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Eric Pilon-Bignell | Futurist and DAWNY OF THE 4TH INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION
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ABOUT THIS EPISODE
https://youtu.be/vTnAORr77Y8
ABOUT THIS EPISODE
Between the emergence of ChatGPT, Google’s upcoming AI thing, and Microsoft’s vaguely evil Bing, the world is definitely on the precipice of a HUGE change. If you’ve tried these tools, you know. In fact, how do you know that any of the things I am saying now aren’t just part of the script that the hive mind came up with? It’s getting scary and confusing, isn’t it?
Good thing we have people like this episode’s guest, Eric Pilon-Bignell. Eric is a futurist who wrote a best-selling book entitled “Surfing Rogue Waves” which is a fantastic guide to everything that is going to change the world. Blockchain? Yes. AI? Yes. What’s for dinner? Not yet, but there is an algorithm for that. The world is going to change, for the better, and Eric will help you best prepare for our robot overlords.
This Episode’s sketch: “Law and Order: BTC”
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© Copyright 2023 Stuart Rice
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MORE ABOUT THE GUEST
Eric Pilon-Bignell is a best selling author, speaker, and pragmatic futurist. Eric grew up just south of Toronto, Canada. His recent book, Surfing Rogue Waves released on May 25th. The book presents a gripping and insightful framework on how to pick up a board and surf the rogue waves of the 21st century. Eric’s love of being active and outdoors led him to use the parallels between life and surfing as a metaphor for how we can deal with the changes happening around us.
Eric is a pragmatic futurist focused on addressing disruption by increasing the creative capacity of individuals, teams, and organizations to ignite change, innovation, and foster continuous growth. Eric has an undergraduate degree in engineering, an MBA in Information Systems, and a Ph.D. in Global Leadership. His doctoral work primarily explored complexity sciences centered on executive cognition and their use of intuitive improvisation, decision-making, artificial intelligence, and data-based decision models.
Eric founded PROJECT7, an initiative to raise awareness and money for research on brain-related illnesses. When he is not working with clients, researching, or writing, he can be found in the mountains or on the water. Eric is currently working and living with his wife and dog in Chicago, Illinois.
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TRANSCRIPT
[00:00:00] Stuart: In this episode, Futurist and Dani of the 4th Industrial Revolution, Eric Pylon, Big Null. And I came up with a few sketch ideas. Oh, I just made this super intelligent computer that can out think everything. Whoops. What do we do now, a discussion about Blockchain but like complete nonsense. The Blockchain law drama where there's no drama, like which one did we pick? You'll find out on this episode of it's a sketch comedy behind Cash. Welcome to sketch comedy podcast show. The one of a kind show where I Stewart Rice invite interesting people to have intriguing conversations and then improvise a comedy sketch based on what we talked about. It's the only show like it on the internet between the emergence of chat GPT Google's upcoming AI thing and Microsoft's vaguely evil being. The world is definitely on the precipice of huge change. If you've tried these tools, you know, in fact, how do you know that any of the things that I'm saying right now aren't just part of the script that the hive mind came up with? It's getting scary and confusing, isn't it good thing? We have people like this episode's guests, Eric Pylon. Bignell. Eric is a futurist who wrote a best selling book called Surfing Rogue Waves, which I've read and is fantastic. Uh And it's a great guy that gives you everything that's going on with the world, like all the new technologies and new changes, Blockchain. It's in there, you know. Ai, yeah, what's for dinner? No, you still got to come up with that for now. There's gonna be an algorithm, I'm sure. But Eric's book and Eric himself is actually going to help us like smoothly go into this brand new era. That's going to show up an era that honestly, I'm very excited about because I know a lot of people talk about people losing jobs. But it's kind of my hope is that we don't have to have a lot of crummy jobs. I mean, think of all those fortunate writers at all those crappy websites with the list, the list tickles that don't have to do that anymore. It's great. Maybe they can actually start writing real stuff anyway, without any further ado my conversation with Eric Pylon, Bignell. Hey, Eric, thanks so much for joining us today.
[00:02:43] Eric Pilon-Bignell: Thanks so much for having me. Yeah,
[00:02:45] Stuart: I've got a question for you real quick. What makes you interesting?
[00:02:51] Eric Pilon-Bignell: I guess that depends who you ask.
[00:02:55] Stuart: I asked you this time. That's
[00:02:57] Eric Pilon-Bignell: true. You did. Yeah, that, that, that is a good question. I'm not sure what makes me interesting. I almost feel like asking you what makes you interesting. But I'm sure you've probably got that a few times. I have.
[00:03:07] Stuart: It's a good style
[00:03:08] Eric Pilon-Bignell: tech. Yeah. So now that I'm done stalling, I guess there's a few things that really make me interesting in a way, I think for the most part, I'm just a fairly average person. Didn't have any kind of special superpowers or anything growing up. And I can't really say I new anything. I never knew an author. I didn't know anything about how to publish a book. And, you know, I'm a best selling author. So that's kind of fun. I couldn't, I couldn't tell you that I planned it that way without lying to you. But, you know, that's a neat, a neat, probably uh interesting talking point I would imagine. Oh,
[00:03:48] Stuart: yeah, that's definitely one that I'll ask a lot of questions on because I also wrote a book and it was not the best sellers. So, yeah. So you wrote a book called, writing
[00:04:01] Eric Pilon-Bignell: a book is definitely,
[00:04:05] Stuart: it's, it's definitely sorry, go
[00:04:07] Eric Pilon-Bignell: ahead. Sorry. It's uh it's definitely interesting, at least for me. And this is ironic being uh you know, kind of an improv sketch comedy podcast. The book's got a, some improvisational theory and the importance of it. But to be honest with you, no one really talks about this out loud. But the way, at least I wrote my book was I have kind of no clue what I was doing. And I just kind of kept going with it and opportunistically, I improvised my way when the opportunities came and then I got an editor because I don't know. So I researched that and got a publisher and then all of a sudden you've done this book and it's this petrifying moment where you're like, oh, I need to make this official and I can't take it back and change it. And then the reality of life hits you in and you're sitting there thinking, is anyone, how does anyone know about this book? Do I have to market this book? How does this work? And uh yeah, so it's, it's, it was, it was a crazy journey all the way through. And I don't think at least I didn't have the sequential plan for it. There was a heavy component of improvisation, I guess we'll go, we'll go
[00:05:12] Stuart: with. That's pretty cool. The book is called Surfing Rogue Waves. And um how would you describe the book to somebody who had never heard of the book before?
[00:05:25] Eric Pilon-Bignell: Yeah, absolutely. So, it's not a technical book by any means, it's not a technical read. It's really addresses the rapid pace of disruption we're facing in our everyday lives, humanity as a whole. But if you bring that all the way down to us, the individual, right? We didn't vote for things like the internet or braces, but here they are. So we have all this change happening and we tend to have this inability to notice change while it's happening, we just notice it after it happens. And you know, I'm very positive on it. I think we'll solve incredible opportunities in these next kind of decades coming. But this exponential change is very different than the previous change we had, right? When you're getting into material sciences and nanotechnology and this robust pipeline of biotech and Blockchain and AI we are going to be changing everything we know about our lives, our worlds ourselves as humans. And the book kind of paints a higher picture, not so much of the peak performance individual, but more a framework, surfing framework, ironically, surfing roadways um on how to navigate a lot of this onslaught of complexity and change and how when you understand this, you can project and see further into the future because we understand these exponential trajectories of a lot, these technologies and megatrends. And we also understand complexity sciences and how we can't control it, which drives us nuts, but we can shape it in the right direction. So it's very much for that for the individual, whether you're the CEO of your life, the CEO of a company that the bound, the boundaries are very blurry now between, you know, life and business and we're very much moving kind of all at once at the same pace. And without this framework, it can be very overwhelming. Yeah, information, fake news, everything's an overload right now. And if you don't have that kind of higher level mindset to pull you out of it. It can come across as a lot. And it's, we were taught a lot of things in life that are counterintuitive. But we should be doing more of now. You know, if you told at least you and me growing up, if we just winged it, that was a big, no, no. And improvisations. Not just winging it. It's very much an art and a science, but that's a lot more of what we need because we can't actually predict the change. We know the changes coming. We don't know when it's coming in. What order and that drives us nuts, obviously. But we're seeing these trends and as these trends augment each other and amplify each other, we get the emergence of rogue waves. So we have these different waves of complexity coming in and every now and then they all collide at the same point. There's this emerging of this violent rogue wave. It feels like that's kind of what the book's about paralleling with life, of course.
[00:07:53] Stuart: And we've never experienced the level of complexity and disruption that we're about to face. Like we have never come close. I mean, the closest thing would be like the internet and watching as lawmakers tried to fumble their way through um making sure things were as best they could be because there were so many different things that were out there that were brand new um I mean, you mentioned Blockchain, like I, I, I still, like, I have investment in Blockchain. I still have no clue what it actually does, how it's actually going to affect me on a day to day basis. Like these are the things, these are questions and I can't be the only one, right? Like everybody's got these questions, but it's almost like that meme if you've ever seen the meme of Chris Pratt. Pratt. And he's like, I don't know about Blockchain, but at this point, I'm afraid to ask or I don't know about AI but at this point, I'm afraid to ask like,
[00:08:54] Eric Pilon-Bignell: I think the book unpacks a lot of that and those are great questions you pose and there are bigger elements to a lot of these questions as well which see um as we look into the future, they're a little bit, right? So these, these megatrends Blockchain and the obvious ones are Cryptocurrency, right? We watched that but, but Blockchain is going to do a lot more than that. You touched on one of them. For example, when we have, you know, in irreversible ledgers with completed non timidity, that's not the word I'm looking for. But you know what I mean? So if you're following along with it, we we we have entire industries that change, right? Insurance industries. But lawyers, for example, we have smart contracts, you and me can make, make you, I can buy my home from you and this smart contract layered with some ai on top of the Blockchain executes everything for us. You and me don't have to do anything. Our ai can essentially just talk and it's a secure safe transaction. Well, now all of a sudden what happens to, you know, entire entire mortgage industries, right? So there's, but we're seeing that kind of across and when you have These, we have, when I say robust pipeline, I just mean if this megatrend doesn't hit another one white and that might sound very vague from a high level, but we might be off the Blockchain. One might be 15 years old and not five years old, but five years old might be crisper right? Or it could, it could be something else that, you know, all of a sudden we have real time monitoring and we understand nano and biotechnology better and material sciences is really advanced so we can track ourselves in real time. So doctors suddenly don't need to waste time checking up on healthy people. They can take care of sick people because I'm being monitored through data in real time, through an ai that flags anything. We live longer, we kill a lot of diseases. We have autonomous cars, suddenly there's less car accidents. Well, there's big problems there because like to your entire legal departments sadly depend on a car accident that there there is, there is an entire industry when I say industry, I mean, not like a couple 100 people working, I mean, like billions of dollars built around. Suddenly our hospitals aren't as full. What happens. Our healthcare system collapses. Like there are, there are massive disruptions that are so interconnected that we can't really decouple them and break them off and make to your point, the bed on one and we don't know exactly which will hit in what order. And the book really helps paint a little bit of that picture. We don't need to be a specialist and explain all of them. We just need to have an understanding of what's coming. So when we see them start to form, when we see these waves starting to collide and a rogue waves coming, we can position ourselves in the best position, right? And no other time in our lives, kind of like you mentioned, um will our decisions be so important as small as they might be there? There, they are ultimately going to shape, you know, no matter the size, the fate of humanity. And that sounds all encompassing and over the top. But, you know, we can't really fight these waves, advancements and progressions, but we can use them to our advantage, right? And, and it's, it's kind of riding surf where we find ourselves in a future state that's better all around for everyone, more successful for you. However you define it may be more family time, you know, maybe getting closer with loved ones or maybe making more money, whatever it is, there are internet size opportunities in all of these megatrends and they will appear one day as the internet. And there are certain people who were riding that wave pretty hard, pretty early. If you look at maybe Amazon and a few of these other ones and I'd say they're doing pretty well right now. So they're not all, you know, it's not all you got to be a beso here. But we have all these small interconnected, realistically, individuals, even in business, make upwards of 90% of their decisions are ad hoc improvisational in a way, right? So we have all these small interconnected, improvisational complexity that we have in our life in our everyday life, how we manage our, we'd love to, well, we wouldn't, I would, we'd all, a lot of people would love to just philosophy is right about AI and all these future megatrends. We have jobs, right? We have bills to pay and milk to put in the fridge and all this, this fun stuff. So the book kind of gives a really a 30,000 ft view and some of the ethical conversations we need to be having you. Me, anyone needs. As soon as you say, I, my wife is a great example. She's in health care, she just rolls her eyes and she's like great robots and we're all gonna die. Shut up. But really there's ethical questions here, right? How like, you know, we can't is it wrong to deceive people with ai when they're not aware, most people would say yes. And then it's like if we're taking care of aging baby boomer generation and we understand that, you know, it is deceitful, but it's okay because it actually releases right, the right serotonin and dopamine that actually make them happier through the end of their life will suddenly we're okay with that. But now we're deciding what's ok and not, OK. And what you and me think here or maybe in the West culture as a whole might be different than other cultures. So we have these, these trends that we can't manage in the way we've managed all these problems in the past, right? We can't, we can't have our own, do our own thing in this country, you know, and something in another country, rogue waves are good and bad. A great example is when we're fighting through right now COVID, for example, blindsided us. We weren't ready for a clear example of how parts of the single country, never mind a world to handle kind of these global problems.
[00:14:12] Stuart: Yeah. Well, you know, it's, it's funny you mentioned the AI and so it's the people's perception of AI is very interesting. It's very interesting. And um and you brought up a very good example of the older generation maybe because as you get older, like you have less people in your life. And so I bought my parents on Alexa Right. And my mom would actually have small conversations with Alexa and have a little bit joy and then she could talk to me about it and it's like, oh, she didn't even realize she was participating in the whole AI thing that she thought was scary and all of that type of thing. And it is, it's, it's, it's one of those technologies is one of those things that we've developed that, well, probably not even realizes he's being implemented. It just starts to happen and like the refrigerator knows that you're down on milk and gives the suggestion to grab milk, who's going to dislike that the refrigerators basically manipulating you giving it as a job, but that's not, that's not a negative, it's a positive. Um And so you probably run into a lot of those like arguments against newer technologies because people like to argue against them. I don't really understand them, but they
[00:15:40] Eric Pilon-Bignell: do. And I think our culture is a very shock and awe culture as well. AI has been, you know, bastardized by Hollywood. When Ai is going to be a problem, it's not going to be evil. T 1000 terminator. Why would, why would an AI take on all of our inferior evolutionary biological problems? Right? It would be a cloud based thing that could just do whatever I wanted and it could repurpose our atoms or some nanotechnology for wherever they wanted. It doesn't even have to hate us in general, but the book doesn't get in To that as much because that's getting, you know, a bit more like 30-50 years were philosophizing. At that point,
[00:16:17] Stuart: Kurzweil said, like 30 years, he was very specific
[00:16:21] Eric Pilon-Bignell: has been scarily accurate on 80% plus is um yeah, so something's coming, you know, in his singularity is another one. But this is even before that to your point, there are a lot of people who are like, we'll put a pin in it. We should stop AI but you can't stop AI because there's so many other things going in. When you explain to your point, if you took someone, you know, from 30 years ago, 50 years ago, 30 years ago, you mentioned we're going through so much more change now, we're experiencing 100 years of disruption every few years right now. So how's that for context? Right? If you took someone from 50 years ago and you said, so check this out, we're going to give you this little metal and device and it's gonna have access to all of the knowledge of humanity. You can talk to it in real time. It'll give you back the information, it tracks every single thing you do. People would be like your, you're crazy like you beyond lost your mind. Right? Well, we have that, those are our cell phones like it's, it's, it's already there. So when people think AI they think this self, they think a G I R A S I or artificial general intelligence or these like super forms of Hollywood movies where somehow this super form of intelligence goes head to head with us and then we outsmarted at the end because that's how it's gonna end. I mean, when, when, when, when, when you understand exponential and you look at like what happens after an exponential curve, it's artificial general intelligence that would be like you and me in an ant. And again, we don't hate ants. We don't care about ants, but we also just step on ants. If they're in our way, we're not, we're not out to get them. But you know, if we might, we might read them if they're in our house. But there's no way ants are going to predict the future of humanity. That that makes no sense. That would be the equivalent of us trying to, you know, outsmart the new S I if we ever got to some kind of artificial super,
[00:18:15] Stuart: what, what are the steps we need to worry about to get to that? Do you, do you um do you have a good understanding of like what are the technological steps we would need to get to? Now, we're subservient. We will make great pets. As Perry Farrell said many, many years ago,
[00:18:33] Eric Pilon-Bignell: I think, I think when you layer on some of the other technologies and in, in material sciences and the biology and the science with the ai and all these things, we are going to remove incredible things. Sickle cell, you name it all these pieces. It's, it'll be, it'll be incredible. We have this inability to draw the line between upgrading humans in fixing humans. So in the past, if you the men's and we've invented lots of great things, but with CRISPR, we will fix incredible technologies. And at the same time, we're also going to be able to do blue eyes, blonde hair, six ft eight super athlete, super smart, who draws the line on when it's okay to be using some of these technologies. So the one of the first steps is we need to be having more, honestly, more conversations about these technologies because they are not technical debates. When and I in a book, I unpack a little bit of just the ai ones in a very real world sense where you can say I'm not in a I, I'm going off the grid. But unless you're throwing your car out and your credit cards, those days have passed, right? If you walk down the sidewalk, someone's ring camera has facially profiled and understands all the data points of where you were exactly when and what
[00:19:53] Stuart: day? That's right. You putting down that you're not going to take the COVID shot because you don't want anybody tracking you when you're doing it on your cell phone on Facebook makes no sense,
[00:20:03] Eric Pilon-Bignell: right? And I mean, you know, a lot of us have like social we're giving, we're given numbers that they literally track us for that. We pay taxes on like this is not anything new, you know. So, but the, but who has the rights to that data? And what can they do with that data? Who owns your data? Ultimately, if I ask you that or anyone that people don't know? Right. We don't, we don't have the answers to who owns that data. what they can do with that data, we have different countries doing different things. And when you look into like the deep convoluted neural networks or some of the major advancements right now in A I and some people are trying to figure out two very much mirrors our human brains. But the way it develops through multiple layers is it has all these little weights that it constantly adjusts on the information you put in and it eventually gets you the, the answer and that's where you kind of hear this black box and you don't have to get into that kind of mess. But you know, depending on the information you put in on, it's, it's irrelevant to who designed or build the algorithm that can build in cultural, you know, problems and biases that might be, you know, norms. We don't want that. We've moved on from believe it or not, not that long ago. And when I talk on a, you know, like a humanity scale, you know, 1000 when you look back thousands of years and hundreds of years ago, there was one point when everyone was like, yeah, slavery's okay. And now we're like, slavery is not okay
[00:21:25] Stuart: anymore. It's appalling now. Yeah.
[00:21:27] Eric Pilon-Bignell: Yeah. So if we build in our current ethics and tell that to something that's going to exponentially expanded in the future, we might have a lot of ethics right now. We're not forcing kids, batch processing kids to go to school 8 to 3 every day might seem like barbaric to a, you know, a more intelligent version of ourselves could have been using right, cognitive computing and stimulating their minds and getting them excited where they think they're playing games, but they're learning. We have all that technology now and these are these right kind of shifts that we're seeing starting to build and they're going to absolutely destroy industries. Education is the right one for disruption, I think good or bad again. We, we chatted quick about COVID. That's a bad one for sure. But we have been talking in industries forever about this digital transformation. So COVID comes around and it kind of forces the hands and now all of a sudden, companies are forced to work from home. They all haven't all done well and not all jobs work out to work from home either. I'm not saying there's not lots of sadness and unnecessary, you know, job loss, but for the most part, industries done fairly well. If you take if you take academics, well, they just, they never cared about digital transformation. They ignored all the waves that were coming in, this rogue wave showed up and now they're like, uh, take an eight year old and stick them in front of Zoom for eight hours. Like, what are you talking about? I can't even
[00:22:44] Stuart: bananas. Right. Like, how did we ever think that was going to be effective?
[00:22:50] Eric Pilon-Bignell: Yeah. Just a complete, you know, failure and that just shows the difference between a mindset where, you know, a lot of industry was looking and ready for this digital transformation. And academics were like, well, we've never changed in 100 years. So why would we change now? Well, that's why I have changed now because that's how road destruction works. It doesn't care if you're not disrupting yourself, you're dying nowadays. You know, it's very
[00:23:11] Stuart: true, very true. You mentioned Amazon is a good company that has and a lot of industries have really done a very good job of adapting. Um What are the keys like, what do you, what do you need to have in order to be good at adapting to this stuff? And obviously improv like being able to somehow force you into the future and be able to come up with the proper line for everything. But um like what do you think of the things?
[00:23:38] Eric Pilon-Bignell: Yeah, I would unpack really quickly what I call the surfing framework, which is just to help us kind of view and, um, you know, I'll give you the cheat sheet version. So there's a lot more obviously to unpack.
[00:23:54] Stuart: There's probably more than a couple of pages to the
[00:23:56] Eric Pilon-Bignell: book. Right. Yeah. 300 through it. But the serving framework really identifies a complexity that we look for in our lives. So, surfing can be broken down into three things. Right? A surfer waves and a surfboard. So, if we think of waves, that's the ocean, that's the world of complexity. That's our lives. It's always changing, right? It's moving. What makes a good surfer, not the fact that they can do real time, computational physics and understand lunar and tidal patterns and know exactly what they just surf, right? It takes practice general understanding. So that's a bit of the model. So we've got waves, we understand this through our, our environment, through complexity sciences. We look at a specific part of complexity sciences which I equate to like the barrel of a wave. The ultimate move surfing is to get in the barrel of the wave. But it's very, it's very counterintuitive because the barrel of the wave is equally frightening and exciting. It's where you become way better and it's such a rush and it's so exciting and you become a better surfer, but it also chews you up and spits you out every now and then when you fall. So if we live the way we're always brought up, move things back to the control in your life. Right. Don't, don't, don't be in those uncomfortable spaces. You don't wanna go full extreme, obviously, full road. That's chaos. That's an entirely different kind of framework. But you don't want to stay in control either. You want to push for these certain points of pressure in, in life and in systems and not all pressure is good. Some of it's toxic and you want to get out of there. But we need to embrace that and comfort a lot more and give up and being okay, not being controlled. So we've got the wave. The surfer is us. We improvise and so how do we stay in a barrel? Ultimately, we make the decisions right there, almost instinctive. Um But we've got to kind of understand that. But the third part is your surfboard, this is your rational foundation to stand on. You can't surf on your feet. You need a surfboard. Well, in life, you can't just improvise on wrong things, right? You need to improvise on rational things that map back to the reality of the world, right? And right now we're seeing a whole ton of misinformation. A lot of people have trouble kind of unpacking and falling into their biases and their old beliefs. And if you improvise off that and it's not accurate, right? It doesn't matter your, it's your, it's irrelevant, you're not improvising in the right part of the wave. So really there's, there's kind of if I really dumbed it down, it's, it's three steps, right? You want to look for these barrels, these, these, these points of pressure in your life. We, we identify this specific pressure within certain adaptive systems and complexity sciences as the need for new and novel solutions. So when you're in a situation that's happening, it's there, right? New partnerships or relationships. Right. Suddenly you're, you're talking to this Alexa person in your life, healthy conflicting perspectives. We shy away from that again, not unhealthy and toxic perspectives, but it's okay to challenge each other. It's, it's not a dogmatic extreme one side or the other. Like we're seeing, we should have lots of overlap, we should have healthy conflicting perspectives, right? And there are situations when there's an interdependence that's, you know, you're forced to kind of work together as your only kind of means of success and that's uncomfortable. But again, those are good pressures we should look for. And as the surfer, this won't be anything new to you, you, you'll know better than myself and anyone else. But for those listening, the improvisational part is an art and a science very much, right? So the importance of spontaneity and, and going with what feels like your gut sometimes, right? Or, or you know, the classic. Yes. And, but always be accepting two ideas, don't shoot them down, like accept, you can counter, you can do a lot of things you can build off them. But always be listening is a really big one. We all think we're great listeners. We're not, we're terrible. Uh And, and to leverage those around us. So you complexity works very much like that. A team is always stronger than an individual. So that's step two, step three is, is the surfboard, the rational foundation. And here we have to, we have to, we have to work and this is the hardest part because it forces us to look inwards at ourselves. We're not proving this to anyone other than ourselves. But we gotta be aware of our cognitive biases. We gotta work to notice these biases. We gotta be aware of our rational beliefs, right? Understand fake beliefs and belief, errors and challenge things that maybe we were just always told was right. But we never really thought to think about why they were right. Um In the book, I think I call her Aunt Karen. But, you know, being open to letting facts change your mind, I think that's a big one, right. We get very much. It's, it's one thing if you're cheering for your sports team, I'm irrational because I cheered for the same sports team my whole life. I'll tell you they're gonna win every year and they're not. But yeah, but life's not like that, right? We have to be open to letting facts change our mind. And, you know, I think remembering the strength and weaknesses as we go through all this, as machines and humans and machines. I mean, ai and all these technologies and everything, it's machines and humans are stronger together than either will ever be alone currently in our foreseeable future. So we're not at a point where either is replacing and, you know, seeing those opportunities and thinking how we best leverage both of those because the reality is when we're moving into new unknown waters, there's no data for that. But when it comes to predicting stuff, we have unfortunately been slaughtered by algorithms and AI and they can predict things a lot better than us when they have the right data points. So it's, it's very much a balance of those three elements. You know, the three kind of pillars of that surfing framework that when you understand that and we go through some examples in the first half of the book is a little bit more foundational building this in the back half gets really fun and you kind of surfs up, we get in all kinds of fun situations and it helps you kind of see it. And when you think like that, you start to view the world a little bit differently, your interactions a little bit differently and you might not feel it in the moment much like you don't really notice, you know, friction coefficients and water in your surfboard when you're surfing, but you're surfing, right? And the last part is it's got to be pragmatic. You gotta, you can know, you can be the most knowledgeable surfer physicist in theory in the world unless you get out there and surf and take some wipeouts. Like, you're never gonna do it. So, we're gonna, we're gonna screw up, we're gonna fall. That's okay. Like, we've gotta just, it's better to do something and fail than, than nothing right now at the end of the day. Yeah,
[00:30:00] Stuart: action is definitely the most important thing you're gonna do in any given day if you're not doing anything. Yeah. I mean, it would be neat if we could all be academics and think about all that stuff and, but someone's got to go out there and make that change happen. So, you've got the hair for it. I'm guessing you surf.
[00:30:19] Eric Pilon-Bignell: I'm, I am a terrible surfer. Yeah. Oh, yeah. I try, I'm not, I'm that idiot for sure. You know, for me I probably get up for what feels like four minutes and it's probably 12 seconds and it probably feels like an awesome 12 ft barrel and it's probably four ft wave. But I grew up kind of landlocked in Canada. Right. Never got served too much but, you know, did much of the wakeboarding and snowboarding that stuff and I had some opportunities to spend a lot of time in Australia and the west coast of the U S and I just kind of jump in the water every chance I could again. Not because I was any good, but I was never big and I should have been and I just wasn't, but I was never big, you know, into yoga and a lot of the stuff. And I found surfing had this really perfect mix for me. You're sitting out there and the water is almost flat and you're waiting for sets and it's so, you know, bliss and tranquil and calming and then all of a sudden it builds kind of like life, right? And then all of a sudden you're getting dialed in and you're locked in and you went from this like incredible Zen calm too, like so intense because for me, I'm just trying to paddle. So I don't die and get chewed up by this wave. But, you know, you're like everything, every decision you make, everything is like again, you're improvising it, but everything matters, right? Shifting your body weight, your arms, how fast you're going, what you're looking at where you're going. It's, it's this amazing, you know, and then you go there, you ride it for a bit. You didn't. At least I do. I end up getting spit out, chewed up by the end, you know, spit some nose out, spit some water up my nose, get back at it. But like that, that, that amazing mix is very much like why it parallels I feel so much to life. So I, I definitely not a good surfer, but I love to get in the water any chance I
[00:32:02] Stuart: get, yeah. You know, I've lived on the ocean. I've never been surfing. Maybe, just convinced me. I need to go try Europe.
[00:32:12] Eric Pilon-Bignell: You in Portland?
[00:32:13] Stuart: No, I'm in Denver. I'm, I'm landlocked now. I'm in Denver now. But, yeah, I was in Portland but I graduated high school in Santa Cruz. I had friends that surfed. I had friends that surfed. That would go. Hey, I've got an extra everything. Like, let's go and I just never did it. Yeah. You
[00:32:33] Eric Pilon-Bignell: know what else? You know, what else is great about it? To be honest with you all up and down there, you can, you can go get a little, you know, rent a board for the day or for a half a day and go on your own and, you know, you kind of figure it out on your own a little bit, but it's just so, especially nowadays we are so, so inundated with screens is the word I'm gonna use. But, you know, it's your phone, it's this, you're on the computer, you're so connected when you're surfing, there's nothing else you can do. Your, they're your, your present in the moment with your thoughts. And I think that more than ever is and everyone's surfing as we're going to call, it is different. It could be snowboarding or hiking or reading a book or writing music. I don't know. But whatever your surfing is, it's really important more than ever. Now with this kind of overload and stimulus. I feel that we kind of find our places to surf because it's, it's a, it's a cleanse. Right. It's, it's like a reset almost where we're just so connected all the time. Especially now it's moved. Right. Work from home. People are like, that's the last thing they look at is the screen when they put down, the first thing they look at when they wake up and they're literally on it the entire day. It's, it's,
[00:33:46] Stuart: That's 100% true. I do it too. I can't say
[00:33:51] Eric Pilon-Bignell: guilty. I know. I know. So I think those, those, those little, if you can find those little, you know, spots in life to get away, it helps for sure.
[00:34:02] Stuart: Yeah. Well, I honestly, I could talk about this all day. I am a, I've read everything that Kurzweil's written and I, your book is fascinating to me, but we do have to record a sketch Eric. I know my mind was blown during that. I'm pretty sure a lot of listeners were to do me a favor. I, your book covers so much more. Please tell them where they can find more about you and more about surfing rogue waves.
[00:34:39] Eric Pilon-Bignell: Yeah, I can be found at Eric PB dot me E R I C P B dot M E and the books there as well as this podcast and some other information on, on some of the initiatives that have going on and on all of the social handles, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and linkedin, of course, which are all a slash at Eric PB dot me version of whatever the handles are nowadays, they're calling
[00:35:11] Stuart: Them. and now our sketch law and order BTC in 32 in the criminal justice system, technology based offenses are considered confusing and are largely swept under the rug. In New York City, the overpaid detectives and lawyers involved with these felonies are kept employed because no one else wants to deal with them. These are their stories. I'm telling you your client absolutely committed this murder.
[00:35:45] Eric Pilon-Bignell: Look your honor. I'm not really sure what he's talking about practicing law for 30 years and there is zero evidence of any kind that can point anything to my client being even remotely close to the area in which this murder took place
[00:35:59] Stuart: that is untrue. We have eyewitnesses that that man over there is guilty of murder.
[00:36:05] Eric Pilon-Bignell: Well, that man over there is actually a woman.
[00:36:08] Stuart: I do declare, I believe we will be able to prove this without an uncertain doubt that your client be it man or woman or maybe she should wear a longer hair. Well, either way we will make sure that that person is declared guilty of this murder.
[00:36:27] Eric Pilon-Bignell: Well, I look forward to underst that because I can pretty much confidently refute all of the evidence that is going to be coming this way. How are you
[00:36:35] Stuart: going to refute all of the evidence
[00:36:37] Eric Pilon-Bignell: for starters, there's a encrypted ledger that can't be changed in any way. And if we look at that, I feel like we can pretty much answer most of our questions right there. Oh,
[00:36:47] Stuart: Hold on a 2nd. Let me see that. I rest my case. Yeah, there's no way this person could have committed this murder. Thank you for joining us for sketch comedy podcast show. 100% not produced by Ai I promise you, it was a lot of hours on my behalf. Uh Just real quick, I gotta give you this legalese so that it protects me and protects you. Sketch comedy podcast show is protected under creative commons, attribution. No derivatives four point oh, international license. What that means is if you would like to reproduce anything from the show, please contact the show at sketch comedy podcast show dot com and let's talk and let's get you a really good solid copy of whatever it is you want to reproduce. Until next time, go out there and create a comedy adventure of your own and just make sure that uh it's real, I guess. Oh, well, well, maybe we'll figure out how to do social media at some point it'll evolve somehow.
[00:38:07] Eric Pilon-Bignell: We'll just wirelessly do social media.
[00:00:00] Stuart: In this episode, Futurist and Dani of the 4th Industrial Revolution, Eric Pylon, Big Null. And I came up with a few sketch ideas. Oh, I just made this super intelligent computer that can out think everything. Whoops. What do we do now, a discussion about Blockchain but like complete nonsense. The Blockchain law drama where there's no drama, like which one did we pick? You'll find out on this episode of it's a sketch comedy behind Cash. Welcome to sketch comedy podcast show. The one of a kind show where I Stewart Rice invite interesting people to have intriguing conversations and then improvise a comedy sketch based on what we talked about. It's the only show like it on the internet between the emergence of chat GPT Google's upcoming AI thing and Microsoft's vaguely evil being. The world is definitely on the precipice of huge change. If you've tried these tools, you know, in fact, how do you know that any of the things that I'm saying right now aren't just part of the script that the hive mind came up with? It's getting scary and confusing, isn't it good thing? We have people like this episode's guests, Eric Pylon. Bignell. Eric is a futurist who wrote a best selling book called Surfing Rogue Waves, which I've read and is fantastic. Uh And it's a great guy that gives you everything that's going on with the world, like all the new technologies and new changes, Blockchain. It's in there, you know. Ai, yeah, what's for dinner? No, you still got to come up with that for now. There's gonna be an algorithm, I'm sure. But Eric's book and Eric himself is actually going to help us like smoothly go into this brand new era. That's going to show up an era that honestly, I'm very excited about because I know a lot of people talk about people losing jobs. But it's kind of my hope is that we don't have to have a lot of crummy jobs. I mean, think of all those fortunate writers at all those crappy websites with the list, the list tickles that don't have to do that anymore. It's great. Maybe they can actually start writing real stuff anyway, without any further ado my conversation with Eric Pylon, Bignell. Hey, Eric, thanks so much for joining us today.
[00:02:43] Eric Pilon-Bignell: Thanks so much for having me. Yeah,
[00:02:45] Stuart: I've got a question for you real quick. What makes you interesting?
[00:02:51] Eric Pilon-Bignell: I guess that depends who you ask.
[00:02:55] Stuart: I asked you this time. That's
[00:02:57] Eric Pilon-Bignell: true. You did. Yeah, that, that, that is a good question. I'm not sure what makes me interesting. I almost feel like asking you what makes you interesting. But I'm sure you've probably got that a few times. I have.
[00:03:07] Stuart: It's a good style
[00:03:08] Eric Pilon-Bignell: tech. Yeah. So now that I'm done stalling, I guess there's a few things that really make me interesting in a way, I think for the most part, I'm just a fairly average person. Didn't have any kind of special superpowers or anything growing up. And I can't really say I new anything. I never knew an author. I didn't know anything about how to publish a book. And, you know, I'm a best selling author. So that's kind of fun. I couldn't, I couldn't tell you that I planned it that way without lying to you. But, you know, that's a neat, a neat, probably uh interesting talking point I would imagine. Oh,
[00:03:48] Stuart: yeah, that's definitely one that I'll ask a lot of questions on because I also wrote a book and it was not the best sellers. So, yeah. So you wrote a book called, writing
[00:04:01] Eric Pilon-Bignell: a book is definitely,
[00:04:05] Stuart: it's, it's definitely sorry, go
[00:04:07] Eric Pilon-Bignell: ahead. Sorry. It's uh it's definitely interesting, at least for me. And this is ironic being uh you know, kind of an improv sketch comedy podcast. The book's got a, some improvisational theory and the importance of it. But to be honest with you, no one really talks about this out loud. But the way, at least I wrote my book was I have kind of no clue what I was doing. And I just kind of kept going with it and opportunistically, I improvised my way when the opportunities came and then I got an editor because I don't know. So I researched that and got a publisher and then all of a sudden you've done this book and it's this petrifying moment where you're like, oh, I need to make this official and I can't take it back and change it. And then the reality of life hits you in and you're sitting there thinking, is anyone, how does anyone know about this book? Do I have to market this book? How does this work? And uh yeah, so it's, it's, it was, it was a crazy journey all the way through. And I don't think at least I didn't have the sequential plan for it. There was a heavy component of improvisation, I guess we'll go, we'll go
[00:05:12] Stuart: with. That's pretty cool. The book is called Surfing Rogue Waves. And um how would you describe the book to somebody who had never heard of the book before?
[00:05:25] Eric Pilon-Bignell: Yeah, absolutely. So, it's not a technical book by any means, it's not a technical read. It's really addresses the rapid pace of disruption we're facing in our everyday lives, humanity as a whole. But if you bring that all the way down to us, the individual, right? We didn't vote for things like the internet or braces, but here they are. So we have all this change happening and we tend to have this inability to notice change while it's happening, we just notice it after it happens. And you know, I'm very positive on it. I think we'll solve incredible opportunities in these next kind of decades coming. But this exponential change is very different than the previous change we had, right? When you're getting into material sciences and nanotechnology and this robust pipeline of biotech and Blockchain and AI we are going to be changing everything we know about our lives, our worlds ourselves as humans. And the book kind of paints a higher picture, not so much of the peak performance individual, but more a framework, surfing framework, ironically, surfing roadways um on how to navigate a lot of this onslaught of complexity and change and how when you understand this, you can project and see further into the future because we understand these exponential trajectories of a lot, these technologies and megatrends. And we also understand complexity sciences and how we can't control it, which drives us nuts, but we can shape it in the right direction. So it's very much for that for the individual, whether you're the CEO of your life, the CEO of a company that the bound, the boundaries are very blurry now between, you know, life and business and we're very much moving kind of all at once at the same pace. And without this framework, it can be very overwhelming. Yeah, information, fake news, everything's an overload right now. And if you don't have that kind of higher level mindset to pull you out of it. It can come across as a lot. And it's, we were taught a lot of things in life that are counterintuitive. But we should be doing more of now. You know, if you told at least you and me growing up, if we just winged it, that was a big, no, no. And improvisations. Not just winging it. It's very much an art and a science, but that's a lot more of what we need because we can't actually predict the change. We know the changes coming. We don't know when it's coming in. What order and that drives us nuts, obviously. But we're seeing these trends and as these trends augment each other and amplify each other, we get the emergence of rogue waves. So we have these different waves of complexity coming in and every now and then they all collide at the same point. There's this emerging of this violent rogue wave. It feels like that's kind of what the book's about paralleling with life, of course.
[00:07:53] Stuart: And we've never experienced the level of complexity and disruption that we're about to face. Like we have never come close. I mean, the closest thing would be like the internet and watching as lawmakers tried to fumble their way through um making sure things were as best they could be because there were so many different things that were out there that were brand new um I mean, you mentioned Blockchain, like I, I, I still, like, I have investment in Blockchain. I still have no clue what it actually does, how it's actually going to affect me on a day to day basis. Like these are the things, these are questions and I can't be the only one, right? Like everybody's got these questions, but it's almost like that meme if you've ever seen the meme of Chris Pratt. Pratt. And he's like, I don't know about Blockchain, but at this point, I'm afraid to ask or I don't know about AI but at this point, I'm afraid to ask like,
[00:08:54] Eric Pilon-Bignell: I think the book unpacks a lot of that and those are great questions you pose and there are bigger elements to a lot of these questions as well which see um as we look into the future, they're a little bit, right? So these, these megatrends Blockchain and the obvious ones are Cryptocurrency, right? We watched that but, but Blockchain is going to do a lot more than that. You touched on one of them. For example, when we have, you know, in irreversible ledgers with completed non timidity, that's not the word I'm looking for. But you know what I mean? So if you're following along with it, we we we have entire industries that change, right? Insurance industries. But lawyers, for example, we have smart contracts, you and me can make, make you, I can buy my home from you and this smart contract layered with some ai on top of the Blockchain executes everything for us. You and me don't have to do anything. Our ai can essentially just talk and it's a secure safe transaction. Well, now all of a sudden what happens to, you know, entire entire mortgage industries, right? So there's, but we're seeing that kind of across and when you have These, we have, when I say robust pipeline, I just mean if this megatrend doesn't hit another one white and that might sound very vague from a high level, but we might be off the Blockchain. One might be 15 years old and not five years old, but five years old might be crisper right? Or it could, it could be something else that, you know, all of a sudden we have real time monitoring and we understand nano and biotechnology better and material sciences is really advanced so we can track ourselves in real time. So doctors suddenly don't need to waste time checking up on healthy people. They can take care of sick people because I'm being monitored through data in real time, through an ai that flags anything. We live longer, we kill a lot of diseases. We have autonomous cars, suddenly there's less car accidents. Well, there's big problems there because like to your entire legal departments sadly depend on a car accident that there there is, there is an entire industry when I say industry, I mean, not like a couple 100 people working, I mean, like billions of dollars built around. Suddenly our hospitals aren't as full. What happens. Our healthcare system collapses. Like there are, there are massive disruptions that are so interconnected that we can't really decouple them and break them off and make to your point, the bed on one and we don't know exactly which will hit in what order. And the book really helps paint a little bit of that picture. We don't need to be a specialist and explain all of them. We just need to have an understanding of what's coming. So when we see them start to form, when we see these waves starting to collide and a rogue waves coming, we can position ourselves in the best position, right? And no other time in our lives, kind of like you mentioned, um will our decisions be so important as small as they might be there? There, they are ultimately going to shape, you know, no matter the size, the fate of humanity. And that sounds all encompassing and over the top. But, you know, we can't really fight these waves, advancements and progressions, but we can use them to our advantage, right? And, and it's, it's kind of riding surf where we find ourselves in a future state that's better all around for everyone, more successful for you. However you define it may be more family time, you know, maybe getting closer with loved ones or maybe making more money, whatever it is, there are internet size opportunities in all of these megatrends and they will appear one day as the internet. And there are certain people who were riding that wave pretty hard, pretty early. If you look at maybe Amazon and a few of these other ones and I'd say they're doing pretty well right now. So they're not all, you know, it's not all you got to be a beso here. But we have all these small interconnected, realistically, individuals, even in business, make upwards of 90% of their decisions are ad hoc improvisational in a way, right? So we have all these small interconnected, improvisational complexity that we have in our life in our everyday life, how we manage our, we'd love to, well, we wouldn't, I would, we'd all, a lot of people would love to just philosophy is right about AI and all these future megatrends. We have jobs, right? We have bills to pay and milk to put in the fridge and all this, this fun stuff. So the book kind of gives a really a 30,000 ft view and some of the ethical conversations we need to be having you. Me, anyone needs. As soon as you say, I, my wife is a great example. She's in health care, she just rolls her eyes and she's like great robots and we're all gonna die. Shut up. But really there's ethical questions here, right? How like, you know, we can't is it wrong to deceive people with ai when they're not aware, most people would say yes. And then it's like if we're taking care of aging baby boomer generation and we understand that, you know, it is deceitful, but it's okay because it actually releases right, the right serotonin and dopamine that actually make them happier through the end of their life will suddenly we're okay with that. But now we're deciding what's ok and not, OK. And what you and me think here or maybe in the West culture as a whole might be different than other cultures. So we have these, these trends that we can't manage in the way we've managed all these problems in the past, right? We can't, we can't have our own, do our own thing in this country, you know, and something in another country, rogue waves are good and bad. A great example is when we're fighting through right now COVID, for example, blindsided us. We weren't ready for a clear example of how parts of the single country, never mind a world to handle kind of these global problems.
[00:14:12] Stuart: Yeah. Well, you know, it's, it's funny you mentioned the AI and so it's the people's perception of AI is very interesting. It's very interesting. And um and you brought up a very good example of the older generation maybe because as you get older, like you have less people in your life. And so I bought my parents on Alexa Right. And my mom would actually have small conversations with Alexa and have a little bit joy and then she could talk to me about it and it's like, oh, she didn't even realize she was participating in the whole AI thing that she thought was scary and all of that type of thing. And it is, it's, it's, it's one of those technologies is one of those things that we've developed that, well, probably not even realizes he's being implemented. It just starts to happen and like the refrigerator knows that you're down on milk and gives the suggestion to grab milk, who's going to dislike that the refrigerators basically manipulating you giving it as a job, but that's not, that's not a negative, it's a positive. Um And so you probably run into a lot of those like arguments against newer technologies because people like to argue against them. I don't really understand them, but they
[00:15:40] Eric Pilon-Bignell: do. And I think our culture is a very shock and awe culture as well. AI has been, you know, bastardized by Hollywood. When Ai is going to be a problem, it's not going to be evil. T 1000 terminator. Why would, why would an AI take on all of our inferior evolutionary biological problems? Right? It would be a cloud based thing that could just do whatever I wanted and it could repurpose our atoms or some nanotechnology for wherever they wanted. It doesn't even have to hate us in general, but the book doesn't get in To that as much because that's getting, you know, a bit more like 30-50 years were philosophizing. At that point,
[00:16:17] Stuart: Kurzweil said, like 30 years, he was very specific
[00:16:21] Eric Pilon-Bignell: has been scarily accurate on 80% plus is um yeah, so something's coming, you know, in his singularity is another one. But this is even before that to your point, there are a lot of people who are like, we'll put a pin in it. We should stop AI but you can't stop AI because there's so many other things going in. When you explain to your point, if you took someone, you know, from 30 years ago, 50 years ago, 30 years ago, you mentioned we're going through so much more change now, we're experiencing 100 years of disruption every few years right now. So how's that for context? Right? If you took someone from 50 years ago and you said, so check this out, we're going to give you this little metal and device and it's gonna have access to all of the knowledge of humanity. You can talk to it in real time. It'll give you back the information, it tracks every single thing you do. People would be like your, you're crazy like you beyond lost your mind. Right? Well, we have that, those are our cell phones like it's, it's, it's already there. So when people think AI they think this self, they think a G I R A S I or artificial general intelligence or these like super forms of Hollywood movies where somehow this super form of intelligence goes head to head with us and then we outsmarted at the end because that's how it's gonna end. I mean, when, when, when, when, when you understand exponential and you look at like what happens after an exponential curve, it's artificial general intelligence that would be like you and me in an ant. And again, we don't hate ants. We don't care about ants, but we also just step on ants. If they're in our way, we're not, we're not out to get them. But you know, if we might, we might read them if they're in our house. But there's no way ants are going to predict the future of humanity. That that makes no sense. That would be the equivalent of us trying to, you know, outsmart the new S I if we ever got to some kind of artificial super,
[00:18:15] Stuart: what, what are the steps we need to worry about to get to that? Do you, do you um do you have a good understanding of like what are the technological steps we would need to get to? Now, we're subservient. We will make great pets. As Perry Farrell said many, many years ago,
[00:18:33] Eric Pilon-Bignell: I think, I think when you layer on some of the other technologies and in, in material sciences and the biology and the science with the ai and all these things, we are going to remove incredible things. Sickle cell, you name it all these pieces. It's, it'll be, it'll be incredible. We have this inability to draw the line between upgrading humans in fixing humans. So in the past, if you the men's and we've invented lots of great things, but with CRISPR, we will fix incredible technologies. And at the same time, we're also going to be able to do blue eyes, blonde hair, six ft eight super athlete, super smart, who draws the line on when it's okay to be using some of these technologies. So the one of the first steps is we need to be having more, honestly, more conversations about these technologies because they are not technical debates. When and I in a book, I unpack a little bit of just the ai ones in a very real world sense where you can say I'm not in a I, I'm going off the grid. But unless you're throwing your car out and your credit cards, those days have passed, right? If you walk down the sidewalk, someone's ring camera has facially profiled and understands all the data points of where you were exactly when and what
[00:19:53] Stuart: day? That's right. You putting down that you're not going to take the COVID shot because you don't want anybody tracking you when you're doing it on your cell phone on Facebook makes no sense,
[00:20:03] Eric Pilon-Bignell: right? And I mean, you know, a lot of us have like social we're giving, we're given numbers that they literally track us for that. We pay taxes on like this is not anything new, you know. So, but the, but who has the rights to that data? And what can they do with that data? Who owns your data? Ultimately, if I ask you that or anyone that people don't know? Right. We don't, we don't have the answers to who owns that data. what they can do with that data, we have different countries doing different things. And when you look into like the deep convoluted neural networks or some of the major advancements right now in A I and some people are trying to figure out two very much mirrors our human brains. But the way it develops through multiple layers is it has all these little weights that it constantly adjusts on the information you put in and it eventually gets you the, the answer and that's where you kind of hear this black box and you don't have to get into that kind of mess. But you know, depending on the information you put in on, it's, it's irrelevant to who designed or build the algorithm that can build in cultural, you know, problems and biases that might be, you know, norms. We don't want that. We've moved on from believe it or not, not that long ago. And when I talk on a, you know, like a humanity scale, you know, 1000 when you look back thousands of years and hundreds of years ago, there was one point when everyone was like, yeah, slavery's okay. And now we're like, slavery is not okay
[00:21:25] Stuart: anymore. It's appalling now. Yeah.
[00:21:27] Eric Pilon-Bignell: Yeah. So if we build in our current ethics and tell that to something that's going to exponentially expanded in the future, we might have a lot of ethics right now. We're not forcing kids, batch processing kids to go to school 8 to 3 every day might seem like barbaric to a, you know, a more intelligent version of ourselves could have been using right, cognitive computing and stimulating their minds and getting them excited where they think they're playing games, but they're learning. We have all that technology now and these are these right kind of shifts that we're seeing starting to build and they're going to absolutely destroy industries. Education is the right one for disruption, I think good or bad again. We, we chatted quick about COVID. That's a bad one for sure. But we have been talking in industries forever about this digital transformation. So COVID comes around and it kind of forces the hands and now all of a sudden, companies are forced to work from home. They all haven't all done well and not all jobs work out to work from home either. I'm not saying there's not lots of sadness and unnecessary, you know, job loss, but for the most part, industries done fairly well. If you take if you take academics, well, they just, they never cared about digital transformation. They ignored all the waves that were coming in, this rogue wave showed up and now they're like, uh, take an eight year old and stick them in front of Zoom for eight hours. Like, what are you talking about? I can't even
[00:22:44] Stuart: bananas. Right. Like, how did we ever think that was going to be effective?
[00:22:50] Eric Pilon-Bignell: Yeah. Just a complete, you know, failure and that just shows the difference between a mindset where, you know, a lot of industry was looking and ready for this digital transformation. And academics were like, well, we've never changed in 100 years. So why would we change now? Well, that's why I have changed now because that's how road destruction works. It doesn't care if you're not disrupting yourself, you're dying nowadays. You know, it's very
[00:23:11] Stuart: true, very true. You mentioned Amazon is a good company that has and a lot of industries have really done a very good job of adapting. Um What are the keys like, what do you, what do you need to have in order to be good at adapting to this stuff? And obviously improv like being able to somehow force you into the future and be able to come up with the proper line for everything. But um like what do you think of the things?
[00:23:38] Eric Pilon-Bignell: Yeah, I would unpack really quickly what I call the surfing framework, which is just to help us kind of view and, um, you know, I'll give you the cheat sheet version. So there's a lot more obviously to unpack.
[00:23:54] Stuart: There's probably more than a couple of pages to the
[00:23:56] Eric Pilon-Bignell: book. Right. Yeah. 300 through it. But the serving framework really identifies a complexity that we look for in our lives. So, surfing can be broken down into three things. Right? A surfer waves and a surfboard. So, if we think of waves, that's the ocean, that's the world of complexity. That's our lives. It's always changing, right? It's moving. What makes a good surfer, not the fact that they can do real time, computational physics and understand lunar and tidal patterns and know exactly what they just surf, right? It takes practice general understanding. So that's a bit of the model. So we've got waves, we understand this through our, our environment, through complexity sciences. We look at a specific part of complexity sciences which I equate to like the barrel of a wave. The ultimate move surfing is to get in the barrel of the wave. But it's very, it's very counterintuitive because the barrel of the wave is equally frightening and exciting. It's where you become way better and it's such a rush and it's so exciting and you become a better surfer, but it also chews you up and spits you out every now and then when you fall. So if we live the way we're always brought up, move things back to the control in your life. Right. Don't, don't, don't be in those uncomfortable spaces. You don't wanna go full extreme, obviously, full road. That's chaos. That's an entirely different kind of framework. But you don't want to stay in control either. You want to push for these certain points of pressure in, in life and in systems and not all pressure is good. Some of it's toxic and you want to get out of there. But we need to embrace that and comfort a lot more and give up and being okay, not being controlled. So we've got the wave. The surfer is us. We improvise and so how do we stay in a barrel? Ultimately, we make the decisions right there, almost instinctive. Um But we've got to kind of understand that. But the third part is your surfboard, this is your rational foundation to stand on. You can't surf on your feet. You need a surfboard. Well, in life, you can't just improvise on wrong things, right? You need to improvise on rational things that map back to the reality of the world, right? And right now we're seeing a whole ton of misinformation. A lot of people have trouble kind of unpacking and falling into their biases and their old beliefs. And if you improvise off that and it's not accurate, right? It doesn't matter your, it's your, it's irrelevant, you're not improvising in the right part of the wave. So really there's, there's kind of if I really dumbed it down, it's, it's three steps, right? You want to look for these barrels, these, these, these points of pressure in your life. We, we identify this specific pressure within certain adaptive systems and complexity sciences as the need for new and novel solutions. So when you're in a situation that's happening, it's there, right? New partnerships or relationships. Right. Suddenly you're, you're talking to this Alexa person in your life, healthy conflicting perspectives. We shy away from that again, not unhealthy and toxic perspectives, but it's okay to challenge each other. It's, it's not a dogmatic extreme one side or the other. Like we're seeing, we should have lots of overlap, we should have healthy conflicting perspectives, right? And there are situations when there's an interdependence that's, you know, you're forced to kind of work together as your only kind of means of success and that's uncomfortable. But again, those are good pressures we should look for. And as the surfer, this won't be anything new to you, you, you'll know better than myself and anyone else. But for those listening, the improvisational part is an art and a science very much, right? So the importance of spontaneity and, and going with what feels like your gut sometimes, right? Or, or you know, the classic. Yes. And, but always be accepting two ideas, don't shoot them down, like accept, you can counter, you can do a lot of things you can build off them. But always be listening is a really big one. We all think we're great listeners. We're not, we're terrible. Uh And, and to leverage those around us. So you complexity works very much like that. A team is always stronger than an individual. So that's step two, step three is, is the surfboard, the rational foundation. And here we have to, we have to, we have to work and this is the hardest part because it forces us to look inwards at ourselves. We're not proving this to anyone other than ourselves. But we gotta be aware of our cognitive biases. We gotta work to notice these biases. We gotta be aware of our rational beliefs, right? Understand fake beliefs and belief, errors and challenge things that maybe we were just always told was right. But we never really thought to think about why they were right. Um In the book, I think I call her Aunt Karen. But, you know, being open to letting facts change your mind, I think that's a big one, right. We get very much. It's, it's one thing if you're cheering for your sports team, I'm irrational because I cheered for the same sports team my whole life. I'll tell you they're gonna win every year and they're not. But yeah, but life's not like that, right? We have to be open to letting facts change our mind. And, you know, I think remembering the strength and weaknesses as we go through all this, as machines and humans and machines. I mean, ai and all these technologies and everything, it's machines and humans are stronger together than either will ever be alone currently in our foreseeable future. So we're not at a point where either is replacing and, you know, seeing those opportunities and thinking how we best leverage both of those because the reality is when we're moving into new unknown waters, there's no data for that. But when it comes to predicting stuff, we have unfortunately been slaughtered by algorithms and AI and they can predict things a lot better than us when they have the right data points. So it's, it's very much a balance of those three elements. You know, the three kind of pillars of that surfing framework that when you understand that and we go through some examples in the first half of the book is a little bit more foundational building this in the back half gets really fun and you kind of surfs up, we get in all kinds of fun situations and it helps you kind of see it. And when you think like that, you start to view the world a little bit differently, your interactions a little bit differently and you might not feel it in the moment much like you don't really notice, you know, friction coefficients and water in your surfboard when you're surfing, but you're surfing, right? And the last part is it's got to be pragmatic. You gotta, you can know, you can be the most knowledgeable surfer physicist in theory in the world unless you get out there and surf and take some wipeouts. Like, you're never gonna do it. So, we're gonna, we're gonna screw up, we're gonna fall. That's okay. Like, we've gotta just, it's better to do something and fail than, than nothing right now at the end of the day. Yeah,
[00:30:00] Stuart: action is definitely the most important thing you're gonna do in any given day if you're not doing anything. Yeah. I mean, it would be neat if we could all be academics and think about all that stuff and, but someone's got to go out there and make that change happen. So, you've got the hair for it. I'm guessing you surf.
[00:30:19] Eric Pilon-Bignell: I'm, I am a terrible surfer. Yeah. Oh, yeah. I try, I'm not, I'm that idiot for sure. You know, for me I probably get up for what feels like four minutes and it's probably 12 seconds and it probably feels like an awesome 12 ft barrel and it's probably four ft wave. But I grew up kind of landlocked in Canada. Right. Never got served too much but, you know, did much of the wakeboarding and snowboarding that stuff and I had some opportunities to spend a lot of time in Australia and the west coast of the U S and I just kind of jump in the water every chance I could again. Not because I was any good, but I was never big and I should have been and I just wasn't, but I was never big, you know, into yoga and a lot of the stuff. And I found surfing had this really perfect mix for me. You're sitting out there and the water is almost flat and you're waiting for sets and it's so, you know, bliss and tranquil and calming and then all of a sudden it builds kind of like life, right? And then all of a sudden you're getting dialed in and you're locked in and you went from this like incredible Zen calm too, like so intense because for me, I'm just trying to paddle. So I don't die and get chewed up by this wave. But, you know, you're like everything, every decision you make, everything is like again, you're improvising it, but everything matters, right? Shifting your body weight, your arms, how fast you're going, what you're looking at where you're going. It's, it's this amazing, you know, and then you go there, you ride it for a bit. You didn't. At least I do. I end up getting spit out, chewed up by the end, you know, spit some nose out, spit some water up my nose, get back at it. But like that, that, that amazing mix is very much like why it parallels I feel so much to life. So I, I definitely not a good surfer, but I love to get in the water any chance I
[00:32:02] Stuart: get, yeah. You know, I've lived on the ocean. I've never been surfing. Maybe, just convinced me. I need to go try Europe.
[00:32:12] Eric Pilon-Bignell: You in Portland?
[00:32:13] Stuart: No, I'm in Denver. I'm, I'm landlocked now. I'm in Denver now. But, yeah, I was in Portland but I graduated high school in Santa Cruz. I had friends that surfed. I had friends that surfed. That would go. Hey, I've got an extra everything. Like, let's go and I just never did it. Yeah. You
[00:32:33] Eric Pilon-Bignell: know what else? You know, what else is great about it? To be honest with you all up and down there, you can, you can go get a little, you know, rent a board for the day or for a half a day and go on your own and, you know, you kind of figure it out on your own a little bit, but it's just so, especially nowadays we are so, so inundated with screens is the word I'm gonna use. But, you know, it's your phone, it's this, you're on the computer, you're so connected when you're surfing, there's nothing else you can do. Your, they're your, your present in the moment with your thoughts. And I think that more than ever is and everyone's surfing as we're going to call, it is different. It could be snowboarding or hiking or reading a book or writing music. I don't know. But whatever your surfing is, it's really important more than ever. Now with this kind of overload and stimulus. I feel that we kind of find our places to surf because it's, it's a, it's a cleanse. Right. It's, it's like a reset almost where we're just so connected all the time. Especially now it's moved. Right. Work from home. People are like, that's the last thing they look at is the screen when they put down, the first thing they look at when they wake up and they're literally on it the entire day. It's, it's,
[00:33:46] Stuart: That's 100% true. I do it too. I can't say
[00:33:51] Eric Pilon-Bignell: guilty. I know. I know. So I think those, those, those little, if you can find those little, you know, spots in life to get away, it helps for sure.
[00:34:02] Stuart: Yeah. Well, I honestly, I could talk about this all day. I am a, I've read everything that Kurzweil's written and I, your book is fascinating to me, but we do have to record a sketch Eric. I know my mind was blown during that. I'm pretty sure a lot of listeners were to do me a favor. I, your book covers so much more. Please tell them where they can find more about you and more about surfing rogue waves.
[00:34:39] Eric Pilon-Bignell: Yeah, I can be found at Eric PB dot me E R I C P B dot M E and the books there as well as this podcast and some other information on, on some of the initiatives that have going on and on all of the social handles, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and linkedin, of course, which are all a slash at Eric PB dot me version of whatever the handles are nowadays, they're calling
[00:35:11] Stuart: Them. and now our sketch law and order BTC in 32 in the criminal justice system, technology based offenses are considered confusing and are largely swept under the rug. In New York City, the overpaid detectives and lawyers involved with these felonies are kept employed because no one else wants to deal with them. These are their stories. I'm telling you your client absolutely committed this murder.
[00:35:45] Eric Pilon-Bignell: Look your honor. I'm not really sure what he's talking about practicing law for 30 years and there is zero evidence of any kind that can point anything to my client being even remotely close to the area in which this murder took place
[00:35:59] Stuart: that is untrue. We have eyewitnesses that that man over there is guilty of murder.
[00:36:05] Eric Pilon-Bignell: Well, that man over there is actually a woman.
[00:36:08] Stuart: I do declare, I believe we will be able to prove this without an uncertain doubt that your client be it man or woman or maybe she should wear a longer hair. Well, either way we will make sure that that person is declared guilty of this murder.
[00:36:27] Eric Pilon-Bignell: Well, I look forward to underst that because I can pretty much confidently refute all of the evidence that is going to be coming this way. How are you
[00:36:35] Stuart: going to refute all of the evidence
[00:36:37] Eric Pilon-Bignell: for starters, there's a encrypted ledger that can't be changed in any way. And if we look at that, I feel like we can pretty much answer most of our questions right there. Oh,
[00:36:47] Stuart: Hold on a 2nd. Let me see that. I rest my case. Yeah, there's no way this person could have committed this murder. Thank you for joining us for sketch comedy podcast show. 100% not produced by Ai I promise you, it was a lot of hours on my behalf. Uh Just real quick, I gotta give you this legalese so that it protects me and protects you. Sketch comedy podcast show is protected under creative commons, attribution. No derivatives four point oh, international license. What that means is if you would like to reproduce anything from the show, please contact the show at sketch comedy podcast show dot com and let's talk and let's get you a really good solid copy of whatever it is you want to reproduce. Until next time, go out there and create a comedy adventure of your own and just make sure that uh it's real, I guess. Oh, well, well, maybe we'll figure out how to do social media at some point it'll evolve somehow.
[00:38:07] Eric Pilon-Bignell: We'll just wirelessly do social media.
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