012 - How to be a futurist with Ben Hammersley

In this audio from Pluralsight LIVE Europe 2019, futurist Ben Hammersley discusses how technology shapes society, why Elon Musk is driven more by nostalgia than innovation and several more thought-provoking topics.

• @benhammersley on Twitter
• Hammersley Futures
• 2020 Pluralsight LIVE Europe info

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Intro:
Hello and welcome to All Hands on Tech, where today's leaders talk tomorrow's technology. On today's episode, we bring you some audio from our 2019 Pluralsight Live Europe user conference. Futurist Ben Hammersley talks about how technology shapes society, why Elon Musk is driven more by nostalgia than innovation, and more. We hope you enjoy his thought-provoking presentation.

Ben Hammersley:
So, as you just said, my name is Ben Hammersley. I have lots of roles, as you just heard. I was a journalist for a long time, and a broadcaster, and a writer, and a coder, and all sorts of things. Today I have something of a problem with this sort of multifaceted, slightly eclectic career in that yesterday, well Sunday afternoon, when I was leaving my home in Los Angeles, I was going to work, my four year old was saying, "Daddy, what's your job?" I arrived in London yesterday, I'm obviously British, and my parents live in Leicester and so they drove down here and we had dinner. My parents were like, "Ben, what's your job?"

Ben:
So, I am a futurist. In order to help have you join me in confusing at least two different generations, I'm going to talk for the next half an hour or so in how you can be a futurist as well, because I think it's an incredibly important set of skills and an incredibly important role, specifically for all of you guys who have to make decisions about your company's strategy going forward and also about your own personal strategy going forward. So, really that's what I do. As a futurist, I work with companies and organizations and governments and so on to do strategic future planning with a horizon of about five years out.

Ben:
Now, of course, with most of you here being technologists, you'll know that this is a very difficult thing to do because of a general rule of thumb that we've been living our lives underneath, which is called Moore's Law. This is the original graph from the original paper that Gordon Moore wrote for Intel in 1964, where he said, in general terms, that roughly every year, for a given amount of money, computing power doubles. Gordon Moore, of course, is an engineer, so he used a logarithmic scale. You've never ever seen Moore's Law done in a logarithmic scale before, but this is the original graph.

Ben:
This is a bit of a problem for everybody in this room. The doubling of computing power every year for a given amount of money, that life that we've been living, underneath that, this exponential growth of computing power has made our lives both incredibly wonderful. It means that you all have now, for example, super computers in your pocket. But it's also made our lives incredibly difficult, because as people who have to make decisions, as people have to plan things, Moore's Law has given us these profoundly shorter forecast horizons.

Ben:
How far advanced in the future we can think about the world and still be correct, or still be correct enough to be sane, has radically shortened over the past 30 or 40 years because of this doubling and doubling and doubling of capability that we've got because of Moore's Law. As I said, I live in Los Angeles, and about two miles up the road from me is the RAND Corporation, who invented strategic forecasting. When they did that in the early sixties, they had a forecast horizon of about 20 years. If you read what they wrote in the early sixties, they were more or less correct. They were mostly doing this about military stuff, the Cold War and nuclear weapons and so on, but they were still pretty good 20 years out.

Ben:
Today though, the strategic forecasts that we work to are certainly no more than five years. To be honest, I'm increasingly beginning to think that anybody planning for anything more than two or three years away is insane. Anybody who's talking to you about something that's going to happen in 10 years' time is bullshitting.

Ben:
So, as futurists, myself and you guys now, I've now recruited you into the field, as futurists, we have to think about how we can think about the future in a more sane manner. What I like to do is I like to combine sort of rule-based scenarios. Here is something. Don't bother reading the slide, there's too many words on it. The top one obviously is Moore's Law and then there are lots of other rules-based things which are effectively saying the same thing. Take a technology, every year it gets way better. Solar cells, batteries, bandwidth, storage, all those sorts of things. We take those sorts of rule-based scenarios that we can show definitive data behind, historical data, and we combine them with real world observations by going out into the world, by going out into the streets and looking to see how things are working and then sort of extrapolating forward a couple of years.

Ben:
When you do this, you come to some very interesting conclusions if you do it thoroughly. The main conclusion is that there is an interdependent co-arising of change. Now that sounds an incredibly frothy, sort of complex phrase, but basically what it says is that if technology changes, so does society and so does culture, and if any one of those three things changes, the other two things change at the same time. You can't have a change in technology without there also being a change in society and a change in culture. The same for all of the others too.

Ben:
When you realize this, when you start to think not just about technology, but about society and culture at the same time, then your strategic predictions start to become much richer and start to become much more useful, both for you as an employee or an employer and also for you as an individual. Let me give you an example of this in action.

Ben:
About three years ago, I had a project from a client who wanted to me to look at these. You remember? Hover boards, right? Christmas 2016. Christmas 2016, these were the really, really fashionable thing to get. Where I live in Venice Beach, on the beach, there's a huge sort of path that goes up and down the beach. It's called the boardwalk. It's made entirely of a weed shops now and a Starbucks. Three years ago, there were lots of dudes, mostly dudes, getting on these and riding them precariously up and down the beach. They were a big seller until about January, just after Christmas, when they started to explode. You may remember these. They were made in factories in China, and the batteries that were in them weren't particularly good because those sorts of batteries are quite difficult to make, and they were a bit faulty, and they would explode. And so, they stopped being fashionable after a while, because even though it's pretty cool to be riding on one of these things, it self-balances and stuff, having it explode on you is not cool.

Ben:
But as a futurist looking at this, I saw a couple of interesting things. The technology change was very fascinating. The fact that there were batteries that were capable of carrying a 200 pound dude up and down the beach was a new thing. The fact that there were electric motors that were capable of doing that, using those batteries. The fact that there was circuitry that was capable of dealing with the balancing problem of mildly-stoned 200 pound dudes trying to go up and down the beach was also really interesting.

Ben:
So, when I looked at these, of course, as an as a specific technology, they were a bit rubbish because they explode and you don't want to exploding things on your feet. But when you extrapolate them forward, you end up with these. Now these, these haven't been made legal in London yet, but if you go anywhere in North America, you literally cannot walk down the road without tripping over one of these things. Same in Paris and Vienna and Barcelona, lots of other places around Europe, and when they're made legal in London, they will be everywhere. If you've not seen one of these, there are lots of different companies that make them. They're called e-scooters, and they are kind of like dockless Boris bikes. They're literally just leaning up against everything, and to use one, you go up to it, you take your phone, there's a QR code on the top of it, you scan the QR code with the correct app, it unlocks it, and you're charged a couple of cents a minute to ride it around. They can do about 15 miles an hour and they're pretty handy, actually.

Ben:
But this is radically transforming Los Angeles, because thousands of people are using these every day. The local council is realizing that they're going to have to do something about this, so they're installing extra bike lanes, and they're installing extra places to park them, and they're having to come up with new regulations. Those regulations then driving technology, because in Santa Monica, which is a slightly more expensive place a bit north of me, there are some areas of Santa Monica where the people who live there don't want these driving through them. So, Bird and Lime, who are the two companies that make these particular scooters have had to put in geofencing into the technology.

Ben:
So, if I'm riding up Second Avenue in Santa Monica, when I pass a certain street, the Bird scooter will slow right down, its speed halves, because within a certain area, the local community have decided that they don't want people to go faster than eight miles an hour. Then you trundle along and you go, "I think the battery's dying," and then you're getting push notifications from your phone saying, "No, it's just you're in a place where people are boring." Then you get across the other side of the street and it accelerates again. So you have this technology plus society plus culture has changed this whole thing in about a year.

Ben:
Now, looking at this, you might think, "Well, where's it going to go to next?" And I'll tell you where it's going to go to next. It's going to go to here. This is a picture of my daughter, the one on top, and our robot, the one on the bottom. My daughter, she's four years old and she goes to a preschool that's about a mile and a half away from us. This is Segway Loomo. It's a beta version of it. It's a Segway, so you stand on it, it balances itself, and you lean forward, and it trundles forward quite fast. I give her a piggyback and we ride down the beach path, and we go to our favorite cafe, and she has a steamed milk and a cookie, that she's meant to share with me but doesn't, and I have a cold brew. Then we walk the next 400 yards to the school. The Segway Loomo has an AI built into it and computer vision. You say, "Hey, Loomo," and it goes boop boop beep, and you say, "Follow me," and it goes boop boop. Then it uses its patented sort of ass recognition software to follow you down the street.

Ben:
Now, for a sort of hipster, tattooed futurist with a four year old who goes to it, she's very happy, because she arrives at her school with her babyccino and her pet robot, and she thinks she's the coolest thing ever. Of course, this particular device in this particular form factor is kind of a thing for the hipster kids. But, the cool thing about it is on the way home, I can buy some groceries and an extra coffee, and I can load it onto Loomo, and I can have it follow behind me and carry my groceries home.

Ben:
Now that's, again, solely thing for hipster futurists who live in Venice Beach. But, if you think about society and culture, the way that that's evolving, in many Western nations, we have a demographic bubble, which means there's about to be on an awful lot of old people, and an awful lot of old people who live in villages and towns where they have markets and shops that are half a mile away. Those old people would like to be able to walk to the shop and buy their groceries and then walk home again, but they can't, because they can't carry their bags. But this sort of technology, which today is a thousand dollar device, will soon be, because of Moore's Law, where the computing power doubles or the price halves, depending on which angle you go at it from, this sort of technology will be in a shopping cart. So in five years time, you will be buying one of these for your elderly parents, not so they can ride up and down the beach in California, but so they can bring home their groceries from Tesco.

Ben:
The whole point of being a futurist is you have to look at these small signals, the hover boards, and think, "Well, if those individual bits of technology and the way they're affecting society get amplified, what will be the implications?" There's almost always a bigger implication than you can think of. This is because you have to think about all these three things at the same time. Let me go very quickly through the next example.

Ben:
This is the Human Genome Project. In 1994, this particular picture was taken. It was, at the time, one of the most expensive scientific experiments ever done, right? Billions and billions of dollars, tens of thousands of very, very highly qualified geneticists, all dedicated to sequencing the genome of one man. A huge, huge scientific breakthrough. Nobel Prizes galore. It took like a decade. Today, if you want to sequence the genome of one individual, you get one of these. This is the Oxford Nanopore minION. That's my hand, which is a perfectly regular sized hand. That DNA sequencer is $999. You can buy them online from them. They'll ship it to you overnight. The disposables that you need to do the DNA sequence will cost you about 25 quid. Any idiot can learn to use one.

Ben:
Now, the point of showing you this is because when you bring the technology down in price, it enables more and more uses for it. There've been two notable uses recently that I really liked. One was somebody took one of those things and they took them to sushi restaurants around Los Angeles. Whilst they were eating their sushi, they also took a little bit of the fish from the top of each piece of sushi they were eating and they ran a DNA sequence on it to find if the fish they were eating was the fish they thought they were eating. Is this really tuna fish, is this really eel, whatever it is. On average in the 10 most expensive sushi restaurants in Los Angeles, 80% of the fish that they tested was not the fish it was meant to be.

Ben:
The ability to test DNA in situ changes an awful lot of stuff, pretty much every field of human endeavor. The ability to do that, that new capability that we've unlocked, gives us the ability to do all sorts of cool stuff, everything from medicine to food safety and all the way through. By having that new bit of technology and the social implications that are brought from it, it means there are lots more skills that people now need to have. Because to do that, to use those capabilities, we need more molecular biologists, yes, but we also need more data analysts and data storage people and technical writers and science journalists and also the whole ecosystem stuff around just that one new capability. Even criminals, for example, can get into this. Every new technology that comes out, there's a whole new ecosystem of crime and the ability to learn about crime that comes with it.

Ben:
So, for example, with this particular thing, one of the things that we're slightly worried about, and I don't think it's happened yet and if it hasn't, this is the way we're going to get rich. Many, many companies have very strong IT security around their senior management, especially financial services companies, because those senior management are responsible for lots and lots of money and for them to be blackmailed, for example, would be very bad. So, their social media is locked down, their personal data is very much locked down, their kids' social media is locked down, et cetera, et cetera. What we're realizing now is that we're going to have to lock down all of their bodily fluids as well.

Ben:
Because, last night in the bar, some of you were having one or two or three or four drinks, and all of you were leaving saliva on the sides of glasses. It would have been very trivial for me to go in there and pretend to be a waiter, take some glasses, take it into the back, do a DNA sequence on it, and find which of you is genetically predisposed to being a psychopath or any other personality disorder, or indeed any other health issue. By being able to look at your DNA and sequence it with this $999 device and using the skills that I could learn about data processing and so on, I will be able to basically automate very high-tech blackmail, where I can send you an email saying, "I know the thing you've got that you haven't disclosed to your board." All sorts of new possibilities with a little bit of education.

Ben:
So, working as a futurist, it's really good to go out on shopping expeditions and have a look and see what's happening in the real world. A couple of weeks ago I did this, I started off in Whole Foods and, as you know, you probably know, Whole Foods were bought by Amazon. This is a Whole Foods meal kit made by Amazon. Right there on the packaging is the command you have to give Alexa for Alexa to tell you how to cook it. I thought that was pretty cool. That's a signal of the future.

Ben:
Then, around the corner from me, there's an Amazon bookstore. They started opening bookstores again in one of the greatest ironic moves in the history of commerce. If you walk into the Amazon bookstore, one of the first things you see is the kids' section and there's a whole section there for young coders. So if any of you are feeling slightly out of date, don't worry about it, the eight year olds've got your back. I bought a couple of those books because they're actually really good.

Ben:
Then I got an Uber up to the Westfield Century City mall. That mall, they have these, because it's near Beverly Hills, they have lots of sort of health clinics now. You can go into these health clinics and you can have cryotherapy, which is when you sit in a very cold room, which apparently is really good if you live in California because they've never had cold before. You can have esthetics, which is effectively Botox injections. You can have biomarkers, which is where they take your blood and they just check to see if you're still alive. And then, stem cells. There's a shop in a shopping mall where you can go and have stem cells injected into bits of you and it will magically cure you.

Ben:
So again, a signal from the future. The Wellcome Trust around the corner from here, Tommy's Hospital down the street, UCH, they're all doing major scientific research into stem cells as a major bit of unknown science. In L.A., you can just go to a mall and have it just injected into you for fun. A small signal, which has big implications going forward.

Ben:
Here's another really good one. This is Del Taco, which is a very nasty taco chain, not the classiest. Sub Wimpy, for the Brits in the audience. It's dirty, right? But they just brought out this new range of tacos which are made her with Beyond Meat. Now, Beyond Meat isn't on sale in the UK yet, but it is a plant-based protein which is almost exactly like meat. It's absolutely fantastic. I'm a vegetarian and I eat lot of this stuff because it's really good. Two years ago when it came out, it was only available in Whole Foods, and it basically sold out immediately and you had to hoard it. You could sell it on eBay still frozen for like double the price. It was amazing stuff. Now, they're making enough of it that Del Taco, a dirty taco chain in L.A., are selling them in their tacos. They IPOed last week and their stock prices doubled in the past week.

Ben:
Impossible Burger, which is their rival, which makes a burger which is so identical to regular meat that when you bite into it, it actually bleeds, but it's entirely plant-based. They just did a deal with Burger King to sell Impossible Burger Whoppers in 9,000 Burger Kings across the country. Two years ago: tiny signal, Beyond Meat for sale in Whole Foods in western L.A. Two years later, Burger King are rolling it out nationally and Beyond Meat's IPO doubled in stock price over a week. In five years time, we'll look back at this as that weird time when we didn't realize that meat was rubbish and we should all be eating this. Huge social changes.

Ben:
Finally, later that evening, I went to the Lakers game because it was my birthday and I got tickets, because they're very expensive. Halfway through the final bit of the game, there was a timeout. They introduced the six people who were standing in the middle of the court there, on the video screen, as the new members of the Lakers family. These are professional basketball players, except for they play basketball as e-sports players. They actually play for the Lakers but they play on NBA 2019, which is the video game version of basketball, because the NBA teams have all started their e-sports teams and their professional video games players.

Ben:
Now, why am I showing you all of these things? Well, the reason is because, like I say, when we think about technology, it doesn't just create gray boxes that sit in your office. No longer. Instead, every new bit of technology, every new bit of training, every new thing that's out there, every new buzzword, polynimbus being the best one ever, influences not just tech, but influences culture and politics at the same time, which means that we cannot think about our career paths, our journey through life in the same way as our parents did. The reason that my parents are thoroughly confused by my life is because they have no way of dealing with the change that has to happen. Of course, there are lots of things changing.

Ben:
I'm going to skip through these really quickly, but there are all these other complexities that we have to add in as well. Everything from climate change and nationalism to factional ignorance, which is groups of people who base their group identity around things they don't believe in, cognitive warfare, which is certain other groups of people attacking you in ways that make you unable to think clearly. Lots of other things that are making society really complex.

Ben:
So, in many ways, the future of work, the future of your work both as individuals but also as employers and as leaders and so on is this: it's the protection and promotion of human cognition. It's the ability to look at the world as it is right now, clearly and truthfully, and think, "What does this mean going forward?" Not, "How does this fit into a pattern that I inherited from a previous generation?" But instead, "What does this mean going forward genuinely? How do things change?" Because of this, we have to think with much more knowledge, the sort of learning that we have, but also with much more clarity. The ability to think clearly about things is perhaps the most undervalued skill that we have right now.

Ben:
For example, one of the things about thinking clearly is to ask you the question, "Is it truly disruptive?" Is it truly disruptive? Self-driving cars is the Google self-driving car prototype. As you can tell, Google can make really good software, but can't design cars for shit. It's the most Southern California thing in the world. If this hits snow, it'd be amazing. The self-driving car, on the one hand, is an amazing technology, truly groundbreaking in many, many ways. From a computational point of view, this is astounding. Is it disruptive, though? No. I would argue that the self-driving car is the least disruptive thing that has come out of Silicon Valley in 20 years, because it is very specifically trying to move forward to keep things the same. If you wanted to have true disruption in the personal transportation industry, you would be investing in these electrically driven cargo bikes. Because real disruption isn't taking the thing that you're already doing and making it digital. Real disruption is looking at the thing you're doing and going, "Should we be doing something different? Yes. Okay. How do we do that with the state-of-the-art?"

Ben:
Many leaders in Silicon Valley especially are actually not really leaders, they're providing a nostalgic future. Elon Musk is perhaps the worst example of this. Everybody goes on about him being an amazing visionary and futurist. He's not in any way. He's a profoundly nostalgic man, because his vision of the future is a 1950s vision of the future. He's basically building the science fiction he read when he was a teenager, which is rockets and robot cars. It's not innovative. It's just taking an old idea and adding digital to it.

Ben:
We have to think clearly, like I say, about innovation. For example, there is the innovation fallacy. This is also known as the governmental fallacy. To improve, things must change. We are changing things, therefore we are improving things. Not necessarily the case. Then your ability to think clearly about whether or not this is true at every stage is going to be the thing that leads you into the future.

Ben:
AI design is a good example of this. We have to think very clearly about how we design AI. It was referred to earlier by [Sophie 00:26:43] and so I'm going to go quickly through this. Amazon used an AI to build out their HR department. It worked really well for six months until they analyzed the data and they found that their AI had been massively sexist. Why? Well, because the training data they'd used to train the AI had been based on their previous work, and it turns out the previous work had been massively sexist. So, what they realized was they don't just need coders, they have plenty of coders, but they also need ethicists and moral specialists and social psychologists and philosophers, and so on.

Ben:
Self-driving cars, for example, have this same problem. You probably may have seen this before. This is called the trolley problem. Trolley problem used to be something that philosophy students would talk about at three o'clock in the morning smoking weed. Here is the trolley problem: you are the person in the top, in the middle, with the lever. The trolley, currently the way it's working is that its brakes have failed, and it is hurtling towards those five people on the right. If you do nothing, those five people will die. If, however, you choose to act and you physically pull the lever, those five people will not die, but that one person at the bottom will die. What do you do? Now, as a question of moral philosophy, this is actually really tricky, because if you do nothing then, sure, those five people would die, but it wasn't your fault. They were going to die anyway. It's as if you weren't there. But if you pull the lever, you've murdered that one guy down at the bottom.

Ben:
Now, this used to be, like I say, a sort of weed-smoking, 3:00 AM exercise for philosophy students, but today, if you're a coder working for Tesla or any of the other car companies, this is something you're going to have to stick into code into the self-driving bits of your code stack, because at some point the car is going to have to verve left or right. It's got to decide what it hits.

Ben:
So, we took this question to Davos. If you've ever been to Davos, it's the big meeting of bankers and world leaders, all of whom are not in any way sociopaths. We had them compare different types of characters. The ones with the bigger blue line are the people that they wanted to save, and the ones with a bigger purple line are the ones they wanted to kill. So, if you're a baby in a stroller against a cat, the baby lives, the cat dies. If you're a fat bloke against the female doctor, you die. If you're a male doctor against a female doctor, you live. Harsh. Girls are more valuable than boys. Pregnant women are more valuable than female doctors. Female athletes more valuable than female executives. Sorry. If you're an old woman, you're pretty much done for, and so on.

Ben:
Now, this sounds to be really weird, of course, but this is the sort of thing that we're going to have to hard code into self-driving cars, right? Now, you're going to say, "Oh, there's no way we can do that. How will the computer know how that is?" But we have computer vision to drive the damn car and we have really good computer vision to recognize faces and so on, as you saw demonstrated about half an hour ago. So, this is trivial to do, and because it's trivial to code, we're going to have to code it, because we're going to have this decision made for us.

Ben:
Now it's not surprising that we're not very good at these sorts of things, because if the theory goes, and I know this is a very controversial number, but let's just imagine it's true for the next 10 seconds. If the theory goes that you need 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to be really good at something, then it's not surprising that we're not very good at living in the modern world, because none of us have lived in the modern world for 10,000 hours. Indeed, most people have not lived in the digital world for 10,000 hours. If you had, it would have meant you had spent two and a half hours a day online using deliberate practice, not just dicking around on Twitter, but being deliberate about it for the past 20 years. Nobody has done that, which means that we are all, as a society, pretty rubbish at living in the present.

Ben:
So, what do we do about it? Very quickly. To future-proof ourselves, we have to maximize for cognitive diversity. We have to build teams, individuals around ourselves, and teams, individuals in our own heads, which are cognitively diverse. We have to train ourselves in many, many fields, as many fields as possible, to give ourselves the greatest possibility of living in the future and living successfully. We have to think about the metacognition, thinking about thinking, learning how to learn. We need to do that by paying attention to how we think and what we know, by pausing a little bit and thinking about the assumptions you're making, and the way you're making decisions, and the knowledge that you have about stuff. The products that were demonstrated earlier today are going to go some way to help you do that, to surface what it is you actually know. By paying attention to that and paying attention to what you don't know, both as individuals and as an organization, within your own companies, will enable you to think more clearly, and it's that clarity of thought which will enable you to succeed in the future.

Ben:
You're going to start hearing this phrase a lot, because the original book came out about 20 years ago, but somebody's rewritten it. I'm absolutely sure it's going to be a big Apple Book this year. The concept of finite and infinite games. Most of our society is based around a finite game, which is a game which has an end to it and a score and a winning condition. But what we're realizing is our careers, our lives are infinite games. The only way to win an infinite game, the point of an infinite game, is to continue playing, to do anything you can to make the game as long as possible. You can't win at training, right? You can't win at learning. It's not something you'll ever stop doing. You'll never win at self-improvement. It's just a daily practice. It's an infinite game, and you have to start it today.

Ben:
One way to start it today, as well as the Pluralsight testing and so on, is to play this game. We call it the grandchild challenge. It's a way of thinking about what the future's going to be like or what the world will be like in the future. Here's how you do it. Well, first thing, you have to accept the premise that your grandparents or your great-grandparents had social beliefs, which you yourself find abhorrent. I mean, let's face it, right? Most of our great-grandparents were kind of racist, for example, or had social beliefs which are a little bit dodgy. They thought that Elvis was going to melt their brains or something.

Ben:
The grandchild challenge is to ask yourself, "What social belief do I have that I find absolutely obvious, absolutely true, will my grandchildren think I am terrible for holding?" What is it that I do today that my grandkids, or the person who replaces me in my job 20 years down the line, will think that I am terrible for thinking. If you apply yourself to that question, and this is particularly a good one to do around the dinner table with your family after they've had a couple of bottles of wine, if you apply yourself to this question, it will give you some sort of idea of the direction that the world is going, the direction that culture and society is going, and from that, you'll be able to work out where technology is going, too.

Ben:
And from all of that, you'll be able to indulge in the final thing, which is: we have to, in order to flourish in the future, in order to flourish in a future which is fundamentally and systemically unpredictable beyond a couple of years, in order to do that, we have to embark on a regime of constant legacy-free reinvention. It's a process in which we have to think consistently. If I was doing this for the first time and I had to use modern tools, how would I do it? If you apply those questions and you apply these habits of clear thinking to your life as individuals, as employees, and employers, and leaders within organizations, if you think afresh and you think more clearly, then no matter what the future is, and as somebody who's paid to predict it I can [inaudible 00:00:35:32], no matter what the future is, you will find yourself flourishing and profitable.

Ben:
But if you decide to not do that, if you decide to stay where you are, if you decide to never reassess, if you decide to never learn and never develop because you've reached a point now where you think you're successful and therefore you have won, then I can't help you and you won't be here next year anyway.

Ben:
Thank you very much.

Outro:
Thank you for listening to All Hands on Tech. If you enjoy this podcast, please rate it on your platform of choice. You can see show notes and more info at pluralsight.com/podcast. If you're interested in attending this year's Pluralsight Live Europe, which takes place March 23rd to 24th, in London, England, there's a link to learn more in the show notes.