realm of possibility and create, create the world that needs to happen for us to live sustainably on this planet. And so we need all the positive energy we can. And I feel like we just get mired in negativity so much so I'm really looking forward to your book. I haven't read it yet, but I'm going to read it for sure. So as we emerge from this pandemic, which you know is likely climate related, and you know, we're still faced with this climate emergency that, you know, some people might say it's looming or already emerging or already here, very much already here. I would say it's already here and certainly devastation in many parts of the world already. And what we saw in your country, Australia, with the fires and you know, the desertification that's happening in Africa in many places. So I think it is already here. And, you know, this actually depending on what science you look at. I just watched a series of film about the climate loops phenomena. There are these underlying changes that are in place that are really going to be very hard to turn around and they're already happening which is going to release more and more greenhouse gases into the environment and so forth. And you know that if we aren't, if we don't find some way to develop the collective will to change how we're living on the planet and change at the policy level and the governmental level and come up with, you know, new innovations. Things are going to get really bad. And so, you know, I think there's, you know, an equal question about finding the resilience we need individually and collectively both to kind of.

Get ourselves going in the right direction where we could actually start dealing with the problem, finding solutions, and then also at the same time to be able to deal with what may be coming our way if we're not able to find the solutions or wherever we are somewhere in the middle of that. Right, so what do you think is most going to contribute to creating the resilience we need? Maybe you could touch on it a little bit individual, collective and then systemic, if you could.

Yeah, totally. It's interesting. I just read the other day that In Northern California 95% of our deep kelp forests have gone. 95%. And those deep kelp forests sustain a myriad of sea life. You know, they are the thriving ecosystem of the ocean. So, you know, I read that and then how do I react in terms of resilience? So I think the first thing we need is individual awareness. So my book basically starts at the premise that like do you know yourself well enough? Are you to be resilient you have to be completely self aware. Then you can become autonomous, then you can become self sufficient. Right. So I think firstly we need people to stop waiting for someone else to solve the problem. This is ridiculous. If we are all self aware enough to understand that we could contribute to solution with thinking, with doing right, it's not about. And then, and then we can form groups, we can connect. Because a lot of this strategy, this emotional, physical, intellectual, creative resilience strategy is that once you fortify yourself for survival and thriving, it's then about the ripple effect of how can you affect others, how can you spread this kind of optimism and confidence. So I think the first step is self awareness. For heaven's sake, people like someone else isn't going to fix this for you. The next part is find your people, like connect with groups where you can start making a difference. And I think when we talk about resilience, when we look at the kind of level of natural disaster in the world, decentralizing is so important. You know, I have a project at the moment, I'm rolling out green energy across the Caribbean region for International Development bank or I'm roadmapping how that might look. And I said to them, you're a bunch of islands like and a couple of mainland, but a bunch of islands is perfectly situated to model resilient decentralization. So in terms of people form small groups that can have more impact, then start spreading that and yeah, then use the collective. But I really honestly feel like every human needs to feel like they can be part of the solution. They shouldn't feel hopeless. They should feel like they need to activate that part of their brain that has been dormant all through education, all through work with a focus on expertise and apply it in groups, idea share. What are you going to do? Yes, how are you going to react to this? This, this truth that is coming of hotter, fiercer, wetter climates, you know, but also how are we going to like for instance the Bushfires in Australia have become so ferocious, and those in California, there was an X prize offered for new solutions. And I look to exponential technologies and think, come on, there has to be something we can do with a carbon veil. There has to be something we can do with massive jet engines. We need to rethink our reaction to all of these climate changes because the way we've done it in the past just isn't going to cut it with the magnitude of the issue now. So I think now more than ever, it's about human creativity. But you have to have confidence to be creative.

I'm curious if you followed what's going on in Australia since the fires, because I'm just wondering what is it going to take for us to wake up? Because, you know, so many of us are basically in survival mode or just coping, and when we get out of the pandemic, are just going to go back to kind of, you know, surviving, living, staying entertained, right? And then, you know, there is a core people who have awakened to what's going on and are, you know, embracing sustainable living and global movements and trying to do that decentralized organizing. And there's that group of people, but it's a small percentage of the population growing, but still small. And then you have a significant percent of the population that thinks all this is a bunch of balderdash, Right. You know, that it's some kind of conspiracy. Right? So, you know, what's. I'm wondering what's going to take for enough of us to wake up and go in the direction you're talking about for it to really make a difference. And I'm curious if the fires in Australia really created any sizable awakening among the people of Australia or the policymakers.

Who knows about the people of Australia. Here's the thing is, Australia is the most comfortable place to live. It is so comfortable. The Social Security safety net, the quality of life, the design of the place. It. There's only 26 million people, maybe it is so comfortable. So I feel like one of the reasons I don't live there, even though I love it, I love Aussies, I love all of that, but you have to be a little bit on edge in order to feel the urgency, in order to get things moving. And I feel like it's too comfortable. And so even though those bushfires were insane, you know, most people live in cities, it didn't really impinge on the cities. It caused massive smog and it caused heartbreak and devastation in our beautiful national parks, our animals, you know, but.

It'S yeah, it's just, and, and as to the people who, you know, the climate skeptics, I spent a lot of time trying to find common ground. You know, you've got to find common emotional ground to connect with people. But at this point in the game, you know, they can ride on the backs of people that are going to fix it. Honestly, we don't have that much time to mess around with a skeptic. We just have to feel a little sorry for them that they don't have the vision and we need to just move the hell on. Because I just feel like the scale of natural disaster, like look at Miami. Miami lives with, what is it at sea level or marginally below and the water is coming up nonstop and there's nothing you're going to be able to do about that. Really what we need to do is develop hovercrafts and not pretend that roads are going to work, that boats are going to work, that houses can just be a foot higher. We actually need disruptive invention and innovation to respond to such disruptive climate change. From a, from a government level. Australia is very conservative still. I do love that for coronavirus. Unlike the government here, for instance, they united, both sides united to present a united front and they've dealt really well with coronavirus. I wish they would do a similar thing for environment. As a green energy car person, I've always never really understood why Australia hasn't embraced green hydrogen, for instance, and used it to roll out an entire fleet of Aussie made green hydrogen cars. That's a bit of a passion of mine. They don't even have a subsidy on alternative fuel vehicles. But in terms of people making a massive difference, a good friend of mine is very invested in plant based food and was telling me how in the States the uptake of plant based milk is so high that it will only take another 2% of people drinking it to tip over the dairy industry. And I'm not wishing this on the dairy people, but the difference in a plant based diet, carbon footprint wise and a meat based diet and a dairy diet is immense. And if it's happening all through Latin America, it's happening in America. We could see huge changes in that kind of carbon footprint within the next decade. If people continue to embrace plant based and continue to look at what they each do, that contributes massively to this unsustainable footprint. I think that's really interesting.

Yeah, it's really interesting. Sometimes it can feel a little hopeless, but if you really start looking more deeply into it, some of these Things at scale. Small shifts can make a huge difference at scale. And of course those, you know, what we're eating. And that's going to change how the farming industry works. And if it can move things more to sustainable farming, replenish the topsoil, which can trap a lot of carbon. So there are possibilities and all the same predictions that have it going really bad, they can turn the other way around, start to flatten that curve. So we are going to need a really different way of thinking about things. So tell us a little bit more about both your EPIC resilience framework and then maybe this adventurous thinking in whatever order. Would you like to explore that?

Yeah. So I'll start with EPIC because it is the foundation. So EPIC stands for emotional, physical, intellectual and creative resilience. And it is in two sections. So classic resilience is about surviving an event and so strong mental and physical strength is part of survival. Survival resilience. However, we are facing a massive and disruptive era. The Zeitgeist is such that this is the fourth revolution, this is the rise of machine age. And how do humans rise and level up to match that with human ingenuity? And this is my area of passion, is how do we help humans understand that they needn't be threatened by the machine age? They have to rise to meet it with the unique characteristics that the human brain has. This ability to make unexpected connections between imagination and expertise.

The second part of epic, the intellectual and creative resilience, is about how do we thrive in chaos, how do we thrive in this relentless change when we accept that this relentless change is going to continue to increase and accelerate because we have digitized, because everything has gone online, which means that the sharing is out of control. In fact, everything's out of control, right? But for me that's a good thing because I look at it and go, so much opportunity. This is so much fun. But that's because I have a mindset that is very creatively confident in terms of being able to imagine solutions. So the second part of the EPIC is really about encouraging people to move outside their comfort zone of expertise. And so the intellectual resilience is about looking and learning about things that have no relationship to the work that you currently do, your area of specialization, and then teaching yourself to get back into that curious mindset and push for those connections. I read something random about origami self folding robots. Think about your work today and force yourself to come up with a connection. What could it be? And then creative is about idea sharing this idea you and I both know when you have many ideas and you share ideas, you become prolific and people seem to think that their one idea is like they're hanging onto it. No, we share, then we connect, and as we idea share, we develop. This other way of thinking, which I use is prompted by my adventurous thinking five lenses. So each of the lenses, one of them, thinking backwards, is about closed loop, closing the loop, being much more sustainable, upcycling, having no waste. One of them is about core value, and the most extreme is parkour, which actually inverts your regular way of doing things. All of these lenses throw you into this state of variable mental discomfort and ultimately help you just develop the habit of making these unexpected connections that give you the confidence to understand you're as good thinking in the realm of possibility as you are in your area of expertise. It's just the type of thinking that we've never nurtured at school, we've never nurtured in the workplace. All of a sudden, it's vital that we rediscover this, because machine learning can do prediction, they can do analysis, they can do behavioral observation, but it cannot do what our brains do, what every single brain does, which is imagine and then create. It can't do that.

Absolutely. So tell me how you've applied parkour as a matter of equivalent. So it represents a discipline that I don't know that I understand that much about it, but I've seen it when people are running up besides the buildings and stuff like that, and jumping here and jumping there. So how did you apply that to adventurous thinking?

It's the mental equivalent of jumping off the side of the building. So super high failure rate, but disruptively innovative when it happens. So, for instance, parkour might be, I would say to you.

How it's all about disrupting a system. So let's see, I'm going to throw something to you. What's something that you do every day? Just a thing that you do every day. Just a thing that you do in the process of your work. Outreach to people.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, I'm on zoom all day with people talking to people on Zoom. Yeah.

And what are you trying to do? Like say we said, what about this? Let's pack all of this. How do you try and get through to climate skeptics?

What are the three ways that you use every time that you're just like, this is what I'm going to do, this is how I'm going to do it. And then you go, what are they?

Well, I guess because I don't really deal with a lot of climate skeptics. I'm mostly into, you know, preaching to the choir probably, unfortunately, but. But I think, you know, maybe it's with clients, especially because I am a business consultant as well. So trying to get clients to.

Really think differently about their what, look much more deeply about what they're doing and think differently about what they're doing instead of just being completely caught in survival mode within their business, you know, with this bottom line focus and old models. And meanwhile, the market's already gone 20 years ahead of them and they're still trying to survive in the way they were thinking 20 years ago.

All right, so if we're going to do parkour, I'm going to ask you three things that you would do. So I'm going to go. The first one is you try and get your clients to look more deeply. Right. What's another thing that you do? I knew you said something about get them to consider new systems. We'll say that too. Yeah.

And I try to get them to be willing to look at the difficult things, to actually to face the difficult things.

Okay, and then how do you get them to do that? Exactly. How do you get them to do that? Because I want this to be a good parkour. How do you get them to look at the difficult things? What do you say to them?

So I ask deep questions about their business. Right. I asked the questions that are going to surface the ways in which their business model is not working.

This is good. Okay, so this is how it's going to go. Parkour. So our normal way of doing things. I'm reading off my post it. Okay, so we're going to address climate skepticism with clients.

Right.

The first, we're going to get clients to look more deeply at whatever they're doing. Second, we're going to have them consider new systems. And three, your. You are going to ask the deep questions. Now, parkour, we are going to invert everything that you just said, but we still want to convert the climate skeptics, right? So now instead of get clients to look more deeply, we can either say, don't get clients to do anything, or we can say, only look at the shallow stuff. I don't really mind. Let's say we don't get clients to look at anything. Right? Okay, the first one. Now, now here's the thing. As I invert, what often happens is the brain goes, oh, well, well, in that case, if we're going to do.

That, that's what my brain's doing already, right?

Don't do that. You need to consider all three inversions as a set, not just one. If it's just one, you'll get incremental change. It's already been done. Because you'll go to something that you know already exists. Right. So bear with me here. So no deep looking by clients. Or you could say you're not going to have them think deep, think deeply. Right. Then we're not going to look at new systems. So you may say only use existing systems. Ooh. So let's say that only existing systems.

And then lastly, you are not going to ask the deep questions. You are not going to. So who's going to ask the deep questions if it's not you? What would the opposite be?

It would be. They would be emerging in some way for the client. I guess they would either be asking them or they would be emerging somehow in the process.

Yeah. So either people from within the organization are asking the deep questions. So let's just say that stakeholders, stakeholders are somehow forced to ask deep questions. Right. Of each other. Okay. So now we have. We are going to convert the climate skeptics, amazingly, through a brand new system. And that new system is we're not asking the clients to do any deep thinking. We're not. We're only going to use systems that already exist. Right. And you are not going to ask any questions. So hopefully we're going to provoke stakeholders to ask each other and that is it. Now what are you going to do? So now I throw that to you, knowing that you have never seen this answer before because it's the opposite of best practice. And so now, hopefully your brightness, like. Well, I don't know. Right. That will be the first bit. That's the first good news because that means we're outside expertise.

Right.

So now you're going to start imagining, if I have to make this happen, what might it be? What could it be?

Is it an internal dashboard? Is it something where everybody is forced to share one climate observation every week and judged by their peers? I don't know. We don't know.

Yeah.

See?

Yeah. It gets my mind thinking much more in terms of how's your brain feeling?

I'm massaging it. How's your brain feeling?

Look at this. Feels. Yeah, yeah. It's thinking, you know, it's thinking creative, you know, it's thinking about other possibilities, much more organic and emergent ways that that could happen.

And what it's starting to do because you don't have the answer is it's asking yourself questions. You're getting into the habit of asking yourself question questions. What do I think? What do I want? What wouldn't I want? Right. Such a dynamic way to be thinking.

Yeah. So you're really talking about changing the brain. You're talking about changing the brain here. I mean, all this.

We can think of it.

Bumping you off your old neural pathways and forcing new connections.

Yes, yeah. And the extent that we can do that, the brain is actually going to grow and thrive because even anything that causes such great new neural pathways is going to help the brain thrive and increase its capacity. It both its complexity and sufficiency. Right.

And neuroplasticity all over the shop. We love it. It's great for everybody. But essentially it makes you feel alive. It makes you realize what you're capable of in terms of thinking and to sustain that level of like, ah, this is amazing. You have to be peak physical shape, you have to be fit, you have to be eating the right, right nutrients, you've got to be getting enough sleep and then you become like so much better than artificial intelligence, which still cannot, with all the money and energy we're putting into deep learning, come close to our ability to imagine and develop these connections. That's what I find really exciting.

Let me ask you a tough question here because I know this is going to come up in the summit. So everything you're saying makes sense to me and I'm trying to do that to the best of my ability. And I know there's a lot of innovative people out there doing that and kind of all those combinations of things you're talking about within epic resilience and including getting in good shape and all the rest of it. And you know, there's a lot of privilege in our ability to do that. And as things get tough, there could be kind of an emerging elite of some kind that's doing that and developing these extraordinary capacities for resilience and creative thinking and innovation while the rest of the world is not catching up and is falling further behind. And so how do we create, keep that from creating some kind of new elite, right. That, you know, replaces an old elite, maybe that operated under different thought models and, and different power structures. But there's this, you know, so, yeah, I, I don't know, maybe it's inevitable. I mean, there's lots of people that have thought that different elites should run the world because they do better than democracy. But that's a very dangerous thought.

So I think it's got to come a couple of pronged approach. It's got to come through education.

Every kid coming through the system needs to. I mean the suicide rate in the USA right now since COVID hit in high school kids is out of control. The eating disorder rate is up 35%. Not okay. So these kids need something to help them have optimism. And again, everybody needs optimism. But I would suggest that with the fourth revolution, with the bringing in of robots into so much of industries, AI into so much of industry, it's perhaps not creating the elite that we may have thought. It's not necessarily everybody with money, necessarily everybody with power. You're going to see millions and millions of people now. I mean, as the fourth revolution, people like to talk about it, you'll only be working a three day week. Perhaps you have all this spare time now if you have all that spare time, you're not earning the money and you're absolutely freaking out. That's not going to work for you. But if you have more spare time and you understand the capability of your thinking, then you'll probably be able to do things with that time that are going to move the game forward. So you're really going to see you on the elite. But I feel like, I feel like the base is that people need to understand what they are capable of. And from there I think that it doesn't matter. Yes, maybe I have. I mean I was only running for 15 minutes a day. It doesn't matter. I'm not saying you have to spend hours and hours working out, right? And, and also, as you say, people cannot necessarily afford the type of food that's nutritious. But if we decentralize like I fully believe we should, to be resilient, and if people were to take up a plant based diet, imagine the health and wellness repercussions throughout just the US if all these towns that have no fresh vegetable or fruit, can grow it abundantly in shipping containers, have it on site, eat plant based stuff, be super healthy, they may only be working three days a week. But if there's, I don't know, maybe there's a minimum wage, I don't know. But even if there's not, if you're at that level of health and optimized potential, you're going to find stuff to do.

Yeah. Well, your point is I'm an optimist.

But that's how I am.

Well, so am I. And you're pointing at something that's really a passion for me because there's, there's a lot of ways to think this is really difficult. One, you're pointing to Our education system, which radically needs to change. And I think of people like Zach Stein and some really innovative people who are both into the whole sustainable global re envisioning everything, but also applying all that to our education system. And at the same time I have this tremendous faith in human beings and all of us in our innate resilience and goodness and creativity. And I think, you know, if you make new ways of living more available, people will intuitively pick up on it. You know, like it doesn't take a huge shift. It's like the, you know, it's like what you were comparison, you know, making the comparison between what's going on with AI and the machine age and so forth, but can't touch what human beings can do in terms of our creativity. And we all have the underlying neural structures to do the healthy thing, to make the healthy choices. And just if you kind of get the obstacles and the fear out of the way, change can happen really quickly. I actually think change could happen in really dramatic ways and really positive ways. But we have to think really creatively about how to, you know, like, I would love it if there was some way that, you know, kids in schools all around the country had the opportunity just to listen to you for 10 minutes.

You know, well, I'm developing a whole schools thing that I'm rolling out for free that will be this epic resilience thing. Because kids need to understand that there's more than just rational knowledge. All the kids with adhd, I have radical adhd, my kid does too. You know, all the people that are outliers because they have attention deficit or because they're introverts, not extroverts, all the people that are disadvantaged by this current super outmoded way of educating, which, let's face it, was basically built for the Industrial revolution to get people into factory jobs and into sitting in a cubicle, right? That's not life. And so we need to start with those kids and we need to give them an option. So expertise, possibility, let's treat them equally and value them equally and then watch it roll out. And I think people like Tom Brady eating plant based diet, right? Imagine the impact he's having on Buffett footballers all over the world just going, hang on, he's an amazing athlete. How is he doing that? You know, I know my husband used to eat meat three times a day and now he eats it maybe twice a week because we got a service purple carrot that brought us the most incredible plant based meals for a while just to help us understand what it could look like, I think once people are exposed to this sort of thing, you know, and then we go to the farmers that are disenfranchised because they had cattle and we say, here's another way to grow algae or plants or whatever it is. It's so much more sustainable, so much more healthy for you and your family. So much better in terms of what you can make, you know. So I think, yeah, people need to see this happening and even if it happens in tiny little decentralized areas, it will spread.

If it's good, that's fabulous. Yeah. I mean obviously we have an education system that was designed for a world that's gone, been gone for 30, 40 years and we really talk about disruption. I think where we need disruption is really in our educational system from K12 all the way through universities. I mean there are some really interesting global projects now at the university level that are trying to make more competency based and really innovative technology based kind of learning available all over the world, regardless of resources. Some really interesting things going on. But I think it really needs to happen with our children.

As soon as you combine that with, if you gave them all a plant based lunch and looked at their, their nutrition as well as this new way of learning, imagine the leap forward, you know, if you tackle all that stuff together. And the other thing that I love about this resilience thing that I have is it's inclusive. So you finally pair inclusion and innovation together where they should be and you start really seeing impact, you know. So I think yes, schools combined with the health system, talking about wellness and being proactive and being aware of your own health and microbiome and all those other things, instead of outsourcing it to other people who have profit, profit ahead of your well being. You know, like this idea of decentralization and going back to a self awareness and a level of autonomy can only be good for people.

So you are a futurist and I'm going to put you on the spot and ask you to do a little predicting. So you know, what do you think the next future 20 years is going to look like? Do you think we're going to be able to flatten the curve on it a bit or you think we're going to have to deal with huge disruptions before we wake up?

Oh, huge disruptions, definitely. Yes, I think. And you know, my expertise is also in alternative fuel vehicles. The level of takeout for green hydrogen, for EVs, for electrically run solar stuff is really heartening. I'm excited, I'm not excited about the future of scarcity of the raw materials for the batteries, especially the rare minerals. I've looked at the countries that have the resources. I don't like what that says about geopolitics, but I'm excited because I believe with some of these innovations that are out there, like one UK researcher has hydrogen as like a toothpaste. Right. I think we're going to leapfrog the need for batteries in many areas and that is going to open the floodgates because if we use this is my excitement about an abundant future for energy. In particular, if we use natural resources to generate energy, it's abundant, it's 24 7. We don't need the efficiency of conversion that we've always relied on. All the numbers that we've always run have been about, oh, that's not efficient enough to be worth it. But if you've got ocean or wind powering something or a hybrid, you're never going to not have energy. And so what that means is whether you have like low tech solution or a high tech solution, you can all use renewable energy. And I think that is, you know, I think that's by 2030. By 2030, I think the amount of renewable energy being harvested in kind of low conversion devices is going to be massive. I think that developing countries are going to leapfrog us in terms of jumping on that kind of a soil battery, a saltwater battery. You know, I think that we're going to see people making hydrogen from seawater and using that salt to create a battery and then using the water that's the end product to be desalinated water. Like we're going to see convergence of so many technologies. And honestly, by 2030, yeah, the climate is going to be more severe. I think we're going to be inside more than we'd like to be. But on the flip side, we're going to have made huge strides towards finding other energy sources and in that decentralization, actually becoming a little more empowered, literally because we won't be reliant on central grids, which means maybe the whole government system might have a shakedown. And I mean, look, that's happening now too. So bring it on.

Well, yeah, yeah, that, that's all really exciting and especially because, you know, the emerging electric car industry and even, you know, the driverless cars and all that can create so much wonderful change. But the shadow of that is lithium mining. So, you know, I'm grad, I'm not.

A fan of lithium. I'm pushing away from lithium I'm just going to leapfrog that.

I'm glad you see that possibility. That's wonderful. So this has been, it's been really, really, really interesting and thrilling and so I'm curious if there's some kind of resilience practice that you might share with our audience, something that you do to keep yourself resilient, whether it's a practice people could do or do you, I don't know if you do kind of mind training or mental things or meditative things or something. Is there anything you'd like to offer to our audience?

Yeah, well, so. So what? I. When I wrote my book, I came up with this quadrant checklist. So if you think of yourself in terms of emotional being boundaries and values, physical being wellness. Right, Physical wellness, Intellectual being, new learning and curiosity and creativity being idea sharing what I try and do. Well, what I encourage everybody to do is sit that somewhere like that quadrant, just draw it up for yourself, it doesn't matter. And check in with it every week. And am I connecting? Am I sorting myself out? Do I have strong boundaries? Am I as well as I can be, Be self aware enough to understand when you're deficient in say, connection with other people. Like we all retreat for a moment of time. I suffer from depression, so I totally get it. My maintenance is about accepting explosive energy exercise. Because I have so much energy, if I don't direct it at something then it kind of manifests and goes all narky. Right? So. So I think I'm very big fan of Even if you can only. I hate running, but I run for 15 minutes a day. If you can only run for 15 minutes a day, don't listen to people that go, it's got to be a distance, it's got to be a time. You've got to burn this. It's not about that. It's about getting yourself out and feeling the power your body has. So important. And then just read something unrelated to your work every day. Like just a little nugget. Like I get this Science X newsletter and it just brings me all this crazy stuff I don't understand. I love it. Read it for five minutes, think about my work, try and make a connection. And then I move on. I think looking after yourself and the self awareness is key. And then after that it's about connecting. How can you affect other people? Like can you reach out and help someone else understand themselves better? You know, without going past your boundaries, without overextending. But like put your own oxygen mask on first. And when you're all good. Start helping other people and try and help spread optimism because that is what is going to get us to an abundant future where we're all happy little campers.

Wow. My love. It's a really simple model. Four quadrants. Emotional, physical, intellectual and creative. And you know, it's pretty simple. All I got to do is in my kind of relating with those parts of my life, am I, you know, doing something to keep those parts of my life healthy. That's a pretty simple program. It's not that complex. And yeah, I love it.

It works for organizations too. So it's, it's scalable and that's what I love because it's inclusive, it's innovative.

So we need, well be. It'd be interesting to look at education from that perspective or even, even look at early childhood education or K12 education from that four quadrant perspective of EPIC. So I love it. It's a great model. Well, this has been really exciting and such a huge contribution to the conversation we're having at the Global Resilience Summit here in and thank you very, very much, Sally.

Thanks so much for having me. That was fun.

Been a great pleasure.

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