Simon Brown (00:08.914)
Hello and welcome to this episode of the Curious Advantage podcast. My name is Simon Brown. I'm one of the co-authors of the book Curious Advantage and today I'm here with my co-author Paul Ashcroft. Unfortunately, Garrett can't be with us today, but we are delighted to be joined by Jamie Casco, distinguished futurist. Hi Jamie.

Paul (00:20.485)
there.

Jamais Cascio (00:30.338)
Hello?

Simon Brown (00:31.952)
A warm welcome to the Curious Advantage podcast. So to kick us off today, Jamie, you've had an extraordinary career exploring foresight, ethics and scenario planning. And you've got a new book titled Navigating the Age of Chaos. So what led you to writing the book?

Jamais Cascio (00:44.462)
you

Jamais Cascio (00:54.862)
Well, for those of those out there who aren't familiar, there was a term called VUCA invented by the US Army War College back in 1989. VUCA stood for volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous. And it was used as a way of describing the world at the end of the of the Cold War. So you think back on the 90s, was the end of the Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Simon Brown (01:00.561)
Hmm.

Jamais Cascio (01:23.5)
the emergence of the internet as a real thing. And this concept of volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous really spoke to a lot of people in the planning world. Initially in the military, but business consultants loved military language. So it very quickly got picked up by business consultants. And then 9-11 happened. And suddenly VUCA was the go-to term.

Simon Brown (01:37.436)
Mm-hmm.

Jamais Cascio (01:51.991)
And that lasted for quite some time. But I came to realize in the late 2010s that we ate VUCA for breakfast. VUCA had become so commonplace that we were swimming in it. And it really didn't describe much. And so I started thinking in the work that I was doing about what I had been seeing. Now, I've been working as a futurist for, at this point, almost 30 years.

Simon Brown (02:02.044)
Yeah.

Simon Brown (02:06.46)
Fuku was easy.

Jamais Cascio (02:21.516)
So at that point it was well over 20. And I was, have been seeing some really interesting, interesting things about systems falling apart, about large communities of people feeling a great deal of anxiety, particularly young people. Systems that seem to misbehave in really unexpected and disproportionate ways. And just the sheer confusion of it all. And so,

This ended up in a talk I gave in late 2018 for the Institute for the Future in a structure I called BANI. Brittle, anxious, non-linear, and incomprehensible. And it was really my way of looking at the world from a somewhat fresh perspective, but more importantly to give it, to give a new term, a language for describing the world as it stood, as it stands now.

in this post 2010s world era.

Simon Brown (03:26.972)
So think we have to dive into each of those. kicking off with Brittle, so tell us more. I would have an idea what we mean by Brittle, but yeah, tell us what your meaning behind it is,

Jamais Cascio (03:42.104)
Well, brittle and anxious are the two that people most often immediately grab onto. And just to finish out the story, when I published after COVID hit, I made public the Bonnet model on Medium, and it just sort of exploded around the world. globally, particularly in the global South, really embraced this as a way of describing their world. So brittle.

The concept of Bridal is that there are some systems that we have around us that look strong, act strong, maybe even be strong until they hit an inflection that just causes them to shatter. And we saw that most vividly with global trade, supply chains and such in the COVID, in the period of COVID. We see that right now with democracy in many countries around the world, in particular, my own.

where the systems that had seemed strong for decades if not centuries suddenly started falling apart. And we sort of see this across a panoply of different issue areas. And so I really thought that this concept of brittleness of systems that have illusory strength, that we think are stronger than they are.

really began to speak to me and looking ahead we can see this in a variety of both natural and human systems ranging from the low-earth orbit satellites just were just one or two broken satellites away from having what's called a Kessler syndrome or Kessler cascade where all of low-earth orbit becomes unusable because satellites just keep

Garbage keeps crashing into other satellites causing more garbage, etc, etc or the Western Atlantic ice shelf which Looks really strong seems to be very supportive but is melting from underneath where the ice connects with the the underwater ground and There's a very strong chance of the that the Western Atlantic ice shelf will collapse

Jamais Cascio (06:08.588)
within the next 50 years, raising sea levels pretty significantly. But even as it's melting, it's causing problems. And so these big systems that go from functional to failure abruptly, that seems to be a common thread throughout what we're seeing in the present and the future.

Paul (06:29.733)
And this seems to relate to physical systems, people, human systems, environmental systems. You're seeing this across the kind of this characteristic of being brittle. You see this across all those different domains.

Jamais Cascio (06:44.116)
Right, and I think that's in part because of the demands we're putting on human and physical and natural systems, but also the way that we're putting demands on them. There's a real emphasis on efficiency, on trying to get as much done as possible with as little resource as possible, which when it works, works brilliantly. It creates all sorts of wealth, et cetera, but when it fails, it fails spectacularly.

And so what we're seeing is this shift from high efficiency to high failure happening. Everything stretched right, pushed past our limits. And it's, you know, rather than failing gracefully, things are failing abruptly.

Paul (07:20.263)
overstretched by the sounds of it, right?

Simon Brown (07:35.804)
So we'll come on maybe in a moment to how we manage or deal with each of these, but maybe let's walk through them first. So anxious.

Jamais Cascio (07:42.157)
Mm-hmm.

Jamais Cascio (07:46.35)
anxious. Yeah, that's a fun one. That's in many ways anxious is the engine of Bonnie because all of the other characteristics really increase our feelings of anxiety. Anxious is this

Jamais Cascio (08:04.974)
is an umbrella term for all these feelings of fear and confusion and anger and sadness that so many of us feel around the world. This feeling of being unable to make necessary changes, that it's too late to do the things we needed to do, we missed our chance to, feelings that we are overwhelmed. And unfortunately, so much of our

modern media systems are built to enhance that anxiety because for good neurological and evolutionary reasons, the human brain responds most swiftly and most definitively to situations that cause fear and anger. As I say at one point in the book, it's much more important to be hyper aware of the potential for a saber-toothed tiger around the corner than it is

Simon Brown (09:04.498)
Mm-hmm.

Jamais Cascio (09:04.685)
to pay attention to the laughter of children. Even though the laughter of children makes us feel a lot better, the tiger is what we need to worry about. And so we have developed economic and technological systems that really trigger these feelings of anxiety because that makes us click, that makes us act and react. And so we have built out the system, a global system that

Simon Brown (09:08.786)
Makes sense.

Jamais Cascio (09:34.146)
tends to make us feel worse and worse because that generates the most near-term profit. It's a real scary situation when we realize just how globally endemic depression, sadness, misery, despair has become.

Suicide rates are up all over the world. The feelings of helplessness are quite profound for populations, frankly for every group that I've spoken to from Brazil to Sri Lanka to Austria. These feelings are universal and appear to be enhanced by the systems that we have created for control, power, and profit.

Simon Brown (10:35.814)
hoping you'll give us a positive reaction in a moment too but let's finish going through them so brittle, anxious, non-linear, yep, non-linear so let's...

Jamais Cascio (10:40.238)
yeah, we're only halfway through the bad part.

Jamais Cascio (10:49.1)
Now, nonlinear is a mathematics term, but really I'm using it here in a more metaphorical way to talk about disproportionality and hysteresis. Now, most people know what disproportionality is, but hysteresis is a term that refers to a lag between cause and effect. So you make something happen, or you do something, and the result doesn't become visible for quite some time.

This actually came out of the, I've been writing about climate disruption, climate change, the climate emergency for decades, and the various ways in which it manifests in surprising, in a surprising manner.

It turns out that there is a lag, hysteresis, between changes to greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere and changes to temperature and precipitation. So if we were to suddenly put a whole bunch of, a bunch more greenhouse gas into the atmosphere, we wouldn't really see the increase, resulting increase in temperatures and changes in rainfall for another five, 10, maybe even 20 years. The same thing,

applies to the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. Or even the pulling, if we somehow manage to pull some greenhouse gas out of the atmosphere, we won't see benefits from that for another five, 10, 20 years. you know, begin to think about the politics of this kind of situation. And, you know, in lot of the work that I do, all, it's really about the cross, is cross-disciplinary, crossing the streams as it were.

Looking not just at the the geophysics of what's happening with the climate but also the politics of what's happening the economics and So you think for a minute about what would need to be done globally to get people to cut their carbon emissions dramatically and That means things like not driving as much or at all not taking air travel Probably not eating ranch to meet of any kind

Jamais Cascio (13:03.438)
You just sort of go down the list of lifestyle changes that are maybe difficult because they're often very culturally embedded, but would have a big impact on how much greenhouse gas we put into the atmosphere. imagine getting people all over the world to make these kinds of dramatic changes to their life and nothing gets better. In fact, things continue to get worse.

And that feeling of that lag has a real social and political impact. So thinking in terms of about disproportionality, we also look at disproportionality of wealth and power and the ability for very small changes by or changes by a very small number of people to have enormous global effects. Elon Musk is kind of the canonical example of this, but it's

There are so many more examples around the world of a very small cabal, very small number of people who have enormous power. Enormous in a way that a lot of people don't recognize. There is a kind of scale blindness that happens when people start thinking about big numbers. It's a really interesting research in the United States, but also undoubtedly there have been global parallels to this, asking people what they

think would be the ideal ratio of CEO pay to new hire pay. And they say it's something like seven to one. What do you think it is? Well, it's probably closer to like 35 or 50 to one. The reality is like 400 to one. And the same thing applies to people who think about the millions or billions of dollars. After a certain point, rich is rich.

Paul (14:44.38)
Hmm.

Jamais Cascio (14:52.718)
And whether you're talking about a 35 to 1 ratio or a 300 to 1 ratio, it still feels the same. And so we don't have a good sense of the proportion of power and wealth that's been concentrated. And I'm looking at this not in a political sense of trying to argue for a particular ideology. I'm looking at this really as a way of understanding how systems work and how systems fail. And right now we have, please.

Paul (15:19.431)
And Jermé, the three that you, the brittle anxious nonlinear, they seem to also compound each other or reinforce each other. Those examples you talked through there, you know, made me more anxious. And I know you're referring to a system that is brittle, right? I mean, is that the same, is that true? And is that the same for incomprehensible as well, your fourth in the concept?

Jamais Cascio (15:29.377)
Yes indeed.

Jamais Cascio (15:36.365)
Well, yes.

Jamais Cascio (15:46.366)
I would, I believe so. And that it is true that these compound each other. And that's actually something that I described fairly clearly throughout the book, that these are not separate silos. These are all interwoven and changes to one can cause changes to the others. Incomprehensible in many ways just sort of sums up everything because it's

Incomprehensible doesn't mean we don't know how something works. It means we don't know why it's doing this. Why is this change happening? And so I go sort of go down the list of different ways. In the book, I go down the list of different ways that we find the world incomprehensible. Whether it's talking about the unthinkability of global thermonuclear war, which is actually more possible than ever before.

the insanity of people who are the insanity is probably is the wrong word, but the the people who do not believe that vaccines work, you know, and that kind of absurdity is what I was going for there. The absurdity of people who have these truly bizarre thoughts about the world that have turned into serious identity and political power. The

confusion and confabulation arising from the use of artificial intelligence, large language model artificial intelligence. We need to make sure we distinguish that. That's a particular type of AI that's out there that's having these issues around, know, lying to you with extreme confidence. The fact that these systems are built to sound like they know what they're talking about, but

often don't because all they're doing they're essentially what i sometimes call spicy autocorrect you know they're doing the same thing that your autocorrect on your phone does except doing it in a much bigger way that is they're predicting what the next word should be you know so on your phone it just comes up with this with a small list of possible next words based on a very limited model with these ai's that have billions of parameters and have

Jamais Cascio (18:12.63)
you know, use up, you know, lakes full of water and in cooling and require, what is it? Microsoft is trying to get ahold of a nuclear power plant specifically solely for its AI. Yeah. You're using so much power, you end up with essentially a much better model for predicting what the next word will be in response to a prompt or a query.

Simon Brown (18:25.618)
Three Mile Island,

Jamais Cascio (18:42.498)
But it's still just predicting what the next word will be based on parameters, not because it understands the question. And we have, I don't know, for pretty good reasons, I think our brains have evolved to see humanity in things that are not human. Which is really great when we're talking about our pets. I have cats and I will very happily think of them as

The other people in the house, I know they're not people, especially when I have to scoop their boxes. But it is, we have expanded our circle of empathy to embrace these non-human creatures as part of who we are. We have the same kind of feeling towards lot of our machines. And it's again, it's hijacking a good human system. And we're seeing the sort of across the spectrum of these Bani

characteristics is this hijacking of human responses, whether it's accidental or for immediate consolidation of power or increase in wealth. And I think that a great deal of the transformation that's happened in the last decade that changed the world from Vukha to Bani.

has come out, has derived from the increasing sophistication of our ability to hijack the human brain. Now, I don't dig into that element in the book because it's still something I'm thinking about. didn't want to put it out there in text until I felt more confident in it. But that's where my thoughts are heading, that this is something that's part of a much larger

much larger invasion of the human brain.

Paul (20:44.069)
Yeah, yeah. So, Bunny, now in the book, and you've just done so in talking through Bunny, as you describe it, the anxiety inducing part of that, let's say the podcaster in part of the book, you're sort of explaining how you see it and how you see the world. But you also present positive Bunny in the book. Tell us, tell us what what is that? And perhaps, you know, what are some of the ways that we can counter brittle, anxious, nonlinear, incomprehensive?

Jamais Cascio (21:03.725)
Yes.

Jamais Cascio (21:14.766)
Sure, of course. Well, let me step back and say that I didn't write this book alone. I have as a co-author Bob Johansson, who's president emeritus from the Institute for the Future, and Angela Williams, who's the CEO of United Way Worldwide. And so Bob and I worked closely together to come up with a positive Bonnie. He had actually worked with VUCA for decades, and he had come up with something he called VUCA Prime.

Paul (21:15.451)
What can we do?

Jamais Cascio (21:44.81)
about 15, 20 years ago, that was a positive spin on the V-U-C-A. So vision, understanding, clarity, I always forget what the A is. Something along acceptance or something like that. But it's a positive, a positive VUCA, and he really wanted to see if we could come up with a positive Bani. And I already had in mind some ways of responding to the Bani world.

resilience and empathy and other things that while they were useful ways of characterizing it, didn't fit the BANI model. So, to fit the BANI, what we came up with was bendable, attentive, neuroflexible, and interconnected. So bendable...

is a B word version of saying resilient and flexible. The capacity to withstand shocks but both adapt to them and remain rooted. So bendable, resilient, it is all around figuring out what you can do to make sure that you have the capacity to withstand things. It's something that requires some thinking ahead. So building up your...

extra resources, making sure you have an emergency kit. It can be something as simple as that. It can be something as broad as making sure that you have multiple layers of redundancy. One example that people may be very familiar with is of a brittle system that could have been resilient was the CrowdStrike computer collapse from 2024, where a

an attempt to do an upgrade to the software on these servers, that effort failed. And it turns out those eight million or so servers around the world were in use by tens of millions more other computers and other organizations to get things done. Like the National Health Service used systems that worked on using CrowdStrike. A whole bunch of American airlines, a variety of airlines used CrowdStrike.

Jamais Cascio (24:07.272)
And it was a massive failure around the world that happened because they didn't have a backup plan in case the update failed. They had no way of backing out of the update. They had no way of recovering and shifting to a different machine. And that can apply everything from the company that made the software all the way up through the companies using the servers to the companies.

reusing the companies using the servers. It's basically they all became so dependent upon this one thread that they didn't have to be dependent upon if they were willing to invest the time and resources into having backup plans, emergency plans.

Paul (24:45.895)
Hmm.

Paul (24:54.023)
And we've seen this a couple of times in very recent, three times to my mind, one Heathrow airport. don't know if you saw globally, you went down, um, due to, um, a problem with the power, power plant, uh, Spain, rather famously lost powerful, I think something like 24 hours, um, still, still TPC, exactly why, um, but presumed not enough resilience in the system. Um, and you, and we're seeing this for global supply chains as, as global organizations are trying to figure out.

Jamais Cascio (24:59.544)
Mm-hmm.

Paul (25:21.767)
you know, a new environment dealing with tariffs and so on, you know, how bendable are their supply chains?

Jamais Cascio (25:29.098)
Right, exactly. And the thing is, we saw with COVID just how brittle those supply chains can be, and yet it's as if so many of these organizations didn't learn that lesson. Didn't learn that they need.

Simon Brown (25:41.766)
And is this back to the efficiency piece you were saying earlier? So you're saying that we're striving to take cost out, take redundancy out, I guess, at every point. And that creates that brittleness that then one thing can throw the whole system into a major issue.

Jamais Cascio (25:44.707)
Mm-hmm.

Jamais Cascio (25:58.762)
Exactly.

Actually, one interesting example of resilience and what it might look like. In California, every organization, every citizen of the state, it's drilled into their heads that we're going to have a big earthquake real soon. There's going to be the big one, whether in Los Angeles or the San Francisco area, and it's going to happen sometime in the next decade or three. Be ready for a big earthquake.

So a lot of organizations came up with plans around earthquakes, how to deal with the local bridges or transit systems collapsing, how to deal with your employees still wanting to work but being able to reach the office. And it turns out that for those organizations that had plans around earthquakes, many of them were able to adapt more quickly to COVID because they already had the mental infrastructure.

in place, the resilience thinking in place to how do we deal with this disruption, whether in this case the disruption comes from a virus rather than from a fault line, but it's still a disruption to our normal practices of working and we have plans for that. And so one thing that's really important around resilience is something that's called an economies of scope. So most of us are familiar with the term economies of scale, which says, you know,

The bigger the system, the bigger the structure, the more it can handle even disproportionate to their size. So you can handle even more than you thought you could. That's right. Economies of scope say that you wanted to design something so that it can do more, can be applied to more situations than it is initially designed for. So the example that gets used in every discussion of economies of scope are

Jamais Cascio (28:01.888)
A wheelchair, wheelchair cuts on corners, on curbs of sidewalks, pavements. You have a, many corners now have a wheelchair rim. Well, that's great for people in wheelchairs, but it's also great for people pushing baby strollers, people pushing shopping carts. Anyone who needs a little bit of help with something else on wheels that they need to be able to get up onto.

the, you know, off the street. And so that's an economy of scope. Being able to build for one thing that actually applies to a bunch of things. And so that's one of the things, one of the elements of a good resilience process.

Simon Brown (29:59.782)
So we're talking with Jamais Cascio. He's a distinguished futurist and scenario strategist known for developing the BANI framework of brittle, anxious, nonlinear and incomprehensible as a tool for understanding and navigating a world defined by chaos. He's a fellow of the Institute for the Future and former research fellow at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies. Jamais was named one of Foreign Policy magazine's top 100 global thinkers. He's worked with organizations including the UN.

Cambridge University and the US Agency for International Development. This work focuses on making sense of disruption and helping leaders build resilience and clarity in uncertainty.

Jamais Cascio (31:33.11)
Okay, all right. So, attentive is really a way of saying empathetic. it's something we have, if you're attentive, you have empathy for situation. It's basically paying attention to what other people are going through. Being aware of their situation, their context, and recognizing that they live, they have their own struggles with all the chaos that's happening around them.

It's not just something that you're going through. It's something that everyone around you is going through too. And it really just is a way of modeling minds in your own mind, mirror neurons. Empathy is something that has a deep neurological basis of being able to recognize and construct these models of how other people are thinking and to do it all unconsciously. And it's a remarkable skill that humans have.

this ability to understand other people's minds.

One for me, the, and for Bob, the key way to, to dealing with the growing amount of anxiety is simply to recognize that other people are experiencing it. You know, that is not something that is only happening to you or is only happening to a single person or a single discipline. And so empathy, attentiveness becomes a way of increasing

the human connection.

Jamais Cascio (33:12.47)
with neuro flexibility, that's a, and the stand in for improvisation, you know, something that we've come to recognize that in an era of chaos, certainty and scripted responses are terrible. They will get you into trouble. And rather you need to be able to think on your feet to develop improvisational skills.

to recognize that a situation has changed and change your interactions with it accordingly. And the improvisation, it's actually a really useful skill to have. And I would encourage leaders and business people or even just people in general to take classes in improvisational acting because it forces you to think about the context of the moment and to see how can I respond to this based on the information I have now.

and how my understanding of the world has changed.

Simon Brown (34:11.516)
We've dived into improv on a previous episode of the power for navigating through things and so fully agree on that one.

Jamais Cascio (34:16.39)
Exactly. Exactly. It's an incredible skill to have, but it also speaks to something in the mind, in the human brain, that ability to recognize what the world looks like in that moment and change how our understanding of it, how we experience that understanding. One of my favorite... me. Sorry about that.

Jamais Cascio (34:45.83)
When am I?

Jamais Cascio (34:52.014)
area. One of my favorite definitions of intelligence is how you know what to do when you don't know what to do. That is, our ability to figure out in the moment how to respond based on limited information. And one of the elements of an age of chaos of this Bani world we're in is we have very limited information. We often have limited or incorrect information about what's happening around us. And so

developing the skills to be able to make tentative plans, but also be able to respond, reshape those plans on the fly. That's a good way of being able to respond to an increasingly nonlinear environment. with interconnected, which is interestingly interconnected was this is the stand in for inclusive, which also starts with I, but

Simon Brown (35:38.682)
And then our final one, interconnected.

Jamais Cascio (35:50.916)
because of the nature of the world right now, inclusive is kind of a trigger word for some people, interconnected. But it really refers to this notion that many times it's not asking the right questions, it's a case of not asking the right people. So the example that we start the chapter with is everyone's familiar with the term black swan to refer to like a wild card or something unexpected.

Paul (36:18.311)
Hmm.

Jamais Cascio (36:18.5)
Well, when Black Swan, when that metaphor first emerged hundreds of years ago, it referred to something that didn't exist. People in Europe in the 16th century used Black Swan to refer to something that you think should exist, but doesn't. And then the Dutch explorers met, you found Australia and discovered that there are, in fact, Black Swans in Australia.

And so very swiftly, the metaphor shifted to be something that you thought didn't exist, but really does. That's great. That was the basis of Nicholas Tullib's book, The Black Swan, 20 years ago. And it's a really, it's a fun metaphor. But for me, what immediately stands out is there were people who knew all along that black swans were real. And that is the Aboriginal indigenous people of Australia. You just didn't ask them. Now.

in the 16th, 17th century, you had good reason for not, in Europe, for not asking them. But today, you don't have that excuse. You don't have the excuse of being completely disconnected from the world.

By asking the right people, you get different perspectives on the dilemmas that you're facing. By asking a wider variety of people a more diverse, inclusive set of ideas and eyes and opinions. You have an ability to see a different perspective. You see different perspectives, get a much wider view, much fuller view of the situation, of the dilemma that you're facing. And so...

Paul (37:59.239)
Hmm.

Jamais Cascio (38:01.37)
The answer to incomprehensibility or the response to incomprehensibility isn't make things no more. Incomprehensibility very often comes out of information overload. It's no better. That is, different people, a wider variety, get a wider variety of perspectives. Now, one thing that you'll notice with all four of these of bendability, attentiveness, neuroflexibility,

and interconnectedness is that none of these seem to be immediately responsive to the idea of the West Atlantic ice shelf collapsing or a Kessler cascade or any of the other massive global future problems that I talk about in the first half of the book. And that's intentional because we recognize that this book is hopefully going to be around and be

useful to people for some time, for at least through the decade into the next. And any kinds of specific strategies or suggestions about how to deal with these massive dilemmas, massive issues, any of those suggestions are going to be very quickly dated. Very quickly, you know, they'll become of the time. You know, they'll sound like 2025 answers. More importantly,

We recognize that our ability to respond to these situations is very much an intimate, personal, individual thing, that we need to build that strength. And so the focus in the positive Bani sections of the book is all about building up our own internal capacities to cope, capacities to be effective.

and thoughtful and still be empathetic, still be flexible in this world of chaos.

Paul (40:03.015)
I think this is one of my favorite things about the model, if I may say, that the level of sort of actually is about individual ownership and individual agency to try to affect some change in the world. I you list, I mean, maybe you could give us some, but you list some really good examples of things individuals can do and pay attention to, you know, to, you know, to try and bring about a positive bunny, right? Maybe share some, some of those.

Jamais Cascio (40:29.286)
Well, a lot of them come out of cognitive behavioral therapy, just the idea of being centered, being mindful. Mindfulness comes up across all four of these chapters of this recognizing the situation you're in, contextualizing it, being willing to talk about it.

Bob was the primary author on those four chapters and he was really insistent that each of the four chapters includes personal stories from individuals from around the world. He wanted to make sure that we use Victor Frankl's story of surviving in concentration camps and the philosophies that he developed in that experience. We use Victor Frankl's stories across all four of the chapters, but we also

you know, talk about the experiences of airline pilots in a disaster or, you know, the experiences of Malala, the Afghanistan girl who was attacked by the Taliban for daring to support girls getting educated and just how she has rebuilt her life.

Stanislav Petrov, I used him, we used him as an example of improvisational thinking. He was a Soviet air defense officer back in the 1980s. And if you remember 1984, that was a pretty high tension year in the Cold War. then, know, KAL 007, Korean Airlines,

Jumbo jet was shot down over Kamchatka Peninsula in the Soviet Union. And there's this real sense that war could break out at any moment. And Petrov was on duty at an air defense station when they got an alert of five incoming missiles from the United States, five incoming Minuteman missiles from the United States. Now he actually wrote the book telling

Jamais Cascio (42:47.914)
Air Defense officers what to do if they got an alert and that was to essentially send this up the chain of command and because the Soviet Union had a policy of essentially massive retaliation at that time, the plan would be to send it up and respond with everything, launch everything back at the US. But something didn't feel right to him and so he threw the book away.

He decided to really interpret the situation based on the information he had at the time and his broader understanding of the world and realized that if the United States was going to attack, they wouldn't just use five missiles. And they had recently put up a new satellite monitoring system feeding data into this and he didn't really trust it. And so he decided not to send the alert up the chain of command.

Simon Brown (43:26.386)
Thank

Jamais Cascio (43:42.084)
And of course, it turned out that it was the satellite's mistaken reflection of the sun off clouds, as seemed to happen quite frequently. His improvisation quite literally saved the world. But because he didn't fill out the forms properly the next day, he was actually given a non-honorable discharge from the military and lived.

Jamais Cascio (44:10.308)
He lived the rest of his life off in Siberia. But it's that situation of needing to be able to recognize the context and make your response happen, use the understanding of the world in that moment and the understanding of the people around you and the understanding of its history and just where we're going to be able to make better decisions.

The one thing that we really try to emphasize in particular in the second half of the book is that what we are facing in a money environment, what we're facing in this age of chaos is not a collection of problems that have solutions or that could have solutions. They quite often they are in fact dilemmas that we can only respond to. Sometimes dilemmas have no good answer.

Sometimes you have to choose between bad answers. And we are seeing a lot of that. the climate crisis is just one example of what that can look like of even the best responses cause pain. And just think for a moment about what happens in a world that we have eliminated fossil fuels. Well, that sounds great, but it means that you have economies collapse.

Some countries have their economies entirely based on the export of oil. And suddenly that income goes away.

What happens to those nations? What happens to those people? There is a philosophy in Silicon Valley that reportedly started from Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook. is move fast and break things. It's the entrepreneurs' goal is to move fast and break things.

Simon Brown (46:12.412)
Yes.

Jamais Cascio (46:14.944)
And that kind of forgets that very often things and people are connected. So you're really saying move fast and break people. And we see this happening across the tech industry. We see this happening across the global economy of organizations, companies, countries, trying to move fast to make new things happen. But in doing so, harming

thousands or millions of people along the way. Unintentionally, usually, but even when we are trying to do the right thing, we need to be conscious of the side effects. And so one of the things that we do with the book in looking at both the negative Bonnie and the positive Bonnie is try to think through how do leaders, how do organizations, how do people who have some power

How can they use this knowledge about the Bani world to make better decisions? And so Bob, who has done quite a bit of writing around leadership in the future, wrote a chapter on Bani and leadership. He really drills deep into steps that leaders can take both to respond to the Bani world, but also prepare themselves to respond to the Bani world.

Simon Brown (47:41.148)
We've in fact had Bob on taking us through that. that's, yes, maybe a nice link to that episode. I think we are coming up to time. So maybe if there's one thing, Jamais, as a looking hopefully to the future, that's a word of hope. What would be the one thing to close out on for our listeners?

Jamais Cascio (47:44.845)
Exactly.

Jamais Cascio (48:04.742)
The future is uncertain and yet we must act. That's sort of the underlying philosophy of this book, that we don't know what's going to happen next. We can make good guesses. We can make good evaluations of possibilities. But even without knowing what's going to happen next, we have to act now. And our best approach to acting in this world is to work in ways that are resilient and empathetic.

and improvisational and connected.

The ability to change the world for the better is in our hands. We know what to do. We just need to decide to do it.

Simon Brown (48:51.73)
Thank you, Xame. It's been a great conversation. You've been listening to a Curious Advantage podcast. We're always curious to hear from you. So if you think there's something useful or valuable from this conversation, please do leave a review on your favorite channel saying why this was so and what you've learned from it. We always appreciate hearing our listeners' thoughts and having a curious conversation. See you next time. Thanks very much.