Your Transformation Station - 104. Real time changes Data is Wrong

Episode Date: March 21, 2022

What are the causes of urbanization, decline in birth rate, and culture and societal changes? Favazza and Terry Thiele, discuss with real-time changes in healthcare data, as well as other 'topics' such as "3D printing", nuclear energy, the 4 fs in "evolutionary psychology", and "business news". PODCAST INFO: Podcast website: ⁠⁠https://www.ytsthepodcast.com⁠⁠ Apple Podcasts: ⁠⁠https://www.ytsthepodcast.com/apple⁠⁠ Spotify: ⁠⁠https://www.ytsthepodcast.com/spotify⁠⁠ RSS: ⁠⁠https://www.ytsthepodcast.com/rss⁠⁠ YouTube: ⁠⁠https://www.ytsthepodcast.com/youtube⁠⁠ SUPPORT & CONNECT: - Facebook: ⁠⁠https://www.ytsthepodcast.com/facebook⁠⁠ - Instagram: ⁠⁠https://www.ytsthepodcast.com/instagram⁠⁠ - TikTok: ⁠⁠https://www.ytsthepodcast.com/tiktok⁠⁠ - Twitter: ⁠⁠https://www.ytsthepodcast.com/x⁠⁠ - Pinterest: ⁠⁠https://www.ytsthepodcast.com/pinterest⁠⁠ - Linkedin: ⁠⁠https://www.ytsthepodcast.com/linkedin⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

you know, inventory issues and economies of scale. Let's go back real quick. Let's look at the, with the decline in the birth rate. All right. Now, with the individuals, I feel like is there a missing factor where I would say, I mean, health. Is that an issue? I feel like that's not taken into account. Well, health actually.

Vaccinations. Yeah. The health of people worldwide has improved dramatically. The poverty rates have dropped dramatically. The one major trend that's driving the population shift is urbanization. How can you create a transformation in others if there's no transformation in yourself? Join your host, Greg Favaza, as your voice on the hard truths of leadership, your transformation station connecting clarity connecting clarity to the cutting edge of leadership as

millennials we can establish change not only ourselves but through organizational change bringing transparency that goes beyond the organization and reflects back into ourselves extracting actionable advice and alternative perspectives that will take you outside of yourself Terry Thiel, welcome to your transformation station. How are you doing today? I am doing well, and how are you, great? Not too bad. It's starting to snow outside.

Father, taking care of the baby in the morning, you know, typical day over here in Missouri. Where are you located? Out actually in St. Robert, Missouri. It's in the middle of nowhere. With snow. Yeah, shockingly, it's weird. It's weird just coming up out of a sudden.

Yeah, we've, moved several years ago from Cleveland. Oh, okay. And I'm, I now live outside of Wilmington, North Carolina. Beautiful. And one of the disadvantages is

alligators. One of the advantages is no snow. You can't win on that battle. No, no, no. And the occasional, hurricane. So let's, let's go into your background a little bit.

I came across some of your work. You spent the last 40 years helping government officials and corporate leaders grapple with strategic planning and sustainability challenges. You taught strategic planning, disruptive innovation, competitive intelligence, and eco efficiency at both graduate and undergraduate levels. Now, can you give a little more in-depth of your credentials for our listeners? Sure. I, after undergraduate, I went to law school out of not knowing what else to do. You know, it deferred reality for three years. And I then wound up, I was fortunate to get a position as an attorney in the Treasury Department. Wow. And from 1970,

to 1990, I worked in the federal government. And I just happened, as it turned out, to get involved with national security. So I wasn't in the intelligence community. I wound up working for Treasury, the Central Intelligence Agency, the defense intelligence agency, and wound up in the executive office of the president. And I guess the fundamental learning that I took away from being a very minor cold warrior is that the future is very unpredictable. I was fortunate enough to attend the National War College in 1986, 87. and if I had stood up in class and announced,

and that class was made up of Army colonels, Lieutenant Colonel's, Navy, Commander's Captains, Air Force, Foreign Service officers, and a sprinkling from the intelligence community, which is why I was there. Wow. And if I had stood up in class in in 1987 and announced that the Erlin Wall would come down in 1989 and that the flag would come off the Kremlin in 1990, end of 1990, I would have been politely ushered out with a lot of tutting, like, you know, poor boys gone,

you know, bonkers. And while I was in the intelligence community, it was the most satisfying job I've ever had. It was a shared vision. There was a common goal. No one was doing it for the money. And I had anticipated from a forecasting standpoint that I'd spend my career in national security. Well, 1990, 89, 90 comes around. The Soviet Union collapses. And, and the, the Soviet Union collapses. and I mean, they were talking about disbanding the CIA. We don't need this anymore. This was Francis Fukuyama in the end of history. You know, we had won.

And the appropriations for military and what have you just collapsed for a while there. So I tell people from a planning standpoint, it was natural that I went from fighting the Cold War to working for a refrigerator manufacturer. So I wound up doing government relations for General Electric for a number of years. Okay. And after that, we wanted, I was located in Louisville, Kentucky with GE. We had wanted to send our two sons to the school I had attended as a boy. and in order to move back to Cleveland, Ohio,

changed jobs and wound up doing the same sort of work for another refrigerator manufacturer, A.B. Electrolux. Did that for a number of years. Uh-oh. You're monologuing. I got carried away. You were giving me so much, like, insight. I'm like, wow.

Sorry. You're good. You're good. I got to be the monologue, the monologue place. Okay. But, but damn. Like, I had a focus, but now I want to shift the focus to what I was originally going to intend this interview to go out to. But first, let's paint a little picture here.

What is the fourth age? And what does that entail? Oh, sure. And it took about 50 years of gestation to sort of bring it into focus for me. I would argue that our species has. has gone through three ages. The first age from about 200,000 years ago, up until I'll say about 10,000 BC,

we were hunter-gatherers. Yes. From about 10,000 BC, up until, I'll pick a date, 1785, we were farmers and herders, primarily. I picked 1785 because that's about the time when steam engines became commercially available that were reliable. And it was the advent of our third age, which is what everyone knows as the Industrial Revolution,

during which we made things. But I would argue that we are on the cusp, and I picked 2020 in the beginning of the COVID pandemic as sort of the starting point of the third age. And how I would characterize the transition through those ages is the rate and degree of change have gradually accelerated over time. But we are now on the cusp of an age where both societal and technological changes are coming at us so fast unlike anything we have ever seen before. And we can get into the

details as to what they are. But the takeaway line for me is for any child born in any of those preceding three ages, that child could look at their parents and their grandparents and say, my life is going to look something like theirs. I can use their experiences and their knowledge as a template to help me going into my future. And I would argue that that's not the case anymore. I don't think that there's anything that I can say to my grandchildren about how I was raised in the 50s and the 60s. That is going to be of any help to them in the future they're encountering because their lives are so very, very different, going to be so very, very different than what I experienced. So, and that is a right there is a fundamental change.

Let me ask you this, because what we're talking about here is nature versus nurture. Now, is there an idea that's coming up where it could be an additional aspect to put on there, and not just nature versus nurture, but also today's era, whatever we want to, however we would frame it, there'll be three ways of understanding how an individual is going to progress in life. And then let's go back and look at that generational change as a child can look at that. I agree 100% and our listeners will do the exact same. We can look at our history and see how it's repeating. what was occurring, what happened and how we can avoid these things.

Because I feel like the millennial generation has this ability to recognize and to pivot around the mistakes that their parents have made and have repeated from their parents. So I really do like that. That is the challenge, but I'll make this argument. if the sort of cultural and societal mores that were established don't apply anymore or our antique, if you will, then what is the millennial and the Gen Z generation left with? And I would argue that they are left with the inherent, and this gets back to your nature, nurture, the inherent human instincts. that we developed 200,000 years ago. Now, those instincts I've sort of characterized as to four attributes. The first of which is we are afraid of everything.

We are scared to death of everything because if we weren't, it would eat us. I mean, that's just ingrained in us. Secondly, we are social animals. We live in groups because we discovered 200,000. years ago, that living in a group increased our likelihood of survival and finding a mate to pass on our genes. So we are group-oriented. Third, within our group, we will do anything to improve our status because the higher up in the pyramid of your group you go, the more likely you are to survive and the better chances of getting a better mate to pass on your

James. Finally, we're curious, not from any sort of altruistic philanthropic, I want to understand the world as much as I need to understand what's over the hill before it eats me. So if you take the societal and cultural moors of the past, that aren't going to fit this very dramatically changing future. What are we left with? Well, we're left with those instinctive attributes. Those are imbred into us. And we're afraid of everything. And if we can't see the future, chaos is frightening. And our reaction to chaos is to overreact violently. So my concern for the future is whether the nurture over the nature in terms of can in fact my grandchildren see past their instincts to survive a very chaotic, unpredictable world.

If you can't see what's coming at you, you get very, very nervous. And I think we see that playing out in our contemporary politics. Let me look at this real quick. With these primitive instincts that are going to become a problem, due to the fact of isolation in a meta and digital and meta world, I feel like this is going to come down to our own internal perceptions of how we are being perceived and all the flaws that we have felt in our entire life are now being challenged. and the only individual that is

self, well, is critiquing is the individual himself or herself. Well, I think what people do nowadays, which is so very different, is you seek out a group of like-minded people. And technology has enabled us to do that on a global basis. So our group formation, which had previously been, I'll argue, sort of bounded geographically and nationally and sort of a vertical bounding

is now horizontal. And so you're seeing group formation of like-minded people around the world unencumbered by time and distance because of technology. And it's a good thing. and it's a bad thing, you've found kindred spirits that reassure you that they think like you or they see the world like you or they react like you.

But it's also not necessarily a good thing in that you don't have to be challenged. You don't have to see other points of view. And those groups, the distinction between. urban elite, educated, and rural, even middle class are stark in getting more so. And again, when you don't understand another group, you're afraid of them. And so you react accordingly. As I said, we're seeing that in politics. I'd argue that since the Second World War, we've had this in Western democracies.

We've had the evolution of a compact between the governed, the elite. Both Democrat, Republican, liberal, Tory doesn't matter, ruling elite versus the electorate. and the average person, the world is such a complex place and it is now a global place that I don't understand what's going on in Bosnia. I don't understand the Ukraine. I don't understand what's Taiwan. Tell you what, I'm going to make a deal with you as my elected official. I am going to give you my vote if you do four things for me.

First of all, I want a job so I can feed my family. Secondly, I want my family to be safe. Third, I want my kids to have a future. And fourth, unless I'm hurting somebody, I want you to leave me alone. And I think what we've seen over the past 30, 40 years is that our ruling elite have failed to uphold that compact. And now you're seeing this sort of political dissension. between rulers and ruled. Now, what makes it worse?

There's a gentleman who passed away a couple years ago by the name of Hans Rosling, Swede. I believe he was a physician, but he did an awful lot of work in data analysis. And Rossling, a number of years ago, went out because he was so dismayed by what he was seeing when he talked to audiences. He's written a book called Factfulness, 10 reasons we're wrong about the world and why things are better than you think. And it was published in 2019.

And he went out in 2015 and asked 1,000 attendees at Davos, three questions. And then in 2017, he asked 12,000 people in 14 different countries, 13 questions. And these are questions that were basically about the nature of the state of the world, the percentage of world population living in poverty, okay, world vaccination rates. Now, and population increase. What he discovered overall was that our ruling elite don't know the facts. they didn't get the answers right. And overall, the 12,000 people that he spoke to, well, no one got them all right out of 12,000 people, or 13,000 people actually, with the Davos included.

No one got them all right. Is there like a communication issue? Well, I think it's a communication issue, but I think it's an arrogance issue. are ruling elite, wherever they are, are setting policies and guiding our governments based upon a false understanding of the facts of the world. Now, let me caveat on this. I completely agree. I looked at this article a while back when I was doing a psychology project, and it was a, it was an experiment that was conducted out and off of BBC.

see where they copied the Stanley Milgram experiment and they made their own, but in a different way where they created a prison and, of course, the guards and the guardsmen. And by the end, the guards completely lost control and the prisoners took over. And they were highlighting that the oppressed was able to come together. to take over as a collective because of what they believed, which was true, was this authority that they've have, they didn't have no understanding of what it meant, but just a general basis of them carrying out orders. And now I'm connecting that to what you're saying. Well, going to the disruptions that we're facing in the fourth age, I'll give you one example. Population.

The conventional wisdom, if you look at the media, is that global population is increasing and will continue to curious and we're going to eat all of our resources and we're all going to die. Climate change is being driven by population growth, which is driven by, you know, our consumption of everything in sight like, you know, Army hits. Okay. When you actually look at the data, when you look at the UN data, you discover that half of the world's countries are below reproduction rates. 95% of the population increase between now and the end of the century. 95% of that is Africa. Eastern Europe is losing. Eastern Europe, Japan, and South Korea are set to lose 40% of their population. China will lose 25%, Russia will lose 13%. The only countries that are coming close to maintaining their populations over time are the Anglo-Saxon countries, the United States, the UK, Connecticut, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia. Partly because our birth rates are better, but also partly because that's where people want to move.

So immigration supports. Now, layer on top of that that there are a set of demographic experts that disagree. agree with the UN and argue that we are going to rapidly, more rapidly, within our lifetimes, reach maximum population, which isn't going to be anywhere near 13 billion. It's maybe more like 8 to 9 billion. Once you get over that hump and you start declining in population, it doesn't stop. Now, think about all of our policies. that are being set with a mindset that our population is increasing. Sustainability is one of those areas, climate changes, based upon we're in continuing to grow.

But within our lifespan, that's going to change. And you don't hear that. Now, factor on top of that, the fundamental technological change. There's a whole series of new technologies, 3D printing, the Internet of Things, AI. I recount him in the book. The point is the 20th century, third age mass production, Henry Ford, every color you want as long as it's black, model of production is being obsolesed. We are going from an economic model of a few making millions.

to an economic model of the millions making a few. Because 3D printing and all of these technologies enable it and take all of the traditional, you know, inventory issues and economies of scale. Let's go back real quick. Let's look at the, with the decline in the birth rate. All right. Now, with the individuals, I feel like is there a missing fact? factor where I would say, I mean, health, is that an issue? I feel like that's not taken into account. Well, health actually. Vaccinations. Yeah, the health of people worldwide has improved dramatically. The poverty rates have dropped dramatically. The one major trend that's driving the population shift is urbanization. When women get to cities,

They stop having babies. And that's primarily because you don't need field hands anymore. Do you have a source that will support that? Oh, yeah. Yeah, there's a number of sources in the book. The most dramatic of which probably, pardon me while I grab it, is a book by Darrell Bricker and John Ibbotson called Empty Planet. Okay.

I'll link that in the show notes. Thank you. And Hans Rossling points out the same thing. You'll see there are a number of other, there's three or four major scientific groups looking at population data. Is that a musket behind you? It's an 1854 Lorenz rifled musket. Oh, my God. That is beautiful.

Actually, I want it. We live near a battlefield here in North Carolina, one of the last battles of the Civil War. Yeah. And a couple of years ago, they were going to have a reenactment, and they had a raffle. And I put in 20 bucks just to support the battlefield and won the musket. Wow. That is so cool. I'm sorry.

Actually, it's it. Yeah. But getting back to the population thing, there's more to it than just gross numbers. I'll give you two examples. China, for a generation, had a one-child policy. And because of that, they favored male over female babies. Yes. So as a result, we now have 25 million Chinese men for which there are no Chinese women.

But when we look at that, now that is based off of the family's own preference, not as in a policy. That's correct. And in India for cultural preferences as well, the same thing happened. And there are 80 million Indian men for which there are no Indian women. So if you want to talk about, you know, political instability. That's an awful lot of testosterone. Yeah. With nothing to do.

I shouldn't be laughing. But no, let's look at the fact that there is a decline that I see with what you're saying. I always want to challenge it and feel like there are other factors that could be involved. But what you're saying with outgrowing our food, like our food surplus, I mean, I see that happening within the next 40s. 47 years just based off what the research is saying. But I mean, who knows? But where we're going, that does make me wonder. Let's go deeper with that.

Well, again, if you're looking at decreasing populations, if Eastern Europe is losing 40% of its population, if you want to see what a modern economy looks like with an aging population, look at Japan. They have villages in Japan. that are totally abandoned because everybody moves to the city, the old people are dying off, and there are no kids. It's a very different set of societal issues.

Now, I don't know what the answers are. But, you know, going back to my, you know, going from Cold War to a refrigerator manufacturer and forecasting, forecasting doesn't work so good. So I'm a scenario planner. So in the book, I've gone through a set of what scenarios of what the future might look like, depending upon how these factors play out. But there's no one universal answer for the whole world, depending upon how those populations go in different countries

and the impact of technology in those different countries, you're going to see different scenarios. So the future for the developed world versus Africa, because Africa is still growing. It'll be the last, if you will, to tip out and then start to decrease. But if 95% of all population increases over the end of the century are Africa, I mean, some of those countries are going to grow by 400, 500%, and they don't have the political or societal infrastructure, to handle that.

So in terms of just destabilization, those are huge factors. Now, how does that play out? I don't know. But I don't think, and I guess the purpose of the book, is to get people to think about the actual condition of the world as it is, not what they think it is. Which organizations in charge of being aware of these kind of factors? Well, again, I'd come back to Rossling has a group. Oh, boy.

Now I'm going to blank on it. There are several geopolitical strategists out there who talk about this that. that obviously have more public profile than I do. Peter Zayhan is one. George Friedman is another. But they're individuals who are thinking along these geopolitical strategic terms, longer term. But the problem with most everybody at the moment is their time scale. what I'll call time depth, especially business.

And American government works in four-year cycles, you know, because that's the national election. And so you don't think out more than four years. If you look at the trends and you look at it over a 10-year cycle or a 20-year cycle, you no longer worry about who's twittering. you get the chatter out and you see the trend lines. Nobody's looking out 10 to 20 years at those trend lines. You just can't see past it.

There's too many fundamental things that could impact that. I just don't see it. Yeah, but again, they've got the facts wrong. And so when they have population wrong, when they have the rate of poverty wrong. Okay. Yeah. they're planning on the wrong information.

So it should be no surprise that we're getting bad results because they're not seeing the world as it is. And you can't see the world as it is unless you look at that day. Now, the problem, one of the problems, and this goes back to working in intelligence. Back when I was in the intelligence community in the 80s, you know, OSENT, open source intel,

okay? You went to the library, you went to the newspaper, you know, you went down and you talked to the person on the street. Well, collecting OScent was a tough day. It was, you know, it was legwork. Well, fast forward to today with the internet. And, you know, I can pick up my phone and I can, you know, I have the access to not only looking at kittens,

but I can get versic, you know, virtually all, all the information in the world real time. We are being drowned in Ocent. Yes. And so the challenge, the process to figure it out, it's called the D-I-K-W process, data to information, to knowledge, to wisdom. You have a data stream,

and you have to extract out of that data stream, the amount, the discrete bits, that are useful information for what you're looking at. When you have those bits of information, going from a fire hose to a teacup, when you have those bits of information, you analyze that and you develop knowledge. Now, most everyone has knowledge. Knowledge is how to do something. So managers and business are all knowledge managers.

They know how to do things. but the difference between knowledge and wisdom is understanding what to do. Yes. Why am I doing this as opposed to that? So a military example would be, I'm at the bottom of the hill, you're at the top of the hill. I can frontal the assault, I can go to a flank, or I can retreat. I know how to do all three. I have the knowledge of how to do it.

The wisdom is disdeme. deciding which to do. Okay, now let me pause you here because there's a couple places I really want to go with this now because we covered a lot and now I'm ready to participate. So first, with this knowledge that you are referring to, I feel like what you said, all right, looking at a screen and then scanning out and then getting this information and having the knowledge, quotations, that that's, That's what managers are preaching to incoming employees and to the current staff. Now, the problem with that is they are preaching regurgitated information, which they are expecting for the individual that they're teaching it to, to understand the exact same way as them as an average.

An overachiever would tailor this information to how they would like to receive it. But then again, this information that they're giving does not allow them to conception. the idea of why and what the doing and caveat, or just emphasize it even more, the information they're giving doesn't teach them for the future when they were to leave this job. All they have is irrelevant information in their head that they have to brain dump once they leave. Thus, what they're teaching is garbage. And that's where organizations need to refine their teaching system to almost match, I would say, the academic system. Well, yeah, but I don't think the academic system is taking any blue ribbons at the moment.

Yeah, no, but never mind. They haven't changed it over like years. Yeah, because again, the difference between knowledge and wisdom is the why, not the what. And knowledge managers, virtually all middle managers, even all the vice presidents, in a corporate environment are, to your point, imparting the what downstream to the group without any regard to as to whether or not that's what you should still be doing? Yes. So I give you an anecdote from my work experience. Gee, this would be close to, well, about 10 years ago.

I took a college class that I was teaching on strategic planning, and we looked at 3D printing. So the fall semester was analyzing all of the different forms of 3D printing at the time. And there's about a dozen different ways of doing it and different materials. and what have you. So the technology 10 years ago, we looked at that. Then the spring term is we looked at my employer at the moment and we analyzed the employer and said, what are the implications of 3D planning for this employer going forward?

I'll be like you creating a gun. And then the class then presented to senior management their findings as to it, and it was scenarios. It wasn't a forecast. It was could be this or could be that. Your scenario planning is, you know, what I do. So we gave them four scenarios on how 3D printing could impact the business. And some of them were troubling, but some of them were very, you know, opportunistic. It's been a decade. And only now in the past year or two has that employer reacted to 3D printing and started to do as opposed to being in front of it. Yes.

And taking advantage of it, they were reacting to it after the fact. The problem with planning anymore is historically in the third age. What was the issue with it? What was the issue with that your students? Well, it was an opportunity to create materials that would better enable 3D printing. So they could, they could get into 3D printing. an area that they had nothing previous, obviously didn't exist, where they could have made real progress in terms of selling stuff.

They could have capitalized on the market, and instead they're playing catch up. See, the problem that I see with this 3D printing is, because I did a lot of research in my academics on 3D printing about two years back, and there was a lot of issues that I've came across, in my research with emotional driven employees that didn't receive what they were supposed to be given, they ended up utilizing the company's systems to create their own weapon and end up shooting up the place. I came across that in a couple of, I think, three different points. I would have to

find that sources. But I just thought that was really interesting how this individual was able to get just the makeup of a weapon and then make one and it fired. Like, what the hell? Well, the thing about the 3D printing technology as it evolves and it's evolving rapidly is it's going to be the Star Trek replicator eventually. I mean, they're 3D printing food. When you, the military is using 3D printing to get rid of inventory, putting 3D printers on a naval ship.

So you don't have to carry spare parts. Wow, that's smart. That's really smart. So you just print the part that you need as opposed to carrying inventory. The world of 3D printing is real-time local customized production. All of the rules of 20th century mass production are being obsolesced when you combine 3D printing, and AI and the internet of things and the ability of a small company to reach local customers, customize a product, and give it to them real time.

Now, let's change this. Let's like we covered a lot and it's great. You have a lot of insight. But now let's frame this towards an organization. How can they utilize your process here in their strategic planning to be, the competitor, but also to realize what is actually going on with their resources? Well, I guess I'd make two bumper stickers, okay? The first bumper sticker is extend your vision over the hill, a longer time frame.

I realize everybody gets driven by the next quarter results, but you will not survive unless you see what's over the hill that's going to eat you. And so you need to think out longer term. Now, the perversity, the perversity of that is the rate and degree of change is accelerating. Yes. So if you went back 50 years and you were looking forward 10 years, the difference between 1950 and 1960 wasn't that dramatic. the difference between 2022 and 2032 is going to be unrecognizable.

So unless you have that longer term vision to see the rate of change coming at you in your industry, it's going to smack you in the face. The second element that I throw out there is pay attention to the, the facts, so much of the conventional wisdom is wrong because people haven't really, again, you've got this fire hose of data, and you've got to get the information out of that that's useful. That's hard to do. You're trying to get a fire hose down to a teacup. And so that's a skill set is fighting what's useful and what's not to be looking at that perspective. It's a different mindset than business has had in the past.

Right there. What you just said, how can leadership hone that ability to get this information from a fire hose to a teacup down to their employees so that they can think for themselves and have this culture that we're all striving for? Well, boy, now you're talking generational issues. And the people that are in the top of these group-thake pyramids, our CEOs and our CEOs and our vice presidents, are the Hans Rossling survey guys and gals who have the data wrong. So they think they're right. if I were a vice president or a CEO and had the capacity to, the thing I, first thing I would do is I would pull in a bunch of my Gen Z people and ask them, can you explain to me what's going on in the world?

Because they don't know. So the perversity is the bottom of the pyramid at the moment. And if you think of group thick pyramids, the bottom is usually the youngest and the top is the oldest. It's just, you know, my point on wisdom, why are old people always viewed as wise? Well, old people are viewed as wise because they survived enough failures over the course of their lives to know what not to do. The experience. It was the experience. I don't know how valuable experience is going forward because that last decade experience

doesn't apply to the next decade. So wisdom may actually in some respects be inverted. Well, interesting. I would look at it as the transferable skills. Like I would say a military training, it's transferable inside an organization. those kind of skills. Yeah, but knowledge of the, of all of the change and the interconnectivity of all of these change agents, who's most adept at looking at that?

It's young people who grew up with technology. Hell, I grew up with a black and white TV with three channels and no remote, okay? The story I tell in the book about my daughter-in-law and her three kids. Four kids. They're sitting watching Home Alone in the summer, you know, Christmas in the summer. They're watching the movie Home Alone. McCauley Culkin is watching a VHS tape of a 1930s gangster movie. The kids interrupt my daughter and look and say, what's that machine?

She says, that's a VHS tape player. Well, how does that work? She said, well, you would go to a store like Airholz or Blockbuster, and they would have these long shelves filled with these. You're monologuing. And the point is, my grandson looked at her and said, how did you live like that? You know, because their world is so different. So if the young people, the young people can see it if they're given the opportunity,

if they're being asked, would you look over the next 10 years for me and tell me what's going to happen, they can figure it out because they've grown up with it. People like me, we're boomers. I mean, we, if they were given the opportunity now, there's another underlying issue is millennials being able to speak up and what they see that is occurring. And then getting these experienced individuals to listen. I mean, just to go back on as far as the data not being correct and them looking at the data and them being so certain they're putting their lives on something that is false. How do they do it? Well, that's that's the challenge. That's the challenge. You've got this intergenerational of young people who perhaps have a better

view of what the world is than older people who think they're wise because they live through stuff that's now obsolete. And how do you get old people to listen to? to young people. And it's baked into us. I mean, we live in groups, and those groups live by group think. And there is nothing more insidious than groupthink. And in order to get ahead in an hierarchy to increase your status, you repeat what's been said above you to get ahead.

You don't fight the next channel of a layer above you. You go along with it. That's why we have wars. Because somebody at the top says, and that's what we're seeing in the Ukraine. Somebody at the top says, I want to do this. And everybody down that chain goes, yes, sir, and goes along. Because they want to improve their status in the group. It's instative.

And if I step out of the group, take a look at sustainability as an example. There are a number of sustainability experts who have sort of challenged the conventional thinking on climate change. And basically have come out and said, you know, if we are concerned about this, if this is real and we're concerned about it, then the answer that we need to address is nuclear efficient. we need more nuclear energy if we are going to change given our energy consumption or change what they're doing the guys that have stepped out and I recounted several in the book that have said you know you're doing this wrong we're looking at the environmental issues wrong not that the environmental don't exist but you've got the wrong answer because you're looking at it the wrong way yes sustainability going forward is not going to a result, a function of a mass production model of smokestacks and drain pipes per few making millions.

It's going to be a different economic model with different sustainability challenges. So let me just explain that with the nuclear energy rather than saying we need more nuclear energy. I mean, if you're trying to prevent an issue, that's definitely not going to help. This just takes one problem. Well, but I would argue that two points. First, nuclear fission has a bad rap. Yes. When we think of nuclear fission, we think of three-mile island and we think of Chernobyl. And we think of nuclear reactors that were designed in the 50s, in the 60s.

When you look at current technology on nuclear fission, there are a number of approaches to fission. They're making microreactors that are comparatively benign. nine, okay, they don't carry any of the issues that those traditional units had. Nobody's talking about that. Then you look at nuclear fusion. There are at least a dozen different start, well, Lockheed Martin is in a startup, but there are a dozen different groups that are working on new and novel approaches to nuclear fusion. That's not the big tokamak.

These are small, if you will, micro reactors. That's scary. Well, but fusion is benign. There's nothing scary about fusion. If one of these guys gets it right and can get nuclear fusion commercially available, that fundamentally changes everything. Fundamentally changes everything. But without getting into, you know,

the weeds, there are so many sustainability issues that are all predicated upon an assumption of what the future looks like and that, that assumption of what the future looks like is wrong. So, Terry, we're going to put this towards wrap up here because we could keep going and going and there's a lot more. And I hear my son in the background. So. Nature. Yes. Yes. How can our listeners get in touch with you if they were to learn more about your writing and your thoughts and ideas?

Sure. My email address is TB Thiel, T-B-T-H-I-E-E-L-E at 4th-F-R-U-R-T-H-H-H-H-A-G-E-D-C-O-E-E-D-C-O-E-E-D-C-O. And the books on Amazon. Our fourth age, a village elder story for young hominis sapientes about their future history. Beautiful. I really do like how this goes into. I wish we could have went more into it. It just started off as a great conversation and I just wanted to listen and it was nice.

Sorry. Sorry. I'm a lawyer. You put it in a quarter and I'll talk forever. I love it. No, I definitely want to have you back on. But, Terry, I do appreciate you coming on to your transformation station. You are more than welcome.

Enjoy the conversation. You've been listening to your transformation station, your voice on the hard truths of leadership. We hope you've enjoyed the show. We hope you've gotten some useful and practical information. Make sure to like, rate, and review the show. Remember, your transformation station is on all major platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, TikTok, and YouTube, and visit the website. Till next time.

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