Predictions On The Future Of Humanity With Futurist Chet Sisk

Have you ever wondered what the future holds like for everyone? Have you assessed the past to understand your present to eventually predict what’s going to happen? In this episode, Stephen Jaye talks with Chet Sisk about the future of humanity and taking another direction. Chet Sisk is a futurist, entrepreneur, author, consultant, speaker and workshop developer. He helps organizations see through the crisis of the moment in order to create plans for the immediate future. Do something different. Make an impact. Tune into this episode! Let’s pull things together, talk about innovation, empowerment, explore your options, and dive deep into the future. --- Listen to the podcast here: Predictions On The Future Of Humanity With Futurist Chet Sisk I'd like to talk to you about the future, planning for the future, imagining what trends are going, what possible worlds could have emerged in the future is an important part of any endeavor. Whatever endeavor you're looking to take on or are currently taking on, this is an important aspect of it. It's an aspect that I had been thinking about for quite some time. I had always been interested in speculating about possible future scenarios. However, I'm relatively new to the field of futurism, which contrary to popular belief is not about predicting specific events. It's more about imagining some possible future scenarios and also figuring out what we all need to do to be prepared to live in this world that is emerging. My guest, Chet Sisk, is a futurist as well as the Founder of Universal Basic Resources. Chet, welcome to the show. Thank you, Stephen, for having me. It is my pleasure and honor to be here, absolutely. Thank you for joining us. Just so that we hear it straight from you and get my readers oriented, in your own words, what is futurism? What does it mean to be a futurist? A futurist is at least my interpretation is that you're a glorified journalist. I came from a journalism background and what journalists tend to do is follow a story in a usual 24-to-48-hour news cycle. Talk about what it means and the characters involved. Futurism does the same process, except it carries that particular story outside of the usual news cycle into decades, maybe even centuries so that you still look for the impact, and how it affects society and all of those things. It's just a bigger version as far as I'm concerned of journalism. I have to say that I use four elements that work for me when I'm doing a prediction. I shouldn't even say use the word prediction because that's not quite accurate. It's more about making an assessment as to what's happening and then saying, “This is what's happening. This is how this happening will probably affect your immediate world.” I use my journalism skills in order to follow the story, to dig down and say, "Where did this come from? What does it mean?" Two, if it's a really important story, I'll go to the tip of the spear to talk to the people on the front end of whatever that story is and ask them, "What's going on? What's happening?" and they’ll tell you. Three, You use historical context. Like, "Have we ever seen this before? Where does this come from?" The fourth thing is that you use your intuitive self to try to wrap your arms around what's happening and say, "Have I seen this before intuitively in my own experience? What do I think it will mean?" You put all those things together and then you come back and you say, "This is what I'm thinking is going to happen." Not a guarantee. It's just an assessment. I never thought of it as being as connected to journalism as you had mentioned but there's definitely an aspect especially the whole looking back into the past. Futurism is about a story that's unfolding and things have already happened or similar events had happened in the past and imagining what's going to continue onward. The great challenge of our time is being able to create this kind of introspection. All of us have played a part in this, either by our complicity to it all our silence, our biases, our unconscious contributions.Share on X For someone that's starting up their own endeavor, say someone's starting up a restaurant in Five Points. It's a neighborhood in Denver, East of Downtown that has rapidly gentrified, for lack of a better way to put it. How would this person utilize this futurism process in their own life? What would this person starting up a restaurant need to do in the futurism realm to be prepared? One of the things about being an entrepreneur is that you really don't have time to do all of this assessment stuff and what are the future projections for the community. You have to do some basic stuff in order to see if this is a good market for you or a good place on location. That's true. What you do is that you get futurists to come and try to give context like, "This is how we think this is going to occur." These are the other elements in society that will affect your business. Not just if you set up at this particular corner, you'll get a good traffic flow but more like should you even be in this particular business. How will the pandemic affect what you do going forward? What's the workforce going to look like in just a few years? If you seek to expand, you want to know what that looks like whether or not there'll be employees available for your restaurant. What about the product that you serve? What does that look like over the next few years? I can think about if you have a fish restaurant, people are running into a challenge with wild-caught salmon because there are fewer in the environment. A trend person, a futurist looks at those things and says, "Is that the business you want to get into based around what we're seeing as projections?" Those things, big picture stuff. When you're an entrepreneur, your window is like this. You're just trying to make sure that the bills are paid, the lights are on, employees are paid and you have a product that comes in. You get a futurist to help you to get the bigger context so that you can start to think about it from a long-term perspective. Is that a common story? People looking at what they're doing only in the context of the world of now and not thinking about the world of 3, 5, 10, 20 years from now. I say 3 to 5 especially when you talk about the workforce, we're in a time of fairly rapid change in the workforce, given the pandemic, showing people working from home more effectively than a lot of people had previously imagined. A lot of people especially people in my generation, demanding something different, almost quitting jobs. They're saying, "Why are you making us come back to the office five days a week?" Stuff like that. Was this a common problem that you see only looking at the world of now? Absolutely. Part of that is our culture. US culture is deeply embedded into the immediate return and quite frankly, the climate crisis is the result of short-term thinking and gratification. It is a testament to the faulty behavior of short-term thinking. This may sound a little political but when you start to burn your own house down, it means that your thinking process is faulty. There's something wrong with short-term thinking, it does not connect the dots to future generations because of the fact that our emphasis is on immediate gratification and materialism, there is no thought outside of the next quarter. It's not people talking about, "We don't think about the next five years." I'm like, "People don't think about the next quarter." Future Of Humanity: It's more about making an assessment as to what's happening. Not a guarantee. It's just an assessment. The entire emphasis is about stakeholder gratification, making sure that people are able to get there in the quarter. That's just unsustainable, no matter how you cut it. There's no sustainability and no validation in it. That validation is coming true through the crises, the series of crises that we have now. Even the pandemic, the bottom line is that we had an opportunity to get in front of it. We drifted because leadership was all about, "How can I get mine now?” It's just an unsustainable practice, which is why futurists really are counter to that. We helped to emphasize the whole idea of thinking about this thing holistically, our future and getting out of these short cycles. It's interesting because I've previously talked in previous episodes and I talk a lot in general day-to-day life about all the different problems that have come from this short-term thinking. A lot of our problems with our work culture that's led to the pre-pandemic survey on Gallup had only about 20% of people engaged in their jobs. A lot of that as well as some of the loneliness crisis and everything else coming from the instant gratification culture of it's easy to post a picture on Instagram and get a bunch of likes but to build a genuine relationship with another human being takes time. You got to show up and be there. It seems to me that as a futurist one of your key roles is combating this and getting people to think more long-term. One of the things I'm wondering is also as a futurist and monitoring trends, do you see this getting better in the near 5-to-10-year horizon? Do you see more people switching to thinking a little bit more long-term to thinking entrepreneurs have to do a little bit of it? Building a business takes a couple of years to build something in a day in, day out, you're working and not getting the reward until later. Do you see this trend? Do you see us moving back toward more longer-term thinking in the US and the rest of the Western world? No, I don't. We have a death grip on short-term thinking in that process. The only thing that comes to mind is that we had a flex point, where if we don't do something else then everything will collapse. It’s like that MIT report that said that civilization will collapse by 2040....