 Hello, this is Dr. James Canton. We're here in Mill Valley, California, beautiful Mill Valley, and I'm Gerd Leonhardt. We're both futurists and we have a bunch of short conversations today about what we do and why we do it and why it's meaningful or maybe not. But so the first question when I talk about this, what do we actually do? Many people don't know what a futurist is or they're thinking of, you know, Ray Kurzweil as the as the imminent futurist, but what are we doing? So how do you describe your job? Well, I do forecast. I look at trends. I use both analytic models and empirical models and I look at data, but I also talk to people who are creating the future, oftentimes the avaliars, and I spend a lot of time in the marketplace looking at what's next and then trying to figure out what are the implications. And I also look at things like who are on a periphery of what we're doing. They're involved in the environment or they're involved in some kind of emerging technology, something disruptive that might lead me to better understand change. Yeah, I use this term a lot, if I can for my clients, to look beyond the obvious. One of the biggest problems that clients are having is that they're so busy chasing what they do today that they have no time to look beyond the obvious. So I was looking at next month's revenue reserve, especially big companies, and this is a death wish, because as you can see, for example, Nokia, it was quite obvious that the touchscreen was coming, but it was beyond their level of obvious. So my mission is to bring that, I think, forward. So I'm looking at three to five years to bring it forward to them. Yeah, I think that that's a I share that perception. Not all futures are the same. There are some very thoughtful futures that you wouldn't want to speak to your group because they'll put you to sleep. They're very smart, but very boring. I think the thing that you and I have in common is maybe a bit of the entertainment factor, as well as that we have one big job, which is to look over the horizon for our clients and say, this is what we think is coming. Your focus, as you said, well, on the next quarter, or maybe even next year, we can tell you how to prepare, how to invest, what kind of talent you need to get ready for that next impact on green and sustainability, or what's coming in terms of the challenges to your ecosystem and competition. I think that's one thing that futures should do, which is to think about what's coming next. There's a Chinese saying that, I think it's Chinese that says, if you want to know about the future, ask your children, because children have this horizon of going, having imagination. And it's so hard to keep imagination when you're just always stuck to the bottom line. So to bring this imagination back to them and say, no, you have to be able to use this sort of play factor and think about, okay, my company today, for example, in the car business, in five years, cars are going to be about transportation. They're not going to be about status symbols, some of them, but most of them not. So what is beyond that obvious? It's very hard to do when you're stuck in the current to look at what's outside of the current world. Kids can do that. Absolutely. In fact, I have a model that says success is a barrier to seeing the future, current success, because you think this is the way it's going to be. There is no steady state. We collaborated together on a project, a speaking project for Volkswagen. And I was in the States and you were meeting with the client and presenting. What did you learn from that that might, another client might help us understand about how the courage of that client even to ask us to think about the future with them? Well, I think the challenge is clearly for us is, you know, that there's cultural issues about how people do things and why they focus on Europe. We're risk adverse and Americans are obsessed with risk and the opportunities, you know, their pioneers and their cowboys in many ways in a positive sense, right? In Europe, we don't do that. So I think it's very hard and a challenge for us to be internationally equally versatile. You know, when you go to Japan or to go to Asia or South America, everybody has a different culture of innovation. But one thing that's uncommon that I found a lot is this, you know, people don't change unless you give them either pain or love, you know. So they fall in love with an idea like measles fall in love with a Kindle and there was no indication that it was going to be fruitful. And Nokia has the pain of being utterly, you know, basically vanishing basically. And out of that pain, now they're changing too. So pain and love is a sort of good recipe. I like that. But I have to, in defense of US companies, they don't always get right. And there's the same kind of problems they have with not seeing the future. I mean, that's really the business we're in is helping our clients see the future. You think about it, Microsoft, they stayed too long with their model of their paradigms based on their desktop. Well, the internet was emerging. They didn't quite see that. You have more agile companies like Apple. I started to Apple. I was on the original Mac team. And much of what I learned, I learned from Steve Jobs, tearing paper up and exploding because we just didn't understand how to be more what I call future ready. So, you know, American companies, some get it. Many, quite frankly, don't get it. And they're not around today. Yeah, I mean, I suppose it works both ways. You know, I think there's really value in how people do stuff in Europe as well as South America where there's all different values. But the bottom line is, you know, seeing the future as you are in the present is sort of the, you have to be not schizophrenic, but you have to be dualistic. You have to be able to see what's in five years, which may in most cases have nothing to do with what you're doing today. Very much so. And that's quite a challenge, you know, for us, of course, that's our daily mission. That's our daily mission. And in all fairness, that's why companies hire us because we're obsessed with, for them, we're kind of the pathfinders.