IN THIS EPISODE, YOU’LL LEARN: 13:57 - The different levels of attention and focus and how to harness the one you need at any given time. 27:57 - Frameworks that connect information into meaningful patterns to build deep knowledge and insight. 33:23 - Why the best investors are masters of synthesizing these principles and leveraging information productivity. 41:08 - How to ensure the information you consume is serving you best. 1:04:27 - Which industries Ross believes will generate the billionaires of the future. 1:11:50 - The current state of Artificial Intelligence. And a whole lot more! *Disclaimer: Slight timestamp discrepancies may occur due to podcast platform differences.BOOKS AND RESOURCES Join the exclusive TIP Mastermind Community to engage in meaningful stock investing discussions with Stig, Clay, and the other community members. Ross Dawson's Website. Thriving on Overload Book. Readwise for engaging with your reading. Hypothesis tool for annotation. Zapier for transferring information. Roam research for capturing information. Logseq for more detail. Notion for highly structured notes via web clippings. Airtable for organizing. Trey Lockerbie Twitter. NEW TO THE SHOW? Check out our We Study Billionaires Starter Packs. Browse through all our episodes (complete with transcripts) here. Try our tool for picking stock winners and managing our portfolios: TIP Finance Tool. Enjoy exclusive perks from our favorite Apps and Services. Stay up-to-date on financial markets and investing strategies through our daily newsletter, We Study Markets. Learn how to better start, manage, and grow your business with the best business podcasts.  SPONSORSSupport our free podcast by supporting our sponsors: River Toyota Range Rover Briggs & Riley American Express The Bitcoin Way Public Onramp USPS SimpleMining Sound Advisory Shopify AT&T BAM Capital HELP US OUT!Help us reach new listeners by leaving us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts! It takes less than 30 seconds, and really helps our show grow, which allows us to bring on even better guests for you all! Thank you – we really appreciate it!Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fmSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fmSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fmSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fmSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fmSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fmSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fmSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fmSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fmSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fmSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fmSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fmSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fmSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fmSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fmSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fmSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fmSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm

“I’m very particular about what information I pull in and what I leave out. I think that is one of the most absolutely critical things that people need to do.” – Thomas Baekdal About Thomas Baekdal Thomas is the founder and publisher of Baekdal Media and a leading media analyst. He is the author of books including The Shift, about the news industry’s transition from print to digital, and advises leading publishers about the evolution of the media industry. Website: Baekdal Media Twitter: Thomas Baekdal Facebook: Thomas Baekdal LinkedIn: Thomas Baekdal What you will learn Media analysis requires vast information to understand media and related areas. (00:53) Efficient information management is crucial for media analysts, and building a tool can help manage information influx. (02:00) Why Thomas built his tool to manage information overload as a media analyst. (05:01) A computer science degree is essential for media analysts to handle complex and varied data. (08:31) Accessing raw data is crucial for deeper understanding and analysis of patterns and inconsistencies. (09:48) Transforming complex data into practical actions is a significant challenge for media analysts. (16:01) News importance fades quickly, leading to JOMO and news avoidance for better mental state. (18:05) Setting up social media filters can manage an individual’s mental space and reduce information overload. (21:27) Diversity in sources, including gender and expertise, is crucial for a comprehensive understanding of issues. (25:02) Aggressively selecting sources and maintaining a manageable number of sources is necessary for effective media analysis. (27:45) Resources INMA Reuters Institute Digital News Report Notion Obsidian FOMO JOMO News Avoidance Transcript Ross Dawson:Thomas, it’s wonderful to have you on the show. Thomas Baekdal: Thank you. Glad to be here. Ross: You’ve been working, analyzing the media industry for a very long time now looking at the future of media. Thomas: I started professionally doing this in 2010. It’s been 13 years. But, I worked 10 years before that as a digital media manager for one of the largest fashion companies in my country. That was on the other side of the media, but it was still media. Basically, I’ve been doing this since the year 2000. Ross: You’re, of course, working in a very rapidly moving landscape following the evolution of media and there’s plenty to follow. Thomas: Yes. Ross: But the nature of your choice, you are deeply involved in information and making sense of the world. I’d like to hear a little bit more about the history of your relationship with information. Thomas: It’s a funny thing because what I do as a media analyst is I try to do all the work that publishers don’t have time for basically, to try to figure out what is happening around the media and around… well, basically, whatever thing, and that requires a tremendous amount of information. You notice as well with your work that if you want to see what’s ahead in the future, you can’t just look at a few studies, you have to be in information all the time on all of it so you can get a bigger picture of it. I spent all my… every day just looking at reports and studies and data and all kinds of things. It can be quite daunting sometimes. Well, it’s fun also. Ross: I’d love to dig into some of the details. I’m sure there’s not a typical day, but what’s your inflammation day look like? How do you start? What do you look at? Do you have any patterns or structures and what do you spend time on? And where do you look? What does your information day look like? Thomas: Well, first of all, there is no day that’s the same, it depends on what I’m working on. But one of the things that I have changed for myself because of trying to manage things is I built a tool. I have a tool that is built by myself where I gather all my main sources. That’s all my podcasts or my newsletters, all the reports that I know are coming in. Also, other sources like websites where I know that they’re publishing things I need to know about, for instance, INMA, the news organization; they publish a lot of blog posts. My resource to get us all that up automatically, I have a script, that is waiting every 10 minutes that is looking for if there is something new. What I do when I want to look into things is I start there, I’ve simply built a tool trying to make sense of things. What this tool is doing—it’s sites are just having all these different sources in one place is and it has a note-taking tool right beside it. If I see a new report, for instance, I can go through it and read it. Then I can take screenshots or take quotes and put them into my note-taking tool right next to it. When I’m working on something, when I’m trying to figure out what is happening, what the trends are, what the things are, that’s what I’m looking at. Then the following days, if I’m working on a specific project for a publisher, or if I’m writing an article, I use that tool to go in and look at what notes I’ve written about things. In the note-taking tool, I have a search feature. I can say I want to look at what did I write about the subscriptions, for instance, and it will show me a list of the notes with reference to which document was a newsletter and which report it was from. That clearly gives me a very quick, but also very efficient way for me to get that information and organize it if you feel. Then, of course, we have… I mean, when we get into the really very specific, that’s just hard work. I will spend hours, days, maybe even weeks, just looking at things. If I have a question I don’t really know something about, I will just spend tons and tons of time trying to find things and there are no simple ways to do that. It’s Google, it’s all my auto sources, it’s some of the sites that I maybe know, maybe they have some data about it. It’s a mix of everything, but my research tool is my starting point. That has been critical to my information management. Ross: That’s really interesting. There are many, many tools out there to do parts of what you’ve done. Why have you made the choice to develop your own? Thomas: Two reasons. First thing is that I happen to know how to code. I learned that back in the 90s. Every single time I’ve looked at one of those standard tools, they are all very impressive, but they don’t necessarily do exactly what I needed to do. In order to optimize it for me, I built this tool so that I could get it to do just what I wanted. I mean, one critical element of it is how it’s doing things automatically. I don’t have to add anything to it. Well, I can add it manually if I want to, but for 99% of it, it is being imported automatically with some scripts and some code and some things. That really saves some time because the problem is if you have one of the standard tools, not only do you have to use them to figure out what you want, but you also have to spend an enormous amount of time bringing the data in and every single day, I get what 30-40 newsletters alone. If I had to manually put them into a note-taking tool, I also figure out what it was, I will never get that done. Here, I have it into the tool. It is searchable. I can add notes to it if I want to. I just decided to create a tool that for me just was super optimized to the way I work. That was what I found to be the most important thing. Ross: Fascinating. Have you ever considered putting this out to market? Thomas: Well, I’ve been asked by several people about it. The problem is it’s not designed for it. It’s designed for me. One of the things I’ve also done, not related to this, but I’ve also built my own site. My site, when people visit that and all the things that are on that, all the code for that is built around, built that too, including the backend system, including the database and the CMS and all that. When I built this resource tool, it’s just built on top of that. Basically, the resource tool took one day to build. It was that quick, but it was only that quick because I built it on top of the system I already have. I can’t sell it without complete reengineering it. People have asked me about it. But yes, I have no plans for it. Ross: That’s fascinating. It goes to the point that for so much of our lives, we adapt ourselves to technology. It’s nice to be able to say this is what I do, this is what I want to do, in your case to have the capabilities to create the technology to do that. Thomas: Yes. Ross: I’ve had many conversations with people who say I like Notion, or I like Obsidian, and I’m going to choose which one is the best one. But it doesn’t have these features, so they’re adapting themselves to the tools. Thomas: Yes. But I will always say that today, it’s almost necessary to all to be able to do a lot of things because when I do my analysis, for instance, if I want to do some data analysis, I could open Excel and do something but sometimes it’s just easier if I have a really large data set to just build a script for it, and do the analysis that way. It has become just part of the way I work that I have the data in front of me and the report in front of me and if I want to do something, instead of trying to do it the hard way, I can just write some code for it. That makes it efficient once you can do it. It’s an important thing. The future analysts, I will always say they need a computer science degree because it is so much about how we are able to work with the information we have. The problem is it’s not just data, it’s not just a simple database; most of the data we have is completely chaotic. We have to figure out a way to somehow manipulate that in ways that isn’t just something you can do with Excel. Coding is one way to do it. I want to clarify here, I don’t just code everything. I have this specific tool and it’s really helping me but 90% of my time, I do the same thing as everyone else is that I look over the text and the reports and those things manually and I try to figure things out. Most graphs and data we get is probably in a PDF file, and we can’t even convert it to data. It’s rather hopeless to work with it as a script. Ross: Yes, it’s not that difficult to suck in a lot of text and build some structure around it. But one of the interesting points here is that you are pulling it all together at once so there’s a lot of data, a lot of information, as opposed to being very selective about what you incorporate. Thomas: Another thing that’s also very important is that when it comes to the information that I use, I always try to get the data. One example we recently had is the Reuters Institute, the digital media report, they produce it every year. It’s really great. You go to the website, you will see all the graphs and everything is really amazing. But I went out to Reuters and I said, could you give me the data? And they sent me the data. So I have something like, I think it’s 22 gigabytes of data from Reuters. I have the ability now to go behind the reports and to look at okay, the thing about all these reports is that they’re picking the things they want to focus on and Reuters is doing a really good job of it. But very often, you want to look behind it and you want to see, okay, what was the question actually when they asked it, and what was the data that they didn’t include? That may also show some kind of pattern so a lot of the time when I try to figure out how to do things for information is simply to get back to that raw source. It’s the same thing we should talk about, some kind of political analysis. I don’t do that that much. But if I do, I want the raw polls, I don’t want what’s in the newspapers, that’s useless. I want the raw polls, I want to be able to see what they actually asked, and I want to see how they defined it. That is much more helpful. Ross: Absolutely. It’s fantastic that Reuters has been good enough to share the data with you. In other cases, you can look for the data source and find it yourself. Thomas: Yes. Ross: Increasingly, the sharing of data behind the charts is extraordinarily valuable. What are the interesting things that you read in reports, you mentioned that several times, significant information sources. I read reports too, probably not to the same depth as you. What’s amazing is that not many people read reports, because they’re so long. I’d love to hear what’s your process of reading and distilling and digesting and taking what is useful from a good report. Thomas: Well, it depends a lot on the report. If we were talking about the Reuters Institute report, I’ve spent weeks just looking at that. I probably get a report every day on average, and most of them are about something either very specific or something in an area that I probably can’t use. In those cases, I’m just like everyone else, just glancing over it. I’m not really reading the text in full, I’m just finding the graphs and I’m seeing if there’s something interesting, and if there’s not, I’m moving on. But I would be out of time in no time if I tried to read every single report in there. But every single time when we come across something where we see, okay, this is really interesting. Like, for instance, how we’ve seen in the media industry, we have this thing called a stop rate. A stop rate is how effective newspapers are at stopping people and asking them to pay. What we found across multiple reports now is that the stop rate is a very strong indicator of how successful newspapers are at converting people into subscribers. Once we started seeing that pattern, that was when I really dug in, and then I read, I go into the report totally, fully read everything to see if I can see something. Then we find other reports and other things. I did the same thing with news avoidance, another big topic I’ve been focusing on. News avoidance, there are so many reports about it, but they are incredibly inconsistent. To understand what happens with them, you have to dig in to see what are the differences between why is this data saying that it’s 70%? Why is this data saying it’s 40%? And why is this data saying it’s only 15%? You can’t just look at a graph and say, okay, all these different numbers, they don’t add up, you have to go in and figure out what was the reason for this massive difference. Often it’s how they ask the question or the circumstances, all these different things. Ross: This goes to the point of sense-making, you’re seeing a lot of information, you’re seeing a lot of depth to that information, and your role, of course, is to make sense of that to be able to see the patterns, to be able to pick out what are the directions, what’s meaningful in the evolution of the media landscape. How do you do that? How do you pull all of that into something which is truly at the level of sense-making, or building this model of the bigger picture? Thomas: Yes, I wish I could say I have some really smart system for that, but I don’t. What I’m basically doing is the same thing that AIs are now doing today. We hear about AIs all the time. What the AIs are doing is they’re just gathering your information. Then through that information as a whole, we start to see a direction and it’s that direction I then cling on to and try to figure out. Take news avoidance, for instance, and news fatigue. I could directly point you to Reuters Institute, and they have a really good report about it. But that’s not the only one. What I do is I look at all these different reports. The numbers can be all over the place, but there’s usually some kind of pattern, and there’s usually some kind of direction and some kind of momentum in all of them. What I then do is I say, Okay, on the whole, this is the direction things are moving in so that is what I need to focus on and look into more or talk about or write about other things. What I also do, when I get to a point where I don’t really know how to make sense of it is I try to turn it into some kind of action. News avoidance is a really good example of that. The first article I wrote about news avoidance was back in 2010, so I’ve been talking about this for ages. But I really started looking at it in 2019. What I found back then, was that all these different reports were so inconsistent, I couldn’t really get a sense of it. Instead, I decided to do an experiment. The experiment was that even though I’m a media analyst, I cut myself off from news entirely for months, completely, totally, entirely.I could see the reports, I could see what people who have been answering and people were saying, but I couldn’t see why. By doing that experiment, trying to get the feel for it, suddenly, I discovered a lot of things. With news avoidance, what I discovered was that it is astonishing how bad news is for you. That is painful for me to say, as a media analyst, because it’s my industry. But once you cut yourself off so completely as I did, you realize that 99.9% of the news you see all the time is completely meaningless. It has no value for you, and it’s just filling up your life. That was a real eye-opener. One of the things I did with that experiment also, because I’m an analyst, I don’t just do the experiment, and then forget about it. I had a system, again, we talked about, there was a bit of coding, but I built a script that automatically took a screenshot of all the newspapers I usually follow. Every single day for that month, it took a screenshot of the front pages. I didn’t look at it at all. But after a month, I went back to it. I started looking at it. My idea was that I will write down all the articles that I had missed that were really important for me to know. What happened was I didn’t write anything down. That actually came as a shock to me. When I moved into it, my assumption was that I had missed something really important. But it was the opposite that all the news even the thing that was important, there was a terrorist attack and kind of thing, but if you read about it a month later, it’s over. Right? You can’t use it for anything, you can’t do anything with it. That really defined what this trend meant for me. That’s basically what I do. I look at a report and everything and if I don’t understand it completely, I try to do something, try to figure out what it means. Ross: That’s absolutely fabulous. This goes exactly to Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s quote, which is something like “Spend time reading last week’s newspapers so you realize there’s no real point to anything that you read”. Thomas: Yes. But you’ll see just today. I don’t know if you’ve read the news this morning. But today, we had Biden going out and saying that the three balloons they shot down in the US over last week were not Chinese, and they were not surveillance. They were probably just private balloons by someone. We have had a week, if not more, of news coverage about these balloons, only to now realize that there was basically no story. It’s astonishing when you think about how much time have you spent over the past week looking at these things, reading about these stories, and filling up your brain and your life with this kind of information. Always realize you can’t use them for anything. It’s completely meaningless. Ross: This goes to our human propensities. We do want the novel, we do want to keep on top of the latest. I think it’s hard to transcend that and that’s part of what we need to work on to transcend our propensities for lots of information, which is not necessarily serving us. I think it’s great that you’re doing this kind of experiment to find this out properly for yourself. Thomas: Exactly. We have a word for it, it’s FOMO, the fear of missing out. In my article about news avoidance back in 2019, I wrote that what I realized after doing that is that we have a new word, and that’s JOMO, the joy of missing out. That’s really what changed things because before, I’m a media analyst so I’m a news junkie. It’s my profession. But it was astonishing, not just in terms of how much it was filling up my life, but also how it felt, in terms of my mental health. I would wake up in the morning, and the news is so negative, so I will always have this negative mood, every single time I finished reading the news. But when you cut yourself off the news for a month, you suddenly don’t wake up being annoyed. That was, I mean, wow. That was a big, big thing to realize. It has changed. One of the reasons why I have to organize my information this way today is because I’ve realized that just having a constantly flowing information, filling up your life, is not beneficial for you, it’s much more useful for you not just in terms of getting information and being informed, but also in terms of your mental state, to have that information organized in a way that makes more sense. It’s the same thing about social media, because the way everyone uses social media is you just have this constant feed, and it just flows your way. But one of the things I wrote about a couple of years ago, was that the most important thing people should do on social media is to set up filters. Every single topic that starts to dominate your awareness in ways you can’t use it, needs to be filtered out. That’s not about creating a filter bubble or anything like that. That’s simply about managing how much of any specific topic that starts to fill up your life. On Twitter, I don’t use actually use Twitter in a while, I have had enough of about Musk, so I dropped Twitter. But on Twitter, I had 200 filters. Obviously, there were things like Trump, that kind of thing where you’re just totally bombarded with it every single day. But every single time you have a topic where you really can’t use the information for anything, it’s just filling up your mental space, I created a filter for it, even if it was something that was basically useful or something that’s interesting, something that didn’t bother me. But if it was dominating me so that I couldn’t focus on other things, I filtered it out. I want to say… this is very important. When you filter something out on social media, it doesn’t mean it goes away, some people think that, but if, for instance, I filter out Trump, but I probably still see a post about Trump every single day, the difference is that without the filter, I would see it 20 times through a day. Ross: I’d like to pull back to the big picture, I’m sure you already have some insights on this. What would be, from your experience and your analysis, the most important things that people can do to manage the onslaught, to make sense of things? In addition to what you’ve already talked about, what are the recommendations you would make for people to thrive, to do well, in this world of unlimited information? Thomas: I have a personal history around this. The history is that I totally and completely collapsed with stress, many years ago. I actually got to a point where I had to change my life, otherwise, I couldn’t get back. What I did back then out of necessity was that I really spent some time thinking about what is important for me, for my health, for my work, for my focus, for all these different things. What I’ve done since then, is that I have been exceptionally aggressive about that. This is about everything. It’s about when I read the news, it’s about which sources I pick out. If there’s a source that is not useful, it goes away. I’m very particular about what I pull in and what I leave out. I think that is one of the most absolutely critical things that people need to do. The other thing, to put it in the other perspective, is also to have a wider view. One of the things I did a couple of years ago was that I realized that on my Twitter profile, again, I don’t use Twitter anymore, but back then, something like I can’t remember the number anymore but something like 80% of my information was male-dominated, so it came from men about men, all kinds of things. I sat down and very specifically created a new kind of following, the people I follow, so that it had a better mix. One thing was the gender difference. It was astonishing the difference that makes because suddenly we men, might sound very fancy, but we have a very same way of thinking. Once you really start to bring in a more diverse gender profile, you start to see things that you’re just wow, I didn’t even know this was a problem. The other thing I also did was that I started looking at more specific sources outside my field of expertise. I’m a media analyst. I’ve been focused on media, and I follow a lot of media people. But I decided to go out and figure out okay, in other areas that influenced the world, about your health, or automotive or other things, how can I follow people in that space that can tell me about patterns and things that are happening that I might not see in the media. The media, generally, I love the media, when I’m a bit critical about it, it’s not because I don’t love it. But the media is itself always in the filter bubble. The media is not very good at changing and thinking about new things and seeing new directions. It’s really important for me as a media analyst to see all these other things from other people. That’s something I spend a lot of time making sure that I have that kind of information coming into me, and also that it is diverse. I want to say one more thing about diverse, when I say diverse, I mean valuable diverse sources. In the media, when they talk about diverse sources, it means taking the most horrible people, and some not-so-horrible people and mixing them together. That’s not useful. We can use that information for anything. Ross: That’s a great distinction. I’d say the bigger point here is just to be conscious. What am I actually doing? Is this useful to me? Maybe I need some other sources. Let’s mix this up. Let’s make this work. I think that the meta advice you’re giving is the conscious of what you’re doing and try different things, and see what’s most helpful. Thomas: Yes, exactly. Seriously, just be extremely aggressive about what you pick and what you don’t pick. Twitter is a good example again. I don’t use it so it’s actually a horrible example. But back then, I only had about 400 things I followed, 400 people or companies or things. Even when I changed my focus and tried to get in more women, tried to get in more other sources, I kept that number at 400. I removed a lot of men I used to follow because they didn’t really add that value I wondered from them. Then I brought in these new sources, but I didn’t increase my total volume. Because if you do that, you just end up being overloaded. I think it’s really important that people be very mindful about how much they bring in and where they bring it in from. I’m not some kind of Guru or expert in this. It’s a constant struggle for me also. I think those two things are really important. Ross: I think that’s fantastic advice. That’s a great way to end up. Thank you so much for your time and your insights, Thomas, it has been fascinating. We really could talk for a lot longer. We’ll try to get you on another time. Thanks so much. Thomas: Yes, no problem. The post Thomas Baekdal on custom research tools, going to source data, JOMO on news, and source diversity (Ep52) appeared first on amplifyingcognition.

Ross Dawson’s mission in life is to advance human evolution – but he's facing a dilemma. How can humans evolve in the Information Age when so much misleading and distracting information surrounds us? By figuring out where to find value amid information overload, Ross became a globally-recognized futurist, creating better business strategies for companies like Microsoft, Coca-Cola, and Citibank.Ross is a global keynote speaker, futurist, author, strategy advisor, and entrepreneur. As an advisor, he has worked in over 30 countries for big names like Microsoft, Visa, and Walmart, among others. He is a best-selling author who predicted the social networking revolution in his book, Living Networks. His latest release, Thriving on Overload, is available now.In this episode, Dart and Ross discuss:- How to find value within our information overload- The 5 capabilities you need for success in the information era- The 6 ways humans pay attention- Ross' time living in a Japanese Zen dojo- The importance of aligning individual mental models within a team- Information hazards we can avoid- The future of humans and technology in work- And other topics…Ross Dawson is a globally-recognized futurist, keynote speaker, author, strategy advisor, and entrepreneur. Named by Digital Media as one of the most influential people in the world in the future of work, Ross has appeared on CNN, ABC TV, and the Today Show, as well as been featured in The New York Times, The Guardian, and BBC, among others. As an advisor, he has worked in over 30 countries for companies like Microsoft, Coca-Cola, Visa, Citibank, and Walmart. Ross is also the best-selling author who predicted the social networking revolution through his previous book, Living Networks. His latest release, Thriving on Overload, is available now. Resources Mentioned:Thriving on Overload, by Ross Dawson: https://www.amazon.com/Thriving-Overload-Success-Exponential-Information-ebook/dp/B0BFP6WCHP Living Networks, by Ross Dawson: https://www.amazon.com/Living-Networks-20th-Anniversary-Hyperconnected-ebook/dp/B09V1PCFWB Winning on Purpose, by Fred Reichheld: https://www.amazon.com/Winning-Purpose-Unbeatable-Strategy-Customers-ebook/dp/B08TCJHZWZ Connect with Ross:www.RossDawson.com www.ThrivingOnOverload.com Thriving on Overload podcast: https://thrivingonoverload.com/episodes/Work with Dart:Dart is the CEO and co-founder of the work design firm 11fold. Build work that makes employees feel alive, connected to their work, and focused on what’s most important to the business. Book a call at 11fold.com.

“Jump in there really be an active participant in the industry, because it’s also about that. How are you becoming a voice, an active participant in the idea sharing and everything that’s being built?“ – Cathy Hackl About Cathy Hackl On this episode we learn from Cathy Hackl, a leading tech futurist and globally recognized business leader specializing in augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), & spatial computing. She is the CEO of Futures Intelligence Group, a futures research & consulting firm that works with clients in tech, fashion, media, government, and defense. BigThink named Cathy “one of the top 10 most influential women in tech in 2020”. Business Website: Futures Intelligence Group Personal Website: www.cathyhackl.com LinkedIn: Cathy Hackl Facebook: Cathy Hackl Instagram: Cathy Hackl Twitter: @CathyHackl Books The Augmented Workforce: How AI, AR and 5G Will Impact Every Dollar You Make Marketing New Realities: An Introduction to Virtual Reality & Augmented Reality Marketing, Branding & Communications What you will learn Cathy is a voracious consumer of information and loves conversations (03:08) But all that information is constantly refined (06:35) It starts with keywords (08:51) And being selective (10:01) Tagging is it, especially high level topics (10:50) She has developed her thought process over time (13:02) Asking the right questions… (16:08) …then hypnagoia (19:00) Blocking time on her calendar and turning off distractions (21:40) How Cathy became the metaverse expert (24:17) When is the right time to share an idea (32:51) Episode resources Feedly Leo Medium Diigo Google Docs Transcript Ross Dawson: Cathy, it is awesome to have you on the Thriving on Overload show. Cathy Hackl: Awesome. Happy to be here. Ross: Cathy, you keep across the edge of emerging technologies. There’s a lot of information to keep across, a lot of new things. How do you do it? Cathy: It’s interesting because when I was looking at some of the questions that you sent over for this, I started to really try to think about, “How do I organize this? How am I doing this?” I’m a voracious consumer of information like a lot of folks are in our industry. How do you organize everything? How do you make sense of all of it? How do I do it? I would say I wake up, I read a huge amount of news—mostly focused on technology, because that is kind of where I spend most of my time. I consider myself a tech futurist. I’m very much focused on the technology, having been working in this space inside these companies for several years now. Definitely, start reading a lot of different information. If there’s something really interesting, I’ll flag it with different services that I use. Sometimes I’ll forward it to one of my assistants and ask them to put it in different programs. We have Google Docs right now—to be honest, as simple as that—on metaverse things. I’m very focused on the metaverse. Back in January, you didn’t have that many metaverse headlines. Now, it’s like every single headline in tech is a metaverse headline or something like that. We used to have a Google Doc where we used to keep those a little bit. Now, it’s getting a little bit more complicated. We use tools like Diigo, for example, to keep things organized. I have a very well-organized Feedly to also keep tabs of things and keep organized, kind of know what are the sources I want to get information from. I mean, lots of scanning, lots of reading lots. I will say a lot of information that I do get, I also get from conversations, especially right now with the metaverse becoming such a hot topic and lots of people wanting to talk to me about it. Sometimes it might be as simple as like, “I’m launching the X project.” Before, I might have been like, “I don’t have time.” But now, I want to hear what they’re doing. What is it that they’re doing in the space? Sometimes those conversations, not always, they don’t lead to anything. But sometimes I’ll find out something I didn’t know, or I’ll know this is interesting. This brand’s thinking of doing this. That’s gonna be happening, what does that mean? What is that a signal of? It’s a bit of a process. Especially in my field because it’s evolving so fast, it’s hard to keep up. What was new yesterday might be old by today in the technology space, because it’s moving so fast. Another thing I do is I publish a weekly column in Forbes called Metaverse Weekly. That forces me as well to always keep on top and try to make sure that I have the freshest news and the most relevant news and those sorts of things. Sometimes I do get that information via a PR pitch; it’s not my preferred way. So, it’s a combination of all these different sources of information. I don’t have one place I go, it’s a multitude of places and sources. Ross: You say in the morning you scan and you look around. You mentioned you use Feedly. Essentially, you’re choosing feeds to go into your Feedly, and that’s been curated over some time I guess? Do you continue to refine or add? Cathy: I continue to refine all the time. They’ve got some interesting AI tools called Leo that you can use to help you as well, make it more tailored. But I don’t only do that. I use my Feedly, but I also go into Google News. I go into Apple News. I like to see how the different algorithms and everything presents the news to me. Of the different things, there might be something I missed. When I go, for example, into Apple News or Google News, I tend to always go to the technology tab because you know they’ve got headlines. I tend to always go to business or tech. But I force myself to go to international or go to other ones, even though that’s not necessarily my main interest. But I’m forcing myself to go to these other tabs because there might be something I’m missing here. There might be something happening in X country that I was not aware of that could impact X. So, forcing myself like that. I’m very lucky that I have a team. I also have my team finding news and curating those. I have them send me a small metaverse review of the of the Daily News, things that could be of interest to me. They’ll send me something on a daily basis. It will be like a headline, small summary, and then the link if I want to read more. So, I also have that added bonus of having a team that also helps me with this. Ross: When you’re scanning and you see all of these articles, some of them you say, “I want to bookmark that, I want to put it in a list.” What is it that makes it something which is worth seeing? What switches the trigger to say, “This goes in my database” or “I got to pay attention to this?” Cathy: It starts with keywords, especially with the metaverse. It started with the keyword “metaverse.” Now that there’s a lot more metaverse content, we have to be a little bit more selective. What is the actual topic here? Who’s actually interviewed? Who’s actually saying this? There’s an article a couple weeks ago when you had Mark Zuckerberg say that Facebook was going to go from being a social media company to a metaverse company. You pay attention to that, right? That’s something you save. Satya Nadella in an earnings call saying the metaverse is one of our goals, you save that article because that is a significant statement by significant figure. I think it started off with a keyword, just anything metaverse, because we didn’t have that much metaverse coverage. Now that there’s a lot more, it’s being a little bit more selective. Who’s interviewed? What’s really the topic? I love going, for example to Medium, to find maybe some new voices. But it doesn’t mean that every single article on Medium that uses the term metaverse is relevant to me or that is a well- thought out article. Be very selective on the sources. Who wrote this? It’s interesting because I’ve seen the evolution with the metaverse on who is writing about it, who’s writing about it now, what is the context. Are they just using it for clicks in the headline nowadays? It evolved. Whereas before, you might have metaverse in your in your headline and it wasn’t necessarily something that people would click on. Now, a lot of people are putting it in the headline because people will click on it. It’s been interesting to see this evolution on how I’ve been tracking metaverse as a general mega trend. Ross: When you put in Diigo or Google Doc or whatever, what happens to that then? Is that for later reference? Do you have some tags to that? You’re accumulating all of this, when do you refer back to that, or how does that help you build that bigger picture? Cathy: When we’re doing Metaverse Weekly, sometimes we’ll tag Metaverse Weekly, so we know we got to pull this in, and at least I know some of the stories that I’ve organized for Metaverse Weekly in Forbes. I’m writing a book. I got an international book deal. Ross: Congratulations. Cathy: I’m very happy about that. It’s on the metaverse. Ross: Surprise, surprise. Cathy: Of course. I’m saving things there as well, tagging it in the book, whatever we’re putting there. Definitely tagging with different things, and it’s going depend on what I’m doing. I’m working, for example, on an article on defense in the metaverse, working with it with Lieutenant Colonel Jake Sotiriadis who’s widely known in strategic foresight. I’m keeping tabs on that so that when he and I have to actually sit down and write the article, I can just pull that information. Sometimes those links just live there. Sometimes I won’t do anything with them, sometime I will. You just really never know in the tech space, to be honest. Something could happen tomorrow where I might have tagged something, synthetic humanoid robot, for example. Then Elon Musk’s goes on stage and talks about his Tesla AI, and everyone’s like, “What is this synthetic humanoid robot?” Sometimes they’ll live there, nothing will happen. But sometimes something will just happen in technology, and of a sudden I have all this research already done on some of these things. Ross: You build up your own tag taxonomy or structure? Do you virtually tag a book or just high-level topics? Cathy: High-level topics. But they’re high level topics to me, right? Synthetic humanoid robots is a topic for me because I’ve been writing about it for a while. That seems pretty specific for someone else, it’s not just robots. Ross: What always intrigues me about this is we got this wealth of information. You’re obviously understanding the space, as well as anyone else in the world. Does that all just happen in the gray matter in your brain? Do you do some mapping to draw correlations? Do you draw out themes, or does it all just happen as you’re writing your weekly articles and your books? What is that process of taking all of those sources, those inputs, “I already know that, that’s new, that’s another angle?” How does that add to the comprehension that you have? Cathy: I think it’s something that you build through the years, to be honest. I started off my career as a journalist, right? When you’re a journalist, you got to keep your sources straight. You got to keep all that information. I think it comes from having been a journalist and having kept things organized in my mind, as you write the story and as you report on the story, especially if it’s something that takes you months to report on. It’s interesting, it definitely brings some of that things I learned from journalism into the space. I would say it’s something that you’ve built through the years when you start to see some of the things. For me, it’s a little bit strange because I do get a chance to try a lot of things that a lot of people don’t get to try or get to see, a lot of things that people have never seen or will see in a couple years. I can’t necessarily store that somewhere because there’s NDAs and stuff, so I can’t just be storing it. But I’ll keep it in my head. Eventually, if I see something else I’m like, “That’s how that’s going work,” or “That’s related to that specific thing that I saw the other day.” I think it’s a lot of mental models in some way. Sometimes it’s something that I’ve seen, that I’ve written an NDA and I can’t really go write about it or share it. I just kind of start it, I guess, in my mind. That has happened, I would say, in a lot of some of the things that I’ve been able to demo and see. Eventually I’ll see something, a startup or something, and I’ll be like, “That startup is related to this other thing to this.” I think it’s a lot of mental maps for me. I’m probably very different than some of the people you interviewed because my work is a little bit different. Sometimes I can’t even put it down on paper. There’s way too many in the AI side, and I just have to store it here. I would say it’s about mental mapping, for me. A lot of it comes from the conversations I have, the questions I ask when I’m demoing a new piece of tech or things like that. It might be different to some of the folks that you speak to, because I do have to keep some of these things stored in my mind without being able to publicly speak about some of the things—or even writing things down. Ross: In the questions you ask or the conversations you have, I suppose part of those questions then are trying to uncover what is new, which is different, whether it fits or not with your existing models? Cathy: Most of the things I’m trying are different and are new. Whatever question I ask is going to be new. Even though I’m not necessarily the most technical person, sometimes there will be technical questions, because I do have a grasp of some of the technical things that go into building some of these devices of the future. Sometimes I’ll try something that is so new that I’m just quiet, I’m just in awe. I’m like, “How did you build this?” My question won’t be as informed or technical. Sometimes when it’s something that is exciting but it’s something that isn’t as new—new to me—I’ll have more technical questions. I’ll pull them and be like, “I had demoed X other device, how is this different?” I can pull those questions. But sometimes when something is so, so new and you don’t have a frame of reference for this something new, you’re just trying to make sense of what this is. Some of the questions might be more elemental, not as informed. But I love what I do because it’s so exciting and it’s so fresh. Sometimes it doesn’t always happen. But sometimes I’ll demo something and I’ll just be like, “What was that,” just trying to, in my mind, to make sense of it, let alone the rest of the population. Once again, to that point, I feel like my experience is going to be very different than a lot of other folks. I’m very hands on, very tech focused, and I get to demo some of these things years before anyone does. Ross: Anyone that’s familiar with your LinkedIn feed, for example, and imagining some of the things which you can’t share—which are even beyond that—they’ll know you’ve seen some pretty amazing stuff. Cathy: If someone were to hack my brain, I think they’d have a lot of information. So, don’t do it people, please don’t. Ross: The problem, I suppose, is the synthesis. Is there a state of mind? Do you find that sometimes when you get these “ahas” you sort of get this into perspectives and to framing things? Is there anything which makes that more likely to happen? Can you design those times when you get those insights? Cathy: I tend to have really some of those moments. I think there were a couple of times that I know I have those moments. Something I learned from Amy Webb is brown noise. She uses it a lot to concentrate. I’ve started to use it, and that really, really helps me get to that next level and really focus, when I need to be very focused and very productive. That’s one little thing. I’ll have those moments, right? It’s kind of a state of flow where your mind is just in it, and eventually this connects and this connects. So, I have that. Other times—and this happens to me all the time, my husband hates it—is right when I’m about to fall asleep, I’m trying to calm my mind—which is not calm—it will come to me. It will just come to me and I’ll make a connection of it, this and this, and then grab my phone and write something, grab a piece of paper or something, He hates it. Everyone’s trying to go to sleep at home and I’m like, “No, but I have an idea and I need to do this.” I’ll have those moments that happens sometimes, and it’s usually at that time. I’m trying to calm my brain. I’m trying to disconnect from the world. All of a sudden, boom, it’s there and connection is made; I totally understand, and I see something I didn’t see before. If it’s me wanting to have that time to really kind of start to make some of these connections, it’s focused time, brown noise—really very focused and studious. Sometimes it’s just that, I’m at a point where I’m relaxing, I’m getting rid of all the craziness of the day. I’ve got three kids, it’s one of those things, I’m getting rid of the craziness of the day. All of a sudden, boom, there it is. Sometimes it’s deliberate, the brown noise time. But sometimes it’s just like this moment where, boom, it just happens. Ross: It’s called hypnagogia, the time between sleep and waking. Thomas Edison, amongst others, used to use that and have some notes ready, so that when he when he was falling asleep he could jot down his latest invention. Cathy: I’m not necessarily inventing things, but it comes to me at times. Ross: It’s inside. Cathy: “I get it, I totally see it now.” Ross: You talked about these focus times, there are times when you block out. How do you block that out? When do you block that out? The brown noises are usually interesting, how do you how do you organize your focus time? Cathy: I’ll put blocks in my calendar on a weekly basis, it doesn’t mean they happen. Ross: The world happens. Cathy: Kids happen, pets happen, lots of other stuff happens during those block times sometimes, pediatricians or whatever it is. I have blocks, but it doesn’t necessarily mean they happen. I have two blocks on my calendar, and it bothers me every single time I look at them. I’m like, “Am I really sticking to this block? I don’t know like. Friday afternoons I’m trying to block off to do those sorts of things, it just ends up being something like, “Mommy, take me to the pool.” So, I’m trying. Sometimes, even though they’re blocked on my calendar, it might be something that just happens. I’ve got an hour in between calls, let me do some of that now. I’m not maybe as structured or as rigid as some folks with their calendar, in that sense. I have blocks for it, it doesn’t always happen though. Sometimes it will just be I’ve got an hour, like I said, between calls, let me focus and really get this project done or this research done. Ross: Do you turn off social e-mail distractions during that time, or do you have any other rituals which gets you into that space? Cathy: I would say my LinkedIn, I close my LinkedIn. If I’m on my desktop or laptop, I have to close my LinkedIn. That’s my most active network, so I don’t want it pinging me every five seconds. DMs, I get way too many dams. LinkedIn, I have to immediately close it. I know that it’s just going to start pinging and pinging. I’m not as bothered by Slack or other stuff. But when it’s LinkedIn, I have to close it. So, I would say that’s one of the things I definitely do. I always keep my phone around. It’s never something where I don’t look at my phone, just because I do have three children. That, for me, is just not an option, and one of them has got some food allergies and stuff. For me, it’s just not an option to turn off my phone. I’ll have it on the side and I won’t look at it, or I’ll cover it up. But I’ll make sure I have it where I can actually hear it ring, or whatever it is that that needs to happen. But I would say my biggest distraction when I’m doing something like this is LinkedIn, for sure. Ross: Changing tack a little bit, I think one of the most important things is to find your area of expertise. You can be the world-class expert and know what it is you’re doing. I’d love to hear the story of how you’ve ended up in your area of expertise at the moment. What was that journey? How did you find your calling as it were and what you’re an expert on? Cathy: I kind of have to trace everything, and it all kind of comes together at some point. The way I explain it to people, the reason I got into the immersive technologies and the metaverse and all the things I’m working on, I would have to trace it back to 2004. I was working at CNN, and part of my job there was to look at all the raw footage that was coming in from the war in Iraq. As you can imagine, not pleasant things. It wasn’t the only thing I did, but it was one of the things I did. I always joke in some way and say I was a Facebook moderator before there were Facebook moderators. When you have a type of role where you have to see this type of content and that’s your job, you have to turn your humanity dial or humanity switch off a little bit or turn it to the side, just to kind of get through the day and go home and have regular life. It was about seven years ago, I went to a conference, and I got invited to put a virtual reality headset on. I put the VR headset on, and I was put into this 6 x 9 very tiny, virtual solitary confinement cell and VR where prisoners in solitary confinement spent 90% of their time. Within a couple of minutes, I just felt something. It was claustrophobia, but it was also something else. I took the headset off and I said, “This is the future of storytelling.” I just saw the future—or whatever that was—and that’s what I want to do for the rest of my life. For me, it was very clear moment. At that moment, it’s like the switch got turned back on. That’s the only way I can describe the feeling. I felt something different. I felt something that made me feel human again. I don’t know what the right term would be, but it was that moment. After that, I was very intentional with my pivot. Everyone thought I was crazy. My friends and my husband were like, “What are you doing? What is this VR thing?” Fast forward, 2021, I’m very lucky to have worked with some of the top companies. I’m considered one of the people that is very much, I guess, an expert in the field. I’m very much at the center of the conversation and everything that’s happening in this immersive and now metaverse space. I would say it was a very clear moment for me when I knew that’s where I was heading. That’s where I’m going to go. That’s exactly what I want to do. It’s evolved and changed. But, for me, it was a very clear moment. Ross: You saw it and you recognized it. How did you go about it? Presumably, you weren’t the expert when you put on that VR headset. You took it off and you said, “I’m going to become that.” What was that journey? What did you do to follow that path? Cathy: I did several things. One of them was voraciously consume absolutely everything there was that I could find that relate to VR and AR. Another thing I did is try to figure out, who are the key players here? Who are the people I need to be paying attention to? Figuring out, what are they saying? How are they saying it? What are they working on? Who are they working with? Going through that and figuring out who are the people that I needed to keep tabs on. Eventually, I’m very lucky some of them became my mentors. As a woman, as a Latina woman, in tech, I was also very lucky to be able to see two other very strong Latina women leading the way. That, to me, was very helpful in saying there’s a place for me here. I can do this. If you can see it, you can be it. I think that was a big motivator for me as well, when I saw them. I used to admire them from afar, they were my north stars. Now, they’re both my friends. It’s been an evolution. But I think I got educated, I made connections. I said I’m going to work in this industry, got my first break, and then made everything I could out of it. It’s been great. I worked at HTC Vive, worked at Magic Leap, worked at Amazon Web Services. I mean, I’ve got a pretty solid career track there. For me, it really started with that pivotal moment. How can I educate myself and learn as much as I can, and then go into these companies and really be a part of it? It’s interesting, as a tech futurist and very much focused on what I do, I’m a little bit different because I’ve actually been inside these companies. I don’t necessarily just read articles, I know these people, I’ve worked on some of these projects. There’s a lot of stuff that I’ve worked behind the scenes on that people don’t necessarily realize. But I know it’s one of my projects or something I had a part in. It’s been quite a journey and exciting one. I’ve been very lucky, I have to say. Ross: You made it happen. Cathy: If you can see it, you can be it. There you go. Ross: What advice would you give to anybody that’s wanting to follow a similar path to you to become the expert? Essentially, in a space of emerging technologies, to keep current, keep ahead, to make sense of it, and become at the center of that, what would your advice be? Cathy: If you know enough about the technology, if you’re interested in something, for me, it’s about getting to the right place at the right time. It’s almost about recognizing a rocket when you see one. I’m sure many people saw some of the same things I did, but they didn’t see it. They didn’t see the rocket. I saw the rocket and I jumped on it. I’m taking this trip to wherever this is leading, and it’s paid off really well. So, I think it’s about being able to recognize some of those rockets, the new things that are coming. If people are really excited about a new technology, get in there, jump in there really be an active participant in the industry. It’s also about that, how are you becoming a voice, an active participant, in the idea sharing and everything that’s being built? The metaverse, for example, as a greater vision doesn’t currently exist, we’re building it. But now is the time to start voicing what you believe this metaverse should be, how you think it should be built. That was a time to be a participant and have your voice out there. We’re all slowly building it. I would say those are some of the things. Making connections, making lots of connections in the industry. Who are the people that you should be paying attention to? Being open to being educated and being open to being teachable, I think that’s very important, especially in my in my space. Another thing I think, specifically, for people that are interested in becoming tech futurist is you can’t know everything about technology and you cannot be an expert in all the technologies. That is way beyond anyone’s capability really. Not even Elon Musk attempts to do that. He has his arms in a lot of different things, but not everything in tech. Sometimes being a generalist in some other areas might be beneficial. But I think in tech, you have to be kind of focused. And you have to realize, what is it exactly that I’m focused on here? There are some folks that are very focused on artificial intelligence, folks that are very focused on more on the bio science side. It’s trying to figure out exactly what you’re going to focus on. Ross: You’re obviously wonderful at sharing. One is to actually share ideas. There is the of having the ideas or having the fresh ideas. At what point do you, I suppose, gain the confidence to feel, “I’ve got a fresh idea and want to share it?” Do you do it right away, just sort of throw it out? Do you do sort of develop enough confidence in your own ideas before you start opining on the industry? Cathy: It’s a slippery slope. The only reason I say that is because I am a woman, and I am a woman in tech. I think it’s a little bit different. I do pause before I tweet, because I know that maybe a guy can tweet what I’m saying and they wouldn’t get the some of the pushback or things that I might get. It doesn’t happen all the time, but I do see it sometimes. As a woman in tech, sometimes I do take a step back and say, “Should I tweet this?” I remember sharing an article with a friend. I said, “Hey, do you think this is going to make anyone angry?” He’s like, “Why do you care? Someone’s going to get angry somewhere.” It’s true, but I think sometimes as a woman, I think it’s a different game—especially if you’re a woman in technology, in a very male-driven industry. Ross: To have something solid to share in that case. I think that’s that value. Cathy: Yes, value. But still, I think that there’s a lot to unpack there. Ross: I think that’s a whole other conversation. Cathy: That’s a whole other podcast, issue, book, anything. Ross: Cathy, it’s been such a delight to talk to you. I so admire what you’re doing and how you’re doing it. Fantastic to get your insights, and I’m sure many other people will really appreciate it. Thanks so much for your time, Cathy. Cathy: Thank you, Ross. Appreciate it. The post Cathy Hackl on finding the key players to listen to, building mental maps, how to see connections, and becoming a voice in your industry [REPOST] (Ep57)  appeared first on amplifyingcognition.

Ross Dawson and Brett King discuss AI, climate survivability, mass migration, and collaborative intelligence. They explore AI's role in healthcare, digital twins, and the need for long-term investments. The conversation highlights the importance of futurists in shaping positive societal and economic outcomes.