Between Worlds

Bradly Trevor Greive is an extraordinary person. He has written 25 books, which have sold over 30 million copies in 115 different countries, several of which have appeared in the New York Times bestseller list, including his classic title, ‘The Blue Day Book’. But that is only a small part of a resume that reads more like the bio of the world’s most interesting man. A certified Cosmonaut, a former Paratrooper Platoon Commander in the Australian Army, a Polynesian Rock-Lifting Champion, and a survivor of 17 surgeries to date - comedian John Cleese once described his life as ‘one long suicide attempt’. Meeting up in LA, we spoke on the importance of conservation in his work, why Bertrand Russell’s essay in praise of idleness is so important in the 21st century, and the challenges of surviving Hollywood.

I caught up with Ross Dawson, a fellow futurist and an Australian native, on a recent trip back home to Bondi Beach. Ross is a futurist, and the author of four books including the Amazon.com bestseller ‘Developing Knowledge-Based Client Relationships’, and the acclaimed book Living Networks, which foresaw the social networking revolution. Over coffee we riffed over some areas of common interest, in particular the impact of AI on the future of decision-making and work.

For as long as I’ve known him, Brady Forrest has been at the very epicenter of whatever the West Coast alpha geeks think is going to be the next big thing. I met him around 2008 when he was running the brilliant ETech conference for O’Reilly Media - which incidentally, was one of the first public tech talks that I ever gave. Since then he cofounded Ignite, a talk series which has been held thousands of times around the world - as well as Highway1, a hardware accelerator which has helped launch over 58 hardware startups.

A member of the infamous MIT Blackjack Team, Jeff Ma was the inspiration for the best-selling book ‘Bringing Down the House’ and the hit movie, ’21’. A successful entrepreneur and expert on analytics, he is also a pioneer in the ‘Moneyball’ movement working with professional sports teams like the San Francisco 49ers and the Portland Trail Blazers to help them make better decisions with data. After selling his latest business, tenXer to Twitter, Jeff now works there as Senior Director of Business Insights. We met up for a coffee in San Francisco to chat about what playing Blackjack can teach you about overcoming cognitive bias, the quantification of work and what it takes to be truly data-driven.

Daniel Kraft is a Stanford and Harvard trained physician-scientist, inventor, entrepreneur, and innovator. I met him some years ago at the Singularity University, where he was chair of the Medicine Track. Daniel is also the Executive Director of Exponential Medicine, a program that explores convergent, rapidly developing technologies and their potential in biomedicine and healthcare. On a recent visit to Silicon Valley, I caught up with him to talk about how traditional medicine is being disrupted by the digital age.

If you have ever picked up a copy of the New York Times, you have probably come across one of Carl Richards and his insightful, back-of-the-napkin drawings and posts that illuminate the basics of money. A financial planner, and author of The One-Page Financial Plan: A Simple Way to Be Smart About Your Money and The Behavior Gap: Simple Ways to Stop Doing Dumb Things with Money - Carl is a fascinating thinker on the future of wealth. We spoke about his latest research on uncertainty, financial planning for freelancers, and why human advisors will remain relevant even in an age of algorithms.

Richard Holden, a Professor of Economics at UNSW Business School, is one of the world’s leading experts on contract theory. He has also been a Visiting Professor of Economics at the MIT Department of Economics and Visiting Professor of Law at the University of Chicago Law School - and has written extensively on the boundary of the firm, incentives in organizations, mechanism design, and voting rules. Many years ago, he was also one of my debating rivals at university. After running into each other on a flight to Dallas recently, we caught up to discuss some of his recent research on why so much wealth is controlled by so few, the impact of smart contracts and the Blockchain on the future design of companies, and why now is a good time to brush up on our understanding of game theory.

Tamer Nakisci is an award-winning Turkish designer with a strong vision and fascination for the future. He started his career at Fiat Advanced Design Concept Lab – Milan in 2004. His design for a flexible, wearable "Nokia 888" concept phone over a decade ago inspired device designs that are only now becoming a reality. Most recently his work was featured in the 2017 Wallpaper Magazine design awards. We caught up in Istanbul to talk about the future of design, the challenges of creating technology that is formless and adaptable, and how creativity comes alive when you provide tools without instructions.

While in Sydney, I caught up with Peter Xing, a key figure in the Australian transhumanism movement, and an expert on business automation. We spoke about the road to building cognitive enterprises, why we need to shift from thinking about digitizing documents to smart contracts, and why the first step in any good digital transformation is defining processes in a way to make your company ‘machine readable’.

Art Morales is the CTO at Analgesic Solutions, a clinical research company focused on the conduct of clinical trials in pain. I caught up with Art to try and understand how emerging technologies like data, AI and algorithms will impact the way we both research and test new medicines in the future. One of the most interest areas of innovation is the cross pollination of ideas and frameworks from one industry to other. To that end, Art and his team are bringing in concepts from manufacturing and statistical process control to monitor and improve the effectiveness of clinical trials for pain medication. Upon completing his Ph.D. with Dr. Paul Schimmel at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Art started his career with Genome Therapeutics as a Senior Computational Biologist. He subsequently led a variety of teams at various companies including the Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research, where he was Global lead for Biology Platform Informatics.