Terence Mauri, acclaimed author and founder of Hack Future Lab, shares the accident that changed the trajectory of his life, explains how risk and reward travel in the same elevator and why regret minimization is important, and talks about the 3 time horizons of AI as a disruptor, warm AI vs cold AI, being a self-confessed failure pioneer, and why we are living in an Age of Wonder, Age of Possibility.  Bonus: a bit of philosophy from Mike Tyson.

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Today's guest is Terence Mauri, a global expert

on the future of leadership, AI and disruption. He is the

founder of the future trends think tank, Hack Future Lab, and

also an acclaimed author. Mauri spearheads a movement for

leaders to rethink leadership in a post AI world. His newest book

is called The Upside of Disruption. It's out right now.

Terence, great to meet you.

Thank you so much, Adam for inviting me.

Absolutely. Well, listen, there's so many amazing

present things to ask you about in terms of your work and the

work you're doing this moment. But one of the things I always

love hearing about from people who have generated a lot of

success in life in their different paths, is their their

roots and their beginnings.

You know, the philosopher Soren Kierkegaard

said that life is best lived forwards, but is best understood

backwards. And I can really relate to that. I had my whole

life and career mapped out in a very linear way. But as as

another famous philosopher, Mike Tyson, once said, you can have

the best laid plans until somebody punches you in the

mouth, and this is what happened to me. So I had a successful

career management consultancy. Things were going well. I was

making good progress. One day, I walked into a store, it was in

the middle of the day, and a car driver lost control and drove a

car into the store. He mounted the car. It was actually a

terrible accident. Nobody lost their lives that day, but many

people were injured, including myself. I woke up under the car

in the store with the wheel of the car still going, burning my

legs. It was one of those kind of accidents where your life

flashes past. You spent a number of weeks in hospital, and you

know when you have time to think when you're out of the building,

that's when you you get to reflect at a deeper level. And

you know, for me, I really sort of it was a reawakening. I

connected with, reconnected, actually, with, you know, my

values, legacy, who I was, who I who I was becoming. And I

realized there was a gap. There was a gap between who I wanted

to become and what I was doing right now in the world of

management consultancy, which is a very transactional world, a

very profitable world, but I wanted to pivot to a

transformational world, a world where actually, I could bring my

life and my values to life in a visceral way and visible way as

well. So that happened about 20 years ago, and since then, I've

been on a mission, a higher mission, to inspire leaders

around the world ranging from NGO and non for profit to S, p5

100, to harness the upside of disruption. What I mean by that

is, you know, sort of turning disruption. It could be career

disruption, technology, disruption, industry,

disruption, life, disruption, whatever the disruption is, big

or small, life changing or professional. How do we turn

that into a tailwind or a platform for focus, laser light,

focus and strategic courage and a more sustainable values driven

life.

There's a lot of risk in going out and doing

something on your own, so I guess what kind of process did

you go through?

I think it's such a great question. It's what I

call a catalytic question, and it's a question that we should

all be thinking about, because our relationship with risk is

often not a good one. Our appetite for risk taking is

often squeezed out of us like a lemon from an early age. By the

age we leave college, you know, we're risk averse, and then

we've got this paradox of companies now demanding that

we're all courageous risk takers, and it's there's a big

rhetoric to reality gap there. And for me, I think that

accident reconfigured my relationship with risk, that you

know life is inherently risky. You can you can die at any

moment. Basically the worst thing we can do is actually not

take any risk, because being addicted to certainty can make

us feel comfortable. But if that certainty is also causing a

stagnation or inertia, we're not learning anymore. We're not

moving anymore. We're accept accepting a status quo that's

not healthy or does not giving us happiness. Well, that's not a

good place to be, and we know that if you look at different

statistics around the world, whether it's the game. Develop

engagement survey. I mean, that hasn't changed for decades. Now,

majority of the global workforce disengaged, but still go to

work, but have mentally quit the job, right? You know, life is

short, like we're lucky. We get about 960, months to live, which

is just 80 years of age. And when you think of it that way,

when I frame it that way, it's not to make people feel scared.

It's this idea that it's never been easier to waste time and

waste energy, because this is the age of abundance. Also, we

have technology that's incredible, but technology can

make the trivial seem urgent. Think about when you look at

your day, reacting to emails all the day, everything seems

exciting and urgent. Probably less than 5% is actually

important. So I think for me, what it did was a couple of

things. Number one, it was a great reawakening, and it helped

me to reconnect with the idea that not taking a risk is a risk

sometimes. Number two, that actually the world will always

be uncertain, will always be volatile, and risk and reward

always come together, wrapped together. We forget that risk

and will reward travel in that same elevator, and sometimes we

forget that actually, you know this idea that we always

overestimate the risk of trying something new could be a new way

of working. It could be taking a career break. It could be

applying for a new job and a new sector, whatever it is, we

always overestimate the risk of doing something new, and we

always underestimate the risk of standing still.

I love that. You founded a Hack Future Lab, which

is focused on future trends as a think tank. How do you define

disruption?

Disruption, for me, is a secular and structural

here to stay, inflection point. But there's different types of

disruptors out there. If we look at mega trends, for example,

we've got optimizer reality that's moving from doing AI to

being AI. That means, for example, five to five we're

moving from IT spending as a percentage of global GDP, moving

from five to 10% over the next seven years to optimize reality.

That's a big here to stay, disruption that will impact and

reshape and redefine value creation, but also redefine

completely new industries and companies. Another example would

be decarbonization, the whole the whole transition to the

green economy around the world. So these are big bang

disruptions, but if we take it down to a more granular level,

you know, disruption can also be a family disruption. It could be

a divorce, a sudden death. Could be a career type disruption. But

actually, how we deal with them? I think it's this kind of point

of view that asking this question, how do I turn these

disruptors into platforms, into tailwinds? You know, how do we

turn these into upside.

It's a great skill to have for anyone, but in

particular for leaders, I feel like to be able to recognize

that every obstacle has inside of itself the key to its own

solution.

I think so. I think constraints are often

opportunities in disguise. You know, for example, Hermes, the

global luxury company, one of the big constraints facing, you

know, the fashion industry is this, you know, the idea that

they're not sustainable business models. They waste a lot of a

lot of money. They've got high carbon dioxide emissions. So for

Hermes, what they've done is turn that constraint into upside

by creating new strategic partnerships with biotech

companies. They develop and kind of produce mycelium, which is a

non leather based form of leather. It's kind of like a

mushroom based type of leather, alternative to leather. And the

big, the kind of big, audacious goal at Hermes now is that at

least half its global revenues will be mycelium based leather

by 2030 now, that wouldn't have happened without turning a

disruption into a tailwind.

So you know, one of the big disruptors that we

keep hearing that's AI. So how are you seeing leaders react to

AI? And how can we best harness this trend without getting

caught up in it?

I think it's helpful to take a historical

perspective first of all. So we go back to 1956 Professor Marvin

Minsky, for example. He was one of the pioneers of AI. And

originally it was going to be called Applied Statistics, but

that wasn't sexy enough. I think there are three kind of time

horizons to be aware of. So the first one was excitement phase.

It took chat GBT two months to reach 100 100 million users. It

took the cell phone 16 years to reach 100 million users. And so

the excitement phase, I think, has happened over the last

couple of years, especially, we've seen over a trillion

dollars of CapEx going. To AI infrastructure, over two $50

billion of VC money as well. That's going up exponentially.

So at that excitement phase, we've now moved to the

experimental phase, for example, T Mobile and open aI have just

formed a partnership for a sort of proactive AI decision in

making model that will be able to proactively help solve

customers pain points. You know, three phases. Number one,

excitement phase, exuberance. Excitement. Number two is the

experimental phase that I believe we're in right now. The

next phase, the next horizon, which we'll be entering over the

next 18 months, is the embedded phase, and that's where, you

know, actually AI eventually will be just become invisible.

Every great technology, if it's truly great, should be

invisible. It'll be embedded in our cell phones, in our

toothbrushes, in our TVs. A trillion sensor economy

connected together, amplifying intelligence, cross pollination,

helping tackle some of the world's biggest existential

challenges, from climate change to healthcare. And we're at the

embryonic stage of that. But you it doesn't take much imagination

to to think about where we're going with this over the next

couple of years, that the the sort of cost of production, the

cost of knowledge production, is going to reach zero in the next

15 years. It would take you a lifetime to read 8 billion

words. Now imagine that you know the fastest AI today can can do

that in the blink of an eye, and again, we can start to see the

exponential opportunity of this platform. But I want to say as

well that we have to be careful of artificial idiocy. Am I

investing in warm AI or cold AI? So warm AI is humanity first AI?

It's a humanity first future enabled by AI. It maximizes,

elevates what makes us more human, and it protects Well,

being, loneliness, democracy, truth and transparency. That's

warm. Ai, the bad news is right now, most governments, most

organizations, are not investing in warm. Ai, they're investing

in cold. AI, cold. AI is machine first future enabled by AI. It

elevates division, disinformation, truth decay, it

erodes well being. And so that's the difference. Are we investing

in a warm tech future or a cold tech future?

For so many of our listeners that are business

owners themselves. You talk about the return on

intelligence, what are some things leaders can do to prepare

their organizations for AI and adopt it effectively?

What a great question. I think, the question

every leader, every manager, should be thinking about right

now, which is to use AI in the right way and an inclusive way,

sustainable way, in a way that sharpens the growth and talent

agenda. We should be thinking about ROI, which is not just

return on investment, but this new human centric KBI, key

behavior indicator, which is return on intelligence, return

on imagination. Imagine a cognitively enabled enterprise

where your talent gets to solve the biggest problems, the

biggest challenges that it faces. That means 10x

productivity, 10x engagement, 10x execution. We know that

that's not the reality for most organizations right now. I just

had an article published a few weeks ago in Fast Company called

the rise of bore out, which is the opposite of burnout. Bore

out is cognitive or emotional under load. It's boredom at

work, and it's at record levels. And so if AI is just doing parts

of the job which we're already doing, and what we're left with

is other boring parts of the job that's not return on

intelligence. And so that's a big question. We should be using

AI to speak to insight, speak to innovation, speed to decision,

velocity for creating new scenarios, new you know, new

products, new services, new platforms, testing out

hypotheses. You know, it's a generative tool. The clue is in

the name, but my worry is that many C suite are just looking at

AI to automate, to make cost savings and to just focus on a

very narrow metric, which is shareholder return.

Sure. This is just maybe a quick question for

you. Is a form of disruption, to disrupt technology by being more

in person?

Yes, I think so. I really think so. Because, as I

said, when the cost of this technology is coming to zero and

everybody has access to the same tools, the same technologies,

it's more difficult to stand out. Ironically, everyone's got

access. Everyone can set up the great website, the great.

Podcast, the great YouTube channel, but how do you stand

out? The value of that goes down. This is one of the

ironies, and I think a lot of people don't think about that.

And it's there's a reason why naught point naught. 1% of

people make money on Spotify or tick tock or YouTube, and that

number is even going down more. We've got to be so careful. I

call it the curse of sameness. Write about it a lot in the new

book, The upside disruption. So yes, ironically, sharpening your

human edge, your in person edge, is going to be the superpower

that differentiates you. Gives you that distinctive quality in

the sea of sameness and sea of commoditization that we're in,

and that's why making the effort to go to these in person events,

speaking at them, contributing to them, panels. This is a part,

an important part, of the human edge. Yes, use the tools around

us. You'd be stupid not to. But don't think that it's going to

be easy just doing it that way. Yes, there'll be a percentage

that managed to do it. But my fear is that when everything

come comes to zero cost. Everyone has access to the same

incredible tools. Well, actually it's much more difficult to

stand out and so that in person, human edge, the that social

skills, emotional intelligence, conversational listening, being

fully present. These going to be important. Human skills, human

skills, Courage skills, these are the skills that we need to

nurture and sharpen for the next generation.

What walls have you encountered in building

something? I love allowing our listeners insight that when you

choose to take a risk, that it doesn't necessarily mean a

pathway paved in gold, it comes with a lot of potholes.

I love that question because disruption is

about humility. And what I mean by humility is the ability to

the capacity, the awareness to know your blind spots, to be

aware of the blind spots that you're blind to, but also

understanding that failure and setback and obstacle is one half

of of success. And as Ryan Holiday says so eloquently, you

know, the obstacle is the way, disruption is the way. And you

know, I'm a self confessed failure pioneer. Yeah, I failed

multiple times in order to get where I am today, multiple

setbacks, multiple rejections, book rejections, client

rejections. You know, 30% of what I do is keynotes

conferences around the world. But you know often you're

you're, you know, when you're chosen, you're, you've been

chosen out of like maybe five or six or eight other great

speakers. So you get rejected a lot. You know, 90% of the time

it's a rejection. Now I could choose two ways to respond to

that. I could say, one, I'm going to give up because I'm

good. You know, my ratio of rejection is so high, so I'm

just not going to do that. Or two, recognize that actually

anything worthwhile in life requires resilience, requires

persistence, requires grit, and that's been the big lesson for

me. I'm here because I've overcome probably more failures

than the average person, and that's been painful, but I've

made pain part of the process and understand that if I'm not

hurting, I'm not growing.

You know I just want to spend one more minute on

this; people, and their relationship to risk is that

they don't understand that a lot of life can be, a little bit

like a game of baseball, and that if you're batting 20 to 30%

it's good batting average.

Yeah.

Most of life, we're not trained to embrace

rejection or misses or missed swings that way we're treated.

We treat it as an ultimate failure, which then generally

means I'm not good enough.

Yes.

For you, where did this light switch flip? Or where

do you? Where could you trace it back to say, this is the moment

where I kind of changed my relationship to failure?

I think it goes back to that life disruption,

life or death moment, life flashing past you, which you

realize you can have your whole life that mapped out that linear

way become obsessed with success and avoidance of failure, and

that's not real life. You know, being stripped down and being

made very vulnerable, nearly losing my life, actually was the

wake up call to me that, you know, we've life is about. Life

is risk. And actually the biggest regret, one of the

things to help our listeners and viewers today is when you get to

the end of your life, and I hope it's a long life, 8090, years of

age, or 100 the number one regret, according to research,

is a lack of courage. That when you look back, the biggest

regret you'll have in your lives, when you look back at

your 90 years will be the amount of times that you didn't you

didn't step up. The lack of courage, the courage to think

bit bolder, the courage to say no, the courage to walk away

from something that wasn't working for you, to courage to

start over. This is our number one regret at the end of our

lives, and we can use this knowledge in advance of getting

to 90 years of age to our advantage and do what you know.

Steve, Steve Jobs or Jeff Bezos used to do very well, which is

regret minimization. To get to imagine that you're 70 years old

and say, what would I regret most not doing when I look back?

Is it not having kids? Is it not starting that business? Is it

not, you know, yeah, hitting that C level in my company.

Whatever it is, success is very personal. But just remember, you

know, at the end of our lives, the number one regret is a lack

of courage. And actually, one half of courage is the ability

to embrace failure and recognize that that is a stepping stone to

where you want to be. It's not necessary. And of course, there

are different types of failures as well. By the way, productive

failures, intelligent failures, stupid failures. So we have to

be careful here as well and understand the nuances. But the

one thing to take away is we need to reframe our relationship

with productive failure and recognize that it's also an

important part of success.

What do you think when you are spending time as an

entrepreneur mentor for MIT, or you're you know, you're speaking

at some universities and engaging with this next

generation that's coming out, what do you see there? Do you

see a group of young women and men that are have that new

definition of failure? Or do you feel we need to be able to

manufacture somehow, for some of these people, maybe not a life

threatening situation, but something that that shakes them

up in how they perceive what we're discussing?

What I love about Generation Alpha is this

incredible vision aspirational, and I think it's very nuanced,

the culturally context and culture demographics, whether

it's Africa or North America or Europe, there's a different risk

appetite out there depending on geography, and so that's that's

a big deal. But the good news is, it can be unlearned and

relearned as well, for sure. And what I love about my work at MIT

is every year we host MIT solve, and the purpose of MIT solve is

to create a generation of solvers. We post Grand

Challenges, global challenges that the world faces, for

example, climate change, lack of literacy, healthcare challenges,

and we give people anywhere in the world, the opportunity to

pitch tech based solutions to those global challenges, and one

of those examples recently was for people with Alzheimer's.

There was a young student called Emma Yang. Her grandmother was

diagnosed with Alzheimer's, or dementia. It's a terrible

disease. One in seven people will get it in their lifetime.

And you know, being a very an introvert and a mathematician,

she framed this as a hypothesis, and she created an app called

Timeless. The purpose of the app timeless is to help people with

dementia stay reconnected to their memories, reconnected to

their families through geo tagging, facial recognition

gamification, received over a million dollars of wealth of

investment since she since inception. This is a great

example of generations solve. This is a great example of what

can happen when the cost you imagine, the costs of doing this

10 years ago, would have been prohibited. It would cost

millions of dollars to set up an app and test it, scale it. Now,

you can do all of this. You can go from idea to iteration to

implementation within hours or days, and obviously that's

accelerated even more with AI. So for me, this is not the age

of disruption, by the way. This is the age of wonder, the age of

possibility, and the only limit is our imagination.

Yeah, I was at a longevity dinner, and it was

very interesting to hear people talk about how quickly and

exponentially medical and health disruption is occurring, and

that the key takeaway from this speaker was that if you can live

10 more years, you'll solve most of your problems that you'll

have in the future, and probably add another 20 to your life.

It's so exciting, isn't it? Ray Kurzweil,

Singularity University has written a book recently where he

really deep dives into this as well. And you know, I was in

Doha big you know, future of tech, future of AI Summit, and

you know, just some of the stats, you know, the facts and

insights coming out are so exciting. This idea that, you

know, we've now got, you know, chips that are the it can be

scaled to DNA, and they can hold billions of transistors. That's

actually happening. It's not, it's not science fiction. So

science fiction has become science flag. And I think you're

right. If we can hold on for at least another time, 10 years,

it's going to be one hell of a ride.

And stay tuned. We'll continue this conversation

with Terence in Episode 479 of The Action Catalyst.