Questioning Futures and Perspectives

Thanks for having me.

Who am I? One of the biggest questions, I think, in the universe, right? Why am I here?

I have been born and raised in the very north of Germany, but actually my parents didn't come from there. But I think what describes me the best is I'm a very enthusiastic person when it comes to future questions. And that's part of my job description as well. So I'm a futurologist, a futures scientist, if you will.

And I like both the technological stuff as well as the societal stuff, the political stuff. And that's why I'm quite constantly engaged in researching topics, reading studies, writing studies, reading blog posts, doing my own podcast.

Essentially, I like to think about futures and visions, and I like to anticipate basically all of that. And why are there political parties, for example, that try to get back to pre-modern times, basically? But why are there also so many constraints in the society that try to undermine basically the visionary parts, what futurists or futurologists like us basically do and talk about? So it's interesting to study humankind, basically, with a certain perspective on non-futurists. That's what I do.

I think because it's fun, to be honest.

When I started working or being an employee some 10 years ago, I was thrown, basically after my bachelor's thesis, [into the] labor market, with employers and the job market. And you have to apply for many, many jobs to get one feedback or so, and then you get into the machinery, and then you somehow realize that building your own career always involves outsmarting or outcompeting other people.

And of course, I mean, growing on your own. But then I had one or two years in a very big company, a DAX 30 corporation. And I got to know all the ups and downs of the people who were working there. Some had only been there for a couple of years, and some of them had been there for 30 years and were already expecting their pension plans.

And what struck me the most, I think, was that many of them didn't really [love] a lot of what they were doing. They were good at their job, no question at all. And some of them had a small path of corporate career behind them. Some of them were looking into the future, like to get the next level and so on. But I rarely encountered someone who was really purposefully doing and loving what they're doing.

Then I found out that you could study futures science or futures research. And I thought that sounds so cool, because me being someone who studied social sciences and political sciences before, I knew that there's more to be done, more to be researched or focused on, than just to look back in history. And I love history. I'm a total history dude. But on the other hand, most of the studies I encountered back then were always describing what already had happened long ago, and then not even deriving from that what was really needed to be done. So giving tips for politicians or for the decision makers in the economy.

Then I found out that you could study that in the Futures Research program in Berlin, which I did, and I loved it, because it was so interdisciplinary. We learned so many things about so many industries or studies, like for instance economic studies or social studies, then pedagogic studies, or, I don't know, everything. A lot of it involved sustainability studies or gender studies. So it was such a packed plan in two years only. And after that we got the certificate which said you are now the master of the future, basically. Okay, not really, but a master of futures science.

And I loved that, because there were so many new possibilities or opportunities for me to realize what I love, which was, or still is, not just researching past events, but also thinking about what could happen next and what the development could be like in 10 or 50 or a hundred years, and then backcast what needs to be done to achieve a desirable one.

Because I think that's one very important aspect of futures studies that very few people know: it's not just about researching very objectively what could happen. That's one very important part, but it's so important to anticipate what you would like to happen next.

And we as a society, every group, every system, every societal system, and it starts with my own mind, everything is a subject of ambiguity and complexity and so much change and volatility and all that, of course. The fun fact, and also the challenging fact, is that you barely ever meet someone, even an organization or a small group of people, let it be a family or so, who really has thought about their own futures. And I deliberately say futures, not just future.

Every one of us thinks about the future all the time. As soon as we get up from bed in the morning, or we leave the house to go to the grocery store, to the market, or we meet up with friends in the evening, which is finally possible again, we always anticipate what could happen in the first place. We dress ourselves up, we need to wear clothes. Sometimes we take an umbrella because we looked at the weather forecast and it said there's a likelihood that it's going to rain tonight. And so we are prepared.

But the more time you go into the future and the bigger the systems are, obviously, but not really obviously, because we anticipate that too little as a society, then it gets complex and complicated. And of course there's not the equivalent to the umbrella in the evening for a society in 10 years.

For example, let's say the climate crisis. I think 99.9% of scientists agree that we have a climate crisis which has been strongly made by humankind. Of course, let's look at the Anthropocene. So we agree on that fact, but it's so difficult to agree on which measures to be taken, to really find out what is happening right now in the Arctic with the glaciers, for example, or with the rising sea levels or with environmental refugees and so on and so forth. It's really difficult to agree on an agenda to avoid certain scenarios taking place.

And that's basically one of the most political aspects of my job: [to] support those organizations, those institutions that are there to formulate, to create or to decide on what actually needs to happen. And that's a very interesting job, because I get to meet interesting people in institutions. I think we're in the same boat here.

But on the other hand, I would call it a very high or a strong responsibility, because the people who are listening to us right now also see us in the entertaining mode. And of course it's part of the job to deliver the scientific facts and visions of the futures. But on the other hand, it's so important for the people who listen to us and take action after that, that the ethically right or correct stuff is being delivered.

Yes, numerous.

The first thing, I think, is the constellation of my family members. It happens to be that my father is pretty old, or I am pretty young for being his son. He was 53 years old when I was born, which leads to the situation that I basically have a father who's the same age as the grandfathers of my friends. So we have an intergenerational education, basically, in the family, which is great.

He experienced the Second World War. Imagine that. He was born in 1934. So he was already conscious when all that shit happened, being born in the west of Germany and then growing up in what [later became the GDR], at least for a few years. I think that's the first thing which strongly influenced how I look into reality or futures or history as well. And I'm really grateful for that experience, and for the long, very deep talks with my dad up until today, which is really cool.

On the other hand, I had a teacher in high school from the fifth until [the eighth] grade. I think it was Mr. Dharma. Rest in peace, Mr. Dharma, because he suddenly and unexpectedly passed away when I was, I think, in the eighth grade. But he was a really nice mentor for many of us in my class. And he used to teach us this motto of the Scouts, which is "be prepared". I never was in the Scouts, actually, unfortunately.

I think this "be prepared" thing started off with "do your homework". Of course, this was the first thing. So when you come back from the weekend and it's Monday, yes, there will be school and you will have had homework. And if you haven't done it, he's going to be angry or stuff like that.

But on the other hand, he was able to teach us the implicit [things], which I only know today and am able to be happy about or thankful for: that the aspects of futures generally, of course, imply that you need to be prepared for certain scenarios. And going back to the example from earlier, if you take your umbrella in the evening and it's not going to rain, you're happy about the fact that you carried it. And even if you didn't use it, it's cool, because you were prepared for another scenario. And the same goes for, I don't know, insurances.

Sometimes there's even the scenario of the self-fulfilling prophecies or the self-defeating prophecies. Another example: if you prepare for a fight with a family member, because you think that there's something that needs to be spelled out, and you expect the other person to be angry at you and yell at you and so on. You anticipate the situation beforehand, and then you go into the situation and you find out he or she is very grateful that you finally bring up that one topic that has been between you for years. You would have been prepared for the fight or the argument. And on the other hand, maybe your way of phrasing things already has changed before you even started that conversation.

And so you learn through your own anticipation of the future, which is great, because I think in so many situations we as a society can learn so many things on, I think, a low level from those situations. My teacher in the sixth grade told us to be prepared and just go through your mind and play through some scenarios. It really helped me a lot.

And I think there were some people who were really influential in the past six years. The first thing was when I started my job here in Leipzig. I moved to Leipzig six years ago, in [2015]. Great city, by the way. My good friend [Sven] was back then the chairman of a think tank, a trend research think tank, and they had just started building up a new research or foresight branch. Back then we were like 11 or 12 people, I don't know exactly.

And [Sven] called me: "I saw your profile on, I think, LinkedIn or Xing, and it says that you studied futures sciences. This is so cool. Let's talk." And I was like, okay, well, let's talk. And so we did. It was 2014, I think, when he called me, and then we met up in Berlin, because I was living in Potsdam and Berlin. And we had a really nice talk and had coffee afterwards in the office, I think, and it was like magic chemistry. That's really cool.

Then one of my main tasks for four years was to build up the scientific method of the foresight team in that think tank, which I did. And during that time, the company grew from those 12 peeps to over [60], quadrupled basically, which was not that healthy for the organization, and also for the friendship between some of the people there, not involving me, of course.

But then in 2019 I left the company, and it wasn't all that easy to leave something brilliant like that behind. But on the other hand, I was looking ahead into a great future of being self-employed and freelancing and doing the stuff I love, and leaving out some of the organizational stress which always comes with being inside a corporation.

But still, I recently met him again, and we had a mixture of vacation and work together in Bulgaria, which we did for a couple of years, at least once a year. And it's one of the, how to say that, biggest mind-changing experiences I ever had in my life. I'm around 33, 34 years old, and I think that one human being has changed so much. On the one hand, helping me to professionalize my futurologist path into something like a career, I don't know. And on the other hand, to find out more about myself and to be more confident in public speaking, for example, or in public guitar playing, because that's our shared hobby: playing the guitar and singing along at the campfire. Not more. I've done small stages, but that's definitely enough.

This interaction with this one person has changed so much, and I'm so grateful for this human being. I think those are the main pillars in establishing the route to what I am now, professionally speaking.

Sure. That's actually still a subject of discussion inside the scientific community, because a future implies that it's not there, actually. And so it's really tough to study something which actually doesn't exist. But that's also the one crucial thing that futures science always implies. So we don't really study the future, and we don't really predict or forecast the future. The main [task], in my opinion, is to anticipate the future, or the images of the futures which already exist in the minds of people or of cultures or of organizations.

Let me give you an example, or our listeners, of how that can look. One classic business case is to have a client, one company, say, from the insurance industry, that needs an outlook into the future. And they say, "Dear Kai, we need this report. Let's call it a trend study. What's going to happen in our environment? So in the economic and the ecological and the political, regulatory, societal and so forth environment? What about those things we don't really have on our radar already? How could they change? Give us a glimpse into the future and look into your glass ball: what is likely to happen? And then let's talk about the things we could already prepare in terms of strategic recommendations or business model ideation sessions."

And so we as a think tank back then started investigating for a couple of months. Actually, the first step is to understand the business model. Because even in something like the insurance industry, [every] company has its own business model: how is the revenue being generated, or how do we talk to our clients or our customers? Is this B2B, is it B2C and so on? So first, we need to understand what really is the environment of this particular client.

And then we start investigating with online research, of course. We read lots of papers. We read lots of studies published in magazines or scientific journals. And of course we have our tools, like trend radars, which tell us, like a trend Google, if you will, what are the most important trend agglomerations, basically. Is it important for the insurance industry to deal with quantum security, I don't know, or with distributed ledger technology? Or is it more important to look at the European Union regulatory level and to talk to some experts from the European Parliament or from the EU Commission? I don't know.

And then the next step, obviously, is to talk to those people. So we do lots of what we call expert interviews. And what we ask them is not to read out their press papers or things that they would publish two months later anyway. The core idea is to identify those people who have strong influence inside a political system, or inside the economic system, or in the tech area, and ask them what they think is doable in some years' time, or what is likely.

So there's a very specific interrogation system, actually, because it's not that easy to really get those people to talk in futures, because it's natural to stick to your role inside society. If you ask the CEO of an insurance company how he or she anticipates the year 2040, they will basically replicate the strategy papers they have worked on for the past five years. And you need to instantly [notice] this moment when they're actually stuck in history or in the present, because you want something more from them. And nobody wants to read a study which basically only summarizes all those present strategic and PR papers from companies that could be done by anyone. That's the first thing.

So we talk to experts, and an expert can also be someone who does not have the big title of CEO or lead researcher. After we did this first round of questions and interviews, we summarized those findings internally, for interim purposes. And then we pick out those aspects we had as a result from the first wave that are very uncertain, but potentially very influential. One could say things like wildcards inside a branch or an industry. Things like: is it possible that there's going to be an insurance company which basically only relies on code? And there's no employees, no employer, no CEO, nothing but code. Is that doable?

And so we have this thesis, and we ask the same experts, plus an extended panel of more experts: what do you think? Is it likely, is it doable? And the moment we have phrased this thesis, one of those people will do it anyway. So we have a very, very high likelihood that things are going to change.

And at the end, I mean, it differs from project to project. Some clients prefer the study, like 50 to 80 pages of text, where you basically summarize the findings of this study process. Some of the clients like to publish those findings as a PR marketing thing, in the way of: look, we as an insurance company are very far ahead and we know the future. They won't tell the press that this study actually is from two years ago, but it's still 10 years ahead. The other thing can be, of course, those findings summarized in an executive summary, and someone makes a film for internal purposes for the employers or the employees. So it's also a little bit familiar to, or a little bit next to, the science fiction community, [which] has the same tools from time to time.

But that's basically the scientific approach. The scientific method relies on being able to document the process of a study and to replicate it. That's where it gets a little bit tricky, because in any social science it's very hard to replicate. The mathematicians or biology researchers are already fighting the fight against the social sciences, because you can't measure social things. If I ask you the same questions today and in a year, you will definitely give different answers. So it's all about being quick, taking a snapshot, basically, of the images of the futures inside the heads of decision makers, and then making up your own mind and putting that stuff into the next decade.

I guess one of the biggest challenges is, or might be, that still today, in the year 2021, living inside one of the biggest and most complex transitions or transformations that humankind has ever experienced, most of the companies don't really account for change. They still are made or being structured in terms of stability.

I don't know how you felt about that, but in the past months many articles or also events had the headline of resilience: we need to become more resilient. Which, by the meaning of the word, actually means being more stable against outside changes. And it's being used at the moment as some kind of PR phrase to actually imply that you are more agile and more flexible to align to change. But that's actually not the meaning of the word.

But I think most of the organizations, including public sector institutions, have as part of their code being stable, or being very restrictive against outside changes, which has one very good reason, and that is survival. But on the other hand, we've learned over the past, I think, 20 to 30 years from very good thinkers that being agile in an organizational sense is actually the number one survival factor in the 21st century.

And it leads into an organizational schizophrenia, that aligning to an agile workforce or a labor market is also one of those changes from the outside which has to be fought against. And that's where I came to the conclusion a couple of years ago that the 2020s, this current decade, is most likely going to be remembered as the decade where most of the companies and organizations died because they weren't prepared for change.

And that's actually very tragic, because there are so many people involved in working for those companies. Especially in central Europe, we have such a strong middle class of companies, and there are so many jobs involved in those companies, and they are really doing a bad job in coping with change. And we've known that for a couple of years. And this pandemic, as a multi-crisis, basically, showed that nothing was prepared, although so many people, from the scientific community to NGOs, I don't know, to society, warned that something like a pandemic was coming.

And I wasn't really surprised. I think from the futures community, no one really was surprised that there is now this pandemic. And we were like, okay, let's keep going. And then a month later we were like, okay, where are the plans? Oh yeah, you have some plans, right? Oh, you don't. Fuck. So I was like, damn it.

So I think that's my point, or my 2 cents to that discussion: the companies are lost, basically. And I've talked to so many big corporations, and even the C-level managers, they know that they are unable to change, to transform from a century-long company to an agile network of, I don't know, teams and bubbles and Holacracy stuff. That's just not doable, especially for highly regulated things like insurance, like the financial industry, like mobility, automotive and stuff. It's just too much. And the new players in the field, let's say Tesla or, I don't know, Trade Republic, they are agile because they started off from a [new] playing field, and that's totally different.

I hope, and actually that's not based on scientific research now, I hope that society is able to really step back a little and analyze the situation. Because, as you just said, psychosis can lead to a better state, as well as horrific car accidents or so can, but they can also lead to a trauma if I don't really deal with the situation. And that's the work to be done, and I think that's not the most preferred way most people like to act.

And now we have the same thing on the table for us as a collective intelligence. The collective mind now needs to learn. And it also needs to heal, on the other hand, because I think the many micro accidents or micro shocks and traumas which happened during the pandemic, which don't get to be on the headlines of a big newspaper or the blogs, those are the things that really nourish my sorrows. In terms of post-COVID scenarios, for me they are often based on an insecure, still very uncertain society.

And back in history, societies always have been very insecure and very unstable, and even the elites, the established community of political leaders, were insecure. What happened? We all know that a hundred years ago or so we had the situation just after the First World War. Then we had the Second World War, in highly insecure societies, with [fractures] under the surface between elites, like conservative and liberal and progressive, I don't know, the scientific community, the religious community and stuff. And that led to people not being really happy. And then they listened to those demagogues, like Hitler was one, and they go to war. They literally sent their children to go to war, and they know that they're not going to come back.

And I think this is the ultimate state of psychosis, like a collective psychosis, maybe. So desperate, and also economic factors aside, you are so desperate that you're ready to send your kids to war or participate in war against some enemy, a virtual and a real enemy in most of the cases. And we've seen that in the past years, this year as well, also in Israel again, that we had conflict. We had so many satellite conflicts, which for me show that even the Cold War never really ended. It's just not up in the newspapers since 1989, because some actually smart scientist said that this is going to be the end of history, the end of the clash of two systems. That's ridiculous. I mean, since then nothing changed. It was just the conflict lines that changed.

But getting back to the topic, I think it's a very dark scenario for the future that we won't be able to learn from this shock, this collective shock. And I think one of the most important things, I mean, of course I'm a futures scientist, but one of the most important things we need to anticipate, or at least [say] out loud more often, is the fact of thinking in times.

Because I think, at least in the global north, we have made such huge progress in the past 200 or 250 years, but also with very many downsides. We all know that, in terms of sustainability and societal justice. But on the other hand, we've made such huge progress in terms of, at least, well-functioning laws. We have the police, we have politicians, we have corporations who are able to deliver so much stuff into our supermarkets that we can simply go there every day between seven in the morning and, I don't know, 10 in the evening and just buy stuff from all over the world, which is actually great.

But so many people don't really realize that this is something to be grateful for. And so if something changes in the daily routines, they are unhappy, and then they're angry, and then they yell at each other. And then they say that those migrants are [the problem], because it's just nuts that they come to our country and want to steal our jobs and our wives. And I don't know, these narratives nourish on the ground of unhappy people and ungrateful people.

And I think this is really closely connected to thinking times differently. By that I mean this whole thing we call history is not a linear story we can tell. And it's also not, and greetings to my history teacher back then, something that repeats all over again. Of course you can always compare things to each other. You can even compare bananas and apples, and I think that's cool. I think we all need to learn, and we need to understand better, Spiral Dynamics and the times, like the levels we are leveraging in the past decades. Because what we are heading towards possibly can be something very cool for everyone.

Even if we are going to be around 10 billion people in the world in a few decades. Some people still believe that we are not able to feed even the people we have right now. No, that is something we definitely need to discuss publicly. It's all about justice, and it's all about what we value as a being, and not just human beings. It starts with human beings, and we need to try, in my opinion, to make it affordable for every person in the world to have access to water, to food, to schools, to clinics, health systems and stuff like that. But it's not that easy, obviously.

And on the other hand, we must not forget to grant certain planetary beings, like the planet itself, Mother Earth, which nourishes us, which keeps us alive, basically, which is part of the universe [rights]. We would totally be [lost] without the moon. We would have some problems without forests, clean air, birds, bees, I don't know, stuff like that. It's so big and so complex, but we should grant those planetary beings rights, just like it happened a few months ago in New Zealand, when rivers became legal persons, which was just a very big effort for climate activists.

But New Zealand is not really the biggest country in the world. It's good that things are starting to change, but as long as it's not forbidden to throw plastic into the rivers, to put chemical waste [into them], like BASF or Bayer or companies like that are doing all the time, or Nestle is still purchasing water sources in those regions where most of the people are basically dying from too little water, and operations like that, they just don't get the idea of wholeness, [of] society, [of] humankind.

And I think that's one of the things we need to address more often, and not just in the activist way, because at least for me that's not the right way of phrasing it. But in a way that really can change things, or address regulatory changes that need to be taken, so that our children's or grandchildren's generation will have a planet which is nice to live on, and not just where everyone is in the state of a refugee all the time, and the climate catastrophe basically destroys the ground for plants and things [we] live from.

That's something I call the Leviathocene. Let me translate it into English. So the Leviathan, this ancient creature, which then in the 17th century was used by Thomas Hobbes to describe the sovereign entity, or the dictator, the state, basically, or the monarchy. He wanted to picture this destructive force with this ancient figure.

And the other term, the scientific term which is being used for climate change, or for this age we are living in right now, is the Anthropocene, which implies that humans are responsible for climate change and geological change, which has already been underway for some centuries, not even starting with industrialization.

But I don't agree with that idea, because it implies that human nature means that we like to destroy nature and that we like to change the planetary boundaries, which is, I think, not the case. If you would do a poll, conduct random interviews with people on the street, or just type some numbers into your smartphone and call someone, and you ask all those people the same question, "Would you agree that destroying the planet is cool?", barely anyone would agree. That's a very shitty idea.

But still, organizations have those boundaries and constraints set by regulatory rules and by society. Essentially, those organizations are responsible for those changes, and they can't just simply stop doing what they're doing. I understand that. So we need to anticipate that as well if we build our future scenarios.

Long story short, I think rethinking times, priorities, in terms of what is really, really essential to surviving, and to living more than just surviving, is very crucial for our generations.

First, I think the first principle or paradigm is that there is not going to be an artificial intelligence that is able to rescue us in our situation, or to doom us, at least not in the next couple of centuries.

Because I have a strong feeling that whenever I go to an event, or write an article or something involving artificial intelligence systems, which are machine or deep learning systems, people somehow expect, especially from the non-IT industry, of course, they expect me to tell them that someday there's going to be [an AI] president or a chancellor, or that everything's going to be automated by an AI, because there's the superintelligence approaching us.

And after spending really many days or weeks or months, I don't know, studying this topic and talking to many experts in the field of AI, I [lack] confidence in those scenarios. Because even if we can somehow simulate human brains with computers, by the speed of the transistors and the CPU and stuff like that, even then it's absolutely very unlikely that those machines are able to be conscious. I won't go more into detail.

But having said that, this is one of the big paradigms, where I think many industries or decision makers, and also normal private persons, expect the progress of technology to somehow necessarily land at an output where we're going to have a superintelligent AI agent that rescues or even dooms us. And it either leads to a state of waiting for, what's it called, like Jesus, like the big Messiah, right? So just waiting, and it's going to be cool someday, so we can still pollute the environment, or we can still go to our nine-to-five jobs and do things just as we did before. As long as I don't need to change, everything's going to be cool. So this is the one big faction, and the other big faction is...

Yeah, exactly. Someone needs to get it done. But I totally agree with you. And there are, of course, the positions that emphasize that things we actually can't really explain sometimes appear to be like consciousness or creativity or, I don't know, stuff like that.

I think the point is what comes into the minds of people and of society, let it be through science fiction, through the daily news or YouTube videos, I don't know. Then we have these two positions I was just trying to explain. The first one is waiting and wishing. Let's say just two of many positions, but those are, I think, the most contrary positions. And the other one is being afraid.

And especially in Germany, we have, I think, more conservatism compared to some other neighboring countries in Europe, for a couple of reasons. But the one thing is that this matches pretty perfectly with being afraid of AI, because we all know these science fiction movies, I [love] many of them, but in many of these narratives the AI somehow or someday turns bad. But to be honest, I'm more afraid of some North Korean dictator who has narrow AI weapons and who's able to [target], I don't know, South Korean or Chinese or even Austrian or German people and simply kill them. That's doable, and that's not intelligent. That's just a copy of some totally weird person's aims and goals.

Maybe I can recommend a cool book. I would strongly recommend on this topic Max Tegmark. He wrote the book Life 3.0, and there he has all these positions, like in a matrix, and talks about these positions. And I think, from what I remember from the book, he tries not to position himself in this very matrix. It's more about getting to know [the positions] that are out there. But I think maybe he influenced my expectancy or my view on how AI might someday [develop]. And it's going to happen, that's undoubted, but I think that we have rather centuries than years or decades until we are at that time.

Totally. And if I may add just one thing, speaking for myself, in my own interest, I need to at least keep this expectancy up, I think, until 2030. Because one of my current projects, which is going to be published around the end of the year, is dealing with the labor market or the workforce and the influence of AI in different industries, for example mobility. This is going to be published at the end of the year. And we work with a pretty narrow definition of AI, which is also being used by the European Commission. And we also have the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence on board, the DFKI, and they share this definition. And I think at least until 2030 [I'll be] around for underlining the narrow expectancy.

I mentioned it before, but it's so important that we need to go into detail, or at least underline it again: thinking in times differently also has one dimension of mindfulness.

I think we as a collective experience [time] now very differently in different cultures or milieus or continents even, or as someone more digital or less digital. If you have a news ticker on your smartphone and you're being bombarded with all these facts about corona or COVID-19 all the time, it's a very different perception from someone who reads the daily newspaper, maybe, and sometimes watches the television news at 8 PM. It's going to be very different. And it made me think of people who are constantly writing comments or hate speech on Twitter and stuff like that. So the ranges are high.

But scientists suggest already that we need to use, or maybe even emphasize, the loss of pace, the deceleration, basically, which was caused by lockdowns or shutdowns or stuff like that. Because sometimes, even for someone like me, who is actually, I believe, very fast-minded, and sometimes I'm not able to speak as fast as I think, many people have that issue. But put another way, when I think of the past [year], about just how many things happened, how many paradigms for myself have maybe changed, or at least nuances have been realigned. It's not just this year in particular, but for every year I think I experienced so many things, because I learned at a very young age how to be more self-aware, how to be more mindful in situations.

I embraced practicing at least a little bit of yoga, very irregularly, to be honest, when I was around 20 years old. And I never got into that thinking of perceiving yoga or alternative approaches to workouts or breathing techniques or so as being something esoteric, spiritual. I just [found out] on my own: it's cool, it works. I'm around 1.85 [meters] tall, so that's not too tall, but the back pain started very early for me, and also knee pain, because I like to do sports, but also very irregularly. So I had these physical traits, and I thought yoga is a nice thing. So I took that and practiced it whenever it works, and it's cool, and it strengthened my body.

And then I dove deeper into that breathing techniques stuff. I don't know the names of that, but when I'm about to go on a stage, there's this moment, a short time, when you sit there in the audience or backstage and the moderator or the anchorman is preparing your speech, or announcing [you]. And you listen to that. And a lot of people get nervous then. But it's all a matter of preparation, of course, on the one hand, and then these breathing techniques kick in, and you just do that, and you're cool. And your brain is totally there.

And for me, everything after that happens in slow motion, basically. I observe the audience while I am talking, and I think about myself, how to walk to which position in the room next, or if it's now the right time to make a joke, or, I don't know, because I like to improvise a lot. And all those are aspects that are doable after you acknowledge yourself as being a very self-aware being.

And looking back in history, it's not that old, the idea of the Enlightenment: everyone can be self-aware and can change their own biography and learn whatever they want and do whichever job. And more and more people are able to do that. But we still have communities or countries, like for instance Pakistan, where we have this beautiful story of Malala. Very inspiring: a girl who just wanted to have basic education, and she wasn't actually able to do that, because the Taliban regime was there, and they are still proclaiming today that education is not made [for] females.

But on the other hand, we have this story, and we have this person who did it and who was able to get out of that system and become part of the other, I don't know, community, the global citizenship. Because when I learned something about humanism 2.0, we could phrase it like that, that everyone should have equal rights, equal opportunities, equal, I don't know. Not equal payment, that's not the topic. I think equality comes from very individual biographies, but the access to education should be there for everybody. And it starts with basic human rights. It starts with a basic internet connection, which we still cope with here in Germany, because it's still so slow, and we have so many [rural] regions where we don't have fast internet. But you get the idea.

And all that, I think, starts with a very broad understanding of mindfulness, of what it means to be not just in the moment, but also, for myself, being in the future scenarios, being in the history scenarios, being with friends, being with family, being with people I haven't seen before, or even people [who] want to harm me.

I also dealt with very, very scary situations. I've been traveling, before the COVID pandemic, to many, many countries, also involving very dark streets somewhere in Cape Town or in Medellin, or, I don't know, I've been to China and experienced for the first time what it means to be discriminated against. And I think it's so powerful to do all these things and to get to know the world, including issues and challenges as well as chances and opportunities, and people, primarily people: to get to know those people better and to understand their pains.

And every perspective [changes] drastically whenever you move beyond boundaries, maybe the boundary of your hometown, or it starts with your flat or your house. Maybe you live in a valley, or maybe you should someday leave that valley. Sometimes you should leave the country or even the continent, or, I don't know, go on a sailing boat and sail to New York. I heard that this should be a trend right now, through the Fridays for Future stuff, I don't know.

And that's the last sentence: it's important to embrace different, or also differing or competing perspectives, but stay respectful towards the environment and other people. And as long as that is granted, I think we shouldn't have any conflicts anymore. But that's a long way to go.

Wow. That's a very powerful question.

I hope it is still said that I passed away some five years [ago]. So that implies that I've obviously lived longer than a hundred years, but then I will have taken the decision on my own to leave this planet, to make space for other generations.

I think most of the ideas I love to spread change over time, in the first place. And in the second place, there are so many ideas or movements or changes or processes I'd like to initiate in people's minds that are not really linked to my person.

I [know] this one entrepreneur, and he's around 63 years old. I met him four years ago or so, and he's still so grateful that we met back then. And in two weeks from now, so at the end of [the month], we will share the same stage for the first time. Because after that, he started his own business, from being a C-level manager of a company in the west of Germany, and now he's a freelancer on his own and does purposeful or meaningful things for him, and he's still so grateful. And sometimes he used to tweet about that on Twitter and write something like: [I'm grateful] that you showed me this path, and I'm still so lucky for having had the chance to embrace change and futures and stuff like that.

And of course, I love that. It's better than any fee some client can pay me for a keynote or for, I don't know, a book or so. Actually, I'm so totally Generation Y: I don't care about money. I just care about ideas and seeing the spark in the eyes of my audience. And that's so cool.

So if I could choose, it would probably be that in a hundred years people would still remember some encounter with me, I don't know where, if it's been on a stage or in a lobby or on the train. I'm riding the train so much, so the chances to meet me on the train are very high. So that in such a conversation the people say: that's so cool, because I started rethinking things. He didn't give me the answer to my life question, but he showed me at least a couple of [doors]. And I found out after that that this was the right door. And if it wasn't, I don't care anymore, because it was the right door afterwards, because of what I made from it. That's actually the only thing I'd like to be remembered [for].

Thank you so much.

Yeah, same. Thank you so much for having me, Xerxes.