Terry Thiele has been a cold warrior and a corporate lawyer. He now consults and teaches strategic planning. This book is the culmination of 40 years of helping government officials, corporate officers, and graduate students think about the future. Terry graduated magna cum laude and received his B.A. in History from Princeton and his J.D. from NYU; he is a graduate of the National War College. He and partner Carol live near Wilmington, N.C.
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Terry Thiele has been a cold warrior and a corporate lawyer. He now consults and teaches strategic planning. This book is the culmination of 40 years of helping government officials, corporate officers, and graduate students think about the future. Terry graduated magna cum laude and received his B.A. in History from Princeton and his J.D. from NYU; he is a graduate of the National War College. He and partner Carol live near Wilmington, N.C.
Links / websites
if you enjoyed the show be sure to check out my info:
https://app.wingcard.io/ROB3SA64
Welcome to the Josh Bolton show where we die in an interesting and inspiring conversation. And now your host, Josh Bolton. Alright, there we go.
Josh Bolton:Hey, there it is.
Terry:You have to be 30% smarter than the machinery you operate and I frequently fail. Fail that test.
Josh Bolton:I didn't know that rule, so it doesn't matter. Yeah.
Terry:Nice to meet you.
Josh Bolton:Nice to meet you, too. So where are you at Terry?
Terry:I am located just outside of Wilmington, North Carolina. About a half hour from the coast.
Josh Bolton:All right. I love the outfit you have by the way. Yeah, I
Terry:clean up good.
Josh Bolton:Yes, you do.
Terry:Yeah. So where is Arcadia?
Josh Bolton:Do you know where Los Angeles is? Yes. So it's like, south east of LA.
Terry:Northeast of San Diego. Yes. Okay. All right. Interesting.
Josh Bolton:It's like in the middle of nowhere, even though it's suburbs like no one, even California. We don't really know it. So
Terry:well, LA, it's I mean, you want to talk about this. The Suburban blur just sort of sprawls on forever and ever
Josh Bolton:does. No say my parents just got back from a wedding up in Northern California past Sacramento. And my mom's like, it's so weird. There's like country, people in California and like, well, it is a big state. There's like a state second fit. Nice. So
Terry:well, there's a big difference between NorCal and SoCal. And the valley and the coast, that's for sure. Yeah, I used to spend a fair amount of time in Sacramento, for my job dealing with state agencies. And just the difference between the Valley and San Francisco. Oh, it's huge. You know, it's two different two and two entirely different worlds. So
Josh Bolton:100%? Yeah, I noticed that here were like, if you go from one city, and you cross the other one, and you're just like, Wow, am I in the same place or my own house?
Terry:Well, it's interesting where I am at the moment the community I'm, my, my wife and I live in is a very relatively new community. I think they started building 1015 years ago. And it's a new developments. And I'd have to say 95% of the people in this development are off of the I 95 Corridor going up to Boston. So there are very few North Carolinians or southerners in the mix at all. And here we are in North Carolina. I'd say we're all Yankees.
Josh Bolton:I wouldn't go that far. But if
Terry:you insist, yeah. Well, I mean, it's just you know, it's the demographics, the shifts that are taking place are kind of epic. So. So how do we go about this? I'm new to podcasting.
Josh Bolton:Okay. I'm pretty easygoing. I'm just more of a a conversation, wherever it goes. It goes and I just try to keep tabs of we're going along, because you were saying you wanted to talk about the future of our species, even how fast societal technological disruptions are?
Terry:Yeah, I just published a book on Amazon. And the title is our fourth age, a village elders story for young homie, nice, Sufi Auntie's, about their future history. And, and the point I make in the book, is that we have gone through as a species, we've already gone through three ages, what I call ages, in the First Age from let's say, I'll say 200,000 years ago, roughly, which is when anatomically modern humans emerged, right? Up until, let's say, 12,000 years ago, we were hunter gatherers. Yeah. From about 12,000 years ago, 10,000 years when I say 12 10,000 BC, up until 1785 to pick a date. We were farmer herders,
Josh Bolton:primarily. Yeah. Sam in your own land.
Terry:Yeah. And in 1785 that reason I picked that date is that's about the time that steam engines realized steam engines became commercially available to drive the Industrial Revolution. Okay, so from about 1785, up until the beginning of COVID, which is a nice, convenient catastrophic demarcation point. We made things we were manufacturers, right? When you look over that timeline from 200,000 years ago to today, the rates and the degree of change has gradually increased, right, such that, starting with the Industrial Revolution, and now increasingly, it's gone from, you know, going back and forth like this to all of a sudden that's going like that. And I would argue that we are confronting the fourth age, which we are about to embark on, which is driven largely by societal and technological disruptions that are all happening at the same time. So for example, on the societal side, for the first time in the history of our species, more of us live in cities than in the country. For the first time, half of the countries in the world have birth rates below replacement level.
Josh Bolton:Right? Yeah, it's not enough kids to even have everything.
Terry:So Eastern Europe is Eastern Europe, Japan, Korea, are all losing about 40% of their population over time. They're dramatically shrinking 95% of the population growth that the UN estimates up until the end of the century. Does Africa, all Africa. So you're seeing countries in Africa are growing by 500%. So in some countries, they're collapsing, and growing older. In Africa, they're exploding. China, in India, in particular, both countries for different reasons, have a disparity between males and females, the birth rate
Josh Bolton:was in China at one point, they had a rule, like one
Terry:one child policy, which they did away with, but it was too late. Yeah, too much damage was done. Yeah. And so there are now 10 million 20 million Chinese men for which there are no Chinese women. Right. And it's even worse in India, I want to say it's close to 50 million men for which there are no Indian women. So that's a lot of unrequited testosterone. That's also destabilizing. So you've got a lot. And then of course, we're getting older. China's already getting older, and China is already past peak population. There are a lot of demographic experts, though, that are saying that UN numbers are wrong. And that because of urbanization, once once people get to cities, they stop having children. When you're in the country, you need kids to work the land,
Josh Bolton:I'll say, get the cattle in, you get one for the cattle like two for the field. Yep. Nirwana just as your the back kind of thing.
Terry:When you get into the city, is there just an additional mouth to fee?
Josh Bolton:Yeah, they're an expense. They're not an asset, that that as women
Terry:have access to better health care, and greater education, that also decides against more children. So there are a lot of demographic experts that are saying that the world isn't going to continue to grow. To the end of the century, the world's population is going to peak, maybe within 2030 years, and then it starts going down. And it won't stop.
Josh Bolton:Obviously, but all things there is ebb and flows. Eventually we'll have to hit a resistance like a bottom.
Terry:Very, very, very likely. But that's sort of the next iteration. Beyond that the challenge is when you look at most of the policymakers, there's a there's a gentleman, Hans Rosling, who passed away a couple years ago, but a Swedish I want to say he was a surgeon, but he did an awful lot of work with statistics, public speaker. And what he discovered was that Most people don't really know the facts about the condition of the world. Right? So he put together a I want to say it was a 13 question quiz. And it was a multiple choice. And he tested the attendees at Davos. And discovered to his chagrin, that most of them didn't really know the facts of the world when it came to poverty, education, death rates, just basic statistical information. They didn't have it right. He then tested 12,000 People over 17 countries. Okay, and most of them got it wrong, too. In fact, no one got them. All right. And I want to say 15% got them all wrong. The point is, when you're trying to plan and strategize for the future and cope with the future, if you don't have the facts straight. You're going to you're going to make the wrong plants. Now, given that the rate of change is accelerating, and we haven't talked about the technology stuff, let me know. Yeah, that's a whole hot mess
Josh Bolton:right there.
Terry:That's it, you know, between 3d printing the Internet of Things, artificial intelligence, brand new materials, synthetic biology, cheap, ubiquitous, reliable, off grid energy. And that's just a couple. I mean, they're all coming together at the same time. And I would argue that what we are about to witness is the obsolescence of the classic Henry Ford 20th century mass production model. And it's not my quote, repeating someone else's words, but we are going from a past of a few making millions, to a future of millions making a few. Yes.
Josh Bolton:So that's so funny. I just want to interject there real quick. It's one of the things I've been telling people, my whole schmick is, we're not the, the Ford or the whatever works. You don't want the people to have an opinion, because they're literally there to bolt something and move it down kind of thing. But now it's with automation. We don't need humans to do that anymore. We just need we need one that has good critical thinking that can be like, Oh, this machine's down call so and so to repair it kind of thing. So it like it's a bit of a renaissance where people don't have to be oppressed in this snap, but it's also an age of creativity and critical thinking when before that wasn't.
Terry:Well, what yeah, there's a interesting science fiction book written in 1999 by Neil Stevenson called the Diamond Age. Okay. And in the Diamond Age, Stephenson describes a future largely driven by nanotechnology and artificial intelligence. And in this future, which very many will be this fourth age that I'm talking about? That the need for people to work to survive, were here to for all through the other ages, you spent your waking hours putting food on the table and clothes on your back and shelter over your head right. In Stephenson's future. Technology is such that people don't really have to work in order to survive. They are provided housing, they're provided food and clothing, and all their physical wants sort of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. The baselines are all taken care of. They just don't have a job. And then the question is, as a human being, what do you do when you don't have to work? How much? How much bad poetry can you write? I mean, right. And that could be the dystopian future we're looking at.
Josh Bolton:Well, I really think we have the seeds planted especially with the corona virus, lockdowns like I worked through it, but I I just didn't even realize it was an option if I like Oh, I'm scared to Corona. I can get 600 A week kind of thing. And it was just one of those. I've like I was chatting with someone at my work. It was just like, This is gonna be interesting. The kids coming of age that turned 18 that we're about to go to get a job in the government sake. No, no, no, no, just stay home. We'll pay you 600 bucks a week. Play your fortnight and the kids now coming to work for like you. It's hysterical. One of them just literally walked off still on the clock and we're like, what do you do? He's like, aren't you gonna gonna pay me to play video games? Or like, no, no, we're paying you to go sweep the floor? Oh, no, when he just literally walked away and never came back. Yeah, I'm like, so this is gonna be interesting to see.
Terry:Well, and when you take all of that disruptive change the societal and the technological. I would argue that over the history of the species, we created cultures, civilizations, and cultures, and then societies to create norms of behavior, to enable us to cope with change and chaos. When you go back to the original 200,000 years ago, in the savanna of Africa, we were imbued with a series of instincts that are hardwired into us, right? And I'll summarize them as we are afraid of everything.
Josh Bolton:Well, we for good reason, back then, if a leaf move, there was a high chance there was a lion there.
Terry:Exactly. So exactly. So so we tend to be afraid of everything. And we and when we feel threatened, we tend to overreact violently. Yes, we form groups, we join groups, because we have ident, we've discovered that being in a group improves our chances of survival, finding a mate and passing on our genes. And that's what it's all about is passing on your genes. So we join groups, we try to achieve greater status within our group, we'll climb the hierarchy within that group, because that improves your chances to survive. Getting a better mate. Overall, you're you're up the pyramid. And the final instinctive attribute is curiosity. But it's that curiosity and that Oh, it's wonderful. And we're looking at the stars. And it's, it's more a case of, I'm curious about what's over that hill, because I want to understand it before it kills me. Right? So it's a defense mechanism. So we have those four sort of core instincts underlying everything else that we do. Now, when this rate of change starts accelerating, we have all of a sudden discovered that our societal mores our cultural mores that were built, over 1000s of years to deal with change, are becoming obsolete. There's an I call this time depth, okay? Time depth is the Think of it this way. Go back 100 years, 200 years, 5000 years, any child from 200,000 years ago, up until today, could look at their parents and their grandparents. And say that their lives are going to give me a template of what my future is going to look like, there may be some change. But if they were farmers, I'm going to be a farmer, you know, you could look at the past, and you could look at your family. And you could say that that's likely what my future is going to look like. That's no longer the case. There isn't anything I can tell my grandchildren, about how I was raised or where I lived, or my black and white TV or my rotary telephone with a, you know. Everybody else listening to the line? Yeah, there's nothing about my experiences that are going to apply to that future that they're encountering, with societal and technological disruption, reinventing everything that they're going to cope with.
Josh Bolton:Okay, I want to say something there because there's some things that even my my grandfather taught me that he even said same thing. He's like, my technology and my stuff was way different than now. But he taught me a lot of the core like you, you give 100% Like that is like a fail if you only give 100% You go 250 If you can, you knuckle down, you suck it up and you just keep going that's not really taught anymore. So there are some things in the history that are still valuable.
Terry:Oh, there I'm not saying that they're not valuable but it in there out of context. It is I'll give you an example that that you might find interesting when you when you think about contemporary perceived human traits that are that are considered problematic. Okay, dyslexia, ADHD, autism. Research indicates that 200,000 years ago, those were not problems. Those were advantages. Having people with those attributes in your group, improve the survivability of the group.
Josh Bolton:So you can you test them something I've been thinking about for a long time. It's I've been having a lot of chats with people about the American school system, how it's broken. And my whole story of I was drugged out because I was the odd one that didn't fall rules. And as I've introspected, and did all my reading and realized, oh, wait, they're the weird ones. I'm the normal one kind of thing. And it's like, why would they force me to conform to them? Hence, the group talk. But there are things like for me, I do martial arts. So my martial arts instructor, I tell him, I don't like chaos consistently. But if you put me in short spurts of chaos, I can get things done. But that's just my advantage of
Terry:ADHD. Yes, yes. Dyslexia wasn't an issue, because there was no read or see before the written word, right? It dyslexic people learn visually, they don't learn, you know, if you've taken them back before the written word, they were fine. They were perfectly fine. When it was different. They were very strong contributors to any group. And that's just an example of sort of the, the templates that we have, we perceive problems. Take it into a future that doesn't look like any of the past. And suddenly, these templates don't fit anymore. They don't societal expectations, in terms of group behavior, and activities, and what have you, they're not going to fit that future. And so the challenge is really for the millennial generation, the Gen Z generation to, and it's easier said than done, because as a boomer, I mean, my generation kind of screwed it up. But rethinking a future that doesn't look like the past at all. And again, going from MIT, if we look at let's say climate change, I think part of the problem with the issue of climate change is the perception is that we will continue into the future with the economic model that we have today. And that it will simply continue on as is no, that's an economic model isn't going to change. And so the implications for environmental issues, climate change, or what have you, are fundamentally different, but people aren't thinking about it, those terms. And once you get to the point that your populations start declining, and you have fewer young people to pay for taking care of more old people. The societal disruptions that are that are coming at us are something that basically your generation is going to have to figure out. So I mean, that's in a nutshell, what the book is, is about is is identifying, trying to identify those issues, and basically trying to start a couple of good arguments.
Josh Bolton:Oh, see, there's so many good arguments within all that just said, I have one question the way you're talking. Have you read the book, the fourth turning? No. It's very similar to what you're saying, but more specific on lineage or what happens? i It's a highly I went, I would highly recommend the fourth
Terry:turning. Thank you. Yes, absolutely. Well, I'd say in writing it, you know, it was 4050 years worth of contemplating, and then trying to put it down on paper. Which is ironic, because I didn't put it down on paper with electrons. But in the process of writing it, I really discovered how ignorant I was because every time I got to a point where I thought I understood what I was talking about, I discovered another line of research or another resource that introduced me to topics that I hadn't even thought about. And trying to train to try to synthesize at all is is a challenge. A good example is I mean, some of the technologies that we're looking at have the potential when you think of synthetic biology and when you think of CRISPR and sort of genetic modifications. Have you of being potentially catastrophic? Oh, yeah. If they're not controlled, and the the image that comes to mind for me is Kurt Vonnegut Did you? You're familiar with Kurt Vonnegut, he was an author in the 60s in the 70s. Unfortunately, committed suicide.
Josh Bolton:What were some of these titles?
Terry:Cat's Cradle. Okay. Mr. Roll rock. God bless you. Mr. Rosewater. Cat's Cradle was the one that in cast cradle the plot involves a scientist who develops a new form of water called Ice nine. And ice nine freezes at 110 degrees. Okay. And the reason he made it was ostensibly for the US Marines because they had to march through mud. And this would freeze the mud and inactive March 3 anymore. But at the end of the story, it's a long convoluted story with lots of individuals doing lots of different things. But at the end of the story, a crystal of this ice nine is inadvertently dropped into the ocean. Oh, we know instantaneously freezes all of the water in the planet. And any person who would touch it would immediately be frozen as well. So it was basically the end of everything. And there are so many disruptive technologies, where the ice nine potential for the techno G is there unless unless we think about it, and and is nuclear weapons writ large. But, you know, genetic modification. gray goo is sort of, you know, the quintessential example of you know, you develop nanotech that runs amok. So the technologies that we are introducing, and they're all coming online at the same time,
Josh Bolton:I wouldn't say especially with the artificial intelligence, some of the higher performing computers that no civilians will never be able to have at least cheaply. Like the super quantum computers, where they've, I've read articles, where like, they've already ran trillions of simulations on how to save the Earth, and only 10 work, and only two are economically viable. And I just sat there, and I'm like, Okay, I mean, not bad. But it's just like the, I guess the way it approaches a completely removed human morale and emotions from the equations.
Terry:Well, and also, you know, you the part of the challenge with AI, is the data, the calculation, it's the inputs and the assumptions that launched the calculation. So you know, if you're building, for example, the model you just just described it that's built upon an economic model, that still perceives mass production of a few companies making millions of units. If that's sort of the economic model, you're going to get a very different result than if you're living in a world of local production of custom products, onesies and twosies. That will be enabled by 3d printing, and just the whole economic model is about to be blown up and redone. If it isn't already. Yeah, it's in the process, and people just don't see it happening.
Josh Bolton:Right. I just find it funny. I say 3d printing, because I have a little mini four inch one right here.
Terry:Yeah, I had a class at Baldwin Wallace University, over 10 years ago, where we looked at 3d printing at the time, did scenario planning, I'm a strategic planner. So I do a lot of scenario planning, and did scenario planning about what the future of 3d printing might be. And then for the company I was working for at the time, the class presented what the options were, in terms of what that might mean for the company. It took the company 10 years to finally get engaged on on react to 3d printing. And that's that's part of the problem is that nobody, nobody plans.
Josh Bolton:It. It's all fire putting out which is the biggest problem that you could do. Kind of thing you're not, you're not addressing the problem. You're making it worse by not not seeing it.
Terry:Well, there's a model called the DI kW model of analytics data to information to knowledge to wisdom, okay, and you start off with a firehose of data. And you sorted out two useful bits, which is the information. And then you take the information and you find interrelationships among the data points. So you develop knowledge, the capacity as to how to do something. But wisdom is the decision as to what to do, not how to do, and, or what not to do. And my experience in business has been that most managers run off of knowledge, not wisdom, that is their expert at doing something, they know how to do it. So, they continue to do it, whether it remains the right thing to be done. Right. So, you know, I'm, I'm, I'm continuing to rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic, because I'm really good at rearranging deck chairs, as opposed to be looking past that as to what I should really be doing. Which is finding a lifeboat.
Josh Bolton:Yes, no, I wouldn't say the way you're explaining it is kind of what I've been thinking is you smart guys, like you can say, this is exactly what you need to do. But if the manager doesn't have the proper input, or the data, they're gonna be like, no, because it doesn't make sense. I've been told to do this, and only this. So it's one of those smart guys like you. I mean, they could pay you and
Terry:again, and again, the purpose of the book is to get people to think about different courses of action. And then evaluating among them, it's it's easy to come up with the analysis says how to how to do something, and do it. Well. The critical question is whether to do it, as opposed to doing something else. You know, this is sort of the classic issue for military commanders. I frontal assault, flank assaults, you know, retreat, I have different options. I'm very expert at doing each of them. The question is, which is the right thing to do? And that's, that requires judgment, and wisdom. It's funny, when when you hear the word wise, it invariably is associated with older people, not younger people. And I think that the reason that is so is because wisdom is the result of surviving multiple failures. If I've lived long enough to survive all of my failures, I have almost defacto become wise, because I learned every I learned something every time I failed. And it just happens to be that young people haven't had the time to fail enough to acquire the wisdom that people who are older and have survived have amassed.
Josh Bolton:100% Yeah, like I'm 28 I've read a lot books, and I'm more wiser than most my age. But even I realized, like, I've not actually gone into trenches. So I don't know. It could be booksmart. But if you go into the street smarts, like doesn't even work.
Terry:Big difference. Yeah.
Josh Bolton:It that's, that's the one thing as like, I've gone through my journey with talking to people and reading books, I realized, Oh, the one thing you can actually hold on to is, you don't know what you don't know.
Terry:Yes, yes. Essentially? Well, it's funny when you going back to instincts, and the universality of them across all cultures. There are also personality traits, which are universal. And there are different personality indicator tools. Myers Briggs is the one that I speak of, okay, simply because it's been validated universally across different cultures. And Myers Briggs identifies 16 different personality types, right, which leads me to infer that because it's a universal and exists in all human populations, those personality types, having a variety of them was a survival value. Back 200,000 years ago, right, or those personality types wouldn't have a fault. Well, I was always frustrated with that. And I took it a step further because there's really no way of evaluating the effectiveness of different personalities. And so I came up with my own sort of character analysis where I think you can judge people on four attributes, which is, are they smart, or I'm gonna get smart or stupid. And it's an attribute of your inherent thinking capacity. Then there's educated and ignorant. Now that's simply a factor of how much information you've you've digested, right? So I can be stupid and educated. And I can be smart and ignorant. The thing is, ignorance is curable. But stupidity is forever. And then there is my ambitious are lazy. And then the fourth attribute is basically whether I'm wealthy or poor. And that's a societal attribute and more based upon your, your societal group, your family, right. born into a poor family born into a wealthy family, you have opportunities for education, that that are going to vary. So it's, it's not an inherent trait, but it is a it impacts your character. Right? What scares me are stupid, educated, ambitious, wealthy people. Because they think, to your point, they think they know because they've gone to school, and they've got a lot of facts, but they don't have the brains to use them correctly. And they're ambitious, and they have the wherewithal to get to where they want to be. So I'm afraid a lot of our politicians maybe fall into this category. And and when they have power, they're very dangerous.
Josh Bolton:Yes. Especially when they're in numbers. Yes. Yeah. Yeah, that's that's one thing. The stupid ignorant. Again, it's one of those I've always thought about it, but I never had like someone with a similar thought pattern for it. So for the Myers Brigg part, I'll get to that. I've taken the test like many times, but it's but I realized it's my personality type. I hit the I N TP. Okay, I guess I'm really good at like, kinda like you good strategy, good at overseeing, but you tell me do the details and say what? Details? Don't you see the forest kind of thing?
Terry:Yeah, yeah. Me and TJ J.
Josh Bolton:Yeah, pretty much the same thing. Except you're more you're more judgment and perception.
Terry:Yeah, I'm very judgmental. And give me give me a task. And just get out of the way, pretty much.
Josh Bolton:But the me I realized when I was doing that, it comes back to the ignorance smart. I realized, I'm still the same personality type unless I'm gonna like, brainwash myself to change. But that might not be smart. Is I realized, yes, I like consuming but my problem is analysis paralysis. Compared to the ignorant person, it's like bad there's a slim chance of winning, so let's do it kind of thing.
Terry:Yes. It's, it's actually that you know that that speaks to the bullshit principle. Actually, a Princeton professor wrote about it. There, there really is a sort of a definition of bullshit, which is a bullshitter is not intentionally lying to you. Their purpose is simply to throw enough information or opinions at you as to confuse your thinking and change it. So it's it's not an overt lie that they're giving you they're just giving you a whole bunch of stuff that's confusing the issue. Ran and Brandolini is law about bullshit is it takes what four times as much effort to defeat bullshit as it does to deliver it.
Josh Bolton:Something like that. Yeah, it is.
Terry:It is so easy to spew it out that it's so hard to, you know, clean it up, clean it up. So, yeah.
Josh Bolton:That's one of those I received this way I'm not that I used to be the guy that bullshit. I just said a lot of smart things. And people were like, Oh my God, and then yeah, when it blew up in my face, it blew apart. And that was, that was one of those it was hard to recover from. Now, I just like I'm brutally honest. So if you don't like it? Well, that is what I know, at this moment at this time, for changes I'll change to alright. So I'm curious, we touched on politics and AI. There, I've heard rumors of the at one point, at least Congress was thinking of using AI, to essentially censor everyone from saying profane, derogatory words like, well, like the N word, like, whore, all that, etc, and would actually scan all our conversations. But the problem was that I kept hearing is, what about freedom of speech? Yes, it's profane and evil, bad. But it's like, if someone really wants to see it, they can see it. That is what our country says, Now, you're saying they can't say that. So. But I'm hearing, they're still wanting to figure out something with AI to, to modify, messages, and I feel kind of touching on AI is only as good as the database will. For lack of a better word, if everyone's democratic and very liberal, and believes no one should say anything bad. And yet, the nurse, the extreme jumpsuit, what happens to the people in middle who they're gonna, they're the ones that are going to get taken out, essentially, between this this split this War politics, and now that was essentially the moral argument for that article was like, where how far is too far? Kind of thing?
Terry:Well, the, the the challenge for me has always been who decides? Right? What's appropriate space and who's not what's not. And And why does that entity or group and this is groupthink? You know, that's a classic groupthink. Why does that group's definition of acceptable Trump another group's definition of acceptable?
Josh Bolton:Yeah.
Terry:There was an old phrase I want to I don't know is it was on New Hampshire license plates, I made this lift for your diet or not. But old phrase was I disagree completely with what you're saying, but I'll fight to the death to defend your right to say something like that. Yeah, I know what you're talking about. And, and I think we've lost sight of that. That the open forum have ideas. And, and the combat among them. Is is essential to progress. And if you close that off, and decide that there's only right thinking, and every other thinking is wrong thinking this is classic 1984. Yeah, I mean, this, you know. And that becomes scary.
Josh Bolton:It does. And then kind of like I was mentioned with AI, because man overall called way back then. And even the concepts weren't even there. He said it, what was it your balls are listening to you. Something else is listening to you. And your TV's listening to you. And I sat there and I'm like, wait, walls could be your Alexa thermostat. TV could be smart TV, and whatever the the on person thing was the phone. And I'm like, he called this stuff back in when this wasn't even a thing. Right. And that's the big one. That when I read through, I was listening to on YouTube for free. I had we still need to finish it. And that's when I sat there. And I'm like, the extreme. Oh, you only worship Big Brother? Well, yes, that's an allegory or symbolic representation of whatever. But that would be essentially be where we're at. You only bow to Congress. You You don't even bow to the President. And you do what they say. And if you do, we'll give you an extra whatever kind of thing. Well, and
Terry:it very well may be that it's it's not even the political hierarchies. It may be the fourth estate, it may be the media hierarchies.
Josh Bolton:I think it's more of a media than anything else.
Terry:And and as to what's what's acceptable to be published. What's unacceptable to be published. And the the pre digesting of information so that you're you're being fed somebody's perceived knowledge, but you're not you're not giving them you're not getting the data or the information to make your own assessment assessment. That's for me, that's the the ultimate danger.
Josh Bolton:Well, it is we're seeing it with the media, especially, actually one of my first few guests. That was, we were supposed to talk about something but we got talking about, because it was earlier in like, February of 2020. No, 2021, earlier this year, sorry, I already think we're on 23. And the thing we were saying is like the media is just, it's almost like intentionally gross and sickening, because then it lingers in your head. But all they're doing is emotionally winding us up to washing our ad. But they're not actually giving us the data or the things we actually need where it's like, oh, yeah, this whole 10% more effective that's in whatever situation, we have then is more effective. Otherwise, same old, same old, we were just saying, Let's see a lot of our prop societal problems by media, it doesn't matter, let's say in general, I was assuming pretty much the whole world because an even a New Zealand guy, and an Australian is like, yeah, media is the biggest problem is like, how the doc shearling told me he's like, it's almost like there's one Navy, like five people in a room that represent the five different regions of the world. And they're all like, we don't like this. So we're gonna make it go away now.
Terry:Well, and this goes back to rustlings survey of the, if you will, our perfumed elite at Davos, and discovering that, while they were very happy with themselves, they actually didn't know the facts of the world. Right. And so their judgments as to what was appropriate or inappropriate behavior. Were based upon faulty faulty data. And the each age hierarchy, you know, you, you, you join a group, and you want to climb up that hierarchy could be a business, you know, this happens. And, you know, each business is its own microcosm of hierarchies. And the group think you're either with us or you're against us. Yes. It's, it's frightening to see how certain people are pilloried when they were in a group, and then they decided that they were going to speak out against the group. And then all of a sudden, you know, the, the elites in the group attack. You they won't taller, and it's, it's becoming, again, if if I'm not, if I'm not certain, if I'm if I'm perceiving uncertainty, which leads to chaos. That's frightening. And I don't like to be frightened. I don't like to be frightened. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna make sure that, you know, everybody agrees with this message. Because everybody, then we'll be calm. And and we don't have to worry about anything. But that's not the way things are gonna work.
Josh Bolton:I mean, that can fix the short term problem, that's for sure. But it can't fix the long term, eventually, like a quick patch, that's fine. Like, eventually you just be like, okay, by the way, we had to do this instead. It's the one thing I've realized with talking to all these business and high level executives is communication. But it seems once a hit about what like the manager didn't like that hit his supervisor, it hits the first supervisor and district manager. The C suite don't know what the hell's going on. They've fudged the data so hard that when they listen is that oh, hey, everything's going great kind of thing. And that was the one thing Oh,
Terry:yeah. And the other version of that is when you've got a CEO who has decided that he or she knows what the future is. Yeah, and don't confuse me with the facts. So you coming up from the up the pyramid from the regions, to the business groups to the C suite with material or information that doesn't jive with CEO thinks it just gets discounted?
Josh Bolton:I've seen multiple times working just jobs in general or the manager the hierarchy of the site. wouldn't listen on a good example, I was working at a security gig I told the supervisor like the head manager was placed in my Hey, like, there seems to be a leak in the back kind of thing because I had to walk. He say, Oh, it's nothing. Three days later, the whole thing ruptured. And there was just a became messy. And essentially, I just wiped my hands clean. And I told to the client, I was like, I informed the supervisor, the manager on the site, and he just took me as an ignorant child. And here we are. Yeah. I mean, that's where it's one of those I have yet to figure it out. It's like, how do you get through someone that is so well, stubborn, hard headed, because so many things could change for good? And then we don't have to worry about the dystopia. It's but I can't seem there's no one clear answer. How do you get through that? Do you have an insight on that? Well, I
Terry:mean, we, we all operate off of instincts. And when you're in a particular position, I'll give you a great example. Okay. Years ago, I was taking a leadership course in a corporation, excuse me. And they sent Oh, I'd say there were about 30 of us, middle mid level managers, okay, for a week course at the University of Indiana on leadership business stuff. And one of the games that they the faculty played with us to sort of drive home the message was a game of free steak. So they took us out in the field, there's a big circle. And they broke us into three teams, and one team was wizards, and the other was trolls, and the other was for site or whatever. And we're all standing in the circle and the supervisor yells out, wizards. So wizards are now with and you're trying to tag other people before they get outside of this circle. Okay. Well, I should back up a step. When they first put us in the circles that were going to play freeze tag, the object of this game is to get everyone on the same side.
Josh Bolton:Okay, interesting. Okay. Okay,
Terry:there they go wizards, the wizards are taking people, everybody runs out. And then they everybody goes back into the circle. When they say, dwarves does the same thing. It was somebody else, it wasn't me, I didn't figure it out. And it was one of the female managers said, Wait a minute. The object is not to get everybody on your side. The object is to get everybody on the same side. So the next time the guy yells out, trolls or whatever, everybody else stands still to get tagged. And then we will all be on the same side.
Josh Bolton:Oh, no. Okay, I see that problem. Now.
Terry:You see. And so everybody goes, Ah, okay. So yells, trolls, and we all stood still it, everybody got tagged, except for one manager, who ran out of the circle. We were now all on the same side, we had mistaken. We didn't hear we were we, we were so hard wired to compete. That our default assumption was, I need to be everybody on my side, not the same side. And there was this one manager, he was an operations manager from one of the factories. And he, you know, we had to basically wrestling the crap next time around, you know, to finally tag him. Uh, but it's, you know, it's a classic case of, we instinctively react in a certain way. We're not, we're not thinking it through there, you know, there's two parts to your brain. There's the primitive brain and there's the modern brain, okay, without getting into all of the gory details, the current best thinking it had been, it used to be, oh, the modern brain is here to control your primitive brain and keep you from doing all these primitive things. The current best thinking is that the purpose of the modern brain is to come up with a persuasive explanation to your group, about why you're going to do what your primitive brain is telling you to do. And when you think about it, that really plays out if we all applied modern analytical thought to everything that we do, and we were all looking at the same set of facts, we would all analyze it in generally the same way, and come up with sort of a universal decision, or conclusion, right. But we never do that you have different groups that are looking at the exact same situation and come up with diametrically opposing positions, which often leads to aggression and war. And it's because it's driven by a set of instinctive drivers, not intellectual analytical drivers. And so when you get back to your, you know, my operations manager, who he could not accept the fact that it couldn't be everybody on his group, he had had to be everybody in his group, even even though that's not what the objective was. That's what you see in business hierarchies all the time. I have to win. I can't do what the analysis suggests, or what's best for the group I have to win.
Josh Bolton:Yeah, if I have to win at all costs, essentially, is the mindset, which is extremely, extremely dangerous.
Terry:And that's exactly why when you when you think about the set of instincts that drive us, and the chaotic future we're looking at, do we have the innate capacity to overcome those instinctive drivers and survive that chaos?
Josh Bolton:No, no, there was one person I was talking to. And that was the biggest thing, he was kind of like yours. Like the 200,000 years ago, we were we kind of looked like we do maybe missing a couple of limb like, like bones here in their veins, but he's doing pretty much but to say, and he said, like your analogy, like 1512 15,000 years ago, yeah. 1500. We introduced farming, which he said, like you hunter gatherers, but there was still like the community. One guy usually just had a lot of land, everyone tended to it. Then if the neighbors were wanted extra cabbage go for it kind of thing. But in general, he's like, that's why they were still healthy. They were still lean, because there were periods of no food at all. So they had to learn to preserve and hold everything. And that's where I said, Okay, what you're getting? Well, recently, within 200 years, in the span of everything, we've reintroduced mass produced food, which has chemicals, which we've never eaten before. And expression for me, especially I didn't like oh, yeah, soy product, it's, um, was calling me. That is there's we're not playing the game of chemicals, but hormones, because like soy, in small doses is not problem kind of thing. But in the large conception, like impossible burgers, whatever, is very estrogenic for both men and female, that is very dangerous, because for a female that encourages breast cancer, for men, it just encourages become more like women. And it was just one of those as I think there was a DNA altering aspect to that one. I'm not sure but it that's where he brought up he's like, Yeah, who we still don't know the consequences of all this food we're introducing. And, you know, we're seeing it's the name of saving the world he's like, but we're not. He says,
Terry:a great example along those lines is the obesity epidemic. Now global obesity epidemic, when you go back to the ice ages, and archeologists have discovered these, what they call venous figures, they're small totems, they're little carvings of a female figure that is quite obese. Well, what were these for? The current best thinking is when you when you looked at when these were carved, and you put them on a timeline. When the when the Ice Age was at its worst, you've got more of these figures than and warmer periods when you've got less of these figures. So they were in some way a totem that was considered important at the time of starvation, when you did not have food and obviously fat healthy, you know, plump Women are going to survive better, and have babies, then starving women in a time of need. And so these totems were considered a good luck charm, that hopefully I'll get enough calories during this ice age to survive and bear children. Okay? Well, our bodies were designed, when there was extra calories to be had that we would store them up, because to your point, you didn't always have calories available. So having that extra fat was a critical survival tool. Right, fast forward to the Third Age, which we're in just leaving well, over the past 50 years, again, when you look at the data, the availability of food on a global basis has dramatically increased and certainly in the developed world, our access to sugar is insane. It is insane. And so that instinctive, biological survival mechanism of storing fat, which was appropriate in an earlier age, is now going to kill us. Because now we have all the food we could possibly want. And we don't stop eating.
Josh Bolton:No, that's actually might be my new thing. Because I'm, I had, I had, I'm getting it under control now, blood pressure problems. And it was just one of those. I sat there. And I'm like, What's the main cause? As I'm saying that I'm eating some toast with butter. And I'm like,
Terry:this is lifted toast,
Josh Bolton:whatever, find this on the African plants, probably not selling pizza, you probably want to find out there. So I looked at, then my fridge and my bell peppers. And my. Yeah, I mean, like, that would be our farmers. And I'm like, me and my kin. You'd find meat and plains because you have to kill it. But again, you have to skin it, that prep it that could take a day right there, you still don't have calories. I think it's a cookie, that could be a nerve to half a day. So you're looking at two days without food. And I got a weird cake. I'm still watching African tribal people to reach the last hunter gatherers. And they said it and it was just one of those it clicked. One of them said, we can actually go without food for three days. As long as we have access to water. We're happy. Yeah, it hurts. So we don't have food but. And that's when I sat down and like when it clicked I'm like, yeah, like my analogy, you might find an elk. They'll take you'll take your day to kill it. Took you half a day to drag it back in there half the day to prep it. And it's one of those, but yeah, you're looking at almost two days without food. Yeah, we go two hours without food. Everyone's like, you're gonna starve.
Terry:Yeah. Yeah. And again, you know, we're whether we're biologically instinctively culture, you know, are we equipped to cope with accelerating change? Where anything that comes in the future looks like nothing that past came in the past?
Josh Bolton:I mean, we haven't say if the clip of climate change is going their death valley might be the normal for the wave, West Coast kind of thing.
Terry:I'm not, I'm not all that concerned about climate change. And the reason being is the sort of the default assumption is the economic model that has driven us for the past 200 years is going to continue into the future on steroids. And that was the source of our climate change issues. Okay, that, you know, when you look at modern science, modern technology are first of all that economic model is going to change. And secondly, our capacity to identify new solutions to technological problems. One of the biggest, it's the classic case of how much climate change is worth, how much toxicity that's one of the constant trade offs, really, if we, if we were truly concerned about climate change, we'd probably be promoting nuclear energy.
Josh Bolton:Literally, it was one of those. I was listening to a hedge fund guy and he's like, Yeah, we have thorium now. It's not radioactive. Yeah, it does the same thing. He's like, so why aren't we doing nuclear? That's one of the guys.
Terry:You know, and again, the perception. The you know, is the information the knowledge is wrong. We're not talking about 50s era nuclear energy we're talking about super clean, super safe. bricklaying super small. Yeah, micro reactors.
Josh Bolton:It's like a six by six box in your backyard. And you can feed the whole neighborhood with just that one box.
Terry:Yeah. And and so you know, I have a, if the technology for other reasons doesn't kill us, I think the technology that we have the capacity to invent that's coming online is going to solve problems. One of the examples I use in the book is when you look at the major cities at the end of the 19th century, New York, Paris and London, they were all in the ninth 1890s, they had a conference to deal with a problem that was literally choking all three cities, it was a massive issue. And it was horse manure. The number of horses needed in these rapidly expanding cities, 10s of 1000s of horses, all generating hundreds of 1000s of pounds of horse manure every day, and horse urine, and then all the flies and all the dust and all the disease. And they had a conference and they was gonna last all week, but it only lasted three days because they couldn't see an answer to how to deal with the manure that was literally drowning their cities. Now the technological solution that nobody realized would solve it was the automobile.
Josh Bolton:But it was a blessing in the curse, though.
Terry:Well, sure, but you know, it goes. At the time, it was a blessing. There's two pictures of I think it's Park Avenue 1900 1913. In one picture, it's all horses and two vehicles. Okay. And the other one, it's all vehicles into horses. Now, obviously, every tech, there's no perfect technology to your point. But we're now going through that, that next technological inflection point for transportation right now. Because we we saw a crisis, and we're solving it with technology. So in that respect, I'm hopeful I don't see climate change as the the end of the world, I'm more afraid of human beings being the end of the world, just because we become fearful and then we overreact violently.
Josh Bolton:Well, how I say it this way, and it sounds really crude, but it's like the Earth has been around for how many billions of years, we're only like a million years on this, which is like nothing for the earth. If even half our populations wiped out, like because of climate change, and no one can keep up with it. So or worse comes to worse, we all die because we managed to somehow kill the bees kind of thing. I was like, their sales guy know what like an are two, 3 billion years left in it, you know, figure it out, it'll sit as you'd be peaceful and can finally be stable, the atmosphere keychain kind of come back to normal growth plan to grow again, and like the Earth itself is not going to die, we're selfish. We just don't want to die.
Terry:Well, and again, bear in mind, global population is not going to continue to grow.
Josh Bolton:So that might be actually beneficial.
Terry:If the population is going to peak in the next 20 to 30 years and then starts to decline. That raises like horses to cars, as a fundamentally different world with a fundamentally different set of issues and problems. And what concerns me is we're not thinking about those problems, we're thinking about problems we're actually not going to have we're thinking about problems associated with an ever growing world when that's not going to be the future right. So we're you know, it's the it's the old drunk looking for your keys under the streetlight not because you lost them there but because the lights better
Josh Bolton:never heard of that way before that's that's kind of good Yeah, well, yeah, it's all perspective and all communication is what it sounds like, but like it was mentioned earlier, how do you communicate when no one wants to listen?
Terry:Well, that's what I'm trying to do with the book.
Josh Bolton:Perfect. And a lot of people are gonna love it. I was a do How long do I got you for? Because I feel like you make it you chat for like three hours straight.
Terry:I'm I'm good to go. All right,
Josh Bolton:hey, listen, let's keep going. I do. So I could tell both of us were avoiding it. What is your take as the species, but also societies with all the political movements? What do you think is going to come of this? Well?
Terry:Again, I let me back up and say that I am a strategic player, I've spent most of my career doing strategy work of one sort or another. And my observation on on humanity is that we all tend to think that the moment we're living in is the most profound moment there has ever been. And the problems that we have at this moment are the worst problems that has ever occurred. Right. And so that tends to give us a sense of importance, because we are living at the most important time as opposed to we're just living at any old time. So everybody's got that subconscious sense that this is it can't get any worse. This is catastrophic. And well, with all due respect. The 60s weren't particularly great time, either. Okay. Riots, burning down cities, political riots in the Democratic Convention in Chicago, political candidates being assassinated. The 60s were pretty rough Vietnam. Oh, yeah. So that as a starting point. Now, as as a strategic planner, I tend to look at issues with a minimum, a minimum of a 10 year window. And on the issues that I've been speaking of, it's even longer. It's it's a gender generational perspective. I should back up and say, when you when you do strategy work, there are three types of intelligence, Intel, that need to get cooked into a strategy, right? There is what I will call tactical intelligence. Sometimes they'll call it competitive intelligence. But it's looking at the here and the now. What the other characters players are doing, and the timeframes are months to a year or two. Right, then there's what I call market intelligence, which is what's going on with within the industry as a whole. So for transportation, think vehicle electrification, think autonomous vehicles, those are trends that are industry wide, moving the entire industry, those trends are maybe five to 10 year cycle, you know, Inception to commercialization. And then the third tier is what I'll call strategic intelligence. And this is the larger environment in which an industry operates. So think of demographics. As a classic, you know, if I know how many 10 year olds today exists, I can tell you the maximum number of 20 year olds in 10 years, I mean, that's the kind of thing that demographics give you. And demographics is generational, you're thinking 2050 years timeframe. So I tend to look at these issues with a minimum of 10 years usually like 50 years cycle. Okay. When you do that, the chatter of the day to day stuff goes away. Yeah. And you see trend lines over time. And I think the trend lines are what are critical that shatter. A is the flavor of the month, pretty much. And so for me the politics of the moment. A good example is Brexit in Europe, Donald Trump here in the States, Trump was not the cause. Trump was the consequence. For me. Trump was the consequence of a dislocation that has taken place and it's started With the second world war, after the second world, after the Second World War, I would argue that Western democracies, certainly the United States, evolved to the point where the complexity of governance became such that the average voter, couldn't take it all in. Okay, this was not a series of of landed gentry farmers who could sit around and and espouse a political theory, the average voter was just couldn't take it all, there was just too much going on, right. And so the average voter, made a compact with the politician. And the voters said, I will give you my vote. If you do four things for me. I want my family to be safe. I want to have a job so that I can feed them. Right? I want my children to have a future. And I want you as long as I'm not hurting anybody else to leave me alone. Pretty much. Yeah. Okay, those four things. And I don't care about all this other stuff. I'm, you know, you figure it out, take care of it. As long as you give me those four things. I'll vote for you. What happened after the Second World War, is our political elites decided that because all of this stuff was so complex, we needed technical experts and technical experts would take care of our problems for us. So you see it the going through the New Deal, circa Second World War, and then post Second World War, the dramatic increase in the regulatory element of governments. So we now have these departments with huge regulatory groups. And when you look at the United States Code, and how big the laws are, versus the Code of Federal Regulations that are published on a daily basis, more regulations are coming out every single day. We turned our western democracies into technocracy. It's where we were delegating when you look at the legislation, before the Second World War, and after the Second World War, before the legislation became very before it would be very detailed about what needed to be done to solve a particular problem. Right after the Second World War, the legislation simply says, Okay, we have an issue, which is ozone, ozone depletion. So we are giving the authority to the EPA to figure out what to do about. We, the Congress aren't saying what should be done, we're letting EPA figure it out. So we have delegated our authority to you to figure it out. And then EPA goes off and draft regulations that then impact all of the voters. Well, long story short, that model of political model has failed.
Josh Bolton:Didn't really work to begin with. I got like, like the short term, I got the short term done. But a long term, no doubt. Well, I
Terry:mean, since the Second World War, what has happened, and this is thanks to Bretton Woods. And the United States Navy, which made the world safe for global trade is simply the Second World War. All of the manufacturing went to China in a you know, if you want to, you know, take out the decimal points and just sort of okay. And the problem with that is I'm back here on the voter, I said, Wait a minute, I need that job. I don't have the job anymore. And, you know, I want to I want my family be safe. And things are really, you know, going and my kids aren't getting a future. And you're spending an awful lot of time legislating stuff telling me what to do. Right. So that compact between the voter and the the political class, I think has has fallen apart. And the anger among voters, those that bottom of the hierarchies that are not part of the intelligentsia, manifested itself in in in Trump selection. And yeah, there's uh, you can you can look at different. It's like when Bloomberg was running for was a candidate for the Democratic nomination, and he gave a speech talking about the change that was happening and, you know, we went from being farmers to industry manufacturers, well, we need to, we need to retrain these people. Because farming is so simplistic it's you take, you put a hole in the ground, you put a seed in it, and it grows, it doesn't require a lot of brains to be a farmer. Well, obviously, Mr. Bloomberg has never been on a farm, right. And there's a great YouTube channel called millennial farmer. And it's a gentleman in Wisconsin. And every couple of days, he spends 10 to 20 minutes, sort of capturing on a YouTube video, what he is doing that day to farm wheat, and soybean. And when you watch a couple of these videos, and you get a sense of the complexity of the process, he's got three or four flat panels within the cab of a tractor at the same time, and he's connected to a satellite the sophistication of farming, Mr. Bloomberg had no clue. So you could you could see this disconnect between, if you will, the ruling class, and the electorate, and the electorate is passed. And that's what's the that's what's manifesting itself in all of the different things that's happening, well get the daily stuff out of the way, think about those larger sub tectonic plates moving in terms of how to reconcile the electorate's dissatisfaction with how governance is currently operating. And I think we'll see within the next five to 10 years, a material change. And I'm not necessarily saying this is revolution or anything like that. But a material change in how the political system addresses these issues. Because it's broken and is not working. Right. But the the day to day stuff I did I blow it I don't even pay any attention to it, because I am much more interested in those longer term trend lines, because that's what will last.
Josh Bolton:Oh, no, that that's literally, that's why I kind of look perplexed, like, boy, you're explain this because that's what I've been thinking is. So, the first thing that came to mind when you mentioned World War Two, was my martial arts instructors are very hardcore Trump fan. And a, it's one of these like, although the election was rigged this year, Mike Well, yes, and no, I mean, this has been going on for a while, since we were allowed to essentially move the lions every four years to county lions. So this is happening probably back in the 80s, when they were like was the state ID, or just the average Joe didn't know this, because you had that one smart guy that had all the right data. And they will just hire him until he would remove everything. So Mike, this kind of been going on for years. We just, it's only just recently predominant that it's a problem and going
Terry:on. And again, part of the problem is we don't teach history anymore. No, we don't. If you go back and you look at the political history of this country, and the number of contested elections, a lot, actually, quite a few. And, and some of them were incredibly smarmy. There there's there's Well, I mean, the the most recent example was Kennedy Nixon, uh, it was decided by the electoral votes coming out of Illinois. And as they were casting, counting the ballots downstate, which was tended to be Republican, was leading, and Illinois was going to go for Nixon. But the votes from Mayor Daley Chicago, never showed up until late and curiously enough, there were enough votes out of the Democratic areas or in in Chicago to tip Illinois, for Kennedy. So there are a lot of people people that feel that, you know, that election was was gained. There are a lot of people that feel that bush and a what's his name? The climate change, Al Gore, Al Gore. Thank you that that election, you know, the hanging chads ballots in Florida that that election was gained many of the elections in the 19th century, were very smarmy in the way they were ultimately resolved. So this is nothing new. I think if there is anything new, it's the fact that we now have the internet and the capacity of media so that everyone has a voice, you've got a voice, you would have had a voice, you know, 20 years ago, I've got to everybody's got a voice and you tend to listen to people that agree with you. So it becomes an echo chamber.
Josh Bolton:That's you know, that's really funny because that's literally what I've private conversations with people. I say that on my social media is great. There are some movements that that truly need to be done like, as shitty as he is the the Harvey Weinstein thing, but it's like, that also then fed into a terrible trend of in this men were being accused of things because women wanted their 15 minutes of fame. Nothing is the women but it was just like, you some of these guys were innocent, they got completely destroyed, and they can't they can't get a job. They can't fend for their families now. But this is one of those. How I my personal conversations is social media is one of those. Are you familiar of Nikola Tesla's comment about life in the future? No. So he said, In the future, the world will be beautiful. All will be known. All No, no knowledge will be accessible. And all humans will interact with each other. Does this analogy so but then we take the George 1984, George Orwell's the dystopia of using that same thing against us. So it's one of those I say it's one of those what's I do want to take them because if you don't have Nikola Tesla's, we are truly now in the best age of our human existence. Because all knowledge and all people can be contacted. In a normal circumstance. I never contact you.
Terry:Kind of thing. No, but in terms of the the communication of ideas is much more fluid, much more fluid and and again, that's that's part of the uncertainty. This doesn't look like anything we've ever had before. The capacity to communicate to influence the the shifts in political sentiment are more perhaps more dramatic or extreme maybe. But the flow of information that you know, the the metaverse whatever the hell that that's stupid personally for him, you know, and when you look at cryptocurrency and blockchain and and again, the amount of disruptive technology that is changing our daily lives. My life today my my my daughter in law was having a conversation with some of my grandchildren this past year, and they were watching the Christmas movie Home Alone. Okay, and in the movie, Macaulay Culkin at one point is watching a video a VHS tape video of a 1930s gangster movie they records okay. So he's, he's setting up the vehicle he puts the cassette in and he's watching the movie and, and my grandchildren ask my daughter in law. What's What's that machine? And she says well that's a VHS player and says well what does that do? And she says, Well, it's kind of like a DVD. What's the difference between a DVD and a CD as well? And of course now they've got Netflix and it's you know all and she said, Well, you you'd go to a store and they have all these cassettes and then you'd pick the movie you want and you read that by see take it home, and then you'd put it in this machine and then you could watch it and then when you were done watching it, you take it out we have another machine that you could put it into rewind it before you took it back. And my one grandson goes how do you live like that? because all he knows is Netflix, which is instantaneous communication of any sort of whatever entertainment that you could possibly imagine at his fingertips. There's a great YouTube video of 217 year olds being given a rotary telephone, and five minutes to dial a phone number. And you're watching these two young guys trying to figure out how to make a rotary telephone work, because they had never seen one before. Right? Uh, you know, the change? And then how do you how do you say, Well, what we used to do? How does that apply to what this is going to look like? Right. So I, again, the politics of the moment are simply the manifestation. I think of this, this chaotic situation, where people are afraid of the future because they, they can't look forward and say, Well, looking at my parents and looking at my grandparents and how they lived, what their world looked like, is going to be what my world looks like. It ain't uh, and and people are afraid and so when they get afraid they overreact so you're getting you know, the politics are going this way that way.
Josh Bolton:Yeah. That's one of those yet there's not really just like, politics money in religion. There's no real right answer to it. But yeah, it the uncertainty and then the social media. It's, I'm trying to think of words and account right now. It's, it's such a deep topic. I'm sorry.
Terry:It's chaos. It is it is chaos. Because there's there's no, there's there's no way to control it. And you know, people complain we've been we've talked earlier about the fourth state the media and, and how they may be part of the problem, because they're, but they've always been part of the problem. I mean, when you look back at newspapers in the 19th century, the role of newspapers in the 19th century was exclusively almost to be the the mouthpieces for different political parties.
Josh Bolton:It didn't really change. I listened to Tom Sawyer, his autobiography, roughing it, and everything. That was what, almost like 200 years ago, when he was around 200 ish. Either way, he everything that's going on right now. It's the same thing they did back then. And it's like, we literally haven't changed. The only thing that's different now is we have a cell phone. That's it. We're really the same people well, and,
Terry:and the speed at which things change is faster. And and again, I'm repeating myself, right? How you did things. Five years ago, you certainly don't do that. Now, you're, you know, you're the just the mode of operation it publishing this book. When I spent all last year writing it, and then a beginning of this year, I figured, well, I'm getting close to being done. I'll go find an agent. And I spent a month or two trying to find an agent and discovered and maybe I'm a little cynical here, but I discovered that agents are mostly interested in people who have a very significant social media presence.
Josh Bolton:Oh, no, you're not you're not seeing anything. That's, I was me. I was I was going to get an agent so I can get into a penguin. And the guy's like, oh, yeah, you don't exist. So we're not going to touch you or, or will touch you, but it's going to cost you 5k A month when it would have been like that. 1k a month. And I'm like,
Terry:what? Yeah. So I have a friend of mine. I've known for years a marketing guy was in the process of writing his first book, and I spent an hour on the on a phone in a zoom call actually with him and really got introduced to where the publishing industry is going.
Josh Bolton:Oh, it's extremely interesting.
Terry:Well, it is I mean, because most books are self published now. I mean, that was printed at by Amazon. 70% of the books sold are through Amazon. And the mix between paperbacks, ebooks, audio books, and hardcover is is rapidly evolving.
Josh Bolton:I think it's still taking Paper, like an actual hard book is still one of the best sellers. But then now then it's like, I would assume personally, but I realized the same thing. It's either paperback or audio, then ebook?
Terry:Well, you know, I, I don't have the numbers in front of me, but I do know that they're dramatically different than what they were for. I was eating dinner, and they're, they're constantly changing.
Josh Bolton:So like, like, eight years ago, it was nothing like this. It was just, it was just pretty much paper. And I would say,
Terry:and then, of course, the other attribute to this is everybody's got a website. And and yes, everybody wants to be on YouTube and be a YouTuber.
Josh Bolton:And now it's take talking, yeah, and
Terry:tick tocking. And so, again, the means of communication, the technologies, the evolution of it to be at the cutting edge of it. You know, just, crypto kitties. Really, I mean, you know, NF T's, you know, it's and people are spending money, real money. A lot of my coworker buddy to get cryptocurrency to go buy. Crypto kitty, right? Yeah. Okay, all right. I guess somewhere in the world, this makes sense. But,
Josh Bolton:well, for me, this is because like, a lot of my co workers are buying shit coins, essentially, they're one 1,000,000th of a percent of the penny. And they're buying millions of Penny these millions of these coins. And one of them, he told me because he knows I'm very good at reading charts, and for trading. And so he's like, would you see him like this thing is gonna fall off the face of a cliff. It's too high. Where did you buy in, and he showed pointed to me and my, I'd sell now even though it says you lost like, somehow it says you lost five bucks. But if you keep this up, one 1,000,000th of percent of a penny times 5 million, that's going to be very painful, as it just keeps going down. And so he did. And it was just one of those he came back. Okay, I bought it and he hit the bottom, he shows me the chart. And I'm like, You really need to unsend fundamentals of
Terry:charts. That doesn't say what you think it says he does
Josh Bolton:not say that.
Terry:But again, it's changed, you know, and and that's why I do scenario planning, because it's so difficult to forecast. And the beauty of good scenario planning is you're looking at potential outcomes, rather than probable outcomes. And if you've done your scenario planning, right, within the four corners of your scenarios, somewhere in there works, something that looks like the future. And but it forces you to think about potential outcomes, that may be improbable, but anymore, given given the rate, and the degree of change, and how quickly they're accelerating. Probability is problematic. Really, it is, you really don't know what's gonna happen. So you better be prepared for all of it. Or at least think about it. And so I just coming back to your your fundamental question about the politics. For me, it's noise. It really is noise we're looking at. And I'm not I'm not the only one saying that. There's a couple authors that I actually mentioned in the book. One is George Friedman, who has written a book called this the storm before the call, and is speaking to the fact that we are going through one of these disruptive periods where the American socio political system is going to reinvent itself. Right. So I mean, I'm not the only one that saying that we're at one of these inflection points where they're going to have to rewrite the rule book a bit, because and it's happened several times in our past. I mean, when you look at our government today, it's nothing like it was before the Civil War, certainly nothing like it was during the Gilded Age, you know, and was redefined dramatically by the depression. And we're going through another redefinition. And the question is, well, what's it going to be and what's it going to look like? The you know, the one of the points I think Friedman makes it. The irony is when you think back to 19th century politics, and Tammany Hall, okay, where you had political machines in urban areas The genius of that political machine, whoever was in charge boss, tweed, whoever, they kept everybody in line and made sure everybody voted the way they were supposed to. Right. But the system was extremely responsive to the individuals within that group. So if somebody in boss tweeds world came and said, You know, I've got a problem with X, can you help me with it? Now, how Boss Tweed might have solved the problem for that person might not necessarily have been kosher. But he was responsive to that person and took care of his problem. So as a strictly political system, in terms of fulfilling needs, at the local level, it worked. It did. And they to post World War Two where you've got technocrats writing regulations, that, you know, an individual I got a farmer, and he's got an issue with water rights. But there isn't anybody in that regulatory bureaucracy that gives a damn about that farmer and his particular problems. And he just gets chewed up in the wheels. I'll give you a great example of the brilliance of our technocracy. Long years ago, I was doing regulatory work for one of the businesses, I was working for General Electric. And at the time, the Department of Energy was writing rules to control the energy performance of appliances. Okay, Congress had passed a law that said, we need to conserve energy in our appliances, we're delegating the authority to DOE to figure it out. Because we're not smart enough. Okay, so classic case of delegating authority in the regulatory agency. So DoD is now going to write a rule on energy performance of ovens. The first proposal that came out in the Federal Register from DOE, on minimizing the energy consumption of ovens was a design standard, it wasn't a performance standard. And what they were proposing was, we are going to require that oven makers take the window, out of the oven doors, because there is so much heat leakage through that window, that by making the door solid, the oven will be so much more efficient. And as I read that, the first time I saw my immediate reaction is the person that wrote this rule, for oven use has never used an oven. Because you need the window to see what's going on inside the oven when you're baking a pie or a roaster, whatever. And if you don't have the window, what you're going to do is you're going to open up the door to see. And that's going to take all that hot air and dump it. And you're going to start over again when you close the door. So it's going to be 10 times worse from an energy standpoint than if you had left the window in right heart. One of the hardest things I had to do was write comments for a hearing on this role. How do you politely tell somebody that they are a complete idiot? Because the rule as it was originally proposed, made absolutely no sense. No, it doesn't.
Josh Bolton:I was just singing on my way. Yeah, that person's never used enough. And before because you do sometimes it will finish early. And you can see through the window. Ah, yeah, it's done. I didn't need the 20 minutes kind of thing.
Terry:Yeah. So, you know, the, the regulatory world that we have created, is not as responsive in some respects as as Tammany Hall was. And so the individual who is being subjected to these regulations, that in the individual's perspective, make no sense is getting sick and tired of it. And that was what Brexit was about.
Josh Bolton:Yeah. Obviously, tying into Brexit. It's kind of like we're experiencing the tail end of old damage. But it this has been going on like like I told me in church this been going on for years. I was just quiet kind of thing. How am I I explained it in my manner is essentially we used to be a community of village, let's say, tops 3000 people. This is the same village as the one where you got your wife, you raised your kids, you had a job, everything like you never left, if you left, you are weird, and you ashamed, and he didn't even take you back kind of thing. And I said, Now, we can talk to anyone in any different village, it doesn't matter where you live, which, as our human how our brains work. That's unheard of like we like the the how fast are we going? And I'm like, this is this is almost like the too much information. And like Facebook, they're intensely playing into human psychology where the curiosity before, were you curious for the infinite scrolling, but it'll never stop. So it's the told them like, we're in the age where it's sad to say, algorithms and AI knows better than we know ourselves. And they are, I said, right now it's for capitalism, which is for good or for bad. But when they start making choices, like smart grids, like they're gonna do that in China, Oh, someone so because China has apparently like a whole ranking system. And they also and Sue is rank one out of 10. Like, I don't know, the actual system, but say, Oh, we don't need to send them energy. I said, in America, if we get to that point, which looks like we're trying to copy China anyways. It's like wolves in where's the limit? It's like, oh, you're a business owner. Okay, we'll just increase your price real energy, even though you need it for your job. Because we just want to said, so. So we're in an age where kind of like you, we don't know what's going to happen. And it's one of those it can be the best thing or give me the worst thing for a certain set of people.
Terry:Yeah, well, it's, the challenge is getting your arms around it in, and you have to start with the right data, you have to start, you know, in glean from that raw data, the right information, and then make sense of the interrelationships of those little bits of information. And the challenge we face is that the the data flow is because we're all interconnected. And there's a sensor on everything there is the amount of data being generated is an absolute, you know, drinking is trying to drink from a firehose. Yeah. And, and pulling out the useful information in order to generate knowledge is becoming so difficult. And so to your point, you know, people just sort of throw up their hands and make a guess. Yeah. Because because it's, it's, it's hard to, to get through that process. It really
Josh Bolton:is. And yeah, have a say it kind of like the whole world this conversation is. So what is the right answer? What is the right path?
Terry:Well, I think at the moment, it's, it's for me, it's not so much what's the right answer as what's the right conversation? Okay, because I think most of the conversations that are taking place are missing out. On what are the right questions to be asking. Yeah, the most of the conversations are based upon false assumptions as to what the data is, what the information is. So if you're starting your conversation on the wrong information, in on bad data, it doesn't really matter where that conversation goes, because it won't be helpful. So taking the time to really think, reflect digest on what the actual state of affairs is, again, time after time after time. I see references to you know, we're despoiling the planet because this ever increasing population we're going to gobble everything up. That's not what's going to happen. Something very different is going to happen. And it's it's not a case of a funnel that goes to a point it's It's a it's a choke point, and then the funnel expands back up again. And if you don't understand that, and if you're not approaching the problems, understanding the facts as they are, it's hopeless. And so I think that's the point is getting people but what's actually going on what really are the facts? And where can that lead us as opposed to assuming you know what's going on and then just bullshitting.
Josh Bolton:Yeah, I was let's begin. But I was coming back to is like, how do you communicate to the people that are ignorant don't want to listen
Terry:kind of thing? Well, I wrote a book.
Josh Bolton:That's how we get to them. We just throw that hook at him and be like, read it. We just throw it like bricks. Like read this. Yeah. Read.
Terry:Good luck with that. Yeah.
Josh Bolton:Oh, sorry, YouTube channel. So throwing your bucket people.
Terry:Well, I hope this was helpful.
Josh Bolton:Oh, it was and it was a great chat. Honestly. It's silly to say, I try not to get political and stuff. But I mean, this whole conversation was just intrinsically that. But the some of them I guess, it's, it's been interesting. They like won't even talk on it. And I'm like, well, human existence, if it's you and me as just a debate, but the third person listening that becomes political. So Mike, it really doesn't matter what we do. Just not saying hello, we could get in trouble for that now with our society.
Terry:Yeah. Yeah. So it's, it's, it gets it gets back to who decides what you're allowed to say? Right. And that's, that's sad. That's very so it is we have
Josh Bolton:the whole The whole reason I it's, it's silly to say like, the whole reason I started my show was like my long story of Big Pharma regime, bad drugs. They thought I was schizophrenic and I wasn't. But I was deathly scared to say my opinion. Because of that unknown mob on Twitter, that now I realized doing this some might make it say whatever the hell they want. That's free advertising. For me it kind of thing. Because others are gonna be like, Who's this person? I got to listen to make sure he's an asshole, too. And then I wait. He's not an asshole. What are you talking about crazy person. And but again, I was conditioned to think oh, the i No joke, the Twitter overlords that tweet their wokeness at us. Like they're not in charge of anything. Yes, they're loud. But ultimately, though, what are they going to do? Cry? Well,
Terry:again, I, I think that that's all. Gross, I think, you know, when, when you're in a group allegiance, to the ideology of that group, whatever group it is, every every group is the same. I'm not suggesting it's only some groups, all groups that are made out of human beings can operate the same way, every single one, right. And when you're in that group, and it's a question of intensity, when you're in that group, your allegiance to the ideology is your ticket to promotion and advancement in the group, right, the louder you chant that ideology, the higher up the pyramid, you get to go. Right. And depending upon what the group etiology is, my personal opinion is that the ones that chant the loudest are the ones that are most uncertain about their etiology. And so their only recourse is to yell it louder.
Josh Bolton:That's as funny because actually, this whole time you're just explaining the group ideology and all that. This YouTube is not YouTuber podcaster he's strictly audio but he's teaching people how to get healthy. Essentially, it's keto but it's a little different. And but the funny thing is the way he says he's like, essentially you're carnivorous vegan. You eat a lot of meat, but you also get a lot of veggies. And he has because he is special proposition is send me 170 characters less on Twitter, essentially text me in public and I will reply to you. So he has all the vegan community the PETA and all that on his case, and all of them are seeing your canceled and he's like, Well, I still get my 100,000 downloads How are you seeing I'm canceled kind of thing. And that he so he makes it a point now to like hit the beehive or say all vegans. You might want to get your kabocha this is gonna be a good episode kind of thing. Yeah. And then they blow it up and everything. It's just it's one of those them like yet. They can't actually stop it and they can yellow they want but they can't stop them.
Terry:Well, and the more uncertain you are that, I mean, if you're not comfortable, you're exposing your opinions to debate if you're not comfortable exposing your opinions to countering views that disagree with your view, and you can't defend it, the only way you can defend it is by silencing the other side, that tells me that you're afraid that you're in the wrong position. Isn't that good? Because you can't stand the heat of a counter view.
Josh Bolton:I want to see, you sounds like you predominantly have worked for others, or did you start on your own? I'm sorry? Did you mainly worked for corporations? Or did you start out on your own?
Terry:No, I actually I, the first 11 years or thereabouts, I worked for the government in national security. I was a minor cold warrior. And that I think, really educated me to how uncertain the world is, you know, we're talking about boy trying to forecast what's going to go on? Well, in 1987, when I was at the National War College, if I had stood up and say, Okay, I'm going to forecast that in 1989, the Berlin Wall is going to come down. Okay, they would have looked at me like I had, you know, yeah, you know, he had a third eye that edit 1990 You know, the Soviet Union will implode, they would have taught, you know, talking on her front door, right. And that that was a lesson learned about, you know, convention to the group think conventional wisdom of the time, surrounding the Cold War, and the Soviet Union was just flat out wrong. And then I F after, after we won the Cold War, you know, it's funny, I started in 1979. And as I was doing work with the intelligence community, I really enjoyed that I was very, very happy working in national security, i and i never failed the sick feeling in the pit of your stomach stomach test, you know, it was it was very satisfying work. And my thinking at the time was, well, there's always going to be a Cold War. So I've got a career. The 1990 comes around, so he collapses and we want and all the all the appropriations for military and the intel community just cratered because nobody assumed, you know, this was a, you know, trying to think of the name of the guy that wrote the article, The End of History. For Fukuyama, Francis Fukuyama, The End of History, you know, Western civilization in one and then of course, we soon thereafter had the Iraq war. We nobody anticipated that one. But I then went and worked in the private sector primarily for large global conglomerates. GE, and then a Swedish conglomerate, AB Electrolux. And last 20 years I spent with a speciality chemical company you know, doing strategy work, regulatory work, government relations, sustainability, love sustainability work.
Josh Bolton:Yeah, I would say that's the key word now sustainability to um, so the reason I brought up working for someone that's the biggest one as I've talked to different people, it's a bit of a running joke, but it's kind of concerning to realize true is like the contradiction. One of the people said, you don't know you, the moment you know, you're a successful business person or entrepreneur, whatever you're doing is when you have actually people yelling at you, even if you're right, like essentially the moderns haters kind of thing. And that's that's one thing as I realized, like going about this is like your analogy, like there's gonna be millions making pennies is like, okay, let's say I want to be an entrepreneur, I want to strike out on my own in my own path, and I realized now it's like, literally, it's high volume. At this point. I'll be making pennies and I'll be lucky. I get scraped together an extra 500 bucks in a month. But most of that's gonna be taken in taxes because I would be apparently the rich for selling things. So it's, yeah. And that's where I was thinking for you. It's like okay, so You worked a stable job, you have a good retirement this net? So the the entrepreneurial mindset wouldn't have to was they put some of your jobs? So it sounds like you did have to be a little more entrepreneurial than most positions?
Terry:Oh, well, yes. Because just because you're in a corporation doesn't I mean, part of the challenge with large corporations. And it's the curse. When you are successful, you assume your business model is ironclad. And you're unwilling to challenge it, to change it to continue to survive. When you look at the data, the average lifespan of an American corporation is dropping rapidly, extremely fast, very fast. So there's, there's got to be a reason for that. And they were talking big companies to you know, look at what happened to GE, my dad worked for a company in Cleveland called dresser graph multigraph. In the 60s, now what address a graph multigraph did, they were a fortune 500 blue chip company, global company, they made all of the mechanical equipment that you would find in an office before computers. Okay, so processing all paperwork of any kind, you know, mass producing letters or or booklets or or they made credit card readers. They made dog tags. So they had a lot of mechanical equipment that that did printing and correlating and all that sort of stuff. Their best year was 1968. And then computers came along and flew, boom, they're gone. They're you know, who's ever heard of a dresser grab multigraph. You know, they just vanished because they couldn't see the future and couldn't adjust it. Which is what an entrepreneur needs to do is be is be adaptable. Right now, it just so happened that, for example, when I worked in the specialty chemical company, Lubrizol. They had new business development groups, and I spent a lot of time working with them. Right. And the challenge was coming up with new businesses in an existing business. Because again, the existing business guy knows how to do what he's doing. And you give him something new to do, and he doesn't want to do it. You know, I get paid for doing this. And I'm successful at that. And you want me to do something new and unknown. That may not pay off. Tell me again, why I'm supposed to do that. I'm not going to do that. So pushing entrepreneurship in a corporation is, you know, the entrepreneurs that working out of the Starbucks, they've got it easy compared to an entrepreneur in a corporation. Yeah, because you don't have that headwind.
Josh Bolton:Yeah, then that's the biggest one I've noticed, as I've talked to different people is like, yes. Everyone's like, oh, I want to be a CEO and make that all that money. They don't recruit they have a workers mindset. They don't realize that one kid that slipped and fell and cracked his head open could literally destroy your business. And that's your head, not not employees, the employees, you just cut them for two weeks this ik business closed, sorry, yours two weeks, go find a new job. But you as the CEO are stuck with that tab. Even if now that's where like structures come in, you wouldn't necessarily be stuck with it. We still have to deal with that kind of thing. And a lot of people I want to be CEO, Mike, you share about that. You really share about that. Yeah. Are you sure you can sleep at night with all the stuff that could go wrong? And that's when it really Oh, it's not that bad. You're I I just I show up, I bark a couple mean orders, I get my stock options and they go home. I'm like,
Terry:No, that's not how it works.
Josh Bolton:That's not how it works. Does never work that way. If it did, damn, everyone be wanting that job. So, I love it. Um, I'm kind of,
Terry:I hope this, you know, meets your need.
Josh Bolton:Oh, 100% I love it. It was it was quite insightful and fun. So I got three going out questions for you. Okay, so other than work and writing your book, what I've been doing to keep busy doing these like downtimes
Terry:Well, actually, I teach and I do some consulting Now, that hasn't really occupied a whole lot of my time with COVID, for obvious reasons, right? So those don't answer your question. I guess what I do above and beyond that, is, I do a heck of a lot of I work with my hands, I make things, you know, we have, we've moved into a relatively new home. And there are things that the boss doesn't like. And so I'm changing stuff and fixing stuff and sawing and you know, nailing and running wires and, and digging holes and moving trees.
Josh Bolton:And that sounds like a brutal boss.
Terry:It's it's a harsh taskmaster. But I love the physical activity. So that's, that's what I do. It's been a few things around the house, I'm writing my book.
Josh Bolton:The second one is, for someone who's trying to be like you, an author successfully gone through the corporate life sounds like successfully married to, yes. What are some tips, tricks or advice you give them?
Terry:When you look at a job, what I've always told my students is any job that you're thinking of taking, and in here, I'm not talking about necessarily, well, I guess it would have applied to an entrepreneur, you use the same analytical tool, I use a nine blocker, okay. And on the one axis are the ones the 10s, and the hundreds, the ones, that's the person you're going to work for. The 10s are the people you see every day, your immediate team, okay, and the hundreds is the larger corporate entity, whatever it may be as a whole, okay. And you will evaluate those three tiers, on the three layers. The intellectual satisfaction, you get the emotional satisfaction you get, and the money. And in effect, the the financial, you know, the the security of it, be it health benefits or whatever, you know that but that remuneration piece, so you I've had jobs where the 10, hundreds was great, the corporation was was great. It was intellectually challenging. But it wasn't emotionally satisfying, because it was all about the money. That's all they cared about was all about the money. The 10s for that group, most of the people I didn't really get along with on a on an emotional level, again, the intellectual issues were challenging, so I'm doing pluses and minuses here. And the ones my boss, he and I did not get along for a lot of different reasons, you know, so you're, you're, you're filling in that nine Blokker with, you know, pluses, ones, twos, threes, pluses, minuses however you want, but it forces you to think about a job across a spectrum of attributes, right? You just don't focus on one, because you, any one of them could sink your ship, if you will, depending upon how bad it got, or how good it was. So that would be you know, my suggestion is when you're when you're looking at what you want to do or where you're going to go think of it in sort of those terms. And the intellectual and the emotional are qualitatively different. Yes. When I first got to Lubrizol, I was hired in by a new CEO, who was just embarking on a new corporate vision, fluid technologies for a better world. Okay. That tagline it was amazing what that tagline meant for rank and file employees. Because this is the Simon Sinek why, you know, not what am I doing? But why am I doing it? So the emotional piece of what I'm doing satisfying that's different than the intellectual piece, which is, is this just mindless? Or am I being challenged as problem solving, you know, is this is this keeping the challenged? You know, thinking? So it's two different things. It's two different things.
Josh Bolton:That's awesome. Yeah, that's, that's definitely a big one. And by the way, the entrepreneur thing is is one of those I'm starting to realize I am one. But it's the I'm not in a position to say get. But that that that not three by three. That's genius. Yeah. Because we're whatever you're doing. If one side is more red than the other, like, maybe it's problem, potentially really good strategy. I'm gonna probably take that. Just an FYI. So the last one is, do you have a website, social media or email, everyone can contact you and be like, Hey, I heard you on the show.
Terry:You will actually, the last line of the book contains my email address. Yes, it's a TV feel at fourth h.com. And I do have a website, which is fourth H. Fourth h.com. And I'm on LinkedIn. And I'm, I'm a boomer, so I'm having a hard time with the website. Just trying to keep it populated, you know, trying to run it like a blog. But being a boomer, this is new to me. So I'm trying to figure out how to make it go. But obviously, if anybody is at all interested in in talking to me, because the purpose of the book, it's not like I've got all the answers by any stretch of the imagination. I'm not trying to put myself out as being some Einstein here. I'm just trying to property good argument, you know, because if people start talking about this, I'll consider this a success.
Josh Bolton:100%. No, 100% Because this, these are topics that we need to talk about, but no one wants to talk about it. Yeah. Wonderful. Well, I like it. I love it. You know? It's been an absolute honor and a pleasure to chat with you.
Terry:I enjoyed it as well. It was a good time well spent.
Josh Bolton:Well Spent indeed.