Jack Uldrich on the unlearning, regenerative futures, nurturing creativity, and being good ancestors (AC Ep64)

“Each of us is creative in our own way. We have the ability to create our own future, but we must first understand that we are creative.”

– Jack Uldrich

What you will learn

• Embracing humility in future thinking
• The power of silence and meditation
• Navigating low-probability, high-impact events
• Why asking the right questions matters
• The role of AI in shaping human history
• Building resilience for uncertain futures
• Unleashing creativity to create a better world

Episode Resources

• OpenAI
• ChatGPT
• Claude
• Pi
• Anthropic
• Cascadian Subduction Zone
• The New Yorker
• Artificial Intelligence (AI)
• Regenerative future

People

• Ray Kurzweil
• Nassim Taleb
• Suleiman
• Harari
• Jonas Salk

Film

• The Black Swan

Books

• The Singularity Is Near by Ray Kurzweil
• Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari
• Homo Deus by Yuval Noah Harari

Transcript

Ross: Jack, it is awesome to have you on the show.

Jack Uldrich: It’s a pleasure to be here.

Ross: You’ve been thinking about the future and helping others think about the future for a very long time now. So what’s the foundation of how you do that?

Jack: The foundation, I would say, is silence. First, it’s meditation. I actually try to get to the thought beyond the thought. And what I mean here is, I’m always looking for insights, but in order to do that, I first have to free myself of all my old habits, assumptions, and other ways of thinking. And so on a daily basis, I do try to meditate on that, and then I look for insights. And I want to make this clear, I’m not looking for conclusions. As soon as you’ve locked yourself into a conclusion or what you think the future is going to be, you’re going to get yourself in trouble. But insights, I do think we can come to insight. So I’ll just sort of step back and say that’s where I start — silence, contemplation, meditation,

Ross: That is absolutely awesome. I think this goes this idea of fluid thinking, as in, there’s a lot of people whose thinking is rather rigid, as in, think of a particular way, and ask a year or two or 10 later, and they’re thinking the same way, whereas that doesn’t quite work when the world is changing around you.

Jack: No, that’s right. And so the next thing I would say is, and I hope to sort of disabuse people of what they think futurists do. I’m quite clear in saying, first, I definitely don’t try to predict the future, but nor do I say I have the answer to the future. But having said that, that doesn’t absolve any of us of a more important responsibility, and if none of us have the answer to the future, we have to be sure we’re asking the best possible questions of the future. 

Frequently, when I see why businesses or organizations miss the future or why they became bankrupt, it’s not because they weren’t bright and intelligent, nor did they have capable C-staff, but they’re primarily answering the wrong question. They just didn’t understand either how technological change had shifted their business, their business model, their customer expectations, or they didn’t understand what their competitors were up to. So I spent a lot of time trying to make sure I’m asking the best possible questions of the future, while at the same time always having humility to the idea that there’s got to be a question I’m missing. And so I fall back on this idea of humility quite a bit, because it’s not what we know that gets us in trouble. It’s what we think we know, that we just don’t. And so we have to have humility as we approach the future.

Ross. Yes, yes. And that’s something that we don’t see quite enough of in the world when we look around. 

Jack: No, really. You don’t. I wish there could be a course on that, or just trying to help people. How do you actually embrace humility in a real way? I mean the Greek root of the word is hummus means close to the earth and so again, this sort of goes back to silence, but I think that I spend a lot of time in nature in order to do better thinking. I actually try to get away from my smartphone, the laptops, and all of this other stuff. 

I love your background. And I think one of the other things is just getting out under the night stars. Unfortunately, 80% of the world’s population, due to light pollution and air pollution, can’t actually see the night stars, which I think is troubling, but it’s this idea, if you can get out onto the night stars, it reminds us one of how little we actually know, but just how much else there is out there. And I think it’s that sort of deep humility that can keep me asking questions and probing the future, and should keep all of us probing the future,

Ross: That evokes, for me, this idea of observing over the very, very long time I’ve been doing foresight and futures. There’s a cyclicality to people’s openness to thinking about the future, and one of them is the big shocks. So we have the global financial crisis, or covid or we have the Asia crisis in the late 90s, or a whole lot of some elections last couple of decades, for example, where all of the. The people who were supposed to know what was going to happen didn’t. And hopefully, when, I think to a fair degree, we started realizing, well, all right, we need to be thinking about the future in a more questioning way, rather than thinking we do know the answers because what they thought of the answers didn’t turn out to be right. So, we can be educated by our falls.

Jack: Right. I think I’m sure you’ve read it, but one of the most seminal books for me in the last 1213 years was Nassim Taleb, The Black Swan, the high impact of low probability events. And that actually shifted my thinking. It was a blind spot I had as a future sort of. Of course, I was aware that these random events happened, but this idea of how important they are to understanding the future, and then to say, how do we think about some of these things. 

And so I’ll just give you an example that I mean for years before, I was talking about the possibility of a pandemic. And it’s not to say I predicted the pandemic. I didn’t, but to say I did write about it and say, here’s how I think. And in my case, my thinking only went as far as the global supply chain, like its impact on e-commerce and the future of work. Like I just completely missed that until we were living it. And so I think getting back to this idea of the Black Swan, I think that there are so many of them, like the possibility of a solar storm or and what that would mean to the electrical grid, what it would mean to our reliance on all of our electronic devices, what it might mean to the future of autonomous cars, if that happens. 

And so as I think about the future, I try to incorporate this understanding that there might be this alternative future. The future is going to unfold in multiple directions at the same time, if some of these rare, low probability events happen, the world shifts. And as leaders and as futurists, we have to prepare people for that possibility, but then we have to think through what else might be some of these low probability, high impact events. And so could I just turn the tables on you, and to ask you, as you as a futurist, how do you sort of think about those events, and how do you try and prepare your clients? 

Ross: It’s a great question. I mean, one of the ones which I think about, which is the California Earthquake. It’s like one of the top ones in that. Well, nobody thinks about it much particularly, except for the insurers who don’t give any insurance away. But yeah, that’s actually a reasonable probability, if you look over a decent time frame. But again, devastating. 

And this comes back to scenarios. So, my core discipline for structured foresight work is scenario planning. We can’t predict, so we need to look at a number of different scenarios. But at any comprehensive scenario planning project, you have your scenarios, and then you add into that the unlikely but high-impact events, which could be natural phenomenon, could be pandemics, could be external, cosmic events, a whole lot array of or even technologies which have impact far beyond what we could imagine, nuclear fission, or whole array of close to unimaginable things. 

And it is challenging for a leader, because you can’t plan for something which is very low likelihood and where you don’t even know the shape of it. And so a lot of it is being able to say with the scenarios you have, and being able to point to some of these far more far flung possibilities, is to build responsiveness. That’s always been, you know, I think that the real function of working with leaders in foresight and futures is to be able to build your ability to respond to the ultimately the unanticipated strategies for what it is you can anticipate, but as you say, you try to look for all the questions you can, but you’re always missing some questions, and so you need to be able to build that ability. To respond very flexibly and promptly and with openness to recognizing things when they happen, rather than the denial or slow to being too slow to respond.

Jack: I would agree, and I would say along those lines, resilience is something I’m speaking more and more to my audiences about, and I just want to use that idea of an earthquake out in California as an example. There was a wonderful article in The New Yorker years ago called The Next Big One, and it talks about the Cascadia subduction zone, this massive earthquake that might hit from north of Vancouver all the way past Seattle and down Portland. And it’s not just the earthquake, it’s the resulting tsunami that comes and it’s apparently 100 years over now that it could happen tomorrow. It might not happen for another 100 years, like we just don’t know, but this idea that it could happen is the insurance companies, I do think, are aware of it, but most businesses and organizations aren’t. And again, you can’t necessarily dictate everything you do based on the possibility that’s happening, but you do have to have a small element of insurance. What sort of resilience do you need to build? Like if you live out there, you’d better have something in the trunk of your car that can make sure you can survive for seven days, like I would say at a minimum, as individuals, that’s what you should do. But businesses have to think at this longer term, but it’s really challenging in today’s environment where short term profits drive most corporations that the goal isn’t necessarily short term success, it’s long term survivability, and so that this notion of long term survivability has to factor into people in organizations and leaders thinking, and I don’t think it does enough. And so I’m spending more time trying to talk about resilience. I can’t tell you I’m getting anywhere with the corporations and organizations I’m working with, but I’m trying to get them to understand the importance of building resilience, to just withstand some of these shocks if they should hit us.

Ross: Well, I also think it’s important to shift to a positive transformational frame. So I’m currently preparing for a keynote in sable career, which is essentially around sustainability. But in a way, sustainability is ground stakes, as in sustained as you can continue. And if you can’t sustain your business or the economy or the planet, then that’s not very good. So that’s got to be the ground stakes. It’s sustainable, but you want to go beyond that to be able to regenerate, to improve, to grow. I think to a point there’s an analog there with resilience, where resilience is able to come back to where you were. But in fact, you want to positively transform yourself, not just to be resilient to shocks, but to be able to the antifragile type concept, where you say, well, in fact, the shock makes us stronger, and how do we go beyond sustainability or resilience to regenerational transformation?

Jack: No, I really like that. And I particularly like the word, ‘regenerative’. I mean that’s to me, sustainable is a word that’s overused and has kind of lost its luster. And as one person said to me, like, if they said, ‘Oh, your marriage is sustainable,’ no one would sort of be happy with a sustainable marriage like but, but we want a regenerative future, one where we’re constantly growing and improving or just doing different things. And so I like that idea of a regenerative future, and I will tell you, as a futurist, I do, in fact, see individuals and organizations beginning to take seriously this idea of moving beyond sustainability and moving towards a regenerative future. And as a futurist, this is where I feel that’s the future I want to help create. And so I’m increasingly open with my clients. Is to say, look, I’m not here as some passive, neutral observer of the future. There is, in fact, a better future out there, and I want to help play a role in that, and that’s why I’m here talking to you and your organizations. Let’s figure out how we can roll up our sleeves and create this better, more beautiful, bolder, regenerative future. Can’t say it’s necessarily catching on with all clients, especially I do most of my work here in the US, but it’s a it’s a growing trend, and it’s one that excites me as a futurist, and it actually gives me increased hope and optimism for the future, to see all of these individuals and organizations just getting in there and working to create a better future.

Ross: So we were chatting before turning on the record button about the pace of change today. So we’ve both been in this game for a long time, and are able to gain some glimpses into the future. And today, with the pace of change, the time horizon we’re looking forward to does seem to be shrinking a bit. 

Jack: It really does. And just to let your audience in, I was saying even though I’ve been talking about exponential change for the past two decades, just using the advances in artificial intelligence as the most prominent example, I mean to see how fast OpenAI and ChatGPT and the other models, Claude, Pi, Anthropic have changed just in the two years since then. Release is absolutely staggering. 

And here’s where I would like to talk about Ray Kurzweil, who I have an immense amount of respect for. He’s the first one who actually turned me on to this idea of exponential growth. I read his book The Singularity Is Near 20 years ago, and he’s been remarkably consistent and been remarkably accurate, but now he is saying, by 2045 human intelligence will be a million fold smarter. I think he uses the term smarter, and this is one that I take seriously. I don’t know if we’ll necessarily achieve that, but we have to take this idea seriously. I mean, I really do believe we as a society are at an inflection point. 

And there’s a wonderful interview with Suleiman, who is the author of a book on AI, and Harari, the fellow who wrote sapiens and then Homo Deus. But Harari says this is the end of human history. He doesn’t say it’s the end of history. He says it’s the end of human history. Something is about to surpass humans, and we as humans have to take this idea seriously, and we have to really think long and hard and seriously about it. And so one of the things I’m trying to spend more time doing is what does wisdom look like in the future? How do we do? I don’t doubt in Iota that we will become smarter and more knowledgeable as a species, but knowledge doesn’t always translate into wisdom. And so what first, how do you define wisdom? And I think to do so, we start to get into these intangible matters, matters of the heart, matters of the soul, other things like that, that even scientists don’t necessarily agree with. But AI can mimic human intelligence, but can it mimic all aspects of the human experience, and right now, I personally don’t think it can and that both troubles me, but it also gives me hope that this is the role that humans are meant to play. We are meant to bring the innate human characteristics of love and empathy and compassion and questioning and balancing of different interests that there is no one answer out there, and so I’m babbling here. But I think early on, I said, or before we started taping, like, I don’t have any answers here, I’m struggling, just as I think many people are, with what’s coming next here? 

Ross: I think a lot of what you said is spot on as and if we just just think, all right, basic thing, what’s, what’s humans’ role going to be here? It’s the wisdom understanding, the ethics, the frame, the context, the why. And that’s not something which we want to delegate. And so I think that whilst there is in a way, the future is unforeseeable in terms of this expo, the scope of technological advancements, the pace of technological advancement and how we use it. This is, in fact, a time when we have more choices in how we create and what we create, where we can actually choose saying, ‘well, we do have extraordinary technologies.’ The question is, what? How do we frame our human role relative to other technologies we’ve created? 

So our attitude and how we embrace this is going to absolutely shape the future of work and many other aspects of our society. And I think that there’s not enough people who are recognizing the fact that the choices that we have are not just in things like trying to slow down the way we use, you know, the slowdown or to have guardrails around technologies that that’s significantly important. There’s more saying how the choices are, how positively we use these technologies, and the choices we want, what we as humans want to be complemented by these technologies. So I think that, yes, we want to, and we will maintain that role of wisdom and guide and mentors, but we have to improve at that as well, because we’re not as humanity has not proven to be as wise as we might want it to be. 

Jack: No. Let me ask you that, do you think? And I think this is really interesting in this world of artificial intelligence and how fast it is coming. I think most people would agree, at least really, since we went from hunter gatherers to agriculture, we have defined ourselves humans by work like that is what we do. And in this post-future world where AI is going to get better, and I don’t mean to suggest it’s going to be able to do everything, but I do think it warrants us to begin rethinking what a world where work itself isn’t the primary driver of our educational system. 

For example, right now, most people go to school all with the idea that you are getting trained to get a job and be, quote, unquote, a productive member of society. And I don’t want to say that that’s bad, but we’re still going to need education, but in this new world where AI can do a lot of different things, how does that change the nature of education, and how do we leverage it to become more creative? How do we use it to become wiser? Like there is this, I always think that the silver mining in all of this is we have the opportunity to create a future where we’re more human we engage in the activities that most make us feel alive like that’s a really exciting future, and I think that’s where we have to dedicate our time and our efforts. And as we think about regulating AI, it has so many positive attributes, and I I’m not anti technology, but to say, at the same time, we have unleashed something that we don’t fully understand, and how can we to the best of our ability to put some sort of safeguards around it in terms of transparency. Can it explain itself? Do humans sort of control the onoff switch in case of an emergency? How do we deal with bias and all of the other problems, but at the same time, we have to also ask ourselves deeper questions, like, how do we need to begin changing as humans and species, in order to really reap the full benefits of this. I mean, I think, to me, that’s some really rich fertile ground. 

And as I’m approaching the end of my sort of I’ll always be a futurist and I want to spend more time sort of delving into into these issues in the last stage of my career, at least in the corporate world, to just remind people It is really exciting, but it comes with great responsibilities. 

Ross: Yes, absolutely. And to your point, around what it is we want to do, what it is that is most human, I believe that is significantly, you know, exploring and expressing our potential, what it is we can do, and in contributing. And both of those are work essentially, you know, work at its best is doing things which we are the best at to contribute to society. If we’re helping an organization who is helping its customers, then we are contributing. 

And so a little while ago, I wrote this, little mini reports, 13 Reasons Why to point to a positive future of work. And I believe that we can have a prosperous, positive future of work. And these are the choices that we we need to make. So I don’t, one of the questions coming back to this frame is, whether we’re able to pull this off, and I absolutely believe that at least a large proportion of people will be able to have fulfilling, rewarding jobs. I really, I think it is unlikely, very unlikely, that we will have massive unemployment. However, the question is, how inclusive can we make that? I think it’s potential for us to have essentially full employment with a very large port of those roles being rewarding and rich in helping us to grow personally. But that’s this. We still have to frame this as a question we have to answer as in saying, what are the ways in which we can create this, make this possibility real?

Jack: Yeah, I think one of my challenges, and I’ve spent a lot of time as a futurist with the concept of unlearning, is that people in organizations, it’s not that they can’t understand the future is going to change what we have a really difficult time doing, is letting go of the way we’ve always done things. And so I think when we’re talking about the future of work, is that, to me, work does just give most humans just this intrinsic value, and they feel as though they’re an integral part of the community. And so I think there will always be this innate need to to be doing something, and not just for yourself, but on behalf of something bigger. And when I say bigger, typically, I’m thinking of community. You just want to do something for, of course, yourself, your immediate family, but then your neighborhood and your community. 

And so as I think about the long-term future, one of the things I’m really excited about is, and first I’m going to go dark, but I think there’s going to be a bright side to this. One of the things that I think is happening right now that’s not getting enough attention as a futurist, is the internet is breaking in the sense that there’s so much misinformation and disinformation out there that we can no longer trust our eyes and our ears in this world of artificial intelligence. And I think that’s going to become increasingly murkier, and it’s going to be really destabilizing to a lot of people in organizations. So what’s the one thing we still can trust? What’s small groups that are right in front of us? And so I think one of the things we’re going to see in a future of AI is an increased importance on small communities, that there’s some really compelling science that says the most cohesive units are about 150 people in size. And this is true in the military, educational units, you know, other things like that. And I think that we might start seeing that, but it’s going to look different than the past, like I’m not suggesting that we’re all going to look like Amish communities here in the US, where we’re saying no to technology and doing things the old fashioned way, but then the new communities of the future are and now I’m just thinking out loud or something. I want to spend some more time thinking about what it will look like. What will the roles and the skills be needed in this new future. And again, I don’t have any answers right now, just more questions and and thinking. But it’s one of these scenarios I could see playing out that might catch a lot of people by surprise.

Ross: Yeah, very much. So, I mean, we are a community based species, and the nature of community has changed from what it was. And I think that thinking about the future of vanity, I think a future of community, how that evolves, is actually a very useful frame. 

So to round out Jack, what advice can you share with our listeners on how to think about the future? I suppose you did a little at the beginning, but I mean, what are any concluding thoughts on how people can usefully think about the extraordinary change in the world today. 

Jack: Yeah. The first thing I would say is this, and I was just doing a short video on this, and ever since we’ve been in grade school, most of us have been asked the question or graded on the question of how creative are you? And if you ask most people, like on a scale of one to 10, to just answer that question, they’ll do it. But you know what I always tell people, that’s a bad question. The question of the future isn’t how creative are you? It is. How are you creative? 

Each and every one of us is creative in our own way and so and I take that as a futurist, I take that really seriously. We do have the ability to create our own future, but we first have to understand we are creative, and most people don’t think of themselves that way. So how do you nurture creativity? And this is where I’m trying to spend a lot of my time as a futurist, and this is where the ideas of unlearning and humility come in. But I would say it starts with curiosity and questions, and that’s why I like getting out under the night stars and just being reminded of how little I actually know. But then it’s in that space of curiosity that imagination begins to flow. And there’s this wonderful quote from Einstein, and most people would say he was one of the more brilliant minds of the 20th century. He said ‘Imagination is more important than knowledge.’ Like, why did Einstein, this great scientist, say that? And I think, and I don’t have proof of this, is that everything around us today was first imagined into existence, and it was imagined into existence by the human mind, like the very first tool, the very first farm implement, and then farming as an industry, and then civilizations and cities and commerce and democracy and communism, like they were all imagined first into existence. And so what we can imagine, we can, in fact create, and that’s why I’m still optimistic as a futurist, this idea that we’re not passive agents, that we can create a future. 

And I just like to remind people like our future can, in fact, be incredibly fucking bright, like the idea that we can have cleaner water and sustainable energy and affordable housing and better education and preventive health care. We can address inequality. We can address these issues like this. People just have to be reminded of this. And so at the end of the day, that’s why I get fired up. And I don’t think I’ll ever sort of lose the title of futurists, because I’m gonna, until my last breath, I’m going to be hopefully reminding people we can create, and we have a responsibility to create a better future. 

Let me just end this. I think the best question we can ask ourselves right now comes from Jonas Salk, the inventor of the polio vaccine. And he said, ‘are we good ancestors?’ And I think the answer right now is we’re not, but we still have the ability to be better ancestors. And maybe if I could just say one last thing, as I also spend a lot of time helping people just embrace ambiguity and paradox. And here’s the truth, the world is getting worse in terms of climate change, the rise of authoritarianism. Inequality there, you could say things are going bad, but on the other hand, you could say the world is getting demonstrably better. It has never been a better time to be alive as a human, the likelihood that you’re going to die of starvation or warmth or not be able to read, never been lower. So the world is also getting better, but the operative question becomes, how can we make the world even better? And that’s where we have to spend our time and that’s going. That’s why we need creativity, curiosity, and imagination to create that better future. So a long winded answer to a short question. 

Ross: Well, an important one, and I think you’re right, that’s absolutely the most important question of all. So where can people find out more about your work, Jack? 

Jack: My website www.JackUldrich.com. I have a free weekly newsletter called The Friday Future 15. I encourage everyone to at least spend 15 minutes every week just thinking about the future. But in order to do that, I send out a newsletter with just five articles, and say, don’t even read them all, but just read one, but begin engaging in the serious work of reading about how the world is changing, reflecting on it, and then seeing where you can play a role in that, and you’ll see that there are no shortage of opportunities. As I always say, as long as the world has problems, there’s going to be a need for humans and there’s no shortage of problems right now. So let’s roll up our sleeves and begin creating the better world we want to live in.

Ross: Fabulous. Thanks so much for your time and all of your work and passion.

Jack: All right. My pleasure. Thank you for your work, Ross. Pleasure, chatting with you.