Insights · December 5th, 2024
Paul Saffo – Futurist, and Jay Ogilvy – Global Business Network, take the stage for a thought-provoking fireside chat on the emergent nature of the future. Drawing on decades of foresight expertise, they unravel how trends and uncertainties shape tomorrow’s world. This session also marks the launch of Jay Ogilvy’s latest book, offering fresh insights into the layers of consciousness.
You can download a PDF of Jay’s book here.
Full transcription
Note: This transcription may not be 100% accurate in its grammar and spelling
Paul Saffo: Good afternoon. It is my pleasure to be here with Jay Ogilvy. I’m Paul Safo. I’m hanging out in Silicon Valley. You might call me a futurist with the past. More importantly, I’ve known Jay for many, many years, and we have crossed paths many times, and you’re in for a real treat. So we have only 30 minutes. I’m going to do a very brief just a few data points on on Jay. He got his PhD at Yale. He taught at Yale, was very happily working as an academic philosopher, and then got lured to Silicon Valley in 1979
He joined the legendary foresight team at SRI International in Menlo Park. In 1987 he went on to co found global business network with Peter Schwartz and others. In 2009 he was dean of the Presidio graduate school, and since then, he’s been working independently, and luckily for the rest of us, has been busy writing, and in fact, he’s very close to publishing a new book. The title of the book is, and I’m going to read this carefully, because it’s a long title, and he spent how many years working on the title, about 20, about 20 years working on the title. So as the moderator, I would be absolutely failing in my basic job if I did not get it right. So it’s coming together, how the emergence of life, evolution and language shed light on the emergence of consciousness and love wealth and artistic creativity.
And actually, could you put up the QR code behind me on the screen please? So he has very generously offered to allow anybody who would like to download the PDF of the book, on the condition that you provide thoughtful comment back to him, and it was a funny thing when I read it. I did make the mistake of starting it late in the afternoon, and I ended up staying late, which ties into a really interesting fact about Jay, and this is the real introduction today to Jay, as it’s the one you won’t see in the BIOS and the like. We have a lot of friends in common, including the incomparable Peter Schwartz. And so I asked Peter. I said, you know, I’ve I’ve known Jay and knew Peter forever. How did the two of you meet? And it turned out, the story of how they met says volumes about how extraordinary Jay is, and I’m going to read this. I couldn’t print it out on paper, but I asked Peter, and here’s what he said. These are Peter’s words. While I was at SRI in 1978 I was doing research on decentralization as an idea for scenario building. GBN, of course, is the company that really puts scenario method on the map. He continues, I had gone to Kepler’s bookstore, this is a famous holy shrine in Silicon Valley, to see what I could find, and bought a stack of books, all of which dealt with decentralization in a variety of ways. One of those books was many dimensional man, decentralizing self, society and sacred by none other than Jay Ogilvy, or excuse me, at the time you were James Ogilvy, that was the East Coast incarnation. You became Jay when you came west, he said, by James Ogilvy, someone I had never heard of, about eight o’clock that evening. I picked it up and I began reading. The next time I looked up, it was 6am and the sun was beginning to rise, my life had been changed.
Jay gave me a whole new way to see things he was and they said, so he finishes the book just after sunrise. Continues at 8am I started tracking him down, and I found him by 9am now, parenthetically, keep in mind, this is 1987 78 this is when dinosaurs ruled the landscape. The web was a dream. Email barely existed. And he said within he concludes, within a couple of days, I was on a plane to see him at Williams, where he was teaching, and the rest, as they say, was history. He typical Peter. He persuaded Jay to come out to California, and the rest, as I say, was history with one detail, Jay and I have known Peter for how many decades? Well, obviously, since 1978 Peter tends to exaggerate. So my first question to you, Jay is, you want to tell us the real story
there. I was mild.
Jay Ogilvy: Leonard, philosophy professor at Williams College, sitting in my office at home and the phone rings,
are you? Professor Oakley, yes, you owe me one. He says, Why think it’s a crank call? He says, You owe me one because I had a fight with my wife last night. I wouldn’t come to bed. I had to finish your book. Can I come across the country and talk with you about it?
Wow.
And he came across. Three days later, he was on my doorstep, and we talked for three solid days, and have been best friends ever since Peter. Some of you here probably know him, but Peter is an extraordinary person who knows everything he reads incredibly and remembers everything he’s ever read. It’s terrifying. It’s It’s terrifying. Yeah, yeah, no, we discovered that weekend when we first met, that not only did we have common interests in the future, my interest, stemming from my main interest in philosophy, is the philosophy of Hegel. Hegel, early 19th century philosopher who was the first philosopher to put philosophy into time.
Prior to Hegel, philosophy was the quest for the great blueprint in the sky of eternal truths. Hegel recognized that Greek consciousness was different from Christian consciousness, which was different from Renaissance consciousness, which was surely different from modernity, as some of Hegel’s students worked out people like Weber, Max Weber. So this business of putting philosophy into time gave me a sense of the dynamics of consciousness. But Hegel did not predict. He did not predict the future. Wise man, yeah, yeah. He actually claimed absolute knowledge, as if history had come to an end with him.
You’ve heard perhaps about Fukuyama’s essay on the end of history. Frank Fukuyama is a very bright man. I never met him, but I read a lot of his works. What he did not mean by the end of history was that newspapers will no longer have anything to write about. It wasn’t the idea that nothing will happen anymore. It was rather the idea that history had matured, it had become adults, and that’s different from dying coming to an end.
Paul: And we love Frank Fukuyama speaking well, I want to get back to you. I got three questions. First question, how has future studies changed over the decades? And let’s not start at 79 let’s go back to the 50s and the birth of Rand, that optimistic period. How has it changed?
Briefly, put philosophically, from epistemology to ontology. Now, what do I mean by that there will be an exam at the end? By the way, epistemology is the theory of knowledge and future studies used to be about trying to know the future.
Jay: Now future studies has become close to the marvelous quote from Sheik Mathew, The future isn’t something we await. It is something we create. When we first started doing future studies at SRI, right in the middle of Silicon Valley, we tried hard to get clients like Google, like Facebook, these big Silicon Valley companies, and they wanted nothing to do with us, because their line was, we don’t need any futurists. We’re creating the future now. Back then, I was not happy with that response, because it meant less business, but today I really appreciate that response. And so ontology, that’s not the logos of knowledge, is epistemology, the logos of being this is ontology thing. And so future studies now I think really is more about creating the future than trying to predict it. And if I summarize that in a slightly different way, it would be that starting with Herman Hudson, Herman Kahn and the RAND Corporation coming out of World War Two, they saw what we could do with operations research, and they said, we can apply the precision of mathematics to the uncertainties of social forecasting. It was just a matter of getting the right tool. And then they we’ve eventually come around to the point of you that know that’s not at all what is possible, because the future is emergent. You have a wonderful metaphor for describing that old, old world, ardently, the moon and a carpet.
Future studies used to look at the future kind of like the other side of the Moon. Before we had had certain navigation, you know, we were utterly convinced that the other side of the Moon was completely determinate, not indeterminate at all, not vague, not like a cloud, but like this side of them. So it was just waiting to be we just hadn’t been there yet, described. And the other metaphor would be the Oriental rug, unrolling the patterns in there. We just haven’t seen it yet, because we haven’t unrolled it all the way that that shift from epistemology to ontology. If I was going to extend your rug example, I would say it’s the same rug, but it’s not the rug that unrolled has the answer in it already. It’s that the rug pattern changes by the act of unrolling.
You know? The other parallel I think about with this is in the same period of time, seismologists in early 1950s they were convinced they would be able to effectively predict earthquakes in a few years. And the further time has gone on, the more they have concluded that it is truly impossible to predict now, future studies is not quite in that sad a shape that we worked out a better answer, and in fact, I’ll come back to that later, but it feels like it was that same intellectual climate the optimism of World War Two. Anything can be solved. We can do science. We can do research. And then that sort of ran into the Hegelian traffic jam, and things became less certain.
Paul: Let me give you a second question. Why are positive futures harder to predict and understand the negative ones? And part of the reason I want to know is when I talk to people and forecasters. So here’s a little forecast trick. If someone demands you to make a forecast and you have absolutely no idea what’s going on, give them a negative forecast. Because if you give them a negative forecast and you’re wrong, they will be so happy that it didn’t happen, and they will give you credit for helping warn them and keep it from happening. On the other hand, if the negative forecast comes to pass, and it’s true, they will think you’re a genius, but under no conditions if you unless you’re absolutely never give a positive forecast, because if that’s wrong, they will show up at your house with burning torches,
with that as a context, no pressure. Why are positive futures so much harder?
Jay: It took us years to realize, to recognize what I’m about to say, and I’m kind of embarrassed, because it’s really very simple. For years, we often created scenarios that were too negative. We wrote a book called Seven tomorrow, seven scenarios for the future of the United States in the 80s and 90s. A great book, but the trouble is, it sold way less than John nesbitt’s mega trends, which came out at the same time, because John Nesbitt mega trends was positive, it was optimistic. I gave him the word megatrends. I heard it a bunch this morning, and I realized that if I’m remembered for anything, it may be for inventing the word megatrends.
So are there any people in this room who ever knew John Naismith, turn your hand up. Just a couple of shy hands. Yeah, John. John was one of the sweetest guys you’ll ever meet, and he was also one of the most generous. And I remember him specifically telling me this, yeah, that he got the term from you. Yeah. He invited me after I wrote the book on decentralization, he invited me to talk to his staff, and then we went back to his house and we talked about one thing and another. This was right when I was leaving Williams to go to Sri. And he said, Why are you going to SRI?
Well, as it happened the week before, a week earlier, I had read an essay by Tom Wolfe, in which he opened with the sentence, I was crossing and re crossing the country with megavolts of nostalgia. And I thought, megavolts, that’s a good word. I like that word. So I was saying meta this and meta that all week. Well, I mean, if you touch a power line, it’s better to have mega volts than mega amps.
But Jay, let’s go back to this question of why. But you know, I he asked me why I went there, and I said, well, to study trends, but not just ordinary trends, mega trends. And at that point, he had written his book, he had taken it to his publisher, and they would, and the title then was high tech, high touch, which was one of his trends, and the publisher didn’t like it, but he came back with the word mega trends, and they launched $100,000 marketing trend, right? Which is, well, okay, so I’m watching this clock and you still haven’t answered my question.
The simple answer is that negative scenarios are psychologically difficult because we don’t like to anticipate pain, but they’re intellectually very easy, because all you do is you take the present and you kick the hell out of it, and that’s easy to do. You can imagine an earthquake or economic collapse or global warming. I mean, negative scenarios are intellectually easy, but positive scenarios which are psychologically very satisfying, because we like a happy ending, but they’re intellectually extremely difficult to write, because to make them plausible, you’ve got to solve problems that nobody’s ever solved.
You know now you can announce the solution of a problem, as I did recently, writing a scenario, I said newspaper headline, graduate student at Duke, reverse engineers, photosynthesis. Now, if that happened, nobody would ever be hungry again. I mean, that will make a very, very positive scenario. But I don’t know how to reverse engineer photosynthesis, but one has to imagine solutions like that to write positive scenarios. I look at it, and as I’ve listened to you talk over the years that a negative scenario is easy, because the way to describe a negative scenario is just take a problem in the present and neglect it and let it get bigger. I mean, of course, we’d never do that. I mean, not like with climate or arms control or something where a positive scenario means you have to take affirmative steps to actually make it happen.
But the other advantage of positive scenarios is the effect on the reader of the scenarios. No,
yes. While you’re right about the danger of offering a positive prediction, you’re absolutely right about that. I think when you have in a set of three, four or five scenarios, there ought to be one that is inspiring. There ought to be one that energizes people to create a better world and create cause people to create a broader possibility space, like we were talking about arms control. I liked your idea.
Trilateral.
Actually, I want you to listen up on this next point, because one of my main purposes for coming here,
a very long journey from Southern Utah, one of my main purposes, is to mo to promote the following idea, and I want you to all talk about it with all of your friends.
The idea is this, as opposed to multilateral negotiations that we’ve heard a lot about, or bilateral
negotiations, what if? And this, of course, is the preview to a scenario. What if we were able to get
the United States and Russia and China to agree that they will transfer somewhere between three and 5% of their military budget to Health, Education and Welfare for at least five years in Sabah. Now, I think the appeal of this idea is that as opposed to bilateral negotiations, where it tends to be kind of zero sum.
You might gain some, but you might lose some with another party. With trilateral negotiations, you give up x and you receive 2x you know if both China and the United States could be checking whether China had actually reduced its budget, when both China and Russia are checking whether the US has reduced its budget and so on, I think each of our countries would discover so fast that we’re a lot better off with all those billions going into Health, Education and Welfare than going into national defense. So I’m going to go to my third question, where you are so going to earn your salary as a philosophy professor, because you’re going to have to explain emergence in six minutes. I would just note, as a forecaster, and I look for trends as Jay was talking and thinking about the present, consider the difference. In the early 1960s Russia and United States were working hard to build the hotline to keep communications going. And at this moment in time, we’re in a world where Russia just cut fiber optic lines in the Baltic, very strange new space. And that takes us to convergence.
Emergence. Is a foresight too? Will it be up in a second here? Good, and there’s going to be an exam.
A nice example to introduce the concept of emergence is the simple combination of the element sodium and the element chlorine to produce sodium chloride, which is table salt. Then combine sodium and chlorine as table salt with the human tongue and the human brain. And whoa, you get the taste of salt.
Now, there is nothing in the nature of sodium or the nature of chlorine or the nature of the tongue or the brain that would allow you to predict the taste of salt. The taste of salt is an emergent property
from the combination of sodium chlorine the human tongue and the human brain, and from everything we know about those four components, there’s no way of predicting the taste of salt. So the future is an emergent phenomenon, and that’s why the title of my book is coming together, which I don’t actually mind for its sexual connotations. I don’t know how about how things go here in Dubai, but in in America, the phrase coming together, you know, simultaneous orgasm. I’ve known you for decades, and you never cease to surprise me, I did not have that’s where we were going. So we literally have three minutes left.
You got to make them appreciate emergence. Go to you got to make them appreciate emergence. Go Good. Well, emergence, it’s almost the opposite of reductionism. In reductionism, you try to explain the whole by the components, by the properties of the parts with emergence, the properties of the parts are heavily influenced by the properties of the whole I think this is true of happiness. You know, it’s really about anticipation rather than reduction. It’s not about causality from the past, but it’s about goals from the future. You gave me this formulation, and it really makes all the difference happiness or beauty.
If I say about my wife, who is very beautiful, if I say she’s beautiful, because I’m going to sound like an idiot, you’ll also risk diverse, yeah, if you say that the economy is strong because because you’re going to sound like An idiot, things like happiness, love, wealth, artistic, creativity, language, these things are emergent, and reductionism does not help us understand so what this chart is about, and it is you described it as an eye test. I don’t expect you to read all the small print, but the idea is, what I’ve done is to identify eight traits shared by a lot of emergent systems, and then take those eight traits through these different levels of consciousness and love and wealth. And let me give you just one example of how the traits can resonate from area to area.
The Linguist Fernand de Saussure invented the idea of the arbitrariness of the sign. What he meant by that was, while there are some signs that are automatic poetic that bowel sounds like the bark of a dog and Tiktok sounds like the sound of a grandfather clock. Well, I grew up with the grandfather clock, and I often would say Tiktok of the grandfather clock is a satisfying background, but now Tiktok is no longer an automatic poetic sound alike, like the shoe over a cobblers door, where there’s a Direct look alike or sound alike instead. Now Tiktok, as you well know, means something altogether else. It’s the social networking so, so it’s become, no longer just an icon, a look alike, sound alike, it has become a symbol.
Paul: So I have one last question I’m dying to ask. I had two, but I’m going to, I’m not going to ask you what your advice is for young futurists. Go up to them at the break. I have one question, why are you wearing white? And I had assumed it was just you had adopted your Gandalf, the white wizard phase of life, which is how I think about you. But I’m sure I’m wrong. So last closing comment, why are you wearing white?
Jay: I am wearing white for several reasons. One of them, the primary reason is with respect to our hosts. Now I’m able to wear a white because about 25 years ago, I had a gig in Hong Kong and was able to get a handmade, customized suit for less than the price of a jacket off the shelf at Macy’s. And so I bought a customized white suit to wear at my yacht club I sailed back then, and I had a boat, and I was member of the Yacht Club, but then I sold the boat, and I’m no longer a member of the Yacht Club, and so the only where I place I can wear my white suit is Dubai.
About Nikolas Badminton
Nikolas Badminton is the Chief Futurist & Hope Engineer at futurist.com. He’s a world-renowned futurist speaker, consultant, author, media producer, and executive advisor that has spoken to, and worked with, over 300 of the world’s most impactful organizations and governments.
He helps shape the visions that shape impactful organizations, trillion-dollar companies, progressive governments, and 200+ billion dollar investment funds.
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