Bronwyn Williams — Futurist, trend analyst, economist and all round good guy

Once more it is, what's involved and a special guest, and I'm not going to do the cheesy thing about saying to her she should have known she was going to be on here, but her name is Bronwyn Williams. Hello Bronwyn. Hi, good morning. Nice to have you along with us. The reason for my cheesy joke up front is you're a futurist, an economist, a business trends analyst. It all sounds very, very, very important, and I know it is, but tell me a little bit about Bronwyn herself. Where did you grow up? What was life like for you? Okay, well I grew up in Joburg. I still live in Joburg, but I haven't fallen that far away from trees so to speak. So I started out my career in marketing management, so pretty classical marketing management, but I was fortunate enough to work for some rather unusual companies, which introduced me to the world of finance and economics, but much more from investment ideas and opportunities point of view, and say classic finance, like we might think about, like child accountants, for example. And because of that exposure to the world of how money works, it really resonated with a lot of my personal interests. So my perspective is not much of a difference really from marketing and economics as much as they sound like they're very divergent fields, in that both of those roles really come down to having to understand incentives and trade-offs with a view to persuading and changing behavior, hopefully for the better, particularly if you're working at a policy level, you definitely want to be in the world better for everyone, but even if you're working in an organization in a marketing role, that's essentially what you're doing.

You're trying to connect people's needs and wants and desires, whatever it is that you're trying to sell. So for me, there was quite a large overlap there, and of course then, that rabbit hole takes you down into the whole world of behavioral economics. And from there, it wasn't a very large stretch to get involved with trend research. So in that I was selling financial products and working as a marketing manager, obviously trends and looking a bit further ahead into forecasts is definitely a core part of the role that I was doing, and that just became more fascinating to me than the actual work that I was doing, which is how I ended up working with the UnChinese Flux Trends, and now I follow the role as really a futurist or a trend analyst, which is really about understanding what could happen in the near and distant future, and then trying to demystify that for our clients, because most of our clients work in the corporate space and got a view at the sort of public sector level too, and what everyone is looking for is a bit of guidance as to that full cone of possibility ahead. What is the best case scenario that we could be walking into? What are the worst case scenarios, and what are the threats and opportunities within that space?

And that's where an agency like ourselves, which likes trends, comes in, in that we are very much trend generalists, so we are able to give our clients and people that we work with quite a broad bird's eye view of what's going on in the world, so you can almost see us as being the contemporary equivalent of what the watchtower watchers used to be in the medieval days, would stand on top of the watchtowers and scan the horizons to see for the rewarding hordes that are coming your way, so our role already is just to buy our clients some time to buy them, even just five minutes ahead of the competition can make a huge difference, particularly in times of turbulence like we are right now. So I think that gives you some context as to who I am, what I do, and where we're going, but basically I'm just a very, very curious person who is interested in the contextual macro picture of what's going on in the world. Goodness me, and it sounds like you must be a very, very busy person, you're studying still, again, more, you're busy finishing up your masters in applied economics, am I correct? Yes, absolutely, as I said, my initial educational background was become marketing management, since then I studied future studies, I studied theology, I studied a bit of design, I've really kept learning, so I can at least say with confidence that I do follow the message that we preach and flex, which is very much the case of the linear career is just no longer in existence, and you really have to be prepared to continue to learn and to continue to evolve if we want to be successful in the future, and that might sound like a chore, but if you are learning things that you're interested in, it's actually quite fun, it's a much more fulfilling way to live your life than to sort of see education or accumulation of knowledge as being something you do when you're young, and then you move on to other things, so at least that's my perspective.

That's a very, very good perspective to have, but yeah, I'm just thinking back now, because our world has changed so much and rather unexpectedly as well, but we were still trying to digest this fourth industrial revolution, and I remember that I was talking to people, we were interviewing people about it, and it was all very exciting, this fourth industrial revolution which was going to hit us, and I was fortunate enough last year to attend the Singularity U Summit, and it was all very exciting, and we started to get into this year, which mistakenly christened 20-plenty. Well, maybe not mistakenly, we did get plenty, but nothing that we expected. I would think that you guys provide a vital role, because so many people in our country, not to mention the world these days, have no idea what's happening. Yeah, absolutely. I think people are struggling at the moment, so it's a perfect time to be in change management trained space, because obviously when life does feel uncertain, people sort of understand the value of the services that we provide that much more, so yeah, I would agree with that. Now, a lot of people, and I come from that kind of a background, and I'm talking particularly about older people as well.

When I was growing up, I was taught that you go to school, you get good marks, and then afterwards you go to college or university, you get your qualification, and then you settle down into a job for the next 30 or 40 years, and then you retire from there and live out the rest of your days. To me that horrified me, absolutely horrified me, and it's like, "No, I don't want to do that. I can't do that." It's led me on a very interesting journey, and a journey where I can honestly still tell you that I don't know what I want to be when I grow up. In all of this, there's a lot of uncertainty, and people do need some guns, because work and the world that we know it has changed, and I've spoken to a couple of people about this. If anybody's still under the illusion that we're going to go back to normal as in what life used to be, they are sorely mistaken. Yeah, absolutely, as Terry Pratchett, one of my favorite authors, likes to say, "What is normal anyway? Normal is yesterday, last week, and last month taken together," so normal is a constantly shifting goalpost. There is no normal other than what is present, so that's a continual process, and we can also make too much of the current phases of change and think that this changes everything this time.

That's not quite the right way to look at it, but rather we need to see that life is a continual progress of change, and the illusion is really thinking that anything was stationary before. One of the things that we've really seen over the last few months is that a lot of the changes that we've already in play have been, yes, accelerated, fast-tracked, magnified and amplified, but definitely from my perspective as someone who sort of spends her life looking at the macro picture, a lot of what we've seen has been in play for quite a long time, and perhaps we've just been a bit slow to react to it, and that's why people that are uncomfortable with change try to hold onto the version of normal that they grew up with or they feel most comfortable with, or suits that particular personality or skill sets, rather than understanding that this is a continual flow. I think that coming back to the points you were making a bit earlier about the fourth Industrial Revolution, we like to get hung up on terms like that and think of this fourth Industrial Revolution as being an event horizon beyond which things will turn into some sort of a new normal or new post-normal or new sort of stationary levelling up, and that's not quite history or what progress really is at all, rather it's a continual wave, it's a continual flow of change, it's not a levelling up or seeps, it's not as simple as that.

But I do have a bit of an issue with the singularity university view of things like 4IR and these sort of phases of change, which I don't think that's exactly what's happening, and we're actually setting people up, particularly businesses up for failure, if we're telling them that if you get through the fourth Industrial Revolution, you can be a survivor, you can be future crypto, you can survive disruption in all these terrible future consulting terms that we put out there. It's not that at all. The lesson we need to take from this is to develop a mindset of being comfortable with the uncertainty of life, and that is a skill that can be learned and can be taught, that goes against a lot of what makes us comfortable as human beings. And there are definitely different types of people in the world, people like you were saying yourself and definitely myself, who thrive on change, who don't want to be stationary, who are horrified at that linear life progression laid out at you, the choices you make, what you study when you're 18 defines what you will do for the next 60 years of your life. That's terribly depressing for me, there are a lot of people that find comfort in having that plan laid out, and definitely part of my role is to get people to be confident about having a blank page ahead of them instead of having a defined road.

That's a limiting way to look at the future, but it's about shifting that perspective and being excited about having a blank page and a huge amount of choice and opportunity ahead of you rather than being frightened by that. I think that that sort of dichotomy and attitude towards life explains a lot of the problems that we see in the world too, particularly in the way that leaders and societies have reacted to some of the challenges that we've been through over the last few months. This whole concept of just being comfortable with dealing with whatever life throws at you and also being able to have the confidence to actually shift that change in a direction that actually benefits you and where you want to end up at the end of the day. Wow, lots to think about. It is what's involved, and my special guest is Bronwyn Williams, futurist, economist, business-trained analyst. When we come back, we're going to be talking a little bit about that. It is what's involved. We'll be back in just a bit. And we're back with Bronwyn Williams. Bronwyn, I've rattled off everything, futurist, economist, business-trained analyst. Would you say historian would fit in there, because is not part of your job looking backwards?

Well I certainly would consider myself an amateur historian. I can't say I could claim any academic credentials or professional working experience there. But absolutely, if you are someone that is in a role like I am, which is in a role of sense-making from a macro perspective, absolutely, the further back you can look, the better context you have as to what direction the world is heading in. And as Foltet likes to say, or as that French philosopher said back in the day, that history doesn't repeat itself, but man certainly does. So humans tend to make the same sort of choices for the same sort of reasons, because we are driven by those same basic needs that we've evolved with. Things like fear and greed and envy, all of those motivators have not really changed as much as we think that we have similised ourselves over the millennia. Yes, absolutely, I definitely have a fascination with history, and I spend a lot of my time reading that for context, I think there's a lot that we can learn from the past. And I think that both the past and the future today are sources of huge, competitive advantage without much competition, because most businesses and most individuals are so preoccupied, what I like to call the endless, infinite present, that there are very few people that are looking back in time for wisdom and looking ahead to the future as being a place to build value.

So people that are able to have that longer time view and have less of a time preference do find themselves with a scarce competitive advantage that can be used to create sources of value that not many people are chasing at the moment. I like the fact that you talk about being of value, because that seems to be one of the trends and I remember very clearly pointing fingers at millennials and Gen X's and Gen Z's and all of those strange people, because they were way too arty-farty, touchy-feely and emotions and could they not just get a job and stick with it, but the world isn't there. What are some of the trends that you've seen or are predicting? Oh, in what regard, if you're talking about the future of work, I think the big trend that we have to grapple with at the moment is we need to re-separate our concepts of what is a job and what is work. So these two terms or these two concepts have been conflated over the last 100 or so years, which is actually quite a new thing, the whole concept of a middle-class population having jobs and having a guaranteed salary at the end of the month, or at least a salary that you can count on. The security is quite a novel phenomenon and it's disappearing just as fast as it really has become normalized in our society.

So that's the one trend people are going to have to deal with. It comes back to this whole concept of being prepared to reinvent yourself many times over throughout your life and to continue learning as part of both a means and an end to personal performance. Of course, the more you learn, the more you develop, the more valuable you are able to be to society. But at the same time, learning enriches the life experience of us warm-blooded human beings at the same time. I think that's the one trend that individuals and organizations are going to have to get their heads around. This whole concept is shifting back into work rather than jobs. Jobs are going to become scarce commodities again. It's harder and harder for corporations to actually find talent that wants to work at a nine to five job, that wants to submit to that sort of amount of control. At the same time, it's harder and harder for someone that's looking for security to find a job to fulfill that security for them because as we like to point out, there's been a lot of research that's come out of a lot of universities across the world saying that your Fortune 500 companies, your biggest blue chip companies now have a half-life of just 10 to 50 years.

100 years ago, those companies had a half-life of over 100 years, which just goes to show that your corporate job might not be as secure as you think it is and really where you can find security going forward if being able to rely on yourself and your own ability to add value to society. Society will always reward those who are able to add value to it. From a sort of world of work perspective, that would be one trend I would definitely look at. Now, when you talk about that, the one thing that you've mentioned a couple of times is this learning and lifelong learning. If I think about it, I used to sit in this whole technology thing. I think the first time that I got on to, I don't know, let's call it Facebook or Twitter or Instabook or whatever it is, I had no idea. Absolutely no idea. People are saying there's so many great things that can be done, et cetera, yada, yada, yada. I went, "Nah, this is just a fad. It will be over." I found myself having to learn to at least understand the basics of some of this stuff. I think tech is a big part of it as well, isn't it? Yeah, absolutely. Although, once again, I'd encourage people not to get too hung up on tech. Technology tends to be an accelerator of change. Once again, it's not necessarily a source of deep change, especially the sort of technology we're seeing right now, the technology for the snatching all the headlines from us, things like automation and robotics and blockchain and virtual reality. All of these things add speed to our lives, but they don't necessarily add deep value to our lives. As the thinker, Peter Thiel, likes to say, "If you take away the screens from our lives, you take away our laptops and our cell phones and our smartwatches, all those shiny black screens that come in our lives, our lives are not very different to what they were in the 1970s when our grandparents were starting their families," which is quite an interesting way to look at progress and to try and separate then deep progress or progress that builds and levels up humanity to the next level, and technology that accelerates and amplifies. I think that one of the dangers that we can look at in terms of trends at the moment in technology is, as I said, most of those technologies that are defining our lives right now are accelerates of technologies. These accelerates technologies are creating huge inequalities in the world in terms of money and in terms of power. Most of those big businesses that we see scooping up large amounts of value on the stock exchanges are in the platform business. They're essentially the new landlords of our current contemporary society. They extract a toll in order to facilitate trade between the creators of real value and the consumers of real value. We built this very strange society that is very fast and very efficient, but it's not necessarily very resilient because we've got very few hands that control essentially the toll gates, the pipes through which pretty much all the value, the real value in society is flowing. That's a longer term trend or so opportunity threat, depending on how you look at these things. That's the beauty of the future with any emerging problem. There's also an emerging opportunity to see the world in a different way and that we need to guard against this massive top heavy, extricative sort of business models that extract value without necessarily putting value back into the system. That's when we end up with economies that are highly financialized, that are highly digitized, that are based essentially on a hollow version of value, not based on real value. If you want to see these trends playing out in the real world, we can also talk about things like modern monetary theory and money printing and how we're printing more money and we all feel richer, but we're not actually richer because we're not increasing the production of real resources and really valuable things that would be out of time and the stuff that we actually consume at the same speed and pace that we are producing imaginary value in terms of that money that we're printing out there. These concepts might seem quite divergent, but it all comes down to really the same point that we really do reiterate in a lot of our work in our talks, this whole concept of having real value and investing in the future. Unfortunately, real value requires having a longer term view. It requires planting things now that can be harvested in the future, rather than just extracting as much as you can in the short term, which is not very sustainable, whether you're talking about sustainability from an economic, a social or environmental perspective. That would probably be the biggest message that we are going to be trying to get out at the moment, that that longer term view, further into the future, planning, saving, waiting, all these very old fashioned ideas about delayed gratification are sources of real value and real competitive value as we move ahead, particularly past the current period of crisis that we are in right now.

We're really going to start to see who has been swimming without their pants on, as they say, when the water goes up, when all the hollow, fake value is extracted from the system as will happen as economic times become more constrained. We are able to see much more clearly where the sources of the real value and the sources of a financialized value lie. If we can separate that, we can position ourselves to be on the winning side of history, rather than the losing side of history as we fall forward. Okay. There are some that would say this, what you're talking about is revolutionary. It sounds very much like maybe we were living in Orwellian times and now we need to overthrow the regimes, et cetera, et cetera, but that's not necessarily what you're saying, is it? No, not at all. In fact, I'd say my ideas are quite old fashioned. They're old fashioned ideas about savers are more virtuous than perhaps people that live all dead, for example. The old virtues of saving and investing and delaying gratification have been really eclipsed by our instant gratification culture. This is a culture that's fueled by things like social media that give us our dopamine every time we get a like on whatever post we put out there into the public, about getting instant information, about instant access to cash because if we can't afford it, we can just charge it on the card. That creates a very vast society, but not a very stable or sustainable or resilient society. I think that my messages actually would be quite old fashioned, even sort of puritan in its origins, in saying that perhaps there is a balance to be had when it comes to consumption, smoothing across our lifespans, across our society, across our generations, but there has to definitely be some sort of a reorientation towards patience, towards investing in the future, towards, as all Greek Proverbs say, planting trees and planting seeds that we won't even see sprouts in our natural lifespans. Other people talk about sort of cathedral thinking. That would be even in Gaudi who built his magnificent buildings in Spain. I mean, they're churches that have been built hundreds of years after the architect has died and the building is still not finished yet. Those concepts of having intergenerational plans and extending that value creation and extraction period beyond the next sort of shareholder reporting cycle into a much longer term view about what is a society that we can build as humanity at large? What can we leave behind for our children and grandchildren? That's the sources of real value are. And it's definitely, as I said, not a very competitive space because of course, everyone wants to chase the VC dream of getting bought out by some Silicon Valley fund that will turn you into the next new work and give you that next massive sort of billion dollar investment, turn you into that next unicorn, so you can cash out very young. That's a rock star dream. It's not available to all of us, whereas there definitely is less competition to build lasting value by adjusting our time scales and our time preferences to just be a bit more patient about where that value is coming from and how long that value is going to last for.

Fantastic stuff. My special guest is Bronwyn Williams. This is what's involved. We will be back in just a bit because I want to discuss where humans come into this whole thing, so we'll do that when we come back. And we're back with Bronwyn Williams, futurist. Don't I understand quickly, you're an author as well? I have a book coming out next year with a writing partner, his name is Leo Priestley. He is also a futurist. He's based in Edinburgh in the UK, and our book is coming out with Bloomsbury Publishing next year, April. It's called The Future Starts Now, and it's really a call to action for everyone, you, me, and all of your listeners out there to be involved with the conversations about the future because what we're quite concerned about is the future seems to be a space that is dominated by big men with big ideas, and it doesn't seem to have been democratized, although the future is entirely up for grabs. The future is uncolonized, even if it feels otherwise, but unless we exercise our right to be part of that conversation, ask questions, get involved with the big ideas, challenge the ideas that other people are putting out about what the world should look like in 50, 500 years from now, then we end up limited to living in a future that is being defined by the big men with the big pockets and the big ideas that currently have a vision for the future. And right now, I don't know about you, but I certainly don't know too many people talking about what the world could or shouldn't be like at the end of the century, other than the voices of people like, say, Elon Musk, who's definitely got plans for all of us. But if you don't like Elon's plans, the best you start coming up with some of your own. So that's really the thinking behind the book is to open some of the questions, some of the longer term issues that are emerging that are going to affect not just us, the future generations, get a view from futurists, but with the view of getting the reader to get involved with those conversations and to start actually having a say into where the world is going. As we say, the future needs you to need more visions of the future, not less. Because at the end of the day, your version of Utopia, or my version of a future Utopia, could very well be the next guy's version of absolute dystopia. And that's the thing, the future needs more choices, more options, not more limited horizons, which seems to be the general voice that you're giving, particularly to young people today, which for me is attractive.

And now we're in terms of what we're chatting about, and maybe this is a skewed assumption that I'm making, but I'm coming across more and more people who are going with all the technology, everything that we've achieved, even during this COVID period, there's this disconnect between humans, between being a human being. And I was told once by my mentor that we need to spend more time being human beings than human doings. Is that something that is coming to the fore? Because I see there's a lot of people that are crying out for genuine, heartfelt connection. Oh, absolutely. Definitely. I think that a lot of these companies, particularly the companies that are winning on the stock market, that are winning big, are building products, not for people, but for bots, or building products for businesses, not for human beings. And that is definitely also a source of competitive advantage, actually, offering value to warm-blooded human beings, because that's what we are. And what the encouraging thing is there, by focusing or refocusing on human beings as humans, not trying to make humans fit in with algorithms or with tech products, and to make us more bot-like. We should actually be focusing on making humans more human.

It's actually in the chapter that I wrote in my book. We spoke about this whole concept of the value of imperfect information. And this comes down to imperfectly competitive markets that would be run entirely by cold, clinical, purely logical bots and algorithms. There'd be no profit left in the world. I mean, this is what you actually learn if you go through even a basic economics textbook. At perfect equilibrium, supply equals demand, and profit margins are zero. That is a perfectly competitive market. All the value is being extracted. And that's where the catch comes in, because human beings are irrational. The irrational human mess needs, wants, and desires is where the margin for any business, for any value creation opportunity lies. Our irrational wants, needs, desires, aspirations are what is valuable in the world. And this makes sense from a philosophical point of view and from a cold capitalist market point of view, in that, you know, when we're lying on our deathbeds one day, the things that we value are not things that are rational and logical. They're things that are more irrational and illogical. And by focusing on that, we're able to have very interesting conversations by saying, if you are looking to make a rational profit, you have to be more irrational and focus on that mess that is humanity. So that's where the magic lies, and that's where the margin lies, in the mess, which is quite an interesting concept. But absolutely, I would agree that we probably made a mistake by trying to turn human beings into being more like robots. And you can see this at schools, where schools try to force children to become cookie cutters, to fall into the mold. We're doing the disservice, because where the value is in the future is in the mess, in the fuzzy angles, on the fuzzy lines and in the gray areas, is where the future value is going to be. So we don't want to compete with machines. We need to see machines and technology as being a tool to improve the human experience, not the other way around. We don't want to change human beings to fit in with the tech-driven world.

Oh, I would so agree with you on that. As always, almost running out of time now. So when we come back, we're going to wrap it up with Bronwyn. He puts his false teeth back in with Bronwyn Williams, a futurist, and a couple of interesting questions I still got to ask. We'll talk more when we come back. And we're back. It is what's involved. My special guest is Bronwyn Williams. So we're talking about technology. We're talking about trends and future trends. What you mentioned just before the break in terms of digitizing everything, it's the one thing I've been absolutely horrified by is that you have to base a lot of business decisions these days based on numbers, figures, algorithms, etc., etc. You put in a certain amount of data and you get back a beautiful business plan of something that will work. But it has no soul. And I sort of straddle two of those worlds. The one side of the business is very much a tech side of the business. The other side of the business is doing what I'm doing now. And to all intents and purposes, what I'm doing now shouldn't be successful. It shouldn't be generating revenue, etc., etc. And yet it is. And I'm ridiculously happy doing it. What is that lesson? Is there a lesson? Well, I think it comes back to what I was saying earlier. That's where the value is. The value is not in the rational. It is in the irrational. I mean, we can see this even if you want to go back to the plastic business case study examples like De Beers' diamonds. Diamonds only have a value because De Beers created this irrational value of attaching this shiny rock that they dug out of the ground. It's actually quite abundant, and not that scarce, and you can make them in microwaves now too. But they associated that little hard rock with being a symbol of romance and of the future commitment to this love interest in your life. So I think that's really just explaining where we put our value. We put our value in things that are scarce, that are rare, but also things that connect to stories, and to connect to the very human, very irrational parts of our lives. I think that's a much more exciting conversation to have about the future. I think we need to probably touch on this whole thing. There's a lot of talk at the moment of people being very scared about robots. robots are going to take all of our jobs, and we're going to have nothing left because the robots are going to do all the work. So what are we going to need? We're going to need like a handout from government, like a universal basic income, because we're not going to be able to create any value for ourselves going forward. And I think that that's absolutely categorically wrong, and what a depressing prospect. Imagine telling a young person today, you will never be able to add value to society. The best you can hope for is a handout from the state. What an utterly depressing future vision to sell to young people. The conversation we should be having is that yes, robots are going to do all the bad work, all the work we don't want to do, all the work that just pays the bill and adds no value to us as the worker's life. And that frees us up to find new ways to create value for each other. And remember, the biggest sources of value are irrational sources of value. They are things like this is why women will spend half a year's salary on a handbag, not because it's a logical thing to do, but because that's what humans want.

We want to be able to distinguish ourselves, not just through the stuff we buy, obviously, but through the experiences that we have, through the connections that we make. And isn't that a much more positive conversation to have about how do you add value to someone else's life? By doing something that you have value to your own life too, rather than saying, you know, how do we hang on to the pressing jobs that currently pay our bills through a salary, which is basically a sort of form of salary, really is our modern contemporary version of serfdom, right? So you sort of give up a lot of your freedom and you give up a lot of your ability to spend your life and your time, that precious time, doing something you love in exchange for a bit of security, which would be that paycheck at the end of the month. If we change that whole perspective on what jobs and work are into being something that adds value to your life and enriches me through the doing of that work too, isn't that a much more positive feature to look forward to in the future where we all sort of queue up like Oliver Twist asking, asking sir to please have some more at the end of every month? Just, I literally had a visual of that, that whole thing with all, what, more, you want more? But I agree with you 100% there. You know, my vision of the future is that we do.

We have the robots that take over the drudge work, which gives us time to explore ourselves, to explore our humanity. So before I let you go, because it's been a great conversation, what would one piece of advice be that you would give to people listening to the show now in order to help prepare themselves for the future? I think the biggest piece of advice I could give to people is that chasing a sense of security will probably be the most insecure thing you can do for your life. So trying to hang on to a salary job in industry that is losing market share is not going to prepare you well. You need to be able to become comfortable with being uncomfortable, to lean into that uncertainty, and to see that as a source of excitement and change, and see change as being something that's positive rather than something that's negative. Because by hanging on to the past, we actually make ourselves more vulnerable to being a victim of the future. Whereas if we are able to lean into that wind, you know, the wind will change, we are having a much, much better chance of being survivors of the future, people that are going to do very, very well. Because change is not going to go anywhere. It's always going to be with us. The illusion is not having changed. And I think that's to sort of close that off.

So the way to think about it is that one of the definitions of life itself is change. When change stops, that is death, right? So yeah, definitely lean into the change. Don't be afraid of it. Actually realize that chasing stability is the last way you're actually going to get security going forward. And this, I think, ties up quite nicely with the concept of this lifelong learning, and preparing yourself. Because too often, we're like a bunch of lemmings, and we just go running off the edge of the cliff because everybody else is doing it. But this is the time, would you say, for us to take responsibility for our own lives? Oh, absolutely. That's definitely one of my favorite soap boxes to climb on, in that one of the biggest challenges I definitely see at society at large, we're looking at a global level, a local level, or even an organizational level, is that all too many people are just too keen to outsource responsibility to an authority of some sort. And that's not useful for society. And it's also not useful for the individual because unless we're able to take responsibility for our own choices, and for our own mistakes, and for our own gains too, then what we end up with is a lowest common denominator future, which to me is also quite depressing. So absolutely, I think also, once again, just like the future, is a source of competitive advantage. It's not false, but doesn't have too much competition.

So it's actually taking responsibility and being able to understand that freedom comes with the responsibility to actually deal with your own responsibilities. So there's a trade-off there, but I think it's definitely a prize worth chasing. Wonderful stuff. Let's end it on that note. Bronwyn Williams, thank you so much for taking time out and having a chat to us. If anybody wants to get hold of you and find out more about what you do, where's the best place to go? Well, you can find me on Twitter. I'm Bronwyn Williams there. I'm an early adopter, so I got the basic name as a handle. But otherwise, head on over to FluxTrends.com, and you can see the work that I do there with Dion Chang and the FluxTrends team. FluxTrends.com is the place to go. Bronwyn, again, thank you very much. Hopefully, we can get you on the show again in the not-too-distant future, and we can talk even more positivity about what is to come. Thank you. There we go. That was my special guest, Bronwyn Williams. Food for thought, eh? Food for thought. That wraps it up for this edition of What's Involved. To each and every one of you, thank you for listening.