 Really smart people think they know the answer and they never do. They always get it wrong and they think that the people have the problem are just dumb. They're not. So the issue is what's the real problem, right? And finding that is hard to do. So there's a number. You have to ask yourself a lot of questions. You have to walk down a lot of dead ends. So you have to give yourself a lot of room for the first letter in our little suit of them to create, which is to clarify. Jeff DeGraft is my guest on this episode of Inside Ideas, brought to you by 1.5 Media and Inside Ideas of Innovators Magazine. Jeff is both an advisor to Fortune 500 companies and a professor at the Rose School of Business at the University of Michigan. You can see it from his hat. His simultaneous creative and pragmatic approach to making innovation happen has led clients and colleagues to club him the Dean of Innovation. He has written several books, including Leading Innovation, Innovation You and the Innovation Code. His most recent book, The Creative Mindset, brings six creativity skills to everyone and is now available for sale. Jeff is a business owner, professor, and author. He says everyone is creative. We are just creative in different ways and in a wide variety of situations. Believe you are creative is the first step to mastering a creative mindset. Once you do that, you can make innovation happen anywhere and anytime. He's also very fortunate and I haven't really heard him talk about this a lot, but Stanny is his wife and business partner and they run a lot of innovation together and hopefully we can pull out of them about his three kids. If it's three kids, I don't think they've had any more, but I have read Jeff's other books and I like his new book and the thick step process for mastering a creative mindset as well as the Innovation Code, which I really loved. I also loved his Google Talk about the Innovation Code and some of the things that he brought out, the risks of trying something radical starting at the edge or the perimeter and how some large clunky organizations get into bureaucracy and they really don't need to be disrupted. They kill themselves because they're not adjunct and willing to move. We're going to get into those six skills of creativity and the book and talk about many, many things today, but I'd like to welcome my guest. Jeff, thanks for being on the show. Mark, thanks for having me on. It's so good to have you here and I really want to start out with the first question in it. It is a leading question, so but I won't make it any secret. So you've been doing this for a long time at the academic and university level. You've been writing books. You've been working on creativity, innovation and business for a long time. I want to know, has that helped you to whether this pandemic has given you the skills you and your family to be prepared to weather this crazy time to say, hey, we're sustainable. We're resilient through this crazy time where we were prepared because innovation usually gives you a little foresight on what could come and what we could do to do that or maybe innovations pop up in times like this. So I guess that's my first question. How have you and the family weathered the pandemic? Well, first of all, I think I don't know if my innovation skills have helped. What's helped is, you know, I'm one of those two million mile guys on Delta. I spend a lot of time in hotel rooms around the world. So, you know, you think on a yearly basis, I'm probably in a hotel 75 days of the year by myself. So the first thing is, I'm used to being by myself, even though I have a lovely family, when you write your by yourself, when your hotel room, you're by yourself. Plus, it doesn't hurt to have a great spouse and a terrific family, right? So I think there's something kind of disingenuine about how we've been able to do this. We have a large house and it's it's in a nice area. I think the more intriguing issues are how people who are kind of scraping by have done this. And what I'm seeing is incredible imagination, you know, learning pods and daycare shifting and and all, you know, you can't take the bus now. So alternative ways of getting to work. I think that's where, you know, as Whitman said, I hear America singing. I think that's the group that's been remarkable. I think the other side of it is all of our large bureaucracies have failed. I mean, think about this for just a minute. Think about how our federal government, right, the whole notion of COVID, where we account for the largest amount of deaths, the large amount of cases, the only comparable places that they're looking at that are similar to us are Brazil, Mexico and India, which of course are all sort of emerging countries, but not exactly what. But then I want your listeners to think about something. I want you to think about while our governments, our universities are most esteemed bureaucracies, including mine, fail. I want you to think about 595 creativity clusters started to emerge. 595 groups of startup people, students, maybe a couple of street people, I don't know. And they got to 116 of them got to phase one trials. And then 54 got to phase two. We now have six at the end of phase three. We'll probably have a dozen more by the time we're done. And drug discovery is going to go from 10 years for a new virus, a vaccine discovery to about 14 months to 10th of the time. The key to this is while our large bureaucracies failed, these 595 creativity clusters got together organically. And what they were able to do accomplish was unbelievable. And usually it's the old that assimilates the new. So usually the bureaucracies would say, here's how much money I'm giving you. Work the other way around. Think about what Moderna did and some of the other people did. They basically, you said to the government, no, you're going to give us this amount of money because we have to develop and deliver this to 7 billion people around the world in two doses. And so what's happening is usually the old assimilates the new. But in a crisis where an event happens beyond the bureaucracy, the new assimilates the old. Can you imagine being at the FDA today after seeing how this got discovered and thinking you're going to put that genie back in the bottle or a higher education institution? It's not going to happen. So the notion is what we're seeing, even though it's tragic. I don't want to make it sound like it's nice. It's horrible. People are dying. It's terrible. But the other side is we're seeing a radically different approach to solving problems. And I love that. And that's what you really, you talk about that a lot in the innovation code. The other thing that maybe a lot of our listeners don't know as well is the creative mind book that you've just come out with that I talked about in the beginning. Actually, I think the launch date for Germany where I'm at came out the 29th of September. So right in the thick of things. And you're not the only one. There's been several other authors that I've spoken to or that I've had on the show. Same thing, book launch and during the pandemic where there's not a lot of book tours. It's all going online. I imagine most of those people have weathered that pretty good because their innovators are creative. They're used to the digital media, their future. So there's a quick pivot in the media area. So films and documentaries have had those as well. As a matter of fact, I had a documentary that came out and it was dead in the water. The documentary is called Now. And I said, we should change the name to Yesterday because by the time that people see this, it's out of date because no movie theaters, no premieres, no nothing. And so that's the other thing that's happened during this time. And so I wanted to know how that shift has gone and how you've gotten the word out for your book. And maybe you've got a copy there. You could hold up for us and maybe tell us a little bit about it as we ease into the show. So yeah, creative mindset. Yeah. So let me just before I do that, let me back up on something. It's really funny. When this all started here in this country in March, in America, in March, I got a call from PBS. And when I was a much younger man, I used to be on the advisory board for public broadcasting here in America. And used to have an NPR program and a PBS program and all that stuff. And what I basically said was you're going to become irrelevant very quickly. If you can't figure out how to deliver educational training to through K through 12, the young people at home. And, you know, bureaucracies are notoriously slow. So this didn't, this didn't, this didn't play well at first, but I had a wonderful partner or not partner person who point person at PBS named Rich Homburg. And he was able to free, you know, a lot of these government agencies have a lot of excess bandwidth. He was able to free up some bandwidth. And it took a long time. But basically now for those people who are underserved and don't have broadband at home, PBS is able to deliver some of this stuff over cable and over the air, which of course makes this far more accessible and far more democratic, which I'm very proud about. I think, I think when it comes to book tours and things like buying a physical book, I've be honest with you, Mark, I've never done them. I've just, I've just, I've been in over half the Fortune 500. And usually the way my books sell, you're not going to see them a lot on, you know, I sell them make the times best selling list. What happens is clients are trying to solve a problem and they end up using your material to solve the problem. I'm very, I'm very big on the idea for this book being very accessible. So what I've done for this book is I've made 15 videos. I've made them for free. There's no catch. And I've made a whole about all the slides and the syllabus and everything you need, because what I'm trying to do is to give teachers who are at home with COVID, I'm trying to give them tools and saying, hey, you know, if you want to have an online class and get people to do something really spectacular where they're making it home, here's a kit to do it. Because my big thing, Mark, we've talked about this, my big thing is the democratization of innovation. I'm really big on the idea that what's happened with innovation and creativity. It's either the stuff you teach at business school, and it's all about making a zillion dollars, which okay, but or it's or it's new agey, you know, just think like this and you're going to levitate the Pentagon of which is, you know, I'm not that person. I wrote a book for the people. I come from a blue collar neighborhood. I came to college as a teamster, you know, I wrote the book for people who are trying to get side hustle, you know, make a little better life, figure out how to get their kid into a better school, take that recipe to a local that that's who I wrote the book. I wrote the book for people who are trying to just make their life a little better and new. Yeah, and I can really see that in the book and that that really rang a chord to me and I'm so glad that that we got on each other's radar. So I believe that I've, you know, and seen many other beautiful wisdoms going in the book you refer back to I think and grow rich Napoleon Hill and you you talk about as a Plato, not Socrates, right, Plato and in the book as well and just some some old wisdoms, but how can we apply and get into a new way bottom up, you know, to everybody? How can how can you say, oh, you weren't born with the innovators or the creativity mindset? How can you get this the six skills to get going? And what are some of the barriers? What are you going to run into? And and and as you're on this journey, what are you going to see? So I really, really like that. And thank you for answering the question because that ties so nicely into what's going on. And these governmental organizations, these bureaucratic monsters, they're just they've really failed us. But then we're people where they have failed us all over the world, not just the US. And so I don't want to pick on anybody. But then we've seen these clusters jump up of amazing people that they're faced with the problem they're faced with. Oh my god, there's no more toilet paper or whatever it is. And they get so damn creative that they just solve it, fix it. And that's so successful. I just seen it time and time again. And so it's beautiful because I really want to suggest that everybody jump out, grab your book, watch those videos and do that. My first real question for you is, do you consider yourself to be a global citizen? And how would you feel about a world without nations, borders, division, walls, or this separation of humanity, one from another, whether it's culture, religion, or just this bunked nationalism that's come about? Well, when I was younger, I was a utopian, like a lot of people are when they're younger. I also, what's different in our generations, I'm considerably older than you, is I watched the abject failure of communism around the world. And I watched the hijacking of socialist systems. And it's not because the systems are bad, it's because power is power and people are people and nothing ever changes. I actually am a big believer that we have some really good ideas that need to be updated. So I grew up also in a world of the United Nations. I grew up in a world where people, my generation, maybe a little older, think about like the Gates Foundation, et cetera, started becoming more universal travelers. So I don't think you have to give up your nation-state view of the world. I'm not even sure you can, but I'm really big on the whole idea is playing together. And I can tell you why, why that's a challenge for everybody. And I write a lot about this. We all have dominant logic. Well, the thing that we have worldview that we think this is the way the world works. And one of the easiest things that happens to us with politicians is when things go wrong, it's hard to explain complexities to and to the everyday person. So they blame the next guy down. They blame, it's the other guy. Those guys who are next door to us. And if you're in Germany, you're seeing this right now. If you're in Turkey, you're seeing it this morning with what's going on in the newspaper, you just go down the list here. And so you're seeing the rise of nationalism, I think, because of two things. One, because people are afraid this is changing. And two, these explanations are easy. I get to go on record of saying, I hate the idea of moving towards simplicity because I think simplicity is for simpletons. I think the world's complicated. I think the world is filled with nuances that need to be finessed and negotiated and worked through. But your inclination and ethos of why aren't we working together? Yes. Yes. Can I just say yes, yes, yes. And when did we all become, why do we hate each other? Because you go to this temple and these people go to that. That's the, when I answer that, Mark, you will meet in Stockholm for our Nobel dinner, right? Yeah. And it's really such a thing that there's a couple reasons that I mentioned it. Your answer is absolutely correct and so eloquent and beautiful. Thank you for sharing that. There's obviously no right answer. But how you tie it to this beauty that our world is so complex and it's made up of very complex systems. And if we can get into this critical mindset, if we can get into complexity science and systems thinking and understand how instead of saying, give me the quick pitch, dumb it down, simplify it for me. I want the quick version, the elevator pitch or the TED talk to solve this global grand challenge or this pandemic that we're dealing with. Let's break down. Let's get into the complexity. Let's not dumb it down or simplify oversimplify our life. The way eras and genres and the way we progress is by these, I don't know, these pinnacles of complexity or when we reach these plateaus of complexity and that's how we thrive and grow. And I think this time, although you said it eloquently, as we need to respect it, we need to take it serious. And it was a terrific time. It's also a time that we've really stretched our brains, we've stretched our hearts, our efforts and kind of moved into this new way, okay, we've got to think of a different model, we've got to think of a new model or we've got to take some old ones that have worked for a long time and make sure we can get that on a much global scale. Can I just build on something you're saying? Early in my career, I started looking at, now this is mostly for America, but it's true worldwide actually. But I started looking at the 21 places in America that produce almost all the election property. It means overwhelming. I happen to live in this little town called Ann Arbor that depending on what year it is has more venture capital per person than any city in this country. I live in a small town. But what's interesting is when we look at these 21 places, they're far more diverse than the adjacent areas. And in our country, it's because of immigration. We have a lot of immigrants. And the whole notion of, well, look at this year, we have six Nobel Prize winners in America, not one of them were born here. So this is our history. So we have this weird tension in our country, which is the places that make all the intellectual property and money look like the world. My wife is from Asia, Stanny's from Indonesia, but she's ethnically Chinese. My grandparents were from Europe. Right. But I grew up in a Dutch on, you know, this is Hungary, right? Yes, my grandfather was a chaperon and my grandmother's father was from Germany. Right. So you grow up in these places where one day everyone acts one way and then the next day there's hand waving people and, you know, the way we all grow up here. So what's interesting to me worldwide, this is also true when you start looking at the places that produce mostly intellectual property around the world. They're far more diverse than other places. So the notion is it's not just nicety or getting along, although that's important. There's an ethical issue here, but it's also an economic issue. And that is these places are juggernauts because people don't agree. And when they don't agree, they have two choices. They can either try and shout at each other and destroy each other, or they can build hybrids. They can build better ways, third ways, new ways. And that's how the world advances. So to me, I'm very big on the notion that diversity is a requirement. So when you start looking at some of the European countries and some of the problems that they're having, it has a lot to do with these different groups that don't want in any way to engage the other group. They just, they're launching their little wars and there's a lot of collateral damage. You can see what happened in France this morning, right? But then you get America even more pronounced because it's obvious here. It's obvious what goes on here. So I want to pick up on your notion of saying it's not just the right way to be, it's also the only way if we're going to go forward. You can't go backwards. I totally agree. I mean, there's so much we could dive into a couple of rabbit holes even there that we're going in the right direction of what we're trying to talk about as well. The other reason I mentioned this global citizen or this thought or process is because really our resources, water, air, species, the pandemic, food, they're all global citizens. They continue to move during a lockdown. They've continued to move across borders, nations and divisions. And the only thing that's been really domesticated as the human being, us have been domesticated by food. I mean, the food still for the most part grows outside, but we're locked up in these human zoos or these boxes now. Hopefully some of them are nice enough, but during this lockdown period, we've really gotten this microscopic, this zoom in view of our human zooms. Some of us are like, what in the heck? I could go and escape to work eight hours a day or I could go, but now I'm kind of in this place and you really quickly see, hey, I need to create a better zoo for myself. I need to create a better place of living because this is not working for me. And so we see this thing that kind of ties into much bigger pictures of where I'm going as well. And so I'll let you touch on that. There's two parts to this that are interesting. So the first part is a policy part and I'm not a policy guy. I'm a university business school professor. The policy part are, as you know, we've got a couple of wars in Africa and in the Middle East that are all about the environment. They're all about rivers, what's happening upstream, why crops are dying downstream, the price of corn, all of that. And that's something that has to be addressed at the United Nations level. Are we going to get along here? Otherwise we're going to have wars and justifiable wars because somebody's basically stopping you. Hold on here. Somebody's actually stopping you from somebody's actually stopping you from doing what you need to do, which is eat. The second issue, which I like what you're saying, I like it a lot, which is there's the issue of locality. So let me give you an example. When this whole thing happened, all these small restaurants in this country started going under. And the government came up with this big bill and you know how this goes. All the fat cats figured out how to game the system and out of a trillion five, a trillion two went to big companies, which was the exact opposite of what was supposed to happen. There's a city in Vermont called Battle Spurro. I'm going to say it again because I'm probably saying it wrong, Battle Spurro. And what they did was remarkable. They took the local restaurants and they redirected the government subsidies for underserved people and they gave the money to these local restaurants as opposed to these huge multinationals. But the condition was these local restaurants had to buy their foodstuffs from local farmers. All of a sudden these people who would be eating kind of you know institutional food are eating forced, I'm not probably five stars where we're at maybe three star cuisine and the local farmers are in business, the local restaurants are in business, then the city of Newark started doing this. This is what I'm talking about when we start figuring out about food and the whole idea of what goes out of their bubble. I think Mark, we're starting to realize that we live in communities again. I think we're starting to realize that the farmer down the road you know sells to the restaurant down the streets, which is the place you eat at on Friday or your date night or whatever it is in your life. That's what I'm really liking. The policy stuff about you know the larger things you know I'm hopeful, but I'm not, I don't want to be encouraging. I just don't see the winds blowing that way. I think it's just too easy to to rouse national sentiment and blame somebody else. I think locally is how this gets solved. Yeah, yeah, I love that. Thank you very much. Do you want to maybe touch a little bit more for us on can we can we give a teaser of since you're already doing the videos a little bit more about the the six skills of creativity, these innovation process that for sure and and maybe I don't know if I give it make it even more complex for you because you wanted you know you have some ties to food in your in your past work and as well that that you know is this big the big boys so to say that and how do you bring that down to these small communities how do you bring this in there if there's a way you could also tie that in you wanted to mention some things as well. Yeah, I'll come back to that. So I'm sure some some of your listeners will know I'm you know I've been involved in big energy and big food for a long time but you know if you're going to change the world you have to go to the belly of the beast. You can't do it by writing interesting op-ed pieces and sniping and doing this you know a company with eight people that's not going to make any that's not going to move anything you have to be willing to go in and see if you can fix some things. But let me talk about the book I think there's two things that I wanted to really emphasize in the book so first of all let me back up. I'm one of the old guys that that's that really started this field in earnest it's really started in 1900 by a German professor Newmax Verthimer and Verthimer has two two very famous students ones in Kurt Lewin who creates the organizational development movement which it's certainly where I'm at and Arbor is also very big the other is a man named Rudolf Arnheim and Rudolf Arnheim is the founder of what we would call design thinking. He wrote a book in the 19 early 1930s late 1920s about art and perception and he goes into this whole thing he was my advisor I'm his last graduate student wonderful. So I'm sort of the end of the start of the field there's a guy who was in front of me at Stanford named Michael Ray. But I'm kind of the second guy in my world in the business world that did this. So you know so I've had a ringside seat for a lot of the research and the first thing I wanted to do was make the research fun and simple. I didn't like this study says this and this says that and so much that's written about being creative it's just nonsense you know what I mean and so this is from some guy who's been in half the forge of pipe out and as some of your listeners will know I'm one of the guys that when I was very young helped build this 20 million dollar company into Domino's Pizza. So those who are mad about fast food I was very young I just want everybody very young learned a lot. I've had tons of Domino's Pizza so now my listeners are upset I guess I gotta shut it off now. When I was younger I lived on Domino's Pizza. Well we didn't know we didn't good news is good things are happening at Domino's now too but it's been a while. So I actually learned by doing a lot of this stuff. So the first thing I learned was mindset and I translated a lot of these things into mindset. So let me just give you a couple of them they're really easy. First of all notice when and where you're creative. These are called flow states right just notice when and where you're creative and it's a simple thing. I'm a morning person so in my house I like to roll out about five in the morning, roll downstairs where I met my little studio. You know people go how do you write? Well I'm like no one's up and no one's around but my wife's a night hawk. So you know we've been married forever right. So one of the things that we learned to do is she sleeps when I write and I sleep when she writes but also pay attention to you know are you creative when there's music on are you creative when it's quiet are you creative when you're running or creative when you're meditating when exactly are you creative. Here's why Mark it's not creativity on demand it's creativity when creativity demands it and I'm a total hypocrite I'm a terrible hypocrite your listeners should know I'm on airplanes all the time I'm always saying I'm going to write on airplanes I can't write on airplanes and I always try I always and then what happens is because I'm at deadline I get up at five o'clock the next morning in the hotel even though I'm giving a speech somewhere talking to a board somewhere and I write and you'd think at my age I would begin to understand I take my own medicine but I just have to tell you I don't but but I am trying to explain one of the things about mindset is to know this is not the time that I'm creative and I see people do this all the time at two o'clock we're going to be creative I'm like is the sugar you know coma going to hit by two o'clock they're not so they'd be one other other things I'm really big on are things like let me give a couple more about mindset whenever I'm doing something really complicated and I can't figure out an answer which is all the time this whole mythology that people like me come up with answers and no no we have lots of dark nights of the soul but one of the funny things is I grew up in the age of am radio so I'm you know I'm I'm 60 61 and um whenever I'm working on something I can hear in the back of my head a song and always in whenever that's happening to me I call this consult the muse in your mind so some people it's a feeling or a picture or a remembrance of something or an image is like but there's always and think about it you know you've got something on your mind you're checking you're trying to leave the airport you got to get your ticket and get out of the red door thing and drive home through the crazy traffic and all this complexity but somehow that doesn't occur to you because you're really noodling on this this thing well if you're paying attention to that almost inevitably it's giving you clues it's saying and it does for me but whenever I talk to people about this I this is because a funny mark they lie people lie they say no no I thought about this deeply and I'm like no you went for a walk around the block and you looked at an oak tree and something happened and it triggered a thing and all the sudden you remembered this thing that happened in fourth grade and the synaptic connection was made and you had an answer I'm like that's how your brain works assimilation and accommodation what happened was you were trying to find the pathway of those neurons fire in that billion complex way and you had a moment the satori moment as they say in in the east or you know or a moment of enlightenment or eureka as the greeks say so so that would be a second one saying are you paying attention to this dialogue between what we might call the intuitive part of your mind and you can't leave it there that's got it then it's got to talk to the rational part of your mind incidentally you should know that that these functions are actually happening in very different pathways very different types of neural nets your brain is very systematic this goes back to what I call cognitive inquiry strategy brain has pathways that often don't cross if they cross your life would be well we do know this when they do cross we have this creates well when people go when people's neural nets begin to erode when they have dementia they cross and we have both sort of real delusion and and we also have amazing sort of insights right the final one I there's a there's a there's eight of these but the other one I would add is I'm very big that innovators look for incongruities so this we started with one of saying the government failed but these organic things work and I think most people don't look at that they just say well the government failed this is terrible we're all going to die I'm like no that it doesn't work like that these incongruities are like in our my country you know everybody's mad at immigrants and trying to limit immigrants and yet all the places that have money and the six Nobel Prize winners are immigrants so you're like that's an incongruity and why we need to look at that is anomalies and incongruities are where all the opportunities are so I had a doctoral student come to me the other day it's a great example she was telling me about her research and she's the first time she met me and she's being she's very smart she went to an Ivy League school she started talking about excuse me the reading she was doing at home about personal issues about development issues in relationships like been marriages and then she talked to me about what her work is that you know at this great you know I teach one of the great universities of the world right um and my thing to her was how does the first thing relate to the second and you could just see she was terrified and I said because you think they're incongruous but I said that's where the research needs to be where nobody has research where you're doing something that no one else is doing that's how you advance the field how you you make a name for yourself that's a mindset issue and I think she needed an older dog to kind of go hey you know don't be afraid of that so those are just three examples of kind of mindset issues that I think you have to get in off the bat before you can even start innovating well don't don't be afraid for being a an old fart because you're not and I'm I'm pretty old myself I just turned 50 and I'm actually a grandpa I just got my fourth grandchild my son's wife just had just had her daughter Soraya and beautiful baby girl and congratulations yeah and I've got four adult children and so it's it's a it's a beautiful thing to to grow old and have those wisdoms and experiences but also to to have the the verb and vigor to keep going and keep thinking keep keep your mind alive and think about how can we you know have this creative mindset how can we move forward with the new skills and and reinvent ourselves or follow this great reset as the world of economic form says and and move forward and I mean I I like I mentioned I I grew up with you know Napoleon Hill thinking girl rich and and all the the good books that you've touched upon as well but I want to make sure that I have those skill sets for the future because I'm always thinking of how can I create resilient desirable futures how can I innovate and you know I don't know if you know this I do I'm part of the expert network for the world economic form present innovations for purpose at Davos every year and I like to kind of stay not only in that creative process but think how can these these microcosmic or these these communities these clusters present innovations or solutions that will solve our global grand challenges and and all that I've presented have always come from the bottom up from someone who has said I'm so frustrated with this system or I'm I'm experiencing you know cancer and I've lost my hair and I'm that's a depilitating thing or I have breast cancer or I I can't afford you know I examine and then the glasses afterwards how do we solve those problems and then people get so creative that they solve the problem and they're really you know not this really technological super thing but they're enough to really make a 250 million minimum impact on our world and things like that that's really is what I like well that's what that's that's where people get lost they they get into either or thinking um this is this will be right in your wheelhouse mark so a couple years ago uh some Swiss scientists got together and said you know the the way we're going to offset carbon is trees right this is the trillion tree argument right which was very popular about a year ago before COVID and so the notion is you know then we start thinking about drones and how do we you know you know I'm very familiar with all all this because I get dragged into these things right but so that's important and we need to create resources for the trillion trees but then governments don't need to do that because once you start looking at the data all all of forests and all types of trees are very specific to the local terroir right so what you really want to do then is give money and resources to responsible people who are local to solve the local problem because because the one solution that you're going to have is kind of going back to the you know Hoover Dam philosophy where we're going to we're going to ruin the environment even though we're trying to save it you know we we had good intentions yeah I want to tell young people who are listening we had good intentions there's two things that you know we went to the moon you know we we built the net we we did a pretty good job we create a couple problems we created a social injustice and inequities in the world we didn't mean to that was not our intent right and we ruined the environment we could not intend to do that so that you know the next generation we need to make a more just world right and and we need to fix the environment but it's not going to be fixed in the way that our fathers and mothers tried to fix it it's going to be fixed locally but we have to create those world eliminate those some of those boundaries and create some worldwide resources to do that so so it's not from above or below it's that these things need to sync up if this makes sense humor so in the book I don't I don't get into this in the book per se what I get into in the book is the six skills that you need to have so let me let me unpack these because I think if you're trying to make your your your community your own life better you have to these are this comes from years of being in the belly of the beast I learned all of this the hard way you know being an innovator is not about throwing a punch it's about taking a punch I'll tell you that yeah um and and so for each of these skills there's a number of methods that that you can use that are and some of them are methods that you should know and some are methods that maybe you don't know but the first thing I call it create because I wanted to make sure this was a this was a you know this was a mnemonic device that was relatively easy to remember so the first letter c is about clarify now I get I get very nasty reviews from students because I make them spend half of the class trying to find what the right problem is and the reason is all the research says in my work training for for about a decade I trained the world's most prestigious consulting company in New York really smart people think they know the answer and they never do they always get it wrong and they think that the people have the problem are just dumb they're not so the issue is what's the real problem right and finding that is hard to do so there's a number you have to ask yourself a lot of questions you have to walk down a lot of dead dead ends so you have to give yourself a lot of room for the first letter in our in our little suit of them create which is to clarify tell me what's wrong and we've all had the experience haven't we have working on a working on a project to find out that we solved the can I tell you a story a quick story please I worked on a project years ago when I was really young I was a member of a advisory group for Steve Jobs called AIS applied in great systems so it sounds more heroic than it is this is what he's being pushed out of apple the first time it's got a project in Los Angeles for general magic yes well right that's right and a lot of the general magic guys were people that yeah if you know the history of this particularly in the university that I teach at there's there's a lot of connections there but I don't want to go down that rabbit hole yeah so one of the projects called the Zeno project and I worked on it with Alan Kay who developed the Macintosh and it was trying to create literacy in south central Los Angeles and it was doing it by teaching people to truck drivers in those all old large laziness so people don't remember these but the object was we're going to fool people because I think it was like 30 the Hudson Institute said like 30 percent of all graduates from Los Angeles school system were functioning in literally the issue is we're going to teach them how to we're good sound familiar we're going to teach them how to read by teaching them how to get their s-class uh truck drivers license because they're all going to be truck drivers so we went through the whole thing thought we're going to thought technology is going to shrink the achievement gap and it didn't make it smaller it made it bigger so so then and it's in a way of like 10 more stories I guess what about about 10 years later I got a call from the editor of life magazine and she was doing a report uh they went on a business I think in 1990 because they wanted to say who the 100 most important people were of the 20th century and she called me and I thought you want to talk about innovation so I'm a brand new professor at this time I just left dominoes I'm in michigan for my first year I'm feeling pretty excited you want to start from innovation she wanted to talk to me I've got by about a guy named Robert fair to graph my name's to graph well this is kind of weird I'm like my name's to graph and she's like yeah you idiot they told you're related to them well true story my father didn't along this father I don't know anything about my father's family well it turns out I had a great uncle who was this guy he's the inventor of paperback books created this company called pocket pocket books and he and there was a biography written about him called two bit culture and what he thought was the reason he did it he thought if you could buy a book for 25 cents in the train station in literate people would become and I've read this and I thought I made the exact same mistake so the mistake I made and the mistake he made was a clarifying problem we went to the solution before we understood what the real issue was there were no jobs to be had for truck drivers in south central um in south central Los Angeles there's no reason for a late day laborer in the 1920s during the depression to become literate I'm just looking at this guy and we're doing it again you know if they only have a touchscreen the Kalamazoo promise you know if everybody goes to college for free it'll solve the problem it doesn't it doesn't it doesn't so first clarify two replicate replicate is Aristotle writes about it called mymesis right mimicking um you know Caldean crow's doing octopi do it you know humans are not the only creative things but we certainly can learn by copying nature what's called biomimicry you know the flukes of a whale become the rudder on a sub you know the peregrine falcons wings become fighter jets you know design and so on and so forth and this there's a lot that can be done there that the third letter e elaborate comes to us actually from a very controversial man who wrote one of the most famous books in the 20th century Arthur Kessler who wrote darkness at noon also was a famous psychologist and also had a really interesting life you can your listeners can look into this he kind of went to pieces at the end of his life but he coins his term called bisoliation but what he means is whenever your approach with something that doesn't normally go with something else your brain naturally simulates it um this is sometimes called defamiliarization if you're an artist it means i'm trying to confuse the brain and that's all brainstorming is brainstorming is taking things that don't normally go together and making synaptic connections and there's a structured way to do this a lot of brainstorming is useless in there in the book there's some instructions about how to actually do this in the right way so those are the first three letters i'll stop at first three clarify replicate elaborate and for each of these there are tools or methods of saying here's you know and i didn't write in here here's what we did at apple or here's we did a google what i wrote in here was here's what you can do and if you want to make the thing in your garage work you might want to think about this and here's a little story about somebody who did it that's so beautiful exactly and we'll um i'll kind of give a little bit of teasers and the show notes and description and obviously put your links in where they can go and look at the videos as well there are six and they're just fabulous one after the other with the the acronym you know great basically and and so it's it's beautiful how how you pull that out and um i you know i i have to be honest i've been stalking you i've been following you for a while i've read your books you know and i and i know enough to be dangerous but i also like the your way of thinking i've watched your pbs stuff and you know i'm a big pbs and and mpr a listener used to be i'm now i've the last 10 years i've been living in hamberg germany and so not as much as as before but that's how that's what i grew up on and um those are all organizations were were um great thinkers great people that come to depart with them at a different different level and so i really um well i want to thank you but i'm so honored to have you on the show and to talk to you about these these things the the thing that i really kind of want to unpack and go into before i get to my first really um big question is as you go through these processes and these skills and and um talking how how we can create these clusters or how from the bottom up that you know anybody can kind of take this journey and and and um you know learn through the stories to to get that success by the way the the the uh the second one with the the mimicry is one that i use all the time because i do a lot with with food and so i truly believe that i've seen that and other things around innovation that i present and that i work on as well um i'm a little a little i guess i have a bias and that is how can we do creativity or innovations impactful innovations for purpose that solve global grand challenges and um you in your book you talk a lot about you and uh stanney both because she's the co-author so as well but you talk about creating the environment and when you use terms like resilience or sustainable in the book it's more about environment or is it sustainable more in an emotional or mental way instead of the environment uh i mean i mean i mean in both ways um that's a great internet it's great where you're going with this um let me speak to this go ahead please there's i i've worked on a number of projects that if you're if you're really an eco warrior because i get letters from you guys all the time i'm an innovation guy and i care about the environment but i don't think of myself as an eco warrior i also work on medicine and everything else so i worked on um i worked on eco imagination which was the first 15 billion dollar spend i've worked on if you're familiar with energy transmission if you're familiar with i've worked on all that stuff um there here's the point that i would make um the whenever you think about being creative i want you to think about three phases to being creative the first phase is design or design thinking phase lots of variations version one version two version three lots of creativity all good but that if that remains your phase which is what happens with smaller companies you'll never get to scale you'll never get to the moon right i'm sorry it doesn't work that way in order to do that you have to get all the way to the aft position which is optimization which is how do we do this so think about i want you to think about something that's really controversial so it might not be controversial here please of course think about one of the big issues is gmos right gmos so there's all this talk from all the anti gmo people by gmos but there's two or three very large credible studies at places like Purdue ag schools that basically say if you do that you'll actually ruin the environment because so much more of the environment will have to be uh you know irrigated you know irrigated and so on and so forth and oh by the way you're going to starve these people in the meantime and so there's people are yelling across the fence but the truth of the matter is the eco movement's getting a lot of traction at the small level community level but the notion is once you start looking globally right and you start looking at the big monstrous companies this is going to be a problem so so the answer becomes kind of understanding the phases of innovation so the first phase where we're doing a lot of that kind of stuff that you're seeing in in your space which is tremendous and i want to be really supportive of that but then you're also seeing the aft position and if we're going to get off of these you know these few companies that are doing all this we're going to have to figure out something that's going to replace them at scale which is not going to be everybody doing their own thing it's going to be picking and it doesn't mean everybody there's one thing but it's just like any you know it's like it is now there's going to be like 10 variations around the world depending where you're at and that's going to be scalable so i want everybody to remember this word that goes with sustainability scalable it has to be scalable right so the notion is elan must comes up with an interesting idea he's got 90 failure rate with his car right and this year he's going to see last year he sold 365 thousand cars which was his target for 2015 so he's five years behind right or four years behind but but what he's getting at is he's getting at scale and the process between that interesting design that had a 90 failure rate and where he's going now is what's what what we're talking about with the environment that's what i want you to see the failure cycle in between and all the rough water in between so that middle part right that middle part before we get from diversification optimization is the part that we have to walk through and it's really contentious and it's terrible right but but if we're going to go from being a if we're going to go incidentally a lot of this again you're going to get hate letters or i'm going to get a lot of this movement reminds me when i grew up i grew up in a very progressive family and we used to go out and we used to do some things we used to do some things with these um with the migrant community trying to help migrant community and what we would run into is a lot of these kind of organic farmers communes people with coffins and they were great ideas but they could never get to scale they weren't sustainable because they couldn't figure out how on a daily basis and some of them did you know think about you know red mill oats and all they kind of some of them figured out but most of them didn't wait there was actually you know a commune type of an organization for their friends they were they were remember quakers are what's called friends the friends community right yeah you're right so so the notes yes that's that's a perfect way of putting so i want your listeners to be utopian i want your listeners to do small things but i want them to understand that there's going to come a point in order to sustain this they are going to have to get to scale and to get to scale you have to think about more difficult things get to a real quick story worked on a project i want to hear it yeah worked on a project for a radical different kind of a jet small jet family could uh six people could go on the jet was made of uh hybrid materials and something they had before graphing it's lighter use way less fuel it's a very environmental right and the notion was they thought everybody buy this jet now a jet like a real nice jets like like eight million dollars this jet i think was like a couple million dollars so it was like this huge price point and everyone was like and we're all going to be driving jets so the first time i got involved in this i'd laugh and i said um well did you go look at henry ford and they said what and i said henry ford 1938 1939 henry ford developed a small plane that everybody's going to drive we're all going to fly a plane to work and certainly that's why we were able to build bombers during the second world war so quickly at the ford plants in the north because henry ford had really fought this through i'm like but it didn't work for all the obvious reasons because you have to have air traffic control people have to fly these things you have to gas these things up you know how are you going to manage uh how are you going to manage that you need uh five thousand more airports and the notion was um the great news was they made this great little jet the bad news is to get to scale and sustainability a whole lot of other things have to happen which are much heavier lifting require large sources of revenue and income to decide to do things so my concern about all this is this grassroots efforts often wants things that are look more like what they wear what they are now not what they need to be to be sustainable and so we get really bad policies we get you know we get trains they're supposed to run from san francisco los angeles and you could just see when they did this out if you're familiar with this project you could just see it's going to be a debacle right and and and i understand why they want it because we want mass transit we want people but the notion is that's taking this small idea and not translating into what it would need to be to be a big idea is this making sense to you it's totally making sense and but it also goes back to how we started where we talked about complexity and systems and how they really all we can't just address a couple facets we got it really to scale you've got to have all the facets of them two examples that you also brought up uh elon whether it's test those basics whether it's solar city all those are overarching infrastructures to connect and if he doesn't have that infrastructure he's made the partnerships with panasonic or whoever else to fill in the gaps of those other facets of that that bigger complex system you get it and I want to add to that and things don't happen overnight ladies and gentlemen they don't electric cars electric cars when they started versus hybrids and you should know this look this up even to this day i think hybrids are 14 times more energy efficient or environmentally efficient but that won't be true forever so when you start why why would i say that because in this country when electric cars started becoming big incidentally didn't start with with tesla it actually started with the ev1 it judge our general motors they buried him in the desert 91 92 right but the notion is uh when this started uh 40 of all utilities were coal fire right and they're so even though you're driving electric car you're really polluting the environment because the electricity was generated through coal fire but one of the worst things you could do all the sulfur dioxide in the environment now it's in this country it's about 25 and rapidly decreasing because it's going to natural gas but natural people get mad about natural gas but natural gas far more of energy efficient far more better for the environment but again not perfect so what's happening is the electric car proceeded the utility company and eventually the utility company will have a very small uh coal footprint and the electric car will be a better idea than the hybrid but right now not incidentally when you start looking at what is the most efficient way to to uh to move and there's something called torque which means how heavy things are it's actually it's actually people laugh it's combustion engines but but combustion engines can be built in highly efficient ways and they can run on things like uh you know combustion engines can combust salt water it's all kinds of things so so the notion is we think innovation is a straight line to sustainability it's not it's evolutionary we're going to have to go through some things and you can't just flip the switch we saw Germany try and do this with the with the with the green meter stuff that you guys did we saw California do this and then Pacific Gas and Electric had all those rolling out you know outages and burning things down so the notion is you got to take it step by step and that I think is something people don't like to hear they want everything now I mean since you brought it up I'd like to if you don't mind tell tell a story as well so have you ever heard the the story of three Henry's no so there's Henry Berg Henry Ferguson and Henry Ford uh they're almost all at the same time so Henry Berg was uh 1813 to 1888 Henry Henry Ferguson was 1884 to 1960 and Henry Ford was 1863 to 1947 and what we need to know is this the story of the three Henry's they they all drastically change uh the future so um I'll start with Henry Berg so Henry Berg uh was really about animal cruelty says these horses these cattle are uh working all these hours a day they're dying in the roads they're not being fed properly they're not being rested um they're you know manure or crap all over the roads there's all sorts of other problems created but the the uh so he created this American society for the prevention of cruelty to animals right um and then Henry Ferguson he really you know Massey Ferguson if you if you know anything about farming so he created there's a British mechanic and inventor he developed agriculture tractor the first agriculture tractor and actually him and Henry Ford um we're seeing the many pictures together you know on the tractors and how they could do it um and then Henry Ford obviously he didn't develop a car he developed the manufacturing process the production on how we can do it the the complexity that we're talking about that system of how you can produce efficiently and so if you were to be able to to put yourself in the mindset of a horse or a cow uh which one of these three men these three Henry's did the most for you you know um boy the animal cruelty that was great I also love what you're saying and it relates to what we need to do and your listeners need to do you need to start locally and figure out what you can do with what you have now the old Teddy Roosevelt saying you know don't get stuck in the planning cycle and don't wait for other people start innovating today that's the democratization innovation that's what I'm all about my innovation labs the innovation rooms are all about this let's start today but understand this so Ford grows up in the you know the Edison turbine company you know he said he actually knows Thomas that this is also from Michigan right um and uh you know he he goes out his own creates his production system creates this real interesting car but he's got a huge problem he's got two problems the first problem is there's nothing that can fuel him sound familiar Elon Musk so he makes a deal with the devil he makes deal with the John Rockefeller right that's a if ever there was a deal with the devil that's a deal with the devil and they could use good standard oil of Ohio fuel and but then the second problem is there's no roads well John Rockefeller at the time is the wealthiest man in the world has a bunch of congressmen in this pocket and he basically leads on these congressmen they build roads now some of your listeners are going to go but that's where we all went wrong it's the worst thing that ever happened well you know in America that's kind of how we do things but the other side of it is in order to get this done you can't just yell across the fence at everybody we're going to have to use a lot of playbooks and a lot of people that maybe so with somebody when eco-imagination started I had a Belgian woman come up afterwards as she when she figured out I was one of the architects of this and she said how do you feel about General Electric making you know this amount of money when they made that amount of money ruining the environment and saying to her I said how I feel is that's how it works do you want to clean up the environment she said yeah and I said well then you need somebody with that scope and scale to start start the ball rolling now again they had their own problems but they certainly were responsible for getting this to start rolling whether you like them or don't like them right and that's what I'm trying to get people to get to is we're going it's going to take all of us and it's going to take a whole bunch of different views of the world and it's going to take some pushing and shoving and that middle part which we're in right now is going to feel like hell it does but we have to keep going forward it's the only way to go it's like COVID it's the only way to go we've got to go forward I still haven't even gotten to my first most hardest question for you but I want to finish explaining the three Henry's because you're fine I'm not sure you or my listeners understand the importance of it so it's not really that the animal cruelty who did the most for horses it's not the tractor that did the most for horses and cows and it's really not even Henry Ford but I think the the thanks would be to the most part to Henry Ford for his production and manufacturing system that that helped those animals help that to lead that but there's one step further than that and it has to do with the complexity that we talk we spoke about and and the innovation or the future of anything sustainability resilience or the future of any product any food product any new smartphone any new flying machine or or air taxi it's not about the brand the brand or that future products name or cool innovation it's about how we produce those products of the future that will ease the suffering of humanity and ease the problems and destruction on our environment on our on our climate on our biodiversity so that's why I like innovators like you know in the mouse lie I like innovators like Henry Ford I like thought leaders who are thinking of ways and creating almost these planetary services they say how can we use first principles thinking how can we use a creative mindset to clean up and solve these problems and do it in a in a production way it's how we produce that in that process doesn't first have to harm human health or environment in that process and that's a whole different mind mindset to shift the vital part of it is is the scale which you've been talking about it's how do we get that type of thinking to scale right now there's tons of planetary services companies popping up climb works is dealing with the scale issue and they're just starting to get the ball rolling there's you know the slate boy lent who's doing the riverways and ocean cleanups with the ocean cleanup projects and that's now getting just yeah and there's many others on board coming online especially in the energy sector food sector as well there's a lot a lot of new startups new innovators that are getting ready and already eating the lunch of some of these big players out there let me give let me give you two if i might let me give you two examples of this so one people get the system wrong so people the big thing right now is plastic bottles they're ruining everything well you know Coca-Cola had a plan for plastic bottles going back to the 90s making them out of plants the problem isn't that they can't make a bottle out of plant or the cost it's not the problem this is a classic example clarify the problem is shelf life the problem is in the distribution of Coca-Cola that bottle of coke may sit on the sit on a store shelf at a bodega somewhere for a year and that bottle starts to break down in six months or seven months the second problem is the business model of that which is the bottling company is not the parent company that sells the zero right so one company has an interest in doing that another company has there's a detriment so the problem isn't can't can we make this and is it affordable this is your systematic thing the second thing when you've got a long-term cause and effect problem the the sad part is nobody cares about your stupid innovation they care about how it solves their problem right that's what they care about so nobody cared about climate change until the entire west coast of this country is on fire the great lakes are as high as they've been in 700 years all of our rivers are burgeoning and if you know anything about the united states we have more rivers than the rest of the world combined right we have a huge river system in this country that's part of the reason we got to be able to move around and stuff and there what are there in late october there are five hurricanes in the Atlantic ocean right so the notion is this is all of the sudden this is becoming real not because people have changed their mind about the theory or the policies becoming real because their house is burning or it's underwater or something terrible is happening and i'd love to say that people change before events but you know and i know they don't a lot of innovation is event driven did we know there could be pandemics worldwide we did in fact the gates foundation started talking about this early 90s and so did the so did the world health organization and when has there ever been a time mark in this world where we didn't have pandemics right herodotus writes about it right the the the china that's rich computer just writes about it in the analytics right so the notion these are old ideas but the notion is nobody pays attention to any of this crap until it's a crisis and here's what the one thing you're seeing shifting again this is comes back to my book the anomalies one of the things you're seeing shifting is is everything was optimized in our life everything optimized the optimal thing until the optimization when you realize that everything is aligned when something was a dislocating event everything becomes dislocated so now you can't go to school you can't go to the football game you can't go to the restaurant you can't do this you can't do any of those things that were all optimized toilet paper there wasn't enough hand sanitizers can you believe in the United States we could not get protective equipment and we have it'll be a scandal forever and rightfully so that we've killed our frontline workers which has been an absolute disaster so the notion is we're starting to figure out diversity and we're having the wrong conversation the right conversation the conversation we're having is it's all about china well the truth is it's all about you need multiple sources and multiple ways and and and what people are saying is but if that happens it'll cost more well if we're being innovative first of all it'll cost a little more not a lot more if we're being innovative right if we're being truly innovative about how we manage these systems but really what that requires is these different groups of people with very different ideologies and very different views of the world actually start talking to each other that's what's got to happen so i've wanted i just wanted to build your point about systems of thinking people get this is the wrong they think this is the problem it's not the problem the problem are these other things downstream what if you solve those then all of a sudden we have a plant-based bottle all of a sudden the bottle not only is good when it goes to the Atlantic Ocean turtles eat it it's good for them you know i would really hope that we could solve these problems that we could really get there but we're going to go down so many rabbit holes and open this up that you know because we've touched and i i truly believe that the the local the indigenous the clusters the communities that they're really the front line they're the bottom up they're they're the the key to a lot of solutions but then what what we hear and you just touched upon it okay china's to blame right they're they're to blame that's it's their problem whatever well if we had that approach and if we're being so nationalistic it shouldn't even come into our radar it should have no effect what what china or brazil or whoever is doing because we're not getting any of our resources there they're not producing any of our products there because we're local we're resourceful we're being innovative and creative in our own nation the thing is is we the us and i'm from the us may have the the the noble laureates and may have those great people then then let's get creating let's make america great again let's get that creativity and and and that creating out of that stuff not just on one little fringe on the side and so that's what that's where your book is about exactly that's why we're having this discussion and so but we need to enlighten people we need to talk about that and say i understand that's what's being discussed in the book that's what what's what's happening to to help people with that knowledge to make that shift so before we get on any more rabbit holes because i mean we could tell stories for hours we've been around for a while and have had some great experiences many more than i could probably ask you on on on some of the greats that you've known and met over the years or consulted with to give us some more wisdom and how we can apply that to what what's going on today and how we can move forward in the future and those things will be found in your book but my first big question for you is the burning question wtf and that's what we've been asking ourselves this year many times but it's not the swear word it's what's the future yeah i think we're at we're all at one of those inflection points um there are three futures and i'm i want to be optimistic i'm not sure i am it's going to take if you talk to me in a couple months coming into this year i told all my staff i said um in the head before the virus really i said this is going to be a bad year this is there's a lot of there's a lot of there's a lot of pandering to ideologies that are outdated and don't work and if you think about almost all the elections around the country let's not just talk about the united states and let's not just talk about politics because politics are usually a reflection of culture and what goes on so it's not just the candidates it's the it's the culture there is one part of the culture around the world that says uh all of our problems are created by people who aren't like us think about england think about brazil think about india think about the united states right we're all doing it um then there's another culture that says burn the system down we're going to do something completely different think about the way the election could have gone here think about the election that you tried to have in the united kingdom right you know i don't want to get a i don't want to get everybody's eye or up but i just want you to get that on the bell curve the edges of the bell curve are masquerading as the middle because both of these groups represent a very small percentage of the populations in these countries but they're very vocal and they're very dangerous they're they're not savvy they have weapons both sides it's gonna and i'm not trying to i'm not trying to say they're equal but i'm just saying the edges of the bell curve are masquerading as the middle and the reason they are is because enormous inequities have been created around the world enormous right and that was a side effect of high efficiency capitalism so one group wants to get rid of capitalism and the other group wants to double down and say you know make something yourself right so the so the first thing is um the first scenario is that the middle of the bell curve strikes back and you're seeing that my country you're seeing the middle of the bell curve start to roar back whether we'll roar back big enough next week we'll have to figure that out um think about the candidate the centrist candidates right so in the midterms it was all everything moved to the left um in you know if you know this and for the first time in my lifetime the generation behind me voted more than my generation did because i'm a baby boomer with largest generation first time exers and millennials your generation showed up right actually showed up um and and so so the the first scenario is the middle shows up and things in an evolution speed and magnitude are always the big issues how much how fast things slowly start to get better we start to walk this back um hope i hope for that scenario second scenario and you're seeing this in other parts of the world is as far as the right moves in countries the response will be the left will move that far it's uh newton's law you know for every action there's an equal and opposite reaction and that those groups um become like in my lifetime become like the soviet union they become ideological but certainly unsustainable they try and create all these new utopian systems that don't work out they destroy the old system so there's no place for the new system to go um i hope that doesn't happen we've seen that happen a couple of countries around the world already that's not very good thing to happen so is as much as we're concerned about the one system being trying to go backwards we got another system that maybe is trying to go forward too fast and too much i think the third scenario which is an interesting one which is the one that i actually think is probably going to happen mark i i'm going to say something really radical and that is what if politics don't matter anymore what if it completely doesn't matter because if you start looking at who funds our municipalities it's all now these private industries and what if the political entities that we've all thought we had were so powerful what if they have no power at all what if we disregard them what if what if um what if things are what if things happen through different avenues and i think to a large degree that's happened in my country whether it's and i'm not saying it's all good but i'm just saying if you were to say which is more powerful right now in the united states the senator google you know because the senate saw got google on mad on this i'm like yeah if this was a this was a bar fight you know i got 10 bucks on google you know the google is going to wipe the floor with these guys so to me and i'm not and i'm not do not want your listeners saying jeff is in favor of big corporate interests i am not right what i'm trying to say is that uh that big interest could be a could be a union could be cooperative could be uh you know a community and i think they're starting to be and i think the biggest thing that the young people have got right is that they get that as a consumer they can direct these companies by their buying habits what they get wrong is they're all over the place so if you didn't like candidate a you know what what they'll say is we're going to boycott these 1500 places that's that's the dumbest thing i've ever heard you don't like candidate a you figure out who are the three people that sit at the top of these committees and what's the one company that supports all of them and you basically destroy them right i mean i'm not trying to give you a blueprint for this but what'll happen is those people will capitulate because they have to capitulate the money so the notion is there's there's this there's this reckoning about about inequity that we're going to have to deal with one way or the other i'd like it to be scenario one scenario three looks very much like it's happening and scenario two i think is incredibly viable in the next five years because we're no longer on the sunny side of the hill and when you're very correct on on how you how you give your answer so you're giving us three choices and uh you're coming around all the demographics but that's okay i'm going to put you on the spot though jeff i'm going to put you on the spot and i want to ask you it's a very similar question uh but it's it's you it's your answer it's for you and maybe no more extended than for your family uh for stanning and your kids what does a world that works for everyone look like for you yeah i'm um this is where i'm going to go absolutely back to my upbringing i think there's two things that need to happen number one it's again this is going to upset some of your readers it's not where we all end it's where we all start right that the whole notion of equality and liberty are not the same idea liberty is about freedom quality is about sameness so to me the only way to have a just society is to start everybody at the same place and that means there's a lot of issues about injustice that are legacy issues around the world's education systems an absolute disaster not just in this country in a lot of countries um you know um some people need child care because they're you know so the notion is i don't think we've done a very good job what i think in my world we do a much better job at the starting line all the way through i think in america one of things that'd be very easy to do is make community colleges for free so even if you have a trade you have skill right and i think you should be also given opportunities to gain capital early in your career so you can build businesses it's good for the economy you become a taxpayer it's all good the second thing that uh i think needs to happen is we need to have a vision or a sense of destiny and we don't when i grew up we are going to the moon it was pretty clear the soviet's had spot nick in space and so all of us good little good little boys and girls when i grew up in america we all you know we look at it we were the empty of the world in terms of science and math and things like that i grew up with that um what happens once you become sort of the big dog on the street your your goal becomes staying the big dog which is not a goal right your goal should be um we're going to fix the environment and in fact incidentally one thing that i come back to the covid thing the world i want i'm delighted that that uh not entirely america i don't want to make it sound like that but mostly america is solving this problem right we're solving with the vaccine we're solving that problem look at the money it's being spent in this country versus being spent in other countries i'm not trying to make an america first argument not at all i'm just saying that we're doing what needs to be done in spite of everything else and i think that's given us a sense of destiny that's that's where where i'm from we shine like we're gonna do this and going to mars is not that i think that the two things that we have to go to the moon on are we we created a very unjust world all you have to do is drive 50 miles in either direction from where i live in in arbor i live in a bubble where everyone is smart and whatever and drive 50 miles in any direction i'm from and i'm from one of those places and then the second the second part about uh that is the environment which is your passion i think we've ruined it and but the other side of it is this is where this is where i'm a boomer i'm not about uh living in small houses if you want to live in a small house that's cool right if you want to recycle bananas that's cool right in favor of all that but i think the way you solve the environment is that that combustion engine gets 300 miles a gallon right and uh you know those those areas that currently burnt down instead of us trying to do everything with that why don't we make those places pick a fence around them and say let's let them recover let's let's say we don't build on any let's decide like we did with the national parks we're not so a lot of it's uh not what i think we should do it's what i think we should stop some of it's what we should start doing and some of it we should stop doing and what you know here's the big problem with all this and a personal level and at the end of the day it all comes down to human nature i hate to say it i hate to say you know um how many do you have friends that are social media friends that have posted things that were they're nice people you went to school with them you like them i want to start out by saying they're good people but they have bad ideas and you've tried to explain what's wrong with their idea instead of listening what do they do they get more enraged this is dominant logic right this is what this is the world we're in and what we keep trying to do is we keep trying to explain logically how this works what we need to do is make this personal and more emotive right think about your grandchildren i just got my first grandchild a couple weeks ago um so i saw it online too yeah the big thing is do you want to have a better world for your grandchildren make it personal so yes the world i see i don't like i like the i like that we have a centrist choice that we can that we can take the system that we've got and and re level said it to what it was originally supposed to do which was everyone started at the same place like when i was a boy that instantly isn't true across the board so you know strike that it should have been it should have been more inclusive but if it if what i went through was more inclusive it would have been better and then too um where are we going as a planet you know uh and i just i don't see it i don't see it in germany you know uh you have this incredible you know mrs. merkel and where she you know she's stepping where are you going i know what you don't want i don't know what you want and same is same is true for us the only country that seems to have a pretty clear idea where it's going right now has to be china and and it's uh where it's going is uh uh scary looking at the road they're building et cetera multi-generational views or this this infinite game as uh simon cynic would say you've unpacked a couple things that can only get into a couple of them just a little bit to tickle the fringes and then then we've got to wrap up with a couple questions um um i really appreciate your views and and you unpacking you know what's the future and what does the world that work for everyone look like for you there's some some things that i've really heard out and also experienced a lot of us are waiting for the future to be delivered to us so we're hoping that through a vote or something that there's a politician or someone looking out for our infrastructure and our best needs and that they're going to deliver us that since we voted or since they're the ones who are in the political power or in the government or that they're going to deliver us this future i'm kind of waiting for that uh that's that we're really going to be disappointed if we wait for the future to be delivered to us that's something that yes you know i always stand behind the map or and i'm better show you show the earth a lot of us because we're all on the same planet but we're all crew members there's none of us who are passengers just along for the ride waiting for uh the these wonderful politicians that we have to to create this beautiful future to deliver it to us even even the innovators that is kind of in our arena um we're going to be sorely disappointed let's put our hand on the steering wheel we can actually play a big role on what our futures look like uh and our families and the way we live uh the thing that you did mention with with the moonshots you talked about gfk's moonshot i'm also a big fan and i love that vision uh one thing that's kind of went under the bridge or or not gotten a lot of knowledge or traction but it's uh a thousand times bigger than the moonshot for gfk going to the moon and that is the world's first ever global moonshot and it's the the paris agreement the the 2030 agenda more importantly than that it's it's a roadmap and a plan it's called the sustainable development goals 17 sustainable development goals targets and indicators that are the world's first ever global moonshot if you think about it 197 countries came together for the first time ever and agreed upon a plan roadmap through back casting foresight dynamic systems modeling years of negotiation and preparation when they decide about the decided upon it in september uh 24th 2015 now we're already five years into it uh if you understand that that is a historical precedent if you if you think of two countries or even two separate delegates um despiteing on where they're going to go eat lunch or what book they're going to read or uh you know how they're going to divide up resources they can't find their ass with both hands sometimes excuse my french but the it's unheard of 197 agreed and you know we've had some some controversy and obviously trump and some others trying to trying to jump out of that but that's a historical precedent and that's that vision that medium that that you are talking about we were in our generation and you uh i grew up on star track and so i had this sci-fi vision of of the future you know no smoking gender diversity gender equality and and you know all these cool things that we've been able to innovate engineer and create those futures for the most part fairly close you know general magic we talked about it has done amazing things apple and many others uh and now teslan spacex what we're seeing this year during a pandemic some but let's put a pin in that let's put a pin in that because there's a very important piece you're getting at here which is even if we pulled what like just like Kyoto we didn't sign Kyoto but here's the thing all the major american companies conform to it why because that's their customer base this is this is what i was saying in scenario three this i want everybody to get this that maybe the government doesn't matter this is a radical idea that the notion is you look at what michael bloomberg has done with the paris agreement right the paris agreement i think in in most of the fortune 500 you might i might not be correct but most of the fortune 500 in this country that's headquartered here is observing it oh yeah even though the government doesn't so the notion is we're gonna still have the same effect i just need you to get this that that vision i'm with you 100 was so compelling that that the notion is it kicked into our system as a logical place to go yeah i love that that i mean that's exactly ties it and and says it so well i want to wrap up our conversation with it's kind of selfish it's for my listeners it's i want you to give them three sustainable takeaways something that's going to make their life better or help them um and basically if there was one message you could depart my listeners you know the sustainable take about takeaway that has the power to change their life what would that be um i give you three of them first of all um the way in which we learn everything is through experience see one do one teach one so the first thing is find somebody who's doing what you want to do and apprentice yourself to them and once that you develop mastery find somebody who wants to do what you're doing and apprentice them that will make you this sustainable two stop thinking about what you want to do it's narcissistic it's the self-help thing run amok start thinking about what you're designed to do what is it that your gifts your natural gifts your experience your education what is it that you can do and and do that do more and more of that finally what are you willing to give up to grow everything costs something in life anybody tells you differently is trying to sell you something right the key to creativity and innovation in your life might not be doing something new it might be stopping something old apprentice yourself look at what you're designed to do and be willing to stop something to create capacity you want to write that book great stop going to pilates you want to build that restaurant stop volunteering at the humane society now i know those are all good things but look at everything costs something if you don't have time you don't have capacity you have to create it you have to create the capacity to enliven your creative self yeah i think more modern uh one is uh you know get off the kick talk for that extra hour two hours a day get on to something that's uh you know writing your book or doing something else what have you experienced or learned in your professional journey over these many years that you would have loved to know from the start smart people aren't good at learning some smart people think they know everything and um i was a i was a terrible high school student came to college as a team store a group in a hud house and i went through college incredibly fast and won a bunch of awards i was 25 when i got out with my PhD i did my PhD in two years um what i what i learned was because i was such a dummy growing up i could learn really quickly and the people who had much better pedigrees than i did seem to have trouble and they they they stopped so um if you're smart open up your mind and understand that you don't know everything and if you don't think that you're smart as other people boy you have advantage because you're going to have a lot of room to think new thoughts and i really encourage all my listeners to get out there and listen to you your your videos and watch them and get your book read it um that's also it's also available on audio right yeah and if you go to jeftagraph.com just jeftagraph.com there's a page which you click on it and all the resources are there so the videos it's all and it's all free i'm not going to bother you i didn't build it for that i built it so if you wanted to start a business or work with your classroom or whatever it's free that's the reason for doing it so it's great if you buy the book please if you got you got the resources by the book great if you don't there's also stuff there for you a lot of the companies that listen i deal a lot with fortune and thousand companies and have a lot of futurist innovators they're going to run out and grab it they definitely want to have it and you'll probably receive some follow-ups from them asking you to to come and be on their show i i really like uh if we could maybe do a follow-up in a few months and have sanny if she's interested i we didn't even get to talk about your innovation center and and what she does and she runs everything and she's like she's far smarter than her husband so you should just know that the boss the boss of all this is uh she's a diminutive uh bright beautiful and and bossy lady i think you guys have a power couple but married to forever you should know she's kind of she runs everything that's fabulous yeah she you guys are a power couple and i really like what i've heard her speak before and and and heard what she does and we'll have to get together and talk a little bit more about it hey jeff it's been so wonderful to have you on the show thank you so much and let's do this again soon mark thanks for having me this was a real treat thank you you're welcome