Hi, and welcome back to Resilience Unravelled. And on a beautiful day in the northeast of England, looking at the sun splitting the rocks and the polar bears have actually shaken off the rest of winter. I'm delighted to meet someone from a foreign country, a land far away in where are you, Chris?
Chris:I'm down the road in North Wales.
Russell:Very good. Well, I'm talking to Chris Marshall today and very much looking forward to that. Some interesting things to talk about. Give us a bit of a pen profile of yourself.
Chris:Yeah, so for the last ten years, I've basically been researching and working in two different fields and kind of spent the last ten years bringing these two together. So, the first is behavioural science. I'm a behavioural scientist, and I look at decision making in conditions of uncertainty. A lot of my research focuses on risk taking and resiliency, and then the other side of my kind of research looks at foresight, so how professional futures work, how the world's changing, where it could be heading. And I think that the kind of interesting intersect between these two is obviously how we view the future very much depends on where we are cognitively. If we have a pessimistic outlook, then often we can actually peel that back. And not always pessimism comes from stress, but we know stress elevates pessimistic viewpoints, and we know that optimism can increase or lower stress levels.
Russell:Is there any proof for that?
Chris:Yeah, absolutely. So, I mean, this kind of comes from some of the kind of the more recent neuroscience findings. And what we find there is that we obviously don't just have one brain state, we have many. And we can look at this from the point of view of we fire different circuits depending on how stressed we are, the neuroplasticity features. We can also strengthen a particular circuit or kind of let it degrade. And what we actually find from that research is the more stressed you are, lots of different things happen. We almost see the world through a completely different filter, and that is that the higher your stress level, the more rigid your thinking is, the more pessimistic it is. And it seems to be I mean, this is not necessarily testable, but it seems to be a hangover from kind of in the Stone Age.
Chris:If a lion came walking into your village, it pays to be pessimistic, and it pays to be pretty rigid in your thinking because you want to run rather than sit there contemplating if it's a pretty lion or not.
Russell:Yes, that all makes sense, and obviously we talked to it before many times about neurotransmitters such, like, hormonal responses to things. But it's interesting that you're coming at it from optimistic optimism, pessimism rather than anxiety, and the more emotional states. Is that because you're a more cognitive thinker?
Chris:Yeah, it just comes from kind of the angle I come at it from. I guess I also think that kind of in the broader kind of population, talking about pessimism and optimism, perhaps easier terms, I think sometimes when we're talking about stress states, people go, I don't feel stressed. And actually, when we're really talking about brain states, we're not talking about emotional stress necessarily, we're just talking about neurological stress, which is obviously very different. It's an arousal level. Absolutely. Anxiety to me, I think there's enough research to say that anxiety is pessimism enhancing. Yes, it would be with that, yeah. I think there's a lot of crossover between those terms, and it really depends what field you come from as to what you use.
Russell:I think, okay, so we've got this idea of pessimism, which is fine, and obviously a lot of the work from, oh, my goodness, I've got such a memory for names. The Attribution guy talks about pessimism optimism and learned helplessness and says that we have a natural predisposition for pessimism. Learned helplessness as a result of negativity bias. Is that something that you would subscribe to as well? And if so, actually becoming optimistic is actually quite a challenge. It's quite a load cognitively, isn't it, to achieve that?
Chris:Yeah, absolutely. I think I probably would agree with most of that. As I said, I think really from the stance I come at, that the brain is primarily a survival tool and therefore it does pay to be negative and it pays to be pessimistic, or at least it did in years gone by. And this is kind of where my research kind of becomes very interesting, is that where we had life threatening situations and events almost occur to us daily. Let's go back to kind of Stone Age when we lived in caves. That when something uncertain happened around us, when there was kind of something fleeting in the corner of our eye that the grass was moving or it was a funny smell on the air. It really did pay to be kind of on guard, on edge, and run to what was familiar. But what we find today is we still have all these stresses, but they come from different sources and they're not necessarily life threatening, but our brain still treats them as if they are.
Chris:And so nowadays we get stresses from things like, well, it could be anything cognitive overload from social media continually watching episodes of Netflix, which is cognitively draining. The list is endless. And then we get on to why we're so attached to negative news headlines, because it comes back to that wiring, that very primitive biology, if you like. Neurology of our brain. And mass media knows that and is very clever at tapping into it that we listen to. We prick our ears up and pay far more attention to a negative news headline than one that's optimistic.
Russell:Arguably, it's a form of prediction, isn't it? As well as ancient wiring.
Chris:Yeah, absolutely. So, this is kind of where a lot of the research is pointing. And I think it's fascinating that prediction or kind of forecasting is very much influenced by, as I said, the emotional state that you're in. And so, yeah, they're absolutely connected.
Russell:Okay, so that's fascinating. I get resilience and foresight because actually, one of the ways we build people's resilience is to manage anxiety by actually getting to think about the future, assess risks and build plans. And having a controlled and thoughtful process allows that to happen. So that makes sense. Are you saying therefore, then, actually the stress response restricts resilience as well as foresight?
Chris:Yeah, absolutely. Well, I think we could let's kind of just define resiliency for a minute because, I mean, there are many different definitions out there. In my research, I tended to use the framework Hardy or Maddie used, even of hardiness. And so, I think it's important to kind of state that people who are resilient, it's not that they don't encounter stress, it's just it's a buffer between the stress that's happening and it actually having a neurological effect. But no, absolutely. And we can look at performance psychology and everything else, and we know that there's a certain amount of stress which is, at least on an acute basis, very helpful. It's an inverted hue that if we're under aroused or over aroused, we're not performing at our optimal. And if we're in that middle ground, then we are. So, when we're talking about thoughts and foresight and everything else with stress yeah, when you see that the brain actually ratchet up this ladder of stress to the very high stress states, our thinking does become less abstract.
Chris:We become far more rigid that we like the status quo because it feels safe, it feels familiar. And as we kind of relax, as we calm down, then we start to engage in those abstract thinking processes. So, if I'm speaking to an audience, I'll often ask them, where do you have your best thinking? I said, raise your hand when I say the location. And I always start with the office because it's hilarious because nobody ever puts a hand up apart from actually, I did have one lady put her hand up, but I think she was sat next to a boss and she felt compelled that she better say that. But normally as soon as you then start saying, oh, it's in the shower, or it's on holiday or it's out for a walk, or it's out running. And what we're actually just observing there is it's obviously got nothing to do with the location.
Chris:No, it's to do with the brain state that individual is in.
Russell:What about the David Eagleman, the concept that actually the brain is a prediction machine and it's simply filling in what it expects to see based on previous experience, because these half completed pictures and reliance on patterns and such like, how does that play into this theory.
Chris:Yeah, absolutely. So, again, kind of what? Absolutely. We're a sense making machine, aren't we? And that's what prediction is. We're trying to make sense of different environments and different situations. And this is where we start to get into things like anchoring bias, confirmation bias, that you're absolutely right, that we run with the first piece of information quite often, and then we find every bit of supporting evidence for our viewpoint. And this is where it actually when we start. I think we've now got far enough in this conversation to link it all together. And actually, one of the really interesting things from my work is that we live at this pivotal moment in human history from a point of view of turmoil, disruption, potential human change. And I think that's where we start to get into. You'll be well versed in the stats of rising stress, rising anxiety.
Chris:Actually, we could even go rising pessimism. And that's not too it's kind of expected if we take this back to as soon as you make an environment uncertain. And in this point, we're not talking about risk as in uncertainty in a casino or a lottery, but uncertainty as in ambiguity. We have no idea what the outcomes are. Then you start to see pessimism and pessimistic future predictions come through. I think certainly see that's kind of in the zeitgeist of what we see around us in the population. So, this was kind of the reason for researching and writing the book Decoding Change was that I really do believe that if we bring this back, I think one of the most key human skills is our ability to be creative, innovative, and adaptable. But what's really interesting is with none of those things when we're stressed. No, with the opposite.
Russell:Well, it's interesting you say that. I sort of know the answer to this question, but just in case anyone's in the audience is thinking about it, we generate self -inflicted stress and pressure by using deadlines, and often they are a creative source. The sort of tension release of tension, tension using sleep band in the hard deadlines, they can create huge amounts of creativity and innovation. But it's using stress in a control well, it's arguable yes, it is. It's using stress in a controlled fashion. So, do you have any thoughts on that?
Chris:Yeah, absolutely. I think you've just hit the nail on the head. For me, it's about becoming far more aware of our stress or emotional state and actually learning to control that. I think modern society has done very well at almost providing us an environment and a landscape where we don't have to pay attention to our internal state. If we if we feel overloaded, overwhelmed, anxious, stressed, we can distract ourselves with almost an endless stream of dopamine releasing things. I mentioned social media and Netflix, but no, absolutely. I think it's a lot about controlling that emotional state and becoming that starts with awareness. And I think we have stepped away from that because we have a view, or have done in the past anyway, that negative emotions are things that we should run from. And what we're learning more and more is that emotions are just signals and actually just like pain, physical pain is a really good signal that we should pay attention to.
Chris:And if we don't, we wouldn't be here.
Russell:I mean, people stick them out. For me, an emotion is a collection of things which are just pulled together to be able to represent ease of thinking about a specific concept. And I think people get too wired up about positive and negative emotions. I mean, it's very interesting. There are very few definitive descriptions or definitions of emotions. The Zekman, but actually after that and then even his research is quite peculiar because it's based on facial responses. But I find this spurious argument when I'm just talking to a lot of people about the difference in cognition and emotion as if they're different things, but actually it's stimulus response, really, isn't it? And its chemistry, electricity processes, and those things have just had a language wrapped around them because of insufficient scientific evidence and labelling. Almost.
Chris:Yeah, absolutely. I couldn't agree more with you there. But it is, and I think from the brain's point of view, let's just bring this back. An emotion is just a signal. The brain doesn't decide this is negative or positive. It's just a signal. And I think, as you say, we've wrapped this up in so many kinds of overly eloquent terms, but it's time to kind of actually peel it back and just go back to what it really is.
Russell:I'm loving what you're saying and agreeing you thought that he far too much. This might not make for the most stimulating podcast because you and I on the same page here but let me broaden down. So increasingly we're talking about neurodiversity as a narrative that we're building around certain cognitive states. I'm choosing my language as carefully as I can because it's contentious in some quarters, but also scientifically. It's about not straying into casually irrelevant references. If you could unpack a tiny bit of neurodiversity and its impact on this concept, because signalling, I guess, might be different. So, I wonder if we could you could start with the simplistic and work up to the complex.
Chris:Yeah, absolutely. I'll do my best. I guess my kind of specialisation in neurodiversity literally stems from the fact that I'm autistic. I can't say that I actually research this. So again, as you're saying, there is by the term diversity, there is an awful lot of diversity within neurodiversity. But let's just start with what it is. When we look at the more kind of clinical definitions or psychiatric definitions, neurodiversity, typically, when we actually peel this back, has always been seen as a disorder or even a disease.
Russell:That's quite an interesting way of thinking about it, isn't it?
Chris:And that's really come from the fact that as humans, we love to kind of go, well, this is the central tendency, and anything that deviates from it must be wrong. It's either too much or too little, but it's defective, it's deficient. And what we're actually finding now is we're moving to a place where that kind of thought process is being changed. And the way that I try and kind of put this to people is that neurodiversity is essentially the same as we talk about biodiversity in nature, that we wouldn't go around going, oh, my word, that tree is too tall or that one's too short. It's diversity in nature. And this is just diversity in both brain wiring and thoughts. So essentially that's what neurodiversity is. The reason it's being categorized as a disease, or a disorder is that the behaviours can be different to a neurotypical person.
Chris:Now that we've got kind of a basis to work from, for me, where this kind of goes, I'm going to bring this back to some of the stuff on kind of how I see the future plant panning out and some of the trends and maybe the trends we see. And what we see when we go back into history is that the largest upheavals, the largest transitions in human history occur when we have an information revolution. So, we could go back to ancient Egypt with hieroglyphics. Suddenly knowledge was able to be passed down not from person to person, but through a more permanent source. Then we get to the Gutenberg press, which allowed the transition of information from just a select few to a far greater population. Then we I mean, people laugh at this next one, but telephone, the telephone speeded up, the speed of communication was just light speed compared to before.
Chris:And what's really interesting, each time you go through these, you have to peel it back and say, well, what's really happening? Because it's not the telephone, it's not hieroglyphics, it's not a printed book, which is really transforming things. It's more views coming to the table. You're getting a far broader diversification of experience, of forecasting, of thinking. And so what we're seeing now is obviously we've just come through kind of the information revolution, as we like to call it, information technology revolution. I think AI accelerates us even more. And what we're also seeing happening is we're starting to see what I call the age of awareness. So as humans, we're becoming far more aware of not only our impact on the natural environment, but of other viewpoints, other people, our own health, our own wellness. And one of those this is a very long-winded answer one of those is that we're starting to embrace different viewpoints.
Chris:And this is when neurodiversity comes in, and I think really comes in as a massive benefit to not just social planning, but corporations societies, I think, every level. And it's something that's been overlooked simply because how we've classified it in the past, but now we're starting to see it as a real source of creativity, of lateral thinking, different thinking. So that's kind of how this all pulls together.
Russell:Okay, fantastic. So, tell me a little bit more about Future Site. Foresight. Sorry? Future site is completely different. So, science fiction firm, isn't it? Foresight. I'm writing so many notes down here, sadly, I'm using a very small piece of paper, and you'll give me lots to think about.
Chris:Don't worry. My kind of role in professional futures work, or foresight, really comes from I guess my kind of day job as such is I'm a global macro investment strategist. So, I look at how investment markets are working, and obviously to have a real good handle on that, you need to know the wider context. And this is where I became fascinated with trends and megatrends. And this was maybe about ten years ago, and that was when the research for the book Decoding Change came in. And really when I started to realize just why were at this pivotal moment in human history. So, I've talked about the age of awareness, I've talked about information revolutions. But what makes this period so different is that we aren't just seeing change come from one direction. This is why it's such an uncertain and unsettling landscape and why understanding our psychology and neurology is so important.
Chris:So when we look around us today, when we look at the trends and megatrends kind of intertwining and interconnected and driving change, we see everything from demographic change. So by the time we get to mid-century, we could stop talking about overpopulation and suddenly start talking about, oh my word, we're now at the first time in human history where we have global population decline. We could talk about a natural changing environment that we've kind of been blind to for a long time. And now we're suddenly starting to wake up to the kind of the implications of that. We could talk about a global order change, which is kind of underway. The exceptionalism of America is fading. I know that may be contentious issue, but I think we nothing contentious.
Chris:But that's been on the cards for a long time and it's been fading. If we measure it by something like an economic measure such as gross domestic product, we can say it's been fading since the mid eighty s. And then add on to that as everyone's talking about, we have this disruptive technology change, and AI could literally transform. What we know is knowledge, what we know is work, what jobs are there, what careers are there. And in the past 250 years since the Industrial Revolution, all we've really had to deal with is technology change. We had a global order change in the middle. Obviously, Britain was the global order before World War I, and II, and then America took that mantle. But we haven't had some of these other massive changes to deal with. And what I see happening is a massive change in cultural philosophy.
Chris:So that's kind of where my foresight work is. And I try in the book, I try and just provide people with a framework, because we really do, as a human race, have some hurdles to overcome. We really do have some obstacles. And the way I see it is when you look back through human history, as I've said at the start of this conversation, you can't fail to be impressed by humans’ ability to be innovative, adaptable and creative. And I believe I'm an optimist about the future because I think if we can harness those human abilities, we can overcome all of these obstacles. I think the real existential threat to humanity is found in our thinking, because that's the only thing which will stop us finding the solutions. That's quite a big statement, but that's kind of where my research goes.
Russell:Interesting. And so, I know you've written the book, and that's probably a good idea to actually point towards that now so people can get hold of it and unpack this a little bit more depth. Well, let's do that. First of all, test that book. How you get to find out more information about it? Where do you find more information about you?
Chris:Yeah, so, I mean, people can go to either my website so that's Chris Marshall UK, and there's links to the book. And also, kind of I run courses on kind of helping people understand this pivotal moment in change. In terms of the book itself, it's available. Amazon is probably the best for global orders. So, it's called Decoding change. Understanding what the heck's going on and why we should be optimistic about our future. And it's an easy read, it's not an academic one, and it's kind of divided into two main kinds of sections. One is better understanding how the world's changing and getting better at seeing it. And then the second half is really about preparing mentally to be able to see those changes more clearly. And it talks about things like kind of the biases in our thinking, or negative news bias, filter bubbles, echo chambers, all these wonderful things that we have to deal with in our modern world, which can actually stand in the way of us seeing how change is happening.
Russell:Okay, that's fascinating. Who did you write it for?
Chris:I actually wrote it predominantly for my kids. I've got two kids. They're at eleven and 13. And as I said, kind of I think if we can get our thinking right, then we can overcome all the hurdles ahead and we can actually take humanity to the next golden age.
Russell:And I guess the challenge for a lot of children is they're not brought up to think this way. They're brought up to think in terms of feelings. This is a gross what's the word? Generalisation, but almost developed now to sort of celebrate victimhood and to avoid this cognitive rational approach to understand this different side of things. So whilst I'm optimistic, as you are, I do worry somewhat that it needs more campaigning and more robust arguments to be able to persuade those who exist in the land of make believe in Woohoo that we need to get a grip. Really?
Chris:Yeah, absolutely. For me, a great future, a golden future, a promising future, however you want to term it, is well within the grasp of not just the next generation, but the generation after that. As you say, it's about harnessing the basic natural talents of humanity. And I don't think we are I think you're right in that we're not paying attention to optimizing our state to be creative. We're simply standing back and going, oh, the future looks terrible. And that isn't the way we solve anything. When we're pessimistic, we have a very dim view of future, which I think shines through certainly in some of the younger generation.
Russell:Are we pessimistic? Because actually it's not just pessimism, but it's actually a pragmatic reality that we just don't know how.
Chris:Yeah. So, this is how I actually start the book. In chapter one, I actually talk about previous kind of cycles in history and we've always had I'm going to be rather harsh and call them doomsayers. And the issue is that I think it comes back to something you said earlier, was that we fill information to predict and when we do that without really standing back and thinking about what, we're thinking about some metacognition when we're just simply just extrapolating what we see around us. So, let's take some of the targets we have today. Let's say this kind of 1.5-degree target around climate change. People are absolutely right that the progress we're making on a day-to-day basis is not going to achieve our target. But what they're missing is change does not happen in a linear fashion. Innovation is never linear. Innovation has these paradigm shifts and what we find is that there's been countless times before us of people going so I'll use the case of Malthus kind of around the Industrial Revolution, he was like that the population is going to increase exponentially and food is only going to increase linearly.
Chris:Therefore we're going to come to an era where we can't feed people, it's going to be famine, it's going to be warfare. And Malthus was right. On the population side, it did increase exponentially. What he missed was the power of innovation. And food kept up and more through innovation around agriculture, very basic things that we think about today, like a four-field rotation system, but they were revolutionary at the time. And that's exactly kind of the message I have, is we've got to believe in the power of humanity, and I think we've lost that belief and that has an impact on how we see the future and we don't believe we can overcome the obstacles.
Russell:Wow. Well, I could chat with you all day, but I need to respectful of your time, and that's absolutely fascinating. Chris Marshall UK and as we said, the book was decoding Change, available from all good retailers and online retailers, too, and it's been an absolute joy. Chris, thank you so much for your time. I really find it fascinating.
Chris:Thank you. Russell. Thank you so much for having me.
Russell:You take care.