Enhancing Thought through AI Tools and Reductionist Approaches

“It’s not about the amount that we say. It’s about making what we say really count. We can use some of these tools to write the long one, so that we can then go ahead and very quickly write the short version and really dial in.”

– Nikolas Badminton

What you will learn

• The journey from business strategy to futurism
• The power of small, focused communities
• Integrating AI tools in future scenario exploration
• Balancing traditional research with generative AI
• Embracing the unexpected in creative processes
• Using spiritual practices to enhance cognitive abilities
• Fostering deeper discussions through listening and questioning

Episode Resources

• Cyborg Camp
• Dark Futures
• ChatGPT
• Claude
• Gemini
• DALL-E
• Midjourney
• Stable Diffusion
• freelancer.com
• Evernote
• Vice
• Second Life
• Grof Breathwork
• Psychological kinesiology (Psych-K)
• AI (Artificial Intelligence)
• Generative AI
• Neural networks
• Grammatical inference
• Recognition linguistics

People

• Amber Case
• Chris Dancy
• Kevin Kelly
• Bruce Sterling
• Jaron Lanier
• Douglas Rushkoff
• Terence McKenna
• Rob Hopkins

Books

• From What Is to What If: Unleashing the Power of Imagination to Create the Future We Want by Rob Hopkins
• Cyberia by Douglas Rushkoff 

Transcript

Ross Dawson: Nikolas, it’s awesome to have you on the show.

Nikolas Badminton: It’s really, really good to be here, Ross. It’s long overdue, I think.

Ross: Yes, indeed. So you are a futurist. A futurist is a person who thinks about the future. So you gotta have to make sense of the world and to be able to think effectively and communicate that well. So, how do you amplify your ability to do that well?

Nikolas: So it’s really interesting. So if you sort of go back about 12 years, and I was sort of making this, this movement from business strategy, data-driven work, creative work. I worked in the advertising industry, then worked in software platforms. Actually worked for an Australian company called freelancer.com for a while, and then ran their sort of ops in North America. As I leapt from that into the bigger, wider world of sort of being a full time futurist and working in in that side of things, there are a few things. I mean, the first thing and everything is sort of accretive. 

The first thing I found was, you know, running meetups and running conferences was sort of the lifeblood of really injecting new ideas and thoughts together and creating sort of a microcosm and an ecosystem of sharing ideas. About 11 years ago, I ran a conference called Cyborg Camp by VR in Vancouver, with Amber Case and my friend, Carous O’Connell, that I’d known for a very long period of time. It’s about the intersection of humanity and technology. And about 140 people flew from all over the world to come to this little conference. Amber Case was actually a really big draw, and she talked about cyborgs and cyborg anthropology and whatever. And what was interesting was creating this, this drive of information, having people like Chris Dempsey, the organizer  in the overall organizing principles behind cyborg camp, was really interesting, the most connected man in the world, and he was collecting all the information and putting it all online in Evernote and making that available. Blogs were coming out of this. We made it into Vice and whatever, and slowly, we were capturing a lot of information. 

And then I ran a Future Camp, which was an unconscious on the future. I ran another conference called from now. And then I ran a series of events for about six years called Dark Futures, which some people were calling the Black Mirror of TED Talks. But needless to say, the first sort of, really accelerator of knowledge and intelligence augmentation for myself was all the people I could tap into and all the people that wanted to come on the journey. So community was the very beginning of that, around about that time, I started doing a lot more keynotes, so I had to do a ton of research. And what I’ve got is I’ve got a network of people that work in large organizations, in R&D departments, people that work in academia and whatever, and I could chat to them that became a podcast that I run called exponential minds. And it’s sort of an occasional, I do an occasional season every couple of years, and I bring in about 10 speakers to talk about various things. 

Ross: Just to backtrack a little bit. So this idea of communities, conference events, people come together, smart people have conversations. So how do you make useful, valuable conversations happen? Is there any art to it, as an individual or as a conference organizer, to make these places where there truly is collective intelligence and knowledge sharing?

Nikolas: So I mean, the way that I used to run conferences. I kept them specifically small, so there would either be 50 or 100 people. I’d ensure that there was no real sponsor. Occasionally, if someone wanted to give me some beer, that’s cool. If, say, Microsoft wanted to give me a room to run my conferences, or a set of rooms, that’s cool as well, but there was never sort of any pay to play or anything like that. So that was the first guiding principle — was like to make it sort of a non commercial enterprise. I never made money that gave me the opportunity to really open the doors and invite people specifically for free, from my community and across North America to be in the room and to bring specific ideas and content, and I would actually spend time working with them, to prime them and say, I love what you do. I love what you talk about here, where you kick off a discussion, where you do a presentation, and whatever. 

So what I found was that was a really good way of getting things going. So it wasn’t me as a leader of the conference. That in about 50 people, there’d be like 15 to 20 people that were really leading everyone into these larger discussions as well. So tapping into the subject matter experts to really lead us all into a brand new world and making time. So it wasn’t just all keynotes to actually have the open sessions and open discussions as well.

Ross: Fantastic. Yeah, I can really see that creates the conditions for more useful conversations than the usual. Yeah, sign up and sitting there, sitting in a dark room with someone on stage all the time. 

Nikolas: Yeah, exactly. And I used to capture a lot of the information from my meetups and everything like that, and used to share them on my original website, Nikolas barrington.com so I used to, I used to really try and bring it together. And I didn’t. I wasn’t doing this work to make money, per se, or to have a really successful business. I was doing it because I loved it, and people could tell that. And the people that would work with me and support me were in it for the game. And everyone was trying to sort of raise their sort of vibration, in a way, their cognitive vibration, and sort of step forward. And then it sort of changed tack a little bit when I started getting booked for keynotes. And I sort of I at one conference, I had a microchip implanted in my left hand by Amal Graafstra from Dangerous Things. And that sort of hit the headlines in Canada, and that me as a futurist, sort of hit that stage a little bit, and ended up with like 60 keynotes the next year. So that sort of changed that whole trajectory. And I moved away from running conferences, per se, into being a featured person at a conference. And that sort of changed the trajectory of how I thought about research and really trying to be efficient in doing so.

Ross: So well, whilst we’re talking about research, how do you do? How do you amplify yourself in digging deep? And that’s one of the things, because I received my book, Thriving on Overload. It says, okay, infinite amount of information makes sense of it. But, you know, as a futurist, I have a claim to be good at that, because I do, yeah, as you do research into just any topic under the sun, and suddenly you’ve got to tell people who’ve lived their life in the industry, it’s things that they don’t know or new ways perspectives on it. So it’s a there’s plenty of research and thinking to be done.

Nikolas: Yeah. I mean, I sort of came, I’m not an academic, but I actually came from a background doing Applied Psychology and Computing, which covered a lot of different technologies, and early doors on the internet, like 993, and whatever I was. I was building artificial neural networks and doing grammatical inference and recognition linguistics, a whole bunch of things. So I was already, like primed to do research into more esoteric sort of technologies and ways of thinking and philosophies in terms of the technological trajectory forward. So I mean, more than anything else, having access to the internet, but like looking at thinkers like Kevin Kelly, Bruce Sterling, diving into people like Jaron Lanier, Douglas Rushkoff in the 90s, his book Cyberia.

Ross: I love Cyberia. That was very influential to me.

Nikolas: Hugely influential book to me. Like, just still to this day, like, but like Terence McKenna and everyone, right, and Jaron Lanier and VR and DMT all sorts of stuff. And it sort of took me into that counter culture pocket. So I’ve always kind of looked at the edges and the counterculture for where things were really happening. And, biohacking was of interest to me. That was definitely counter culture, the early days of, you know, artificial intelligence or whatever. 

No one was giving these guys money. Everyone was like, these were just like the weirdos in labs trying to create artificial life where, in sort of digital form, and to see, sort of how this would metastasize and and live within sort of virtual environments, early early doors, like Second Life and things like that. All of this was just weird, weird, strange sort of edge technologies. And what’s interesting is, and the events that I always used to do were all about that edge. We’ve almost lost an edge, and everything’s been sucked into this homogenous sort of wood chipper of technological opinion. I mean, I think Silicon Valley is part of that mix as well. But, I still really work hard to scan the signals and sort of identify different trends by linking different things together in a lot of different ways that maybe people don’t expect you know that relate and come together and have an effect on the world.

Ross: So that’s a really interesting point, and that’s yes, the idea of synthesis. Okay, we’re exposed to similar information, and if you dig more, then you can uncover more different information. But it’s pulling it together in novel and useful ways. That’s right. So what is it that supports your ability to do the synthesis, this ability to stand on stage and say things that people find generally interesting because they’re different?

Nikolas: I do a lot of research on with every keynote, I into a ton of clients. On the client side, I, you know, I go into the industry. I call people in the industry. I read a ton of of academic research behind the industry, stuff on the edge academically, as well as sort of what’s in the mainstream and what’s being done. And also, those sort of edge players, and when I start to move forward and start to create some new new thoughts, then I can sort of start to play around with scenarios. And this is what’s become really interesting to me. And I know that you talk a lot about the augmentation of capability through the use of things like generative AI and the such like. And this has been something that I’ve been playing with quite a lot, not only from a generation of textual content, but also the like the exploration from a visual perspective as a helping mechanism to take us in in whole new directions as well. 

I mean, in my work, it’s like signals to trends, to scenarios and to stories, and I’ve really been trying to push the boundaries of what scenario exploration is with platforms like ChatGPT and Claude and Gemini, and starting to see, what we can do to look at positive and dystopian scenarios, which was obviously part of the work that I was doing, apart in facing our futures over the last couple of years since that Book was completed, zero Gen AI sort of help was, it was in my my book, and actually very little Gen AI helps going to be in my next book, because contractually, you’re not allowed to do those things. 

So, what we can do, is start to explore the mirror. Why I kind of call these Gen AI systems a mirror. So, pose it a question, pose it some scenarios, trying to work out and see what, what comes out of it. And generally, what I find is, maybe I’m talking about energy and ecological ecosystems, and I’ll pose it a question, ‘What if you know, renewable energy is pushed to the side, and green initiatives are canceled, and we go full tilt in a maximalist fossil fuel society?’ And in preparation for this, for this chat, I sort of went into that to even delve even deeper into, like, the mechanisms behind that. And it’s sort of interesting. You get this mirror of like, ‘Oh, yeah. I kind of expect that the answers to come from that. Okay, let’s push that out to 2050.’ It’s kind of an accelerant and whatever. It’s kind of interesting when you start to think about, you know, the reference points of all these systems and where they’re getting it from, where something like Claude and ChatGPT actually feels like they’ve, they’ve been drinking from the same fountain, and you’ve got and Gemini just seems to be a little bit like, freaky. It’s super interesting, as I went into it, it was, like, poetic and dystopic, and it was so for example, I sort of asked this, you know, describe a world in 2100 where environmentally friendly, non carbon fuel solutions are discarded. And I went on and on and on in a prompt, very sort of directional, and, you know, the others would be like, here’s a list of things that happen, very sort of cold. I didn’t ask it to write in a particular style of a publication or anything like that. And then Gemini just came out with this, and this is fabulous. The year is 2100 the gamble on renewables failed spectacularly. Big Oil whispering sweet nothings of energy independence and economic growth won the hearts and minds of a desperate world. The result a planet drowning in its own fumes and and I kind of love that poetic nature and Gemini, I think, is sort of the unsung hero, a little bit right in the scheme of things, that we suddenly getting something that’s interesting, that starts to talk about the geopolitical chess point. Or tech on steroids, violence and Exodus, and it’s like, Whoa. Okay.

Ross: Is this just the basic free model? 

Nikolas: Yeah. This is just the basic stuff, Ross. Just playing around. I used the latest version of ChatGPT, which I’m not particularly excited about what I get. It’s okay, and sure it can help us, write some plans and do this, and I can see if you’re sort of an entry level, and I was have doing an interview earlier today, if you’re sort of starting off in your career, and you want a sort of a shoe up to help you sort of get better quicker, I really do think there’s a lot of potential for these tools. I think when you’re in an advanced, sort of nearly 30 years in the game, with really firing on all cylinders in your sort of chosen profession, I think that, we expect more from these systems to go there. But it’s interesting. 

On the textual side, I get a little bit of juice from the squeeze. I’m finding that on a visual perspective, I’m getting a ton more value and a ton more opportunity to be provocative in the work that I do in storytelling, even using Dall-e or midjourney or Stable Diffusion right now. I’m actually working with a client. I’ve written three science fiction stories about airports a concert and a control center for the concert, and I’ve written the stories myself, I actually helped myself with like, writer’s block on the third story, because once you’re like, 3000 words in, it all gets a bit cross eyed. Sat in where was it? Or sat in Minneapolis Airport at 7:30am trying to bash out the final story. And I’ll be honest, I sort of tapped into to ChatGPT, just to help me break the impulse of that. It wasn’t particularly exciting story, either, and it didn’t end up in a place that was as exciting as some of the others. 

Ross: So these were for a client. 

Nikolas: Yeah, this is for a client. This is some work that I’m just finishing up right now. And I’m working with a very close friend of mine called Ray Lebre. He’s been working with stable diffusion and mid journey and those models. He was the first person that I knew that was building the servers at home off of like the open source sort of code, and he’s been doing it for about two years. And he’s probably the most advanced person that works in design fiction, speculative fiction, establishing shots, and really pushing the boundaries of what we can do with it. And we’ve just been working with a client, and the you know, the client thinks they have absolute creative control, and we have to remind them that there’s just a bit of strangeness in generative AI, and there’s part of that strangeness that’s really and if we embrace the strangeness, I think that that’s that’s incredibly interesting visually for us to sort of take us into new realm. So it’s interesting when we start to mix imagery with words, when we’ve got real human-driven narratives, working with some incredibly strange sort of visual, excuse me, with some really interesting visual sort of reflectors. 

Ross: This is an illustrated story, essentially. So you’ve got text and then you’re using images to illustrate the story.

Nikolas: Yeah. Absolutely so. So I’ve written these three stories of airports and concerts and also all sorts of stuff, and we just took moments, and then we used them to sort of start to build out the experience, right? And it’s a really interesting process, because when you work with clients. They actually get a very high quality, highly creative piece of work for a lot less money in a lot less time, which is great, but it’s got these side effects, which are, you don’t have 100% creative control, so how do you let go? And I think that there’s something quite spiritual about that, in a way, in a business context. And what’s really great is it’s like, I’ve got all these questions about this image, and it’s like, exactly, and now we’re going to take that into social media. I can’t say who the client is yet, but like, I’ll let you know when, when we’ve released it. We can take that into social media, and the conversation will be bigger around some of the more unexpected aspects of the images and the stories that we’re going to be telling to create engagement in communities, to really level up the thinking as a whole. And it again full circle back to the. Community. Back to the accelerant within that, whereas the accelerant were before was the 20 experts. So that would be my conference. The accelerant now is the strangeness of the generated images and the sort of the quirkiness of the of the speculative fiction I would have written. 

Ross: It’s a great illustration. My next question was going to be, yeah, it’s got, we can use these tools. But the point is, how do we think better and more? So it’s, it’s one thing to interact with ChatGPT, and you get a nice answer. And yeah, there’s lots of people play with these tools, but that doesn’t mean that they’re necessarily thinking better as a result. So it’s not so much. Okay. I don’t I don’t care if GPT has a good answer. I want GPT is answer to make me have a better answer or model or way of thinking. And so I think you’ve you got to that in a way with how you described these images, and the way in which those can amplify, including our questioning, our sort of that just makes me think, but I mean also just pulling back to those text answers. So you’ve got these, all right, I’ve asked us the models about 2100 and what it might look like. So how does all of this, all of these tools and approaches flow through to your richer, broader, deeper thinking?

Nikolas: It’s really interesting. It’s not about the amount that we say. It’s about making what we say really count and and by that, I mean it’s actually really good to go wide and reasonably deep, in a way, and these tools let you do that, but it helps you absolutely reduce down to what you really want to focus in on. So for example, I’m writing a book called Hope Engineering right now, and it’s just started. It’ll be out in a couple of years, and it’s a book that explores philosophies of hope, their intersection with possibility, thinking and the intersection with futures, exploration or foresight. It’s not really been framed that way by anyone and explored in that way. And I’m sort of really starting to work out what that actually means in terms of a playbook for modern executives. 

But what’s really interesting is when you start to ask questions about these areas, it takes you into this realm of like this is what we know about them and these. It identifies the missing links that you have to sort of build bridges between ideas. It highlights where there is a lack of clarity. It also does highlight some congruences, but slightly less so, but it reduces me down to maybe, instead of like writing a huge swathe of the philosophy of hope, the philosophies behind possibility, thinking and taking us into futures thinking there and right down into the heart of what we need for these ideas to have some kind of impact, to be said in a completely new way. Right? So it’s that reductionist approach is what we’re all striving to have, which is like the old story about, ‘I’m sorry I wrote you a long email. I didn’t have time to write a short one, right?’ So, so it’s kind of interesting that that we can kind of use some of these tools to write the long one, so that we can then go ahead and very quickly write the short version and really dial in, and that’s what I’ve actually found Ross, is that, when I have used these tools, you know, and I I use, you know, Gen AI two to LLMs and whatever, you know, for a small part of my practice. But when I do use them, I use them as a platform for hopping off into deeper exploration using other methods as well. Because, you can’t always trust that all of those studies exist or whatever, right? But it’s an excellent way to just go, Okay, we’re focused in that’s really clarified my thoughts. 

I can go for it further, and I think academically, that’s proving to be quite valuable. Yes, I’ve got a very close friend that’s actually on the chair of biology for Canada, for plant biology. And it’s interesting. Sat down her students extensively use things like ChatGPT to help them write better reports and work, and she goes, I’m all for it. They were terrible at writing reports before, and now, at least they’ve got a semblance of an understanding of of writing that can make sense, and they still have to go back and edit. But she goes, their work is just so much better right now. So it’s just one of those things. Again, people more junior in their careers that haven’t necessarily struggled with their way through all worked out how to write a lot of very useful information, even maybe at a PhD level, very, very quickly, right?

Ross: Yeah, as long as they’re not over delegating and they are still learning and able to be self sufficient.

Nikolas: Discuss in the realms of modern education, right? 

Ross: So let’s, let’s go beyond the field of AI. So you mentioned you’re cyborg, or delved into that world, or there’s sure other, yeah, tools or approaches used to augment yourself. So what else do you use to amplify your cognition?

Nikolas: So one thing, I’ve dabbled in psychedelics in my past, in the searchlight, but I don’t really like bother with that anymore. It doesn’t really work very well in the mix as a father and a productive human. There’s a couple of things I do that are super interesting. 

Number one, I do something called Grof Breathwork, and Grof Breathwork is, have you heard of Grof Breathwork? 

Ross: Yeah, I have. Yeah. So, so like for the listener, it’s basically hyperventilating for three hours with light, light, very loud tribal drumming. And it sort of very much activates sort of an, I think, an empathetic center of sort of the consciousness, and sort of you go very deep in sort of a psychotropic state is incredibly powerful, and I’ve used that to really sort of push through, ego boundaries and a number of different things. 

Another thing that really helps me with my work, and this is on a more spiritual sense, which I think is incredibly important and a lot of businesses ignore, is I do something called psychological kinesiology, or psych K, I have someone guide me through belief system reprogramming and the healing of multi generational trauma. So on this side of things. It’s like those things that you learn in the scaffold of Emotional Belief Systems as a child from the age of zero to six to eight or so, finding the blockers, finding out those belief systems and clearing the pathways forward. And not only has that made me a better human, husband, father, all the good stuff. It’s actually made me a better futurist as well, to be open to bigger ideas, to listen a little harder, to be a little bit quieter with my thoughts, and to try and navigate whole new areas. And there’s a community around me as well. We all support each other with this, and it’s led by a very incredible person and her team. That’s, that’s another side of things, again, augmenting the human condition by sort of challenging what we’ve been given and what we what we’ve learned through our lives, to say, hey, we can change this, and we can level ourselves up in completely new ways.

Ross: Yeah, just one thing to pick out of what you were just saying is the being quieter and listening more, and so that’s if you want to amplify it. That’s probably a pretty good place to start.

Nikolas: Yeah, and I’ll be honest, as a keynote speaker and the guy that’s run conferences or whatever like, it’s been, it’s probably been my greatest challenge all the way through my professional career, right? Because, I was back in the day, I was the guy that could fix things technologically. So I’d go and fix them. I didn’t need anyone’s permission, right? Or I knew best, or whatever. A lot of this comes with over confidence, and like the inflation of the ego, as it were, and now this, this, this quieter part of my life, has sort of led to so many more opportunities professionally and personally that I think it’s really important. And I think with doing futures work, there’s more questions than there are answers, and there’s more wisdom in the crowd than there is within yourself and the work that you’ve done. But we’re sort of, we steer the ship, right? We steer the conversations. I think that’s really what we do as futurists up all in all.

Ross: Yeah, there is a real danger with being the speaker on stage, being invited, being speaker on stage to you know, people want to know what you want to say, but that’s you telling them. That’s not necessarily the job, and it’s you know, you do have to in order to be able to you. To get people to see the future better, or to be more inspired. Whatever it may be, it’s often less about telling or being from a place, more where you are questioning and being able to engender that questioning. I think a lot of speakers don’t get there.

Nikolas: Yeah, and so, I mean, pre pandemic, late, late 2019 my style used to be very much like, here’s a future that you must care about. And it was very sort of lecturing,, very sort of, here it is. Good luck. Welcome to the future. Goodbye. And I tell the story of my book as well. In in late 2019 I spoke to 800 farmers in Alberta, Canada. And, Albertsons are very, taunch, forthright, you know, tech like Texans, you know, like very, very driven, very passionate people. And at the end, the guy stood up and he said, I think most of what you just said is bullshit. And I was like, huh, 800 people looking at me, and, well, I said, Look, I think you’re wrong. And we went through it, and we went around, and actually made friends with them. Afterwards, we ended up having a fairly decent email exchange on a number of different areas around renewable energy and farming and a whole bunch of stuff, and until he sort of gave up the ghost and didn’t want to talk anymore, which is cool, but I was, I was I was ripped apart with this like, Oh my God. Like, how the hell can I avoid that again? Because it’s horrible, and people were attacking me on Twitter, and it was all bots and horrible stuff. Afterwards, I picked up a book as I was flying to New Orleans for a vacation with my wife, and she was just pregnant, and I was like, okay, everything changes now. So I was having a moment anyway. And there’s a book by a guy called Rob Hopkins as a British guy, a community activist. He wrote a book called from what is to what if, and even just the first couple of chapters, talking about the power of curiosity and creativity and imagination, and even asking a simple question, like, what if, just it doesn’t close a conversation, if there’s a non believer, it starts a whole new realm of conversations, and it’s like, well, I don’t believe you, Yeah, but what if, let’s explore that together, and that that moment changed my entire trajectory, and, like I said, a little quieter, listening a little more and posing a question. It’s like, but what if this technology changes your industry? This societal change has a ripple effect and introduces new competitors into the market, you know, what if. What if? What if? 

And and that was incredibly powerful, and it’s become a mantra of mine, you know, shift your mindset from what is to what if. And the idea that imagination, anticipatory capabilities and empathy can really level up and elevate an organization where we’ve got an organization that’s been where people are told what to do, when to do it, and what hours to work and to liberate ourselves, right is really important. And again, it comes down to the executives and the leadership, listening and I would say most of the consulting work I do is around helping executives inquire about a future and then inviting people in to inquire with them, right?

Ross: Yes, yes. And just, I think another interesting point around the pushback there is that I encourage people to disagree with me, because I say, if you disagree with me, that means you are thinking, you’re thinking about what you think is right and why you think I’m wrong. And if you’re thinking why I’m thinking about why are you think I’m wrong and why, why something else is different, then that’s great, because you’re thinking about the future and I’m not going to be right, but you’re giving something. You’re giving people something to be able to scaffold on which to be able to construct their own thoughts. Don’t think what I think? Yeah. I’m giving you something on which you can build your own thinking. 

Nikolas: Yeah, and even if it’s like that, that idea of a mirror, you know, even if you disagree, and I use this technique in my keynote. At the end of my keynotes, just like you say, it’s like, does anyone have a question? And if there’s like, 600 people in the room and no hands go up, you know that someone wants to say something, right? Because everyone’s smart. And so I literally say it’s like, we’re in a room full of really smart people. And I’m sure some of you don’t agree with some of the things I said. You know, does anyone have a challenge? Do you think I missed anything that is when I find audiences really wake up, and then the questions start flowing, and then people have permission. I don’t think we give people enough permission to disagree, right? And I think that it’s an incredibly important tool to actually use. So that’s really cool.

Ross: So how do people find out more about your work and your books and your wonderful things that you give to the world? Nikolas?

Nikolas: Yeah, there’s really, there’s Nikolas. If you type in Nikolas Badminton, there’s only one of me. There’s another guy called Nikolas Badminton in South Africa. He’s not a futurist. So you can quickly determine that that’s not me. I run futurist.com and which I acquired from Glenn Heemstra a few years ago, amazing thinker and futurist and a great mentor of mine. 

Yeah, and that’s generally where you can find me. I’m very active on LinkedIn. I do tons of chatting, debating, arguing, and engagement and just go out and find a little bit more about me. But start futurist.com start with my name. I’m all over the internet. I’m basically an internet business. So there we are. I’m ubiquitous on the internet.

Ross: So good to talk. Thanks so much for your time and your insights, Nikolas.

Nikolas: Cheers, Ross. It’s been a pleasure. Bye.