Professor Mark Esposito - Talks about Artificial Intelligence, Economics & Thanos!

All right, so let's kick this off.

Let's kick this outside then.

Yeah. No, it's awesome. Thank you so much for coming in. I was looking forward— I was looking at what happens—

I had the mayor And I think there's a podcast. I was in Dubai a few weeks back— a few days back. Then I had Doha, Paris, and I have to come back here. And I was looking what's going on my week. And I have the Dubai Future Foundation, and then you guys, right? So it's like, that's the highlight. And then 8:30 is a sweet spot. Because at the end of the day, I can be chill.

I can work.

I can relax. Absolutely.

Absolutely. So you're roading around, traveling back and forth. It's a crazy time of the year. Quite.

I think it's been more than what I thought. But I was kind of recording a message on the way here in the car. I think, yeah, you know, I'm going to have some days off now during the holidays. And then when January starts, well, slightly a little bit later, mid-January, there is Abu Dhabi, there is Dubai, then there is Boston, Washington. Then we have South Korea, we have South Africa, and then I have a South Africa to San Francisco flight. Which is like a 29— I was looking at 29 hours. I mean, that's literally, right?

Yes.

And so we're thinking then San Francisco, then Boston, then it's Geneva, then it's back to Dubai. I think this is already the end of March and I already know my schedule by heart. That's pretty, pretty sad, right? Because I mean, it means there's no buffer, right? But look, it's, it's— I'm privileged, right? I always think privileged to do what I do, and it's a sign that, you know, my mission is still on underway, right? It hasn't been exhausted yet. I'm still serving the purpose.

So, I mean, you know, you take like, you know, as a fangirl moment, I mean, you have such a profile. It's like you're co-authoring books. You've just released one. You've got another one, you know, due to go to the publishers in March next year. You know, you've got a number of titles under your belt. You're a professor, you're a practitioner. You don't just lecture at one school, it's Harvard. And then it's not just enough that you're lecturing and putting out content and all of the research that goes with that, but then you're also running, you know, think tanks and you're advising companies like PwC on strategy. And I know you've been working with, you know, some governments. I remember you were in India earlier. So, you know, I mean, I think I've got a, couple of questions, but I suppose one that would intrigue our listeners is like, how did you get to where you are now? Like, what is your anthology?

You know, there's a fuzzy logic around, you know, let's say performing at certain levels is that you fundamentally don't know why, right? You don't know. It's just that you work so hard on investing in the things that you think are important that suddenly the spillovers are clearly— I remember years and years and years of hard work and very little was happening, like disproportionately with the effort. And then one day, an event or two or three or an appointment at a university or a course, then that becomes like the trigger. And it just accelerates much faster than what you could ever imagine. And it keeps that continuing for a while, right? So the pipeline builds itself up, right? You keep on writing, you never know exactly when it'll get out, who will publish. And so if you're looking at some of my emails, they are open project that we've been running for month. You never really know when it's going to land. But sometime it lands. And if it's a good project, the impact it generates is big. So we've been writing for HBR, Harvard Business Review. Last article was 2020. And then we've been starting to write on generative AI for a few months. And then we went through 11 rounds of review views. And now we are finishing line with HBR. But when you hit HBR US, the email inbox for a few weeks will continue to come in, right? But it's been almost 3 years.

Yeah.

A work that you cannot put down for a 1,000-word article, right?

Wow.

So somehow when you do this over time, critical mass kicks in.

Yeah.

And so you simply happens to go faster, you harvest more. But what people don't see is the invisible time where nobody saw you, right? The work you have put in it, right?

Yes.

And I had never forgotten where I'm coming from. I never forgot that there was a time where I was hoping would somebody invite me for a speech. And I was trying to see when, how will it feel like when somebody will invite me for a speech. I was even willing to pay for my own travel, everything. Just invite me, right? And it wasn't happening. But I remember when I didn't have any books. Under my belt. And I remember my mentor saying just about, you know, persevering and all of that. I remember all of that. I remember my submission to teach a course at Harvard, and I remember the email that got sure, you know, let's, let's have a call, right? And I'm thinking, how— what happens now? What do I do now, right? All of these things. Yeah, I remember the rejections, many, right? Of course, all of them actually, somehow. Um, so yeah, it becomes part of, uh, your life.

Absolutely.

You know, it's not, it's not like a transaction. It's just the only way you can live life eventually, right? That's why if you're successful, it kind of grows with you. So I don't know, I don't, I don't think it's a good answer, but that's the answer.

No, I mean, it's, uh, you, you have that set goal from the start, so obviously you're, um, like you said, perseverance through rejections, through the hardships, you just keep going and building yourself up, and here you are. I mean, uh it does get crazy at some point.

It does. Yes. But I never take myself too seriously, by the way.

That's—

I never— That's a secret. Yeah. And I believe half of what I say.

Right.

So it's okay. It helps, right?

It's like I always make the joke. I'm like, take my advice because I don't use it. So, but yeah, I mean, I was actually reading something that someone had posted on LinkedIn today and it was actually for scholars and they've set up the sites where you can you can submit an article and you are guaranteed a rejection. We will respond to you within 2 hours, hopefully. And it is like, and you will be rejected. And, you know, it is just sort of like to build up your tolerance for rejection. Yes, it is.

It is the thick skin supply.

And it is like, because, you know, I also know when you guys are researching and you submit an article for publication, I mean, it could take them months to review and decide whether they are going to publish. And in that time, you cannot circulate that elsewhere because you literally just have to sit and wait for it.

You can ask Yusuf when you see him. He got an article published in a top-tier journal. And the entire journey is roughly 6 years from the ideation, the data collection, the interview, and iteration, iteration, iteration, different attempts. And eventually, you hit the— the right pain point, and you go over it, right? Yeah, 6 years.

Do you think that process is maybe, I mean, an overestimate? Because 6 years is a lot. I mean, a lot can happen in 6 years. The ideation can actually evolve and change. And is it still relevant by the time it gets to business? Is it because of the process itself of these layers of reviews and due diligence and whatnot? Or is it more of a— or of an evolution of the thought itself, where the ideation then, it's that journey of the final product 6 years later is something completely— maybe not completely different, but more enhanced or generated from the initial thought.

So I think the ideation does change the way you think about your own work as well, right? Because you're living in a dynamic environment that shapes your perception of things. But it's the process that is conservative by design. And so it's designed for challenges, challenges to be, you know, inbuilt, right? They're inherent, they're congenial to how it's supposed to work. It's a lot to do with who you are, whether you have access to editors that will give you maybe favorable advice on what to do.

Luck.

That's sometimes, right? We have to work hard to get lucky. The right conversation at the right time, the right sense, the right set of peer reviewers who like the work you do or not. There are many— it's multifactorial.

Yes.

But the outcome somehow is that if you learn how to, right, you're just, as you rightly say, you increase your tolerance to rejection. You see rejection as part of the process of pivoting more and more. And if you learn to be a bit more, I would say, an academic practitioner, you'll be able to take some of that and maybe bring it to another journal or another art— another magazine where you can nonetheless have impact. It's just that the same work becomes more than one work, right? So it multiplies. So that generates the volume. So eventually people read your work, and depending on what is happening, there will be a group of practitioners who appreciate your work, that's an easier one to push out. Some academic reviewers that eventually get to know your work, you might be invited to, I don't know, edit a special issue and it's like increase, elevate your profile.

Just keep adding that layer, that extra layer.

Okay.

So it's, I think it's a bit of an old-fashioned, I would say medieval industry, right? That's not capable of easily adapt to time. And so how do you, nonetheless generate significance for the work you do, considering that nonetheless the validation that comes from the process is an important one, right? So you need to always be in a position where you are legitimated by the work you have done over years, right? Because then it provides you with this reassurance that even your mistakes are in good faith. Yes. It's not easy, right, to navigate charlatans with proper scholars, right? And so The investment you put in scholarship, it's an investment that pays off over time. But it's not a straight line. It doesn't pay you off in one specific kind of reward. It kind of pays you off in this peace of mind that your work has a foundation somehow, right? And then it stands on its own somehow. Stands.

It's stable.

Yeah. And over time, you age, you feel more comfortable with the work you do, and that foundation becomes legacy, right? So— there is a moment where you realize that there is a legacy that is being built up. And you understand that you can't stop right now, because then if before it was about the drive for foundations, now it's becoming the drive for expanding the legacy and who will benefit from the legacy, right? This, I would say, magical commitment to life that you do something that is greater than your ability to understand, right? It happens in many jobs. In my job, it happens in writing, right?

Yeah.

And teaching, of course.

But so what would you say is, is your why? Like, you know, what is—

because that mission you, you mentioned.

Yeah, yeah, the mission. Because, you know, an illustrious career comes at a, at a cost, right? You know, you have to sacrifice. You're living in multiple time zones, you're juggling a lot of balls in the air. And, you know, we can talk about time management and all of those fancy things, but at the end of the day, there are some things that you have to learn to say no to because you're prioritizing something else. So what drives you?

That real cost.

Look, I think that it's the only way I can live my life. I don't think I am capable of anything else, right? And so there is this confluence between who I am and what I do to the point there is no really a boundary I can say. You know, there's Mark. I mean, Mark today in a podcast is not fundamentally different than Mark tomorrow. Meeting with, I don't know, students or government officials, right? What changes is just the dress code and the context, the content. Yeah, yeah. But fundamentally, identity and authenticity is really what drives who you are, right? So the moment that you're not shifting the cost of your career to your persona, you kind of generate stamina from being who you are, right? So People in good faith, they tell me that I have unlimited amount of energy. I mean, I can continue for hours, right? And I perform really constant. And that's because for me, it is not a transaction cost, right? I'm not trading off who I am for what I do, right? There's no real difference between what I do for living and what I am, right? And so that degree of congruence It's probably what has defined me in many ways. That's also why I'm not fundamentally two different people.

Yeah, right.

I don't have to wear a hat.

Yeah.

Uh, I just simply have to, I would say, stick to my principle, right? What I really like and believe in. And age teaches you a few things, right?

Yeah.

Experience, wisdom, so to say. But you kind of not really lose your quintessential being, right? And that's so important. Like, I realized that as low or high I can go, right, it doesn't really shake the core, right? Which is, it's not that I'm double-guessing, right? Just that I haven't maybe worked hard enough. I haven't understood enough, right? I have not connected the right dots. But doesn't go into, uh, I am wrong, right? Or I am not, you know, right for this. Or you don't, you don't challenge. To give you a different analogy, a fish would never challenge water, right? It would never say water is a problem, right? But many people sometimes they differentiate water from being a fish, and then they think there is a problem. But somehow, aren't they part of this more profound understanding of life, right?

Yeah.

So I don't challenge water, right? I just swim, right? Whatever it is there. So that kind of, I think, gift that life gave me to understand that, remove, uh, shifting costs or externalizing cost. So I can get tired, but it's not coming at the expenses of losing who I am. And I think many people I meet regardless of the jobs, sometimes they become tired, more worn out, because they're constantly trading off who they are with what they would like to be. And that process is over time exhausting, right? It burns people out inside, outside. It does age people faster, right? People, they lose— they lose much more.

Yeah.

Long answers, guys. Sorry.

Yeah, no, we love it. I mean, it's so true. I think that type of conflict is is exhausting for a lot of people. So maybe my next question would then be, so economics, how did you— what made you— because I, I can understand where AI would have come in in like the last 20 years, but before that, you know, would have started out with economics. Yeah. Yeah.

So, you know, I come from social science, and so I did my bachelor and master's in social science. So I, I was, uh, very much into understanding the phenomena of society and life and cultural norms. Um, and then I started to feel that I wanted to rapidly, I would say, expand my understanding of the world. And economics was a field of study that was far from where I was. It was probably the furthest away from where I could possibly aspire to be. So I said, you know, this is probably where I like to dedicate my next chapter, which was the PhD. And I struggled. I think there was no month where I was not considering stopping, right? There was no time where I was not resentful with somebody, with myself. Like, it was a difficult period, right? Because I was feeling probably challenged beyond my ability to understand why should I do that. But over time, it just, you know, you get lucky. You meet people. I was very lucky to meet mentors who are still to this day part of my life. Right. And they were just spanning my boundary. They were helping me understand that I was mainly growing within. Right. And there's not that— what I feel frustration is, is that is a growth spurt.

Growing pains. Yeah.

Somehow. Eventually, that line was crossed. Once I crossed it, I just started to understand much more about the reality about me. So it made me capable of undergoing, I would say, a deeper comprehension about, well, socioeconomic systems. And the social side came from my previous background. So coming from more a humanistic background, I would always consider people and behavior as critical, but I wasn't deep enough into psychology. So I had to understand it from a perspective of economy structure. And for some reason, it just worked with my brain. It became a place where my brain could generate new synapses, new conversation, right? So the dialogue in my head, which is unfortunate.

No, man, no, it's all right. I hear you.

I hear you. The roommate in my head, right? Started to just reveal connections.

Yeah.

And that became over time intimate conversation with myself. But when I was converting them into professional projects, they were over time setting me apart. I realized that I was winning over a conversation, a project, or a publication or a teaching moment because I was seeing what other people did not see. So it felt like, yeah, I have fulfilled a journey of growth that took me to that extent of understanding that was reconciliated in my own sense of reality, right? But it wasn't easy to say formally. How did it happen? I don't know. I think it's a combination of heart, mind, you know, spirit, if you want to put it this way. Uh, that's how it started, and it's been the greatest gift I had professionally to being able to constantly evolve in the understanding of the world. Those two, so like driving engines, the social sciences and economics became my common denominator to understand the world. So today technology happens at a faster pace. It doesn't challenge necessarily an understanding of why it happens at a faster pace. You have an ethical conversation. You're having people talking about we're losing moral compass, we're equalizing humans to machines. You can't just say we're using a very simple economic analysis to make sure that we are equating people to machine because there's a form of quantifying value, right? So you have a language that helps you decipher reality. That's been, I think, my endowment in many ways. It doesn't— it's not the perfect place. I think Yusuf always says that we are recovering economists, right, in many ways. And I don't think we feel comfortable to say we are economists per se. But I mean, we have a training in economics that is, I would say today is critical for my understanding of the things that I can't understand simply because even if I do not understand it now, I find that I have the language to hypothesize and therefore run myself over. Right. So that's pretty much what it is. It's an infrastructure, right? More than anything that has value per se. It's no inherent value. It's infrastructure value, right? So yeah. But again, I don't really know why I was so, I would say, virtuous in doing that. Like, you can say, yeah, he played pretty well. It was a great choice. How do you do it?

I don't know.

Just, right?

Was there an inspiration maybe? Someone or something that inspired you to go in and get deeper down that path, rabbit hole?

Fundamentally, I wanted to prove my father wrong. My father was a medical doctor, and he never really accepted that I could become anything—

But a doctor.

But a doctor, right? But not the kind of doctor that I became, right? More doctor that he wanted me to become. And I wanted to just demonstrate that, that I can be excellent at something regardless that I don't do medicine. So I think just getting to the point where I could feel gratified by my professional elevation, uh, because I always look up to him, right? I mean, he was a hero, right? And then my, my father was a military doctor, so he did different kind of military camps. He was going to war zones, right? We were We were receiving news when Dad had to go to the war zone and he was running a military hospital. So Afghanistan, Iraq, all these places, right? But he survived all of them. So when he was coming back, there was this like this aura about this guy that— and he was a pathologist who was doing mainly a lot of legal work. He became a coroner. He was talking about, of course, things he saw. So his world was so much bigger than mine, right? And I said, you know, I can equally create some form of greatness in my own identity, right? Maybe that's what inspired me in hindsight.

In hindsight, okay.

I don't know whether it's really what happened, but at least let's put it this way: if this is true, I like to believe it. Yeah, at least, right? It's a way of having an answer to the question. Otherwise, I simply wouldn't have the answer.

So I mean, it could be it puts you on that path and You know, after years go by, it becomes a positive affirmation. You know, at that point, you know, it's not, it's not about proving someone wrong as more as here, here we are together, successful. You know, maybe also just that sense of pride as well. And I'm sure it's prevalent for sure.

Improving yourself, right? Like you said, a challenge for yourself.

An only child, right? Um, it's quite a strict father, a very lenient mother. So somehow my mother was not the one to win over, but my father was, right? So yeah, you know, kind of created that space where I had a tension that I had to, to cover, right? Or pull-push factors, you want to call it. But, you know, he was a— he has been an iconic presence in my life. Like, I, I owe to him a lot, mainly because I think he had— he was a man of integrity. And so I felt that I wanted in his older or me, let's say, later years to make sure that he could be proud of me. So for me, it became a form of proving that the effort were worth it when I could see my father. I remember my father used to wear one of these pin on the blazer. And when I joined Harvard, and then he started to wear this. And it was going around and say, oh, my son teaches at Harvard and all of that. And he was doing it. Sometimes more annoyingly than what I hoped, but he was doing it so systematically, right, that for him, me having taught in a place like Harvard was more important than it was for me, right? And that for me, reverse engineering this became a form of thinking, well, it's probably—

Of course.

Probably, right? Absolutely. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, our parents do become our litmus test.

And eventually our fans.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure.

I'm sure you're with the, um, with the behavior and the, you know, uh, the psyche. I'm sure he's into— he's dabbling into that as well, you know, when you guys are, uh, connecting or what. I'm sure he's now more interested in the whole, you know, human side and behavioral sciences. You know, he's probably— you've opened that door, uh, as well.

Yeah, yeah, I would say so. I don't have any more lost him in August, but when he was alive, right? Yeah, he started to— it was when he was reading news that he thought it was relevant to what I'm supposed to know, right? He would tell me about it, right? And of course what he was reading was not relevant what I was supposed to know, right? But, oh yeah, sure, that's quite interesting, right? Sometimes he used to— I used to actually crop with scissors an article. He used to like to read paper, paper, paper newspaper. And I would say, oh look, I found this, and like 3 weeks ago, and it's like, this is old news. I saw it online, right? Right. Says, yo, thank you, Dad, this is great, right? Yeah.

So yeah, yeah, I mean, something about the paper just doesn't—

yeah, I mean, it doesn't go away.

Yeah, it doesn't go away for sure.

No, neither the dust goes away on paper, right?

I mean, you know, as much as we can enjoy technology and and, you know, Remarkables and tablets. You know, there's just something—

my father, my father at the office, uh, even if you send him an email, an attachment, he has to print it out and look at it, look at it, look at it with the desk and, you know, put, you know, marks. And yeah, yeah, he can't— I mean, okay, something on, on the screen, but he'll have to print it out at some point. These guys, they need the tangible feel.

Yeah, I, I, I think I, I understand My father would never be able to consider a WhatsApp message as a phone call. So he would say, call me. I said, well, you know, send me a message. No, that's not call. Just call me, right?

Yeah. My dad also— so my dad was quite proficient at emails, but he had the sweetest way of being very formal and businesslike in emails, even with me. And it would always be like, hi love. "Da da da da da, love Dad." You know, but there was always like a very pattern and I could imagine just a, you know, "Dear so-and-so, sincerely, Petko Tse." So it was like the structure was there, it was just the intro word and the sign-off was different. But yeah, you know, it's, I just sometimes wonder the lives that they led compared to, you know, the lives that we now lead, trying to navigate everything. We're so dependent on technology. And I think, you know, what would it have been like for them to try and get something done? And my dad was in finance. So I mean, for him back in the days, you remember the printers? I still remember playing with the reams of paper, the dot matrix printer. And was it MS-DOS with that green cursor flicking. And I just think, look at us now. I mean, now you can open up attachments on your phone and you email. So we just generally don't switch off and they couldn't take an entire thing home with them.

That's right. I think we proportionally to who we are, we're facing daunting challenges. I tend to respect what people have done in the past when we evaluate it with the mindset of now. You can say, oh, that was easy, but maybe back in the days it was not really easy. So I think today we have challenges like, well, how do we navigate a complex world? Our climate is becoming problematic in many aspects. We're having technologies sometimes more powerful than what we expect. And how do we govern this? Right. We're having geopolitical crisis, all of that. Right. And then you say, well, they had a different life and this is true. They simply had different challenges based on their own understanding of the world. Right. And how will they able to eventually cope and embrace and with less resources than what we have right now. Right. So I tend to think that they contributed in equal manner, right, to the growth of where we are right now. I do, though, believe that they were cushioned by the narrative that was quite straightforward, which was you work hard, right? A family was a kind of conservative topic. People were not challenging what is a constitution of a family. Gender was just a binary answer, right? And therefore, it wasn't necessarily dealing with the aspect of, I would say, evolution of the narrative that now makes it difficult in some parts of the world to even openly say, I am a man, or you're a woman, right? So somehow, in some parts of the world, I have to be mindful, right? Something that probably in their— during their time, never thought of. No. And so biology ruled over any other doubt, right? And today, biology is insufficient for that. I think it was nice to imagine that there is a sense of contribution to life that goes past you as you have an offspring. As children, they become a natural extension of your life. And it was a way for people to measure their own life. And so it was kind of normal that in the social conformity that we had, we had children as part of growing, right? Question was always about Well, can I comply within what is the expected norm? So you go to school, you graduate, you find a job, you settle down, you have a family, you work hard, you try to be responsible, and then you retire. So it was much more linear narrative. Today, I think we are open enough for ramification of the narrative to become different. So we go to school, we find a job, but maybe we don't like it. And then we start thinking like something else. Then we start wondering, is it the right things for me? And we have advising and consulting about who are you and what you want to do. Then we go back to school and we take more studies, and then we take a sabbatical, and then we become an entrepreneur. We start in companies, then we go back to something else. And maybe— so the nonlinearity of life, I think, largely permeates our challenges. And that's probably the only thing that I envy from the previous generation, that certain things were not challenged because they were considered absolute truth. While I think the moment that we shifted from truth to relative information, you open it up, right, for people eventually to use—

That third, fourth, fifth dimension.

Yeah, it's really the multiverses, right, so to say. I think Doctor Strange is a movie on that, right?

Marvel fan, I guess.

Yeah. And so that's, I think, what I envy from that generation. But I equally respect the effort they had done back in the days.

Definitely. You know, it could not have been easy. But I suppose, yeah, everything is relative to the time period that you find yourself in. I mean, at this— you know, if I just think between the ages of 15 and now, so between 2001 and now, we've had so many major shifts and changes like globally. I mean, you know, you saw in 2001 with like the 9/11 attacks. And then from there it's just, you know, global financial crisis and it's wars and it's— and I mean, I think even in, you know, just between 2020 and now, you know, you've had COVID, you've had two wars. We are battling with another recession. I think I was reading this, was it today or yesterday? That the head of the central bank in Turkey, because of inflation, has had to move back in with her parents. And it's just, I mean, these, you know, I think in 2020 we were saying these are unprecedented times, but it just seems like we are still in—

we are witnessing the reshaping of the world in the past few years. That's absolutely— you're right. With everything that's been going on, things are really fundamentally constantly changing economics, the economy, military, even powers in the world are shifting. So it is exciting but anxious. Everyone's anxious at the moment.

Yeah. You know, that's the— I would say the trigger to what the new book— yeah, uh, 2020. And we started to reflect on this question, right? We said, well, we have the privilege that we we can ask questions for a living, right?

Yeah.

And so we started to understand, are we just in the middle of just a very intense storm? And if that is the case, eventually the storm will finish, will subside. But we were noticing signals, right, that we were not just in the middle of a storm, but the storm was a derivative of a much deeper seismic shift. That we were noticing around us, really the idea of the plaque of the Earth, that when they collide, they exercise enormous amount of violence, but new landscapes are shaped. And so we kind of felt this is really what's happening. We are in the formation of new form, like, you know, socioeconomic landscapes. And that's when we started to engage in the journey that brought us to where we are. We started to think that— and of course, this is our assumption— but that we are truly transitioning from one set of institutional and, let's say, architectural proxies to the next ones. And so we consider this the great transition towards a new emerging order. And that was the premise for the work. We said, look, if we are truly in the presence of that transformation, we have to navigate that in a way that people will feel comfortable with it. And, you know, writing a book is one way to do that. You can do this in consulting, you do this in teaching, you do this in podcasts and all of that. So there's this— it's like public intellectualism that is necessary and advocacy. And then we said, well, the beauty of this is that if we are really in the presence of the transformation, is not coming with predetermined value. It's not coming with a predetermined portfolio of options. We likely can write them ourselves. We can constitute our future. And that's kind of why mobilization— we mobilizing towards our new future.

It's that clean slate, if you will. Do you feel that people or society is embracing this? Approach as frequent or as fast as they should?

You know, if we had written the same book in 2018, we would probably found more resistance. Today, similar to the conversation we were having before, the number of shocks we are going through, it's remarkable number. I mean, we can start counting them, right? Uh, yeah, COVID, and then the failure, I think, of our more traditional public health system, countries shifting to extremely authoritative measures, regardless if they were democracies or not, rethinking work. And now we are much more legitimized to think work as an alternative to the traditional going to the office. I think it was today that the government here in the US We published a ranking that said that Dubai is the first in the region for remote working, or what they call digital nomads, right? People who relocated to the region, but they might have a contract somewhere else, right? Then we started with how supply chain crisis, then China shifting from soft power to hard power, kind of decoupling from the narrative of manufacturing country. And now China playing a game on its own, challenging the more traditional institutional framework of the 1950s, '60s, '70s, the— so the US dominating the kind of, you know, the world order. And then you start having, you know, Russia and Iran playing a role. And then you have the GCC dancing with different partners, right?

Yeah.

And they're openly challenging what used to be, right, undebatable. Europe looks like shrinking, NATO becoming at the strongest point in its history. And then we have two conflicts, right? At the time where the region was pacifying with Israel, right?

Yeah, exactly.

It's an incredible period of our history. And so, so to see this as somehow a trajectory that is unfolding from the shocks we're experiencing is where I think there is significant amount of power. That is vested upon us. And now that we have an opportunity, because the resistance to change is lower, how do I inspire people to think, hey, don't think about reinstating what we had done before. Think about writing it in a way that honors the 21st century, right? So like, this is an opportunity to say the 20th century worked great for many people, but the theory of the 20th century, they are now obsolete. Because the 20th century was representing choices and decisions made on the challenges that we had back in the days. But what is, for example, the right way for us to have theory of our own that reflect the challenge we're facing? And I think if we see this as a creative tension towards the future, this is one of the most empowered generations in our history. But we have to mobilize it, right? That's the whole idea, right? We have to get people to say, look, we are moving forward, you can't go backwards. And moving forward doesn't come with the privilege of the past equaling the future. So build it up. Yeah, just envision it, right? Execute it, design it, right? Pivot, fail, recollect yourself, do again. And this is really a spirit. I think The Great Reimposition is, together with Olaf and Terence, the most autobiographical work we have ever done because it reflects our constant understanding of the world as an opportunity for future options rather than have dependence on what has happened in the past that we have to honor, right? We do honor the past, but it doesn't condition the future, right? It should not. I think this is the power. So as difficult as it is, it has not been a journey that has ever disempowered me or my co-authors or the people that talk about this book. Because I think the fascination about you're building the future as you envision it is a fascination that we should raise our children with, right? That's much more powerful to think I can do it rather than I can't, it's fatalistic, I'm not allowed to. So that— I think the language equally changes. So that's kind of where, where we are with this now.

Yeah, because I think, you know, I mean, we had a, we had a class with Yusuf this weekend, um, and strategy. And, you know, between that class and for a couple of weeks before it, you know, just some things that I've been seeing in the news and things that I've been pondering on. And I was actually, you know, remarking earlier, I was saying everybody has this dream, you know, if you're an entrepreneur, you're going to have a, a unicorn, you want to hit that $1 billion valuation. And sometimes is, you know, at what cost can that come? You know, the cost to society because, you know, at the end of the day, the social contract is you either go out and you work for your salary so that you can provide for yourself, or you are the one who is shouldering the burden and the risk of creating something so that others have gainful employment. And, you know, you go ahead and you take the rewards because you've put in the risk. But, you know, I think the measure of success maybe these days is because the measure of success is monetary, right? And I think sometimes maybe that overrides some of the decisions that we're taking because, you know, maybe it's absolutely fine to be an SME, you know, it's the backbone of any economy, you know. Even if you have a look at this market, I mean, it provides like 80% of all jobs. You can do really well, but sometimes there's just this push to go as big as you possibly can, and then sometimes everything just goes bust.

Yeah.

So, you know, I have a way to cope with that.

Right?

And one is to resort back to history and say, well, why do we appreciate quantification of values so much? And that's because we have financialized the industry, we've mathematized it in the '50s and the '60s. It was a way for the world to define, well, how do I know if I'm establishing any growth, right? And this was in the, in the per— in, in the, in the mindset of the '50s, growing was the only direction of travel. And I think we have created a culture where we could quantify value more and more because we could monitor whether or not we're doing better. And even the whole idea of measuring GDP— Exactly. It is just an incremental, right? Compound rate of yourself over time. Now, I think today, we are understanding that that quantification of value is insufficient to measure life. And I think it's coming quite clear. We see this regardless of how it's mainly spoken. In circumstances where the company is trying to think about non-financial value, then it goes into ESG, non-financial performance, attracting different kinds of investors and all of that. When it transcends into more spiritual terms, you're having conversations about, you know, we are a company that is driven by purpose, right? Purpose over profit. And that's B Corps. If you're shifting over to the cost that we are having on a personal life, you can say mental health is becoming a visible enemy for many. And you've been shifting the cost of productivity to basically people's life, right? If you're looking at the fragmentation of families on a global level.

Yes.

Number of divorces, but equally number of, you know, extreme events. And all of that, reduction in number of children, drop in fertility, you can say we have been shifting our career forward. We've been emancipating more and more both men and women in different form, but we have now largely undermined the foundation of our society from a nuclear perspective.

Yeah.

So somehow there is a moment where it's easier for people to say value has a multiple multiple, you know, multiple facets, right? It's not just one, one parameter. No. And this generation is ready to think about a multifactorial, multi-dimensional, multilateral life being worth lived. And this is why people change job when they are unhappy. This is why people go back to school because they say that they want to expand, right? That's why people, they get married for love, not because of arranged marriage anymore, right? Even in country where it was a is largely reduced. And that's one of the reasons why people in the '60s and '70s, they get divorced because they're tired of a life of sacrifice when it wasn't really love. Right. So that sense of voicing identity out, I think, is really, of course, is a distress signal. But there's also an opportunity for us to say, okay, so in light of who we are, how do we build an economy, a society that works for us? So that's where I think Shifting from a narrow scope of measurement to a wider one is in the— is propitious, is in the essence of time right now. And we have to push for it. We have to do it in a way it doesn't look like fluffy or that you're belly-compromising— superficial, right? Or that is like it's social and environmental at the expense of the economy. Because in the moment in which you are nonetheless inducing a cost, that's that you shift into the future somehow. The question is, can we remove the idea of trade-off altogether and say, you are a professional, you're productive, but you're also inefficient. You are a person. You have emotions. Your life changes as you age. Your life experiences are different. Your emotions, they are somehow important as well. All of this is the whole person, right? And how do I build an organization, a society, a city, a country based on a humanistic view or human size, which is decoupling from the industrial dominance we had from mathematizing value, but equally education, right? Children were going to school in batches because it was reflecting factory lines.

Yeah, right.

So it's like, makes great sense.

Exactly. You know, you move from one stage to the next.

Individual assignment, right? Yeah. You are in life. We know that the greatest opportunities are coming from collaboration. By yourself is never enough. But in school, they're telling you that you have to compete with everybody else. And in some schools, they have a distribution curve in which only some are given a grade, which means that the top performer will happen, but there will be people that will be at the expense of that distributed in the lower part of the scale. I find this to be such a detrimental way of thinking about value. Right? Because it creates a culture of fake competition. It's a competition that happens, but it's not building a more compassionate society. And today we need the level of compassion because some of the challenges we're facing are interconnected, interdependent. They're global. So I need to connect with people that don't have access to water.

Yeah.

Because their lack of access to water largely challenges my access to water in the future. Yeah. The sense of, of relationship, that relative viewpoint for sure. And you have to have it, right? So social skills and digital skills together, right, define this generation more and more. But we have to expand our understanding of what is the measurement of life in many ways.

Yeah, because I feel like everybody's just got this winner-takes-all mentality.

It's very predatory.

Survival instinct.

Survival instinct. Very military, you know. If you think about your class with Yusuf, if you have any more traditional strategic terminology, they come from the military. Enter a market, exit the market, flanking a competition, killing the competition, market dynamics, the competitive landscape of a market. The language is binary. Think of also the verbs. You increase, decrease, maximize, minimize. You optimize, you disinvest. Invest is invest, right? Marketing is marketing. It's so binary because it defines really tactical thinking. And that's great if you are in 1950, you have really simple industry, you're trying to grow, and you had to find processes to measure progress. But it's become complex to justify this today when we are so different.

Yeah.

Scott, that's the argument I think we were trying to make for right?

I'm very curious, completely off topic, which do you prefer, uh, teaching or the practical, practical environment?

You know, Adam, I have been, I would say, lucky enough to do practical stuff, right? Like government work, consulting work, all of that. But the ultimate pinnacle validation for me is the classroom. It's the only place where I feel that I am proving my legitimacy when I go to the practice, right, is the classroom. Because the classroom doesn't come from contractual terms. People are willing to like me or not. They can see me as a process. They can see me as a mentor. They can see me as a friend, an inspiration, or somebody they hate, right? So I think the— the range of options in the classroom are much more about merit. If you're good and you think that you are, you have something to say, you got to win over the hearts of so many people that have no vested interest in yourself, with the exception, of course, is of course there is a grade, but the grade is not enough for people to comply, right? People can still think fundamentally, I dislike this guy, right? So classroom is my ultimate form of validation. I think it's the highest level of validation I can I can think of in my life. I have been with prime minister and I befriended some of them and I never felt, right, that they were validating me. Never. I never felt that they say, oh, I agree with you. That was like, oh, that's pretty cool. But the student that comes to me and say, what you told me made so much difference. I did that. It's the much wider range of validation. Right. And I always say this is a bit of It sounds cheesy, but I mean it, right? Over the years, some of what people consider my success is nothing more than reflected light. It's light that I'm reflected from what other people that I met have done, right? So when my students succeed, then they shine and that light reflects upon me, right? So I kind of become illuminated as well, right? There's a spotlight on me, but the light is not originating from me, and I truly believe it. I really have seen incredible story of people going out there and making differences. When I'm meeting important people, I recognize they're important. They also sometimes they suffer self-importance, and that doesn't necessarily go too well with me. So one of the things I learned in my career is that I don't have a fundamental respect for authority. But for me, a classroom is an honor, right? Yeah, so anyway, I think I just got some authority I respect fully. Traffic authority.

It's cheaper that way.

It is much cheaper. Yeah, I love, uh, traffic rules.

Never once Will you ever see yourself go astray? No, it's excellent. Um, so earlier you, you made a reference to Doctor Strange. I do have to ask you the question: Marvel or DC?

Marvel.

Marvel.

You know, this is a stupid habit. As I travel so much, my first world problem is that I sometimes watch all the movies So I have to decide what to do. I don't want to work because I want to have that me time. Food comes, but then it finally ends, right? And so there is me and the screen. So I go back and watch Marvel. So I flew a few days back from Paris to Dubai, and I have watched again, I think it was the Endgame. And the Infinity War, right? A good one.

It was a good end to that series.

Yeah, I want to— first of all, I want to— I wanted to say, I am inevitable.

I was gonna make this same joke.

I mean, I wanted to say, when does he say he's inevitable, right? Because I want to— I want to use it in classroom. I want to step in and say, I want to do everything, right? Um, yeah, but I don't want to be Iron Man, you know, because that didn't go too well, right? Yeah, it was kind of sad, but He has an AI avatar when he's at this funeral. And it's actually something true now that we can have our AI avatar, right? It's a true story. So I was thinking, I said this to Terence C, my, well, brothers in arms in many ways. I said, the good thing about having an avatar is that they will likely outlive us, right?

Yeah.

Yes. Right? So you guys are not done with me.

I mean, I was going to say, I mean, you could technically via your avatar our lecture for generations to come.

Pretty much. We are testing something. I cannot disclose too much, but we are testing something now. We're training with our own data a bot, and we are looking at what happens. Can, for example, this bot represent us? Yeah, to some degree.

Can I put us forward as a test bed for your bot at some point in time? Sure. We can do a second podcast. We can.

With a bot? With pleasure.

We'll keep it short for you, but I'd love to try that. I mean, that would be awesome.

That would be really awesome.

Oh, yeah.

It would be awesome too. I mean, I think whenever we're going to get to the point, right?

Yeah.

As incredible team members.

Because we also plan on being around for a long time.

Of course.

Inshallah.

Inshallah. Speaking of Marvel, if you had an option for a superpower, what would it be?

Flying.

Flying.

Yeah, kind of tired of having this Iron Cast stuff that takes me around. I'd love to be able to fly much faster. Customs, customs control, all of that. Just zoop. Or Hyperloops. I love the idea that I could just close my eyes and just transport myself somewhere else. I would do much more with my time as well, right? But knowing myself, I would go back in time to make sure that my day becomes longer. Right. Because I'm sometimes a couple of weeks late on who I have to send email. So at least it feels less than 2 weeks, 13 days. But yeah, travel, flying. I love to be able to fly. I always— there are 2 things I always loved. One, when I'm in the water, I feel as an element, right? So I always like to tell to myself that this is more than just enjoying the water. It's almost like maybe, you know, water was more important than whoever my previous lives. But that's, you know, this may be in— it's the same roommate in my head, right? Underwater has no oxygen, so we start going into, uh, into, uh, delirium. Um, yeah, flying, I love to. I always fascinated by the superhero who can fly.

Uh, so yeah, I just love superheroes in general.

We need them, you know, right? You know, sometimes it's Whether it's superpowers or not, yeah, just we need that.

We need that in our lives for sure.

I know when you're looking at like, you know, I say Marvel and you're looking at the fight against the army from Thanos, right? And you have all these heroes coming from all over. It is this feeling that makes you feel that there is good over evil. I think we still need to feel that, right? I mean, we all wanted, many of us wanted Thanos to be defeated, right?

Yes.

Why?

Because somehow, deep inside, we inherit and we root for good, right?

Yeah.

Yes.

And we need it, right? And sometimes, I think we're surrounded by a series of news that make us feel that we're losing on so many grounds, right?

Yeah.

And on that point, Thanos's approach, in his view, was doing a great good as well, increasing 50%. That's right. This is what he thought. He wasn't essentially evil. No. He was actually trying to do something good. In his, in his request.

Yeah, however misguided in his attempts. But actually, you know, if you think about his whole argument about resources and how to manage things for the population versus, you know, the lessons from this book and how we can remobilize, I can see.

Again, I, I appreciate plugging in the great Remo after Thanos, right?

I mean, but, but But there are definitely the—

you know, the great Remo, he would have said this book is inevitable, right?

Yeah, no, that's really cool. Anyways, Mark, I think on, on that note, I think we'll wrap it up. But I just want to say again, thank you so much for your time. This has actually been really lovely to get to know you a little bit more.

Thanks so much. I mean, look, For some reason, when Adam and I met at the graduation, I knew about the podcast. And I said, "Would love to," right? It just looked cool. And I'm happy that he really eventually pulled through and we found the time to do this at the end of the year, right? When I knew, we sat down, we settled down a date. For many weeks, it became like a good, a good meeting, right, for me to go and attend, right? Sometimes there are meetings where I say, well, I have to, or, you know, it's important. The effort somehow has to be put there. This was one of the easiest drives I made, right, although I got lost twice because I still cannot really understand the infrastructure in this part of the world, right? So take a right, but then it's actually an overbridge, and then you say, why suddenly went from 3 minutes to 14?

Yeah, anyway, it very much depends on the app that you use. Yes.

Yeah.

Yes.

And the update.

Yeah, that—

yes, the app and the update for sure.

And not just the app's update, but also your phone's update. Yeah, we have a— there are some places in the city, as much as I love it and as much as I love living here, where there are days when I can feel like, uh, I'm, I'm in an episode of Maze Runner. He's like, I just cannot find an exit or an entrance. That's also true.

You can be forever next to the Sheikh Zayed Road and just stay on the service.

The service, yeah.

Never, never being able, you know, elevated to the main road, right? Never. Like, suddenly, okay, I can't find an easy way. You cannot merge. Stay where you stay put, right?

Mark, but this was awesome. Thanks so much for having to have you on in the future to further discuss, for sure, all these—

what a pleasure—

all these topics.

Thanks for having me, guys. I really appreciate, first of all, you doing this. A great, great demonstration of networks and how, you know, you know, studies are just the very beginning, right, of relationships that are built over years, right?

Yeah.

I'm very happy we do this for the community and beyond, right? I can't wait for this to, you know, be released. You tell me then when —so we'll promote it, we'll push it. Thank you. And then I can say, well, I was the first guest of season 2. Yes.

We definitely started the season on a high. Thanks so much for having me. All right. Here you go. And cheers. Thank you.

And cheers.

Cheers. Cheers.

Thank you. Cheers.

Thank you, guys.

Thank you.