Ep 255: PJ Pereira - In 20

Edited highlights of our full length conversation.

Can you imagine?

This episode is the second in a series of conversations I’m having in partnership with the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity.

For the weeks leading up to Cannes, we’re focusing our study of leadership through a single lens. The impact of Artificial Intelligence on the Creative Industries.

Are we moving fast enough? Are we going far enough? Is this an opportunity to fundamentally redesign the creative industries? Do we follow the puck or skate to where it’s going? There are opportunities and risks around every corner.

PJ Pereira is the Founder and Creative Chairman at Pereira O’Dell.

PJ is also a published author and an artist in his own right. We talk about a piece of animation that he recently created for his latest novel in which he used AI, and and we’ve included a link in the show notes for this episode.

One of the themes that’s emerging from the conversations and background research I’ve been doing, is one of those realizations that is both surprising while striking me immediately as unquestionably true.

As a species, human beings are particularly bad at recognizing the speed, scale and impact of exponential growth.

Let me share an example I heard on a New York Times podcast recently, that uses cases of COVID to illustrate this.

If you start with a single case, and cases double every three days, then after 30 days, you have about a thousand cases. We can all wrap our heads around that.

But then go 30 days longer.

Now, you have a million. Wait another 30 days? Now, you have a billion.

AI is moving with the speed of a virus, and we are struggling to recognize the implications in ways that we can relate to.

We don’t have to go back too far to see how quickly our understanding of “normal” can change.

On March 1st, 2020, society was operating pretty normally. Chris and I actually took a plane to Chicago on the 2nd, and we flew back to New York on the 5th.

Five days later, five days, that idea was unimaginable, and it remained that way for a year.

But speed of change is not the only measurement that we should be conscious of.

The enormity of the gap between the normal, as we understand it today, and what we will demand as normal tomorrow, is usually beyond our imagination to see or to predict or to project.

PJ brings those limitations of our imagination to life through a vivid and unforgettable example.

At the end of the series, I’ll offer some thoughts on what we’ve heard and learned, and where we might go from here.

In the meantime, thanks for joining us.