#E22 How to Navigate the Unprecedented Change in Society that Lies Ahead with Futurist and Behavioral Scientist Chris Marshall

Read the HYPERSCALE transcript.

(00:58) Hi everybody and welcome to another episode of Hyperscale. It is your host Briar Prestidge. Today we have Chris Marshall, futurist and behavioral scientist, director of the Fast-paced Complex Environments Institute, head of investment strategy at Dragon Investment Managers and author of Decoding Change. Welcome to the show, Chris.

(01:20) Chris: Thank you so much. Thanks for having me.

(01:23) Briar: Of course. And I'm very excited to pick your brains about lots of different aspects today. So I hope you're ready.

(01:28) Chris: I am, I am prepared.

(01:32) Briar: Excellent, excellent. So you've spent years working in a diverse range of areas from behavioral scientists to global macro strategy. Tell us a little bit about what you know about human potential.

(01:47) Chris: Okay. Great opening question because this is a pretty big topic, but let's first define what human potential is, or at least what human potential is to me, because I think the definition I hold is a pretty loose one. And that's purposely so. So for me, I think as we move towards our human potential or we move towards our human potential, when our minds are calm, rested and we're basically free to play, we're free to have fun, that's where we start engaging in kind of what I call joy states. It's a state where our mind, we have those unbelievable breakthroughs, those kind of insights, those lightening ideas, whatever you want to call it. It's kind of, we've all experienced these moments and that's when we start to, in my view, unleash our human potential is the more time we can spend in those states.

It's also the interesting thing that happens here and why I kind of, I label this is the human potential as it's those states that not only do we get more breakthroughs, but we are open to new ideas. We're more adaptable we're more cooperative, empathetic and even caring towards other people. We're naturally more curious. And if we turn to the physical side of this, when our brains are calm and actually joyous, we physically operate better or perhaps we could paint it from the other side when we're stressed, that's when we pick up endless lists of diseases and we don't function very well. So kind of with that definition, I think for me, actually, I need to peel back the kind of the timescale a little bit further of kind of my interest in human potential. And I think that actually starts when I was about 15 years old and I was an athlete on the British ski team and I had this incredible performance psychologist.

I’m neurodiverse. I'm a high functioning autistic person. I'm naturally prone to stress and anxiety, which makes it quite funny that that's now my specialization. But as a kind of a young ski racer, I was naturally very anxious, which had direct implications on my sporting performance. And it was at this point when I was about 15 years old, I came across this sport psychologist, performance psychologist in the US called Dr. Jim Taylor. And he really opened my eyes to kind of what effect our thinking has on not only our perspectives, but our stress state and our output. It was then kind of bring this forward to post-grad research. So I did post-grad in behavioral science and I started looking at how kind of situations of pain or pleasure. So in an investment setting we could say loss or gain, how those were kind of translated differently. How they were seen differently by individuals depending on their personality traits or even how resilient they were mentally. For me, this whole thing of human potential comes down to our mind state. And actually when we can get into those kind of really good, joyous, stress-free mind states, we naturally start unleashing our human potential.

(05:02) Briar: Amazing. And how can we get into these states? What would you recommend, because I'm sure this is a very interesting topic for business leaders, operating businesses can be very stressful, especially under the market conditions that potentially the media is trying to push and drive. We can't get away from social media. Back in the past, we could have put down the newspapers and had this, this turn it off, we switch off the TV, this kind of perspective when it comes to, news. Unfortunately the media is not very balanced with how they report. they, they get more click throughs when they have a lot of fear driven titles and click bait headings and things like this. I think what I see when I'm speaking to entrepreneurs these days is that they do feel quite stressed and obviously that potentially would affect their business. So how can we be in this state of low stress, creativity that you talk about?

(06:04) Chris: You bring up some really interesting points there and, I think firstly just revisit kind of one of those things you've just said, which is this kind of negative news bias. And this is something that a lot of my research has gone into and actually went into the book that you mentioned at the start, Decoding Change. Newspapers, social media sites, mass media they're really, really good at this. They understand that you and I, we will a hundred times more frequently click on a headline if it feels like its negative or it's like life-threatening because that's our psychology. That's actually our brain wiring in a stressful situation or if there's a threat to us, we almost instantly revert to some very, very kind of basic wiring. And that is our brain is a survival tool. It's why you and I are here.

Because when there was like a kind of a rustling in the grass when we lived in caves or there was a funny smell on the air, it really didn't pay us very well to be curious and joyous and kind of like, oh, I wonder what that is. We'll go and have a look. It paid us to be really, really rigid and negative and run or in some situations fight. So that's why we talk about the fight and flight response. 

Getting into those states, for me it's actually starting to build awareness. And I'm sure we're going to touch on this more as we go through the conversation. But that's one of the things I see happening is in the modern world we've become more disconnected to our own minds because there's so many opportunities to just focus on the external that we run away from negative emotions. Because we're told that negative emotions are bad and we should only have positive emotions. If you feel lots of these negative emotions, well you have like a plethora of ideas and solutions to avoid thinking about them. It could be turning on the TV, it could be scrolling on social media, it could be picking up a bottle of wine, it could be embarking in a really high intensity exercise class, which gives you loads of dopamine. But we've basically a lot of people who feel that feel that kind of stress and overwhelm and anxiety. What we find is that is there's almost, if they can bring awareness to their feelings without judgment of them, then that's the starting point. From there we actually have all the tools we need to regulate our emotions. We have all the tools we need to regulate our stress, we have all the tools we need to regulate our energy. We've just turned to external sources as both the cause and solution.

(08:49) Briar: Well, I think that's really interesting and it actually reminded me of a period in my life when I was living in Australia. I just moved to Australia from New Zealand and I was working two waitressing jobs, part-time waitressing jobs. I was going in at 3:00 PM working till 3:00 AM polishing plates and cutlery. And then I'd picked up a second job where I had to wake up at 5:00 AM. So I was going home after a long shift, sleeping for three hours, going to my next job to make coffees at Flinders Street Station. And then I'd finish and go home and quickly nap before starting my shift again. And of course I was burning the, candle at both ends. Of course, I felt quite lost and unmotivated. I didn't know what I wanted to do with my life. I'm a new grad, I've just gone through a very expensive university education and now here I am polishing plates and cutlery and cleaning toilet and things like this. That wasn't really what I'd had in mind for myself. 

I really did hit rock bottom. And I think part of the reason was like how you said, I had up until that point always been surrounded by friends or family. I'd lived in a big university house with 5 other girls. I was never by myself. So I think I'd always avoided being by myself. And there was one particular night where I was kind of forced to be by myself and actually put some thoughts into things and really hit rock bottom. But then what I found was because I felt like I had nothing, I made a really drastic decision to move to New York because I felt like I had nothing. I felt like I had nothing to sacrifice, it could only get up and better from there. So is that sort of what you talk about that sometimes we have to be by ourselves, we have to go through these hard periods of change in order to potentially see that the light so to speak, or to move forward or to come up with a plan of action.

(10:45) Chris: Absolutely. Yeah. I think this is like something really interesting and actually really important because I'm going to ask you a question. I know you are the host here , but I'm going to flip the table. When you were kind of in that state, I want to just ask you, what was your future perspective like? Was it positive or negative?

(11:05) Briar: It was super bleak was I could not see a way out. I felt like a rat running around a little rat wheel. I was very tired. I was actually questioning the meaning of life in all honestness. And that, and that's, I don't think a good thing to really be questioning like, what is the point of my existence sort of thing.

(11:27) Chris: Yeah, no and that's really common. So, so what we actually find, I'm going to come back to the kind of the question about sitting with ourselves and sitting with our thoughts, but what we actually find is when we're in these kind of stressed states, so when our brains are in a hyper vigilant or hyper aroused state for long periods of time so we could call that chronic stress. It's not necessarily emotional stress. And that's where people kind of sometimes misunderstand this. We're talking about neurological stress here. So it's not necessarily coming from trauma or it's not coming from a significant life event. It's just overwhelm overload. We've got too much cortisol running through our brains. And what we actually find, which is really interesting, which again kind of comes into a lot of my work because I obviously deal as a professional futurist, I'm dealing with how the future's unfolding. And as a behavioral scientist, I'm dealing with how we make decisions and how we form either forecasts or perceptions. 

One of the things we find from the latest neuroscience research is as we get into a chronically stressed state, so we're always kind of in this default stress, state overwhelmed, anxious, ruminating, actually it has a direct impact on how positive or negative we view life situations both around us and in the future. And the key is to actually sit down and be still and really peel back where our thinking is coming from. We have as, as I said, become very good at just distracting ourselves. But unfortunately that just leads to compounding the issue. We're not dealing with the source of stress. Now when we're actually talking about sitting with ourselves, it's one of the worst things humans are capable of. We hate it.

In fact, there's some really interesting research on this talking about I can't remember quite when it was done is in the last 20 years talking about how some neurological researchers sat people in a room and they had to spend 15 minutes alone just with themselves. There was no external stimulation, there was no kind of anything to do. And they actually gave one group the ability to give themselves an electric shock. Now most people wouldn't naturally choose an electric shock, but what they found was there was this massive amount of people who just couldn't sit with their own thoughts, they couldn't sit with themselves that they chose the curiosity of giving themselves a small electric shock just to do something even though it was a painful experience. 

We seemed to have this kind of, this real aversion just to sitting with ourselves and thinking about our thinking or what we'd call in kind of behavioral science or neuroscience, metacognition, the thinking of our thinking. But it's one of the skills that we have. And actually when we do it, we start to peel back not only the sources of stress, but triggers our belief systems, our narratives, which all influence how we view the world and the future and what's going on. So no, really, really interesting.

(14:37) Briar: Super, super interesting. And when I moved to New York actually and had after that, that terrible situation where I was really feeling like what am I doing? Why am I here? What, why do I even exist? And made the decision to move to New York. I think because I had a plan or I didn't have a plan because I had an idea that seemed so crazy. And so out of this world I then had to put little steps in place and I had some kind of purpose and something that I was working towards that almost seemed greater than all of this, this turmoil and thoughts that was going on in my mind. And what I found is when I got to New York and I was completely by myself, I didn't know anybody, I almost approached getting like, it felt weird to be by myself and it felt weird to get to know myself, but I tried to approach it from a place of curiosity. Like you were getting to know a new best friend.

(15:31) Chris: Absolutely. Perfect. Yeah. And I think that's where you start to realize, I think once you've gone through that journey and I just want to kind of, I'll be careful saying that journey, because I think it's a constant journey. I don't think we, I don't think it's something that we suddenly master one day and we never have to revisit it. It's something we constantly have to do. But what you find is that you can cope far more with chaotic, turbulent, disruptive environments in the physical world around you because you get better at understanding there's this still calmness within, it sounds a bit woo woo, but that's actually where the science is leading us. And there's a real clarity to thinking when you don't get caught up in the stress around here. I mean, we would call that in sports psychology, we call it resilience. And it's the ability to be in stressful situations but have a buffer against it. And that comes from self-awareness and understanding that emotions are just signals and there's a real depth if we just listen to our thinking.

(16:37) Briar: And you spoke a bit about worldview before and this perception that we have about the world and how it's continually changing as we go through these experiences. How do we know? And I guess there's no accurate worldview really but what would be your suggestions as to how we can perceive the world in a good way that helps us perform at our best Other than this sitting with ourselves and exploring creativity and things like this. Like is there any kind of recommendations? Should we be turning social media off? Should we be playing sports? Like tell me a bit about this side of things.

(17:16) Chris: So yeah there's loads to do. Most of my work works on two different angles. We've talked quite a lot about mind-set and our thinking. The other side of this is getting better at understanding how change happens because I think that's an also an area where we don't have a good understanding. We've become hyper specialists in like the last well few hundred years really since James Watt brought his steam engine into the industrial revolution in Britain. We've had this process of just becoming experts in an ever smaller area. And one of the things kind of that's fundamental to Decoding Change and kind of outline there is just providing people with a framework of how the world changes on really long-term time scales. Because one of the things I think, which is really helpful for people, but certainly businesses and business leaders or anybody that's having to make high stake decisions in this uncertain, rapidly evolving world, is understanding how innovation plays out. How there are far bigger cycles than just the innovation cycle.

One of the, the real big things is I encourage people to stop being hyper specialists. Not always, not kind of completely changed their life, but for a moment just pause being a hyper specialist and become a generalist. And it's a skillset that we're not taught anymore because the whole of our education system is about funnelling us to become a specialist. And it's a really successful career move. We don't want to lose it. It's what's pushed human knowledge and understanding and potential kind of way, way further in the last few hundred years. But to see the changes happening today, we need to become a generalist and a generalist steps back, a generalist, pauses a generalist, looks at kind of the big interconnect kind of interconnections interweaving of trends and mega trends because I mean, so this is one thing that often if I'm speaking to an audience or doing a workshop wherever I've kind of got a live group of people in front of me, I often ask them the question.

I just say, oh, raise your hand if you feel like the world's changing, if we're kind of at this significant point of change. And the feedback is normally kind of 99% of people put their hand up to that. But then if you ask them a second follow on question, and it's a much harder question, and I say keep your hand raised, if you can pinpoint where that change is coming from and all of a sudden if you're in an audience of 400 people, those 398 that put their hands up, well 396 now put it down. And we have this gap between we understand intuitively that the world is changing, but we don't understand how. And my kind of thinking around this is, is that we don't understand how, because everything's on the move today, it's not just a technological disruptive change. We're kind of used to that, that every 50 or 60 years we have this paradigm shifting change in technology.

But today we have change coming from way more angles than that we have potentially a global order change. The exceptionalism of America is fading. There are many candidates that would like to take up that mantle of being in control of the global order. We have changing demographics at the moment. Yes, we're still in this kind of growth phase, but by mid-century we could well be talking about what does global population decline look like. Certainly in terms of social structures or government structures that we've built up during a period of rapid population growth. We could talk about climate change and kind of climate refugees, population disruption from migration away from areas with rising sea levels or extreme weather. And this is the kind of the point that that we've gotta have a better fundamental framework of how innovation plays out.

That's kind of the other side of the coin of kind of mind-set is vital, but so is understanding change and the drivers of change. And for me, as I said, understanding change is getting better kind of or more familiar with how change happens. That it's never linear, it's never one pace that we have periods of slow pace change and we have periods of hyper pace change. That's where I argue we're about to head to is this pace of radical social change, a really, really rapid change. 

(21:49) Briar: How rapid do you think it's going to be, because you touched on some really epic things before about new world order and things like this, which I think we're certainly seeing it kind of rolling out in the media and if you do research on YouTube and dig a little deeper and not to mention conspiracy theorists and all of this, but I think it's, it's quite good just to hear it from all sides of the coin really from all different perspectives. What's, your thoughts about it?

(22:18) Chris: So I think, I mean this is going to sound like I'm perhaps kind of like catastrophizing or  blowing this up just for effect, but I'm not. I think the change we're about to see makes the industrial revolution pale in comparison. And what I mean by that is that the scale of change all these different angles of change I've just talked about, all these different trends and mega trends, they are interconnected, interwoven, and accelerating. The scale of change I think we're about to be landed in is probably more analogous to when we stopped being huntergathers and became a settled society. Like that change in the cultural philosophy of society was far bigger than the industrial revolution. And that's where I think we kind of draw a comparison, is that we suddenly end up in this world not only from all those changes, but we fundamentally change the philosophy of society.

And again kind of where I trace this back in Decoding Change in the book, but when we look at this through history, the biggest upheavals in humanity is when we have a cultural shift in the philosophy of society normally, that actually follows an information revolution, which is quite interesting because we are in one right now. A lot of us thought that the internet was the current information revolution, but I think AI extends that even further. But when you look back through history, again, as I said, you have these fundamental shifts. We had it in the Egyptian hieroglyphics. All of a sudden knowledge didn't have to be passed from one person to the next. It could be recorded. Then we managed to broaden that out with a Guttenberg press. We started printing books and all of a sudden people could transport knowledge with them very easily. It wasn't just a select few, it broadened out.

Then you get to the next part, which is kind of, for me, it's the telephone. And as basic as this sounds to us today, the telephone was revolutionary in the speed of information transfer. That if we think about, I don't know, trying to get a message from one side of the world to the other before the telephone, it was weeks. And we had no idea if the message got there until the messenger made his way all the way back. And the telephone just revolutionized that. And you kind of see, we had after the, the Guttenberg press, we had the enlightenment period after the telephone, we had the great scientific or the golden age of science as some people call it. And now we're heading to this next cultural philosophical change. And it's because we're broadening out and we're adding more voices to the collective intelligence of humanity. And that's beneficial. 

I think the point I'm trying to make is that human change, when it happens at these huge moments in the near term, it's extraordinarily disruptive. In the long term it takes us to a far better place. And that's the kind of the paradox of change that we all have to live through. And so I think that's kind of why a lot of my work brings together these two ideas because I really kind of I see my job as preparing people for tomorrow and the tomorrow at the moment is this period of disruption. And now if I can just get people to get through this and keep, let's go back to the very first question and actually kind of be creative, be adaptable, be cooperative. We can overcome all of those hurdles, humanity faces. But if we're in that stressed, anxious, pessimistic state, I don't think we actually find the solutions. That's the real, that's the real issue here is I think it's, it's our thinking, which is the real existential threat to humanity.

(26:01) Briar: Very interesting points. And talking a bit about an anxiety and something that I learned very early on when I started my entrepreneurial career, I read it somewhere, but from a psychological physiological perspective, anxiety, the feeling of anxiety is very close to the feeling of excitement. So sometimes what I do as a tactic is when I'm feeling anxious about the future because just like you I'm very passionate about technology, AI, exploring all of these very intricate topics and somehow sometimes I can't help but feel quite anxious with all of this change that is, is going through or just even on like a day-to-day business standpoint. Sometimes it can be a bit anxious running a business, but I, I try and just switch that feeling to excitement, excitement about the unknown and things. And that has actually carried me through quite nicely over the years. Can you talk a bit about this and you did, I think, talk a bit about the excitement and this positivity that we should all be feeling towards this change because it can be very overwhelming with all of this AI stuff that has just very quickly grown this year. It feels like,

Oh absolutely. Yeah. And you are right, kind of that one of the things we see is as the kind of the state of uncertainty increases, then that's typically when we see these kind of anxiety states also increase fear and pessimism are often quite close behind. And as you say, if you can kind of change that anxiety from a fear of the future, the fear of the unknown to curiosity, then, this is kind of where curiosity, I believe is one of our greatest superpowers, that if we can just it's almost just changing the perspective on something. It doesn't mean that you have the answers instantly, but it just means that you change the narrative that you are approaching a problem or a very ambiguous situation with. So absolutely. So these things are, are massive how we view the world.

So kind of when we're talking about those kind of, those future forecasts and perspectives, things around us, that's what we find is that it's not surprising for me to see kind of these massive increases in the population of stress states. we can see that in stress medication, we can see that in lots of surveys around youth anxiety and things like that is firstly that the environment we're in is changing, which I believe is, is fundamentally adding to those, those kind of symptoms. But secondly, it's also not surprising that we see pessimism and fear about the future because as you said, from your own experience when you're in those states, the future is bleak. We don't look to these incredible talents that humans have to overcome obstacles. We just get stuck with the status quo. And that's actually one of the interesting things from a lot of research is as you increase uncertainty, we like to find something familiar. We like to find the certainty, we like to basically stick to the status quo. And this is kind of a massive, again, hangover from that era of being cave dwellers that in these conditions of uncertainty, it paid to be pessimistic as we said right at the start.

The issue we have today is the sources of stress, the sources of uncertainty. They're not necessarily life-threatening, not immediately so anyway, but we're still responding as though a lion has just walked into the village. And that's how we're reacting to it, rather than going, okay, well today the source of stress is very different. It's just my brain responding in a very primitive way. So yeah, stress and anxiety and those things are very much connected to how we see the world, and how we view it.

(30:07) Briar: And it's all very, very interesting. And part of my research that I've been doing lately on this podcast, and also through my latest documentary that I'm working on about transhumanism and the future of humanity, I've had the pleasure of speaking to such interesting people like yourself about what potentially the future holds. And in some of the conversations I've been having, people have discussed about AI reaching a point of singularity by as early as 2045. People have also mentioned around that time, potentially humans could have the option on whether they want to live forever or die. And these are some huge conversations. And I'm thinking, gosh, 2045 is almost just around the corner. What's your thoughts? And obviously you've spoken a lot about change in everything like this, but do you think that that AI will reach singularity? What's your thoughts about AI?

I wrote a letter to the White House last week, I don't know if you saw saying, Hey, I don't believe we should pause, because pausing is like telling a pregnant lady to not have your, your baby for six extra months. There's nothing we can necessarily do about it, but we should be looking into the future. There could be a potential dystopian route, and then there could be this very utopian amazing future where we're all using AI to our advantage to do the mundane tasks so we can focus on potentially what it means to be fundamentally human, which is, as you said, creativity, this social aspect, et cetera.

(31:42) Chris: Yeah, absolutely. I'm not sure I'm, I'm probably qualified to tell you if it's going to reach singularity. It's not my area of kind of research expertise. But I mean, coming from this of what is intelligence, I think is probably, kind of an angle that maybe I have, have some value to give perhaps. So, I mean, so there was a guy called I'm pretty sure I'm going to butcher his name here, but I'm pretty sure it's Howard Gardner. There's somebody to look up. And he came up with a theory of multiple intelligences. And I think this is one of the things that people are missing when they're looking at kind of AI and this, this move towards a singularity is that yes, it might replace a lot of what we call intelligences, but there isn't this one single thing, which is human intelligence.

We are very good at measuring stuff. And so we then we kind of shoehorn things into, oh, well intelligence is this, and this is kind of where we've got the birth of IQ tests and things like that. So I think there's a lot of things which we neglect. And so this would be things like philosophical thinking and coaching, those interpersonal kind of relationships, which we don't teach in schools. We just kind of, we've ignored it. We've kind of gone with the far more knowledge based recalling in bits of information which AI could well replace. But there's more to human intelligence is the point I'm making than just recalling a fact. I also think there's something in human thinking, which AI is very good at aggregating information. You get a common theme. So like take a language model like chat GPT, or something like that. It's very good at finding the commonalities and giving it an answer, which sounds coherent and even very intelligent. But breakthroughs happen at the fringes. It's noticing the outliers. And when you are using massive data, it has a tendency to find the common, the average, the aggregated answer.

I think we just adapt, and this, this kind of comes into, so I've spoken about kind of Decoding Change, but I guess this crosses over into the book I'm currently writing, which called the Pathfinder Mindset. And this really came from both kind of experiences as a young athlete, the performance psychology, but also kind of observing behavior through covid where we had this bifurcation of people either being stressed or thriving. I was one that thrived that I absolutely loved kind of coming away and actually having far more time alone. And then also kind of this observation from stress states in our decision making in investment markets, which are by definition, I think one of the, the most exciting kind of behavioral labs we have. People trying to make a decision about the future and getting caught up in FOMO and everything else. And we can see this play out in real time. 

 The Pathfinder Mindset is, is really trying to give people the tools to do a lot of the things that we've just been talking about. So get better at emotional regulation, get far better at stress management and get better at kind of what I would call liminal thinking, that kind of sitting in between stages, being far more divergent, more lateral, because those are the things, the people that master those three qualities, I honestly believe are the people that are going to master the disruption, which happens over the 20 years, whatever direction it takes, whether AI becomes a singularity or not, whether it's a dystopian future or utopian future. The people who can adapt, the people who can control or regulate their emotional states control their stress states and can think outside the box. They will probably, in my opinion, use AI to turn themselves into what looks like a superhuman rather than be replaced.

(35:38) Briar: I love it. And I, I agree with you. I think, in the, the whole superhuman aspect and that's one of the reasons why I want to keep exploring transhumanism exploring this space is because there's so much research being done in AI and robotics and things like this, and it seems like it's moving quite quickly, but then on the other side of the fence, are we moving fast enough when it comes to us humans being more intelligent, whether it's through like a neural link or some mind uploading or being quicker, faster, stronger, better, all of these wonderful things as well. Like, do you think that we are doing enough, just even thinking about the US and China? So in China, all the kids that are allowed to go on TikTok are allowed to spend like 30 minutes or something and they have to watch something educational, whereas in the US you're allowed to watch whatever you want. And kids are spending so much time on TikTok watching twerking and all sorts of weird and wonderful things, I'm sure. Like, do you think that we are doing enough as a, a human society in order to make sure that we've got intelligent people coming or are we all getting really done with, with reality TV? By the way, I have quit reality TV since I last spoke to you,

(36:58) Chris: This is yeah, a big question and a, a big move. How's your life post reality TV?

(37:06) Briar: So yeah, when I last spoke to you I said I'm going to quit reality TV, Chris, I think it's taking up my attention. I'm going to put that attention elsewhere. It's been two weeks now. I feel good. The thing with reality TVs, it's not like quitting smoking or potentially something like this. I didn't have a feeling inside like I must have it sort of thing. I am finding I've got more time to spend on other things. So I've replaced that time doing a lot more research into the future. And even just sitting by myself in all honesty, as you mentioned, spending a bit more time just being. And I think from that perspective, I feel like my stress levels are down a bit because I just have more time for myself. Yeah. 

The reason I quit reality TV is I felt, not only was it taking up my attention, but I was also watching it before I was sleeping. And a lot of the time, the things that they're talking about on reality TV are mind numbing. And to be honest, that's why we watch it. We think it's relaxing after a long day at work, we're like, oh, I can't think about things I just want to tap out, so to speak. But what I was finding is that there's so much drama and arguing going on, and the conversation that they talk about is not very riveting. So I was thinking, I don't think this is the best thing for me to be falling asleep on. It's kind of one of those situations where we are what we eat, so to speak, I guess from absolutely an information perspective. We are what we ingest and if I'm ingesting all of this nonsense, like what good is that going to be for me going into this period of change that you talk about? Not good at all.

(38:47) Chris: No, absolutely. So, I mean, to bring this back to kind of the I think what was the very first question about kind of, are we doing enough to increase intelligence? I don't think we're doing enough to increase the right intelligence, I should say. So as I said, a lot of our focus still in the schooling system, I've got two young kids, one's 11, one's 13, and it's still very much, they're learning to prepare for exams. And exams are a one hour, two hour, three hour block of repeating information. The AI  world, that's just, it's just ludicrously. Like you, you are not necessarily going to need to know that kind of recall. And they're not paying enough attention on the more philosophical thinking or intelligence. They're not spending enough time on kind of teaching skills, coaching skills, which I think will kind of do that. They're certainly not spending enough time on self-awareness, which I view as a completely different view of or type of intelligence.

 I think we're going to see an awful lot of that. I'm not sure we're making people thicker. I don't think we're decreasing intelligence. We're just, if we take the model that we only have so much cognitive capacity, there's only so much we can do, there's only so much information we can ingest. If we tried to ingest all the information that's actually around us, we would just simply just blow up. That's not a medical term. But essentially, I mean, so every situation that you find yourself in you are selecting the information, you're paying attention to you cannot take in everything that's going on. And so if we are filling ourselves up, if we're using up that cognitive capacity with reality TV, social media, pointless, kind of negative news headlines, whatever it might be, then we are basically leaving less energy and less capacity for other things, which might be more important.

The other thing we're doing, I mean it's important here to talk about, about kind of neuroplasticity, the ability for you to rewire your brain. Because I mean this is like one of the most incredible things the human body can do and why we can be adaptable to new situations in the future is because we can actually completely rewire our brain state. And one of the things we find, so I'm going to pick on reality TV and some of the things you just said there, is that they're purposely designed the way that they're edited, at least to have cliff hangers, to have bits at the start of a program, which you are itching to find out, well how did that situation arise? And you have to wait until the entire show to really find out or it's arguments which really kind of test your moralistic beliefs that you get hyped up, you get in an emotional reaction because you're like, I completely disagree with that, or I completely agree with that, and there's this massive injustice in the world because of it, whatever it might be.

When we bring that back to kind of what's happening neurologically is that as we find out, as our curiosity is peaked, so we are trying to find out, well what led to that or something, we get these kind of feel good chemicals, we get neurotransmitters which induce pleasure and avoid pain and we actually get addicted to it. And this neuroplasticity, this effect means the more you engage in it, the higher your base level is. So the more crisis, the more drama, the more kind of out there events need to happen for you to forget the same kick. And I say kick because it's pretty much the same as drug addiction. It's pretty much the same when we look at it from a neurological level. And so that's kind of what's happening when we're watching these and they're purposely designed to be intriguing narratives. We are as humans, we love story. I mean that's been a trait from time in memorial to now. And we get caught up in these narratives and the narratives are engaging and that keeps us engaged. And you're absolutely right, kind of increasing dopamine levels and things like that, that we need a certain amount of dopamine, but there's actually now a lot of evidence to suggest that we are kind of getting too much dopamine, which can affect our sleep cycles, it can affect our heart rate, it can affect so many different things. 

That's where I kind of see a lot of change needed is we're not necessarily doing anything terribly bad. We just need to stop or control what we are already using. I don't think we're going to suddenly go backwards and cut all digital media from our lives. And as you say, I don't think it's a wise move just because something scares us to run away from it. I mean, we could look at many times in history, take the industrial revolution at that period. I call them doomsayers in Decoding Change in that they look to the future and they just go, if the population increases exponentially, there's going to be famine and war and everything else. Now there has been famine war, but not because of the reasons they thought. And they thought that food production could only increase linearly and the population would increase exponentially. They missed the power of innovation. 

We could take so many examples in the eighties, you had math teachers in the streets saying that we're going to ruin kids' intelligence or maths because of the calculator. They tried to get it banned from schools. I think we're in a similar situation that there's a lot that AI will disrupt and that will be painful in the short term, but it's not a reason to suddenly stop all progress and to scale back, kind of these innovations and things like that that could actually bring an awful lot of progress for humanity.

(44:33) Briar: I was reading a really interesting article recently that actually spoke about the fact that of course AI will take away jobs, but through research that people are doing, it will actually create more jobs in the long run. And I thought that that was something very positive that you don't always see people commenting about on social media and read about in the media and things. And I agree, I think we should always look at things from a place of curiosity. I, I loved when you spoke about that before and that was part of my inspiration with my documentary last year, the 48 hours in the Metaverse. I was like, well if I don't understand this, I'm just going to go in for 48 hours and really experience it. And whilst I'm doing that, I'm going to bring everybody along the journey with me so that people who don't have potentially access to Oculus headsets or they're not necessarily going to put the time in to learn something like this.

I also read by the way, that that because women are more interested in people potentially than men are, for instance, men are more interested in things such as technology, investments, whatever, finances, there's a shortage in women in technology that's been researched that's already out there. I wanted to go into it and really take these women along the journey with me and help them experience it and also help get them excited and curious in things about the future because I think there's a real power in curiosity and learning and understanding than just running away as you rightly discussed before.

(46:06) Chris: Absolutely. And I think there's a paradox here, which I think we don't embrace enough this is fundamental to this, so there's concept of The Pathfinder Mindset and this book that I'm working on now. There’s a chapter in there which I'm, which I just call the, the paradox of pausing and how pausing in a fast paced world allows you to move faster. And we often associate pausing with stopping or kind of, oh, we could have done more, or it's kind of negative, it's got negative connotation in our modern society. But actually as the pace of change increases or the pace of information increases, we can be so biased in our thinking. Certainly if our brain states in the wrong place, if we're anxious or kind of stressed opposed to joyous and calm, then we find that we engage in far more biased thinking.

It is kind of this pausing or in the investment markets, we have an analogy, well we have a situation which where if an investment market sells off too quickly, there's sometimes a forced circuit breaker. All selling is postponed or buying is postponed. And that's, I think something that we're going to have to get better at in the future is micro pauses to just check where we are in our kind of arousal state, where we are from an emotional point of view, how that's affecting our perspective. And this is where actually, so that, as I said, I call it the paradox of pausing, pausing allows us to go faster and make better decisions. And that's kind of one of the key messages I think I have, for the coming decades as we go through this period of rapid change is that it's pausing, which allows us to check our emotional state. It's pausing that allows us to check our kind of stress state or arousal and it's pauses that allow us to really check our thinking and go, well what's the belief or narrative I'm using to make that decision? And is there a different perspective? And if so, am I right?

(48:09) Briar: I think you've given everybody some really great food for thought on today's show, so thank you so much. And yeah, so many good takeaways of how we can pause, check in with ourselves, make good business decisions, not be fearful, but be excited for the future because the future is exciting. Change is exciting. Like if we were all doing the same old thing all the time, like I was in Australia working as a waitress, not progressing everywhere, just going around my hamster wheel, I think we'd all get frustrated. So we should embrace change. I've got one last question for you. Every single guest that we have on the show, we ask them to contribute to this story that we're creating about the future. And lots of guests that I've had on the show prior have contributed towards the story. So I'll share it with you and I would like you to take it, run with it and let us know where it goes and you can be as creative as you want. 

Okay, so picture this, its 2045, you have travelled into the future, you've woken up in the morning in an organic breathing bed and you've walked into your kitchen. Any dish you desire is available at your fingertips. You've assigned your work tasks for the day to generative AI. What happens next?

(49:30) Chris: So what happens next is I think I keep collaborating with AI and I'm going to come at this from the point of view that I check in with AI and through biofeedback and neurofeedback, we collaboratively assess where I am in both an emotional state and a stress state. And we start organizing the tasks for the day, not just simply from a time management point of view, which is what we've done from the industrial revolution, but we start organizing them from what tasks are best suited to the emotional and stress state I'm in right now. And actually, do I need to spend 10 minutes, 20 minutes, however long changing my state-- my brain state to engage in a particular task? 

So I think for me  that's where I hope we're heading. I think time management is a relic of the past. It's literally a hangover from the industrial revolution when we said that during daylight you need to come and walk to this factory and pull a lever and when it's nightfall, when there's no lights in the factory, you go home. And that's how we arrived at the nine to five working day. And we're starting to realize that's not suited to many people's thinking that the tasks, certainly knowledge workers, it's about getting into flow states for deep work. It's about engaging in things which perhaps require more energy when we are at a slightly higher arousal level. And that's the change I think-- I hope we see is that there's this collaboration with AI that we assign our tasks not just by duration or how important they are, but where we are in our brain state and there's a working together to either change our brain state to match the task or we match the tasks to our current brain state. 

One of the things I think might be really good for people is if they go to my website, say chrismarshall.uk actually what they can get there is I've created a, a pathfinder mind-set quiz and it's about 18 questions. It's not long. It probably takes an average of three, four minutes and it's going to score you on how well you manage stress, how well you regulate your emotions, and how well you engage in liminal thinking. So those are the three things we've been talking about that kind of, I think are key pillars to the people who are going to not only adapt to this changing environment, but be able to traverse this disruptive environment the best. So it's free and if people want to find out how well their thinking or mind-set is aligned to this period of rapid change that's there for them,

(52:20) Briar: Amazing value add. So yeah, we'll definitely be making the most of that. And thank you so much for coming on the show, Chris.

(52:27) Chris: Thank you.