Have you ever wondered what the future holds like for everyone? Have you assessed the past to understand your present to eventually predict what’s going to happen? In this episode, Stephen Jaye talks with Chet Sisk about the future of humanity and taking another direction. Chet Sisk is a futurist, entrepreneur, author, consultant, speaker and workshop developer. He helps organizations see through the crisis of the moment in order to create plans for the immediate future. Do something different. Make an impact. Tune into this episode! Let’s pull things together, talk about innovation, empowerment, explore your options, and dive deep into the future.
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Predictions On The Future Of Humanity With Futurist Chet Sisk
I’d like to talk to you about the future, planning for the future, imagining what trends are going, what possible worlds could have emerged in the future is an important part of any endeavor. Whatever endeavor you’re looking to take on or are currently taking on, this is an important aspect of it. It’s an aspect that I had been thinking about for quite some time. I had always been interested in speculating about possible future scenarios.
However, I’m relatively new to the field of futurism, which contrary to popular belief is not about predicting specific events. It’s more about imagining some possible future scenarios and also figuring out what we all need to do to be prepared to live in this world that is emerging. My guest, Chet Sisk, is a futurist as well as the Founder of Universal Basic Resources. Chet, welcome to the show.
Thank you, Stephen, for having me. It is my pleasure and honor to be here, absolutely.
Thank you for joining us. Just so that we hear it straight from you and get my readers oriented, in your own words, what is futurism? What does it mean to be a futurist?
A futurist is at least my interpretation is that you’re a glorified journalist. I came from a journalism background and what journalists tend to do is follow a story in a usual 24-to-48-hour news cycle. Talk about what it means and the characters involved. Futurism does the same process, except it carries that particular story outside of the usual news cycle into decades, maybe even centuries so that you still look for the impact, and how it affects society and all of those things. It’s just a bigger version as far as I’m concerned of journalism. I have to say that I use four elements that work for me when I’m doing a prediction. I shouldn’t even say use the word prediction because that’s not quite accurate.
It’s more about making an assessment as to what’s happening and then saying, “This is what’s happening. This is how this happening will probably affect your immediate world.” I use my journalism skills in order to follow the story, to dig down and say, “Where did this come from? What does it mean?” Two, if it’s a really important story, I’ll go to the tip of the spear to talk to the people on the front end of whatever that story is and ask them, “What’s going on? What’s happening?” and they’ll tell you.
Three, You use historical context. Like, “Have we ever seen this before? Where does this come from?” The fourth thing is that you use your intuitive self to try to wrap your arms around what’s happening and say, “Have I seen this before intuitively in my own experience? What do I think it will mean?” You put all those things together and then you come back and you say, “This is what I’m thinking is going to happen.” Not a guarantee. It’s just an assessment.
I never thought of it as being as connected to journalism as you had mentioned but there’s definitely an aspect especially the whole looking back into the past. Futurism is about a story that’s unfolding and things have already happened or similar events had happened in the past and imagining what’s going to continue onward.
The great challenge of our time is being able to create this kind of introspection. All of us have played a part in this, either by our complicity to it all our silence, our biases, our unconscious contributions. Click To TweetFor someone that’s starting up their own endeavor, say someone’s starting up a restaurant in Five Points. It’s a neighborhood in Denver, East of Downtown that has rapidly gentrified, for lack of a better way to put it. How would this person utilize this futurism process in their own life? What would this person starting up a restaurant need to do in the futurism realm to be prepared?
One of the things about being an entrepreneur is that you really don’t have time to do all of this assessment stuff and what are the future projections for the community. You have to do some basic stuff in order to see if this is a good market for you or a good place on location. That’s true. What you do is that you get futurists to come and try to give context like, “This is how we think this is going to occur.” These are the other elements in society that will affect your business. Not just if you set up at this particular corner, you’ll get a good traffic flow but more like should you even be in this particular business. How will the pandemic affect what you do going forward?
What’s the workforce going to look like in just a few years? If you seek to expand, you want to know what that looks like whether or not there’ll be employees available for your restaurant. What about the product that you serve? What does that look like over the next few years? I can think about if you have a fish restaurant, people are running into a challenge with wild-caught salmon because there are fewer in the environment.
A trend person, a futurist looks at those things and says, “Is that the business you want to get into based around what we’re seeing as projections?” Those things, big picture stuff. When you’re an entrepreneur, your window is like this. You’re just trying to make sure that the bills are paid, the lights are on, employees are paid and you have a product that comes in. You get a futurist to help you to get the bigger context so that you can start to think about it from a long-term perspective.
Is that a common story? People looking at what they’re doing only in the context of the world of now and not thinking about the world of 3, 5, 10, 20 years from now. I say 3 to 5 especially when you talk about the workforce, we’re in a time of fairly rapid change in the workforce, given the pandemic, showing people working from home more effectively than a lot of people had previously imagined. A lot of people especially people in my generation, demanding something different, almost quitting jobs. They’re saying, “Why are you making us come back to the office five days a week?” Stuff like that. Was this a common problem that you see only looking at the world of now?
Absolutely. Part of that is our culture. US culture is deeply embedded into the immediate return and quite frankly, the climate crisis is the result of short-term thinking and gratification. It is a testament to the faulty behavior of short-term thinking. This may sound a little political but when you start to burn your own house down, it means that your thinking process is faulty.
There’s something wrong with short-term thinking, it does not connect the dots to future generations because of the fact that our emphasis is on immediate gratification and materialism, there is no thought outside of the next quarter. It’s not people talking about, “We don’t think about the next five years.” I’m like, “People don’t think about the next quarter.”
The entire emphasis is about stakeholder gratification, making sure that people are able to get there in the quarter. That’s just unsustainable, no matter how you cut it. There’s no sustainability and no validation in it. That validation is coming true through the crises, the series of crises that we have now. Even the pandemic, the bottom line is that we had an opportunity to get in front of it. We drifted because leadership was all about, “How can I get mine now?” It’s just an unsustainable practice, which is why futurists really are counter to that. We helped to emphasize the whole idea of thinking about this thing holistically, our future and getting out of these short cycles.
It’s interesting because I’ve previously talked in previous episodes and I talk a lot in general day-to-day life about all the different problems that have come from this short-term thinking. A lot of our problems with our work culture that’s led to the pre-pandemic survey on Gallup had only about 20% of people engaged in their jobs.
A lot of that as well as some of the loneliness crisis and everything else coming from the instant gratification culture of it’s easy to post a picture on Instagram and get a bunch of likes but to build a genuine relationship with another human being takes time. You got to show up and be there. It seems to me that as a futurist one of your key roles is combating this and getting people to think more long-term.
One of the things I’m wondering is also as a futurist and monitoring trends, do you see this getting better in the near 5-to-10-year horizon? Do you see more people switching to thinking a little bit more long-term to thinking entrepreneurs have to do a little bit of it? Building a business takes a couple of years to build something in a day in, day out, you’re working and not getting the reward until later. Do you see this trend? Do you see us moving back toward more longer-term thinking in the US and the rest of the Western world?
No, I don’t. We have a death grip on short-term thinking in that process. The only thing that comes to mind is that we had a flex point, where if we don’t do something else then everything will collapse. It’s like that MIT report that said that civilization will collapse by 2040. It will happen before then. All of that is based on short-term thinking.
They said we have to do something else. There may be a flex point that will get us to the point of saying, “We can’t continue to do this. This is crazy.” Now, we haven’t proven that we’re ready to go there. Even in the face of the climate crisis, threats to democracy, income inequality, all the pandemics and such, most people don’t recognize this but there is a suicide, depression, opioid, deaths of despair, a pandemic that’s happening in this country.
Apparently, those things aren’t enough to get us to the place of saying, “D***, we should do something else.” What futurists, at least what I seek to do is at least give us a reference to a proof-of-concept model that may have worked at another time. I do know that there were models in our past and not just in the Western past but around the world that did say, “There’s another way to live. You may not necessarily be able to get that Frappuccino and five minutes from your nearest Starbucks but it is probably a better quality of life-based around everything that we’re seeing now.” There were some ancient cultures that did things much slower.
Our culture is deeply embedded in immediate return and the climate crisis is the result of short-term thinking and gratification. Click To TweetI know that there is a movement in Italy called the Slow Life Movement where they’re saying, “Maybe globalization and all this fast, get it together stuff is not serving us.” The evidence is all around us but we haven’t been moved enough to say, “We’re going to take another direction.” My job is to say, “Let’s go see if we can find some proof-of-concept models that did exist to say, “Is there another life that we can migrate to?” I want to be clear. I am not talking about throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
You can take the technology and the concepts of the past and merge them. In fact, we have to merge them into something else in order to create a different world. I don’t know if we’re up to the task. That’s a great challenge. A futurist like myself will say, “This is what we see. Here are some possibilities, some directions we can go to.” We’re at that place where we have to see whether or not we’re going to meet the moment. I don’t know if we will, it’s even money at this particular time. We’ve been so entrenched into instant gratification and every man for himself model that hasn’t been championed by Western thought for such a long time. We think that it’s the way that humankind has always behaved but it’s just that we’ve been in it for so long.
I ran into a guy and he said, he’d rather watch this b**** burn than the share or do something different. That becomes problematic for everybody because if you’re in a position of power, you’re able to keep things the way that they are, even while the house is burning. There’s an opportunity for us to get rid of the CEOs that if they’re doing a terrible job, they’re basically sacking the entire company. The first thing you ought to do is get the Board of Directors together and other stakeholders and say, “You are through.” We’re apparently not there yet or those voices are being silenced by the management to keep us from voicing that.
You would never run a company that way ever. No one would. They sit back and say, “You sack the whole lot of them.” You vote in a new management team that takes the company in a different direction, as opposed to watching the company destroy itself. No one would do that. For some reason, we have yet to arrive at that point. That’s our great challenge. We absolutely have to take a different take.
You talk about taking a different take and some past precedencies or some past proof of concepts. If my readers were to take away three items, three things that we can incorporate into our thinking, into our day-to-day life, that will incorporate some of these aspects of these past cultures that found a more sustainable path, what would those three things be?
There’s something to be said about antiquity. A lot of times, we don’t like to look at the past. I don’t know about you but when I grew up the past was always seen as primitive or demonized but what the past provided were some models that said, “We may not have flying cars but we were sustainable.” There’s an ancient African concept called Ubuntu. It basically said, “I am because we are, we are because I am.” The concept is all things and all people are connected. Imagine thinking about a climate crisis if we ever got to that place but through the lens of Ubuntu, you say, “Everything is connected.”
Some of the practices that we try, we’re doing now, we have to discontinue because it is damaging an extension of ourselves and that will be the planet. That would change leadership immediately. There was also back in indigenous cultures, there was a feminine aesthetic. We call it Feminine Principled Leadership, where the first questions that you ask are, “Is everybody all right? Share your stuff, be kind to others, do the right thing.” As my mother would say, “Make sure you have on clean underwear.” I could never figure out what that meant.
That doesn’t matter.
She will always say that like, “Just in case you’re in an accident.” I’m like, “Mom, I’m thinking that if I’m in an accident, they’re not going to be really thinking about whether I have clean underwear.” She’s always like doing it. The bottom line is that Feminine Principled Leadership is that you think about others first as a part of your process, your way through the world.
Those two things, the Ubuntu, the feminine aesthetic and the whole aspect of the Slow Movement. The Slow Movement is trying to recapture the idea of value inside of communities. That community is key. As you were speaking about earlier, this whole aspect of being alone and separated and how these things are haunting current society because people are not connected anymore.
Ancient cultures understood the power of connection and community and want to define ways of emphasizing this because they knew that that was the lifeblood of the quality of life. When you wanted a powerful quality of life, it was really around making sure that you were connected to other people, that community would look out for you, that everybody shared stuff. They had the community garden and all of those things modern society has taken us away from that. It still demonized that.
It started with the idea of the nuclear family. Now, we have social media that separates us from other folks too. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not against social media. Social media is a great compliment to connection but it can’t be a substitute for connection. That’s why we have anxiety and depression, a pandemic that’s happening in this country.
The whole aspect of re-establishing community thinking about things from a Feminine Principled Leadership version, where we think about others first and foremost whether or not we’re sharing and then the African principle of Ubuntu, recognizing that we are all connected. We’re connected to everything and everyone. There’s not, “I’m going to get mine and good luck to you.” Even though the billionaires are trying to get to Mars, there’s no place for us to go. We need to work this out with each other here.
Community is also another thing that I placed a lot of importance on. I’ve already had several interviews with different community leaders who are trying to bring people together in different circumstances. I definitely do also see loneliness and this disconnection behind a lot of these other epidemics or pandemics that we’ve forgotten about because of COVID.
What you’re saying is just absolutely on point. The idea that the loneliness epidemic is absolutely is stunning. It keeps showing up in the stats. What is it 5, 6 years in a row now that we have a declining life expectancy in a modern Western country? If we’re going to live less than we did in say 2000 because of the fact that there is the opioid, the obesity epidemic, which is obscene.
The deaths of despair you were mentioning.
The deaths of despair thing are people really haven’t really figured this out. Now it’s manifesting through the uptick in crime that we’re seeing and that’s directly related to the pandemic but it’s also a trend as people are actualizing the frustration they’re having with these multiple crises.
There's always another way to live. Click To TweetI don’t want to paint a sad story but I have to at least get us to the point of recognizing that we’re beyond in trouble. We literally have to reimagine everything that we know in order to make this thing work. Otherwise, we may be a footnote and perhaps other civilizations never got to this point but you and I talked about this one other time about the charter call point, the Charter Call Theory. I have to share this quickly. I’m a science fiction geek. I like all of this stuff. The whole Charter Call point that people talk about other civilizations that may exist in our universe but where are they.
Many of them probably got to the place where we did but didn’t make it because of this inflection point, there’s a filter that exists that says, “You’re going to have to become something extra. Above and beyond anything that you know, in order to get to the next point of civilization.” I believe that’s where we are now.
We’re facing that challenge.
I tend to think of it as a gift. We had these long-term systemic crises, systemic racism, income inequality, misogyny, wars, rumors of war and pollution. Now, climate crisis, those things were not sustainable. They have gone on for too long. All the crises are just coming to this point about asking us to do something else other than what we’ve done.
To me, it’s an opportunity for us to say, “Let’s re-imagine how society works. Let’s lead by example.” That’s an opportunity that will get us to that level one civilization, that the Charter Call Theory talks about. We can make it. Like I said earlier, it’s even money but if we do get to the place of creating something special and gathering all of our wits about us and pulling people together, utilizing some of the theories and practices of the ancients, bringing them forward with the new technology, we could make it. It sounds like it’s a dramatic and a bridge too far for most of society.
I’ve learned this more than anything, never underestimate the human ability to rally. We can rally. We’ve seen it before. We’ve done it. This is bigger than anything else that I’ve seen historically but it doesn’t mean that we don’t lack the ability to rally.
First, I want to orient my readers in case people are not familiar. I know I wasn’t familiar when you first brought it up this theory about the level one society and what that means. Do you have a link or a web address that you can provide to my readers if people want to look a little bit more into this concept?
I don’t agree with everything that they do. I don’t agree with everything my wife said either. There’s a series on YouTube called Unveiled and they produce a series of videos that just challenged the thought process that says, “What happens if we’re at an inflection point that’s asking us to become greater?” They go into detail about what would level 1, level 2, level 3, level 5 civilizations look like if we made it through the filter but every civilization and this is all just projection. They’re just imagining it. They say, “What if this is that filter point for us that’s asking us to become greater?” I’m like, “I’m with that. That’s absolutely correct.”
The tools are there for us to make it to become level one but we really have to rally the troops in a way that we’ve never done before. You’re right to bring this up at the beginning of our conversation, that the loneliness and despair are so real. It’s making people, unwilling to even do anything. They just want to just Netflix and chill. They don’t want to do anything else. They’re like, “I can’t handle anything more.” There was a report in the Harvard Business Review that said, “We weren’t meant to navigate this level of uncertainty. We don’t have the skills or even the capacity as human beings to navigate this level of uncertainty.”
People are overwhelmed. They’re just like, “I can’t handle it.” Where we become important in your audience for sure is that some of us are just going to have to step forward and be brave. Just be brave and show that bravery to the rest of our peers, people, communities. People are losing hope and they’re falling fast. Not brave like go out, do a rally and make people angry. The cult of grievance, watch out for that. There is a cult of grievance out there were people, all they want to do is talk about all the things.
It’s everywhere.
All they want to do is talk about what they’re not getting.
There’s a difference between talking about what’s wrong and doing something about it.
That’s the culture that we’ll have to create. It’s one that says, “We are going to do something else because we know it’s important and knows it may work, it may not but there is hope because we’re going to do this,” and that is completely different cult of grievance.
The guests that I brought in onto this show thus far and will continue to bring in going forward, represent to one degree or another, this set of brave people. Some of them have started up some community groups and other ways to combat loneliness. One of the problems that I observed and one of the reasons why we might be so lonely is that it used to be that there were places you would naturally run into other human beings. Without having to plan, without having to send a text message, create an event, you would run into them. If you run into people enough times, you eventually form connections. You form relationships with those people. Nowadays, in a lot of social circles, it’s all ad hoc.
It all involves someone having to step up and plan. There was a lot of way more minor heroes or people that say, “Here’s my community of people, here are my five best friends.” I’m going to be the one that starts that group text chain and says, “Let’s all go to this concert or let’s go all of this bar tonight.” Although they’re not the heroes you think of in the big picture, they are being heroic in a way in how they’re bringing people together and making sure that the people around them don’t lose the connections with them as well as with each other in their circles.
I want to add a little something to exactly what you’re saying because you are right. Now, we’re going to have to elevate those voices because people need to hear that these brave people exist and there is hope. Unfortunately, what’s happening is that the cult of grievance has taken over the airwaves. They’re louder. People with grievances tend to get really loud. They have a big microphone and there’s money to be made in these grievances. We’re going to have to elevate the voices of what I’m doing. This is how I’m combating this. I’m grateful for your show by just making sure that people know that folks exist but we’re going to have to do a hell of a lot more in order to meet this moment because we’re out of time. We have an intractable loud voice of grievance that’s drowning the rest of us out. Anything to get those voices, those people who are doing something, those proof-of-concept models that are in place.
One of the things from an individual standpoint is the battle we all try to have in our head between the easy way out and the more challenging but oftentimes more rewarding way out. When you have a problem, this could be anything, the easiest thing to do is to feel that instant moment of vindication. To feel like, “It’s all those people’s fault. It’s all the other side of the aisle’s fault whether it’s politics or this group of people.”
First of all, look inside yourself. Like it or not, nearly every single person in some way or another contributes to this. We all created this. The easiest thing you can do when you’re home and tired is flip on the TV or scroll through social media. It’s harder to call a friend and to decide what place you’re going to or harder to start a group text but it’s often more rewarding to do that.
Find some proof of concept models that did exist that could give us the opportunity to look into another life that we can migrate to. Click To TweetA lot of the decisions we make there’s the easy way but there’s the way that requires a little bit more effort but gathers a little bit more reward. I see that. Come to think of it, one of the biggest challenges that we all have in our minds is how do we consistently decide I’m not going to take this easy way. The vindication of that person with the big megaphone and the talk show with 30 million followers, “I’m vindicated. It’s not my fault.” That’s great. What are we going to do about it now?
That’s the great challenge of our time. It is being able to create this introspection, “What’s my part in this?” You’re absolutely right. All of us have played a part in this, either by our complicity to it all, our silence, biases, unconscious contribution, all kinds of things. We were a part of it. To me, that’s the part that gives me the juice knowing that I have contributed to it.
It makes me say, “I’m responsible.” There’s an accountability element that has to kick in. People are like, “No guilt, shame and stuff.” I’m like, “Forget about guilt, shame. Let’s talk about accountability and the generations to come, our kids and everything else.” That part is constantly being sidelined by the cult of grievance.
Unfortunately, we’ve fostered that as a way of life. We’ve fostered the idea that it’s not my fault as a way of life. Whenever I do DEI work, people always come back and say, “My parents didn’t have slaves and I don’t understand why you’re approaching me about this.” It’s not whether or not your parents or you or anybody else had enslaved Africans as part of your portfolio.
It’s about what do we do now in order to make this thing right so that we power our entire community as opposed to isolating and saying, “I’m not responsible,” which is always the death now. Anytime people get to the place of saying, “I’m not responsible or I’m not accountable,” we’re toast, no society can survive masses of people not being accountable for the well-being of the society. No society can survive that. Look at the ancient Romans. I constantly use them as a form of reference but it doesn’t match up that neatly with where we are but there was an element where people just didn’t care.
There was no one that was accountable. Lack of accountability always precipitated the collapse of the society or even a civilization. There has to be something I’m not quite sure what it is. All I know is that if we keep providing proof of concept models of another way forward, we have a shot. We have an opportunity. This doesn’t mean that our proof of concepts will work in the same way. It does provide us with an opportunity to create something that could be really special and could save our lives and the lives of generations to come.
Once you disconnect, I don’t care how you cut it. If you create a level of disconnection from the planet, from other people, from yourself, you are toast. It doesn’t mean it can’t be recovered. You can recover your connection with self, with other people and with the planet but you’re going to have to stop and say, “What ideas have I held for so long that would precipitate this level of disconnection.” To me, the real challenge is the idea that the Western concept of every man for himself, it’s crazy or rugged individualism.
They try to dress it up and call it rugged individualism. I know some of the readers will probably disagree with me on this but rugged individualism says that you don’t need anybody else in you’re the lone Wolf. You come in and save the day. That’s not how human beings were designed or when we were at our most effective. We’re effective when we work in the community when we’re connected to each other. Once we do the disconnection, we become selfish, self-indulgent and we’re willing to sacrifice our planet just so that we could get ours. That’s insane. That’s a form of insanity. That level of connection is the key.
The one thing I’d like to add and make sure that I point out on this is that whole, “This isn’t my fault. I’m not responsible.” It’ll make you feel better for a couple of minutes, maybe an hour, maybe even a day but in the long run, it doesn’t, it takes the power away from you. One last thing I want to make sure we cover before we wrap up. Your organization, Universal Basic Resources, what do you essentially do? How the readers that may be looking to get ahold of you and want to talk to you about futurism or Universal Basic Resources would go about contacting you?
You can write me directly at Chet@ChetSisk.com. I respond to almost all of my emails every once in a while, get something where people just want to rag and say massive things. Believe it or not, I get hate mail. Can you believe that?
I am. I learned a while back that almost anything you do if you get noticed, you’re going to get hate.
It’s crazy. If you’re going to write some hate stuff, please don’t but if you have some ideas and some suggestions or you just want to make contact with me and my group of colleagues that I work with, please write me directly, go to our website, which is www.UniversalBasicResources.com. We have a new website that’s coming up and we’re really excited about it.
We have a team of people who work with me in Futurism that basically are designed to do one thing, provide us with hope going forward in changing times. The thing that I’ve noticed more than anything is that, in a time of challenge and crisis people really just need a direction forward. Otherwise, you’re only stuck with the voices of doom and gloom. There are some people that are sections in our society that want to blow everything up.
They just want everything to get toasted. That’s all they want. It’s part of their religious belief. Some of it’s part of the cultural belief. They just want to blow stuff up. They’re neolistic, Ms. Self-sabotaging and suicidal, unfortunately. However, what we’re doing is that we’re providing like, “You heard the other guys but here’s the other stuff. It’s not hoping pie in the sky stuff.”
It really is just based on the data that exists and the best practices from the past that we can implement going forward. Go to our website and you will see those people and you get a chance to sign up and for free get the coaching that our team provides. It’s a new venture for us because all of the places that I speak in around the world kept coming back and saying the same thing like, “We need some takeaways of a way forward,” and we decided that, “Let’s do some online coaching so that we can help to make that happen.” We’re very excited about that. Go to the website, UniversalBasicResources.com and everything we’ll lay it out from there. We’re optimists but we’re not blind optimists. We’re a fact-based optimist.
A great way of truly differentiating yourself from this culture of grievances is to do something. To find a way for hope. Regardless of where things are now, what seems like it’s headed in the wrong direction, the only thing you can do is try to make a change, try to do something and maybe it’ll work, maybe it won’t. If you do nothing, it’s guaranteed, it’s not going to work.
You’ve made a decision when you do nothing. I want to give us a little love out there because we’ve never seen this amount of uncertainty at one time. People are paralyzed by their fear and uncertainty and all of these things. All we’re seeking to do is to try to quiet the noise and give you the coaching and support necessary so that you too will become one of these people who would say, “Let’s create something. This is an opportunity let’s seize the moment.” That’s not pie in the sky stuff. There’s just basic stuff that all of us actually can do. It seems as though the grievance cult is just dominating everything.
Cult, that’s the word you used. I was thinking I had the wrong word there.
People don't think about the next quarter. So the entire emphasis is about stakeholder gratification. Click To TweetIt’s a cult. Believe me, you have to have a leader of the cult that emphasizes the worst aspects of humanity. I’m old enough to remember the Jim Jones cult out in Guyana and the almost thousand people who killed themselves because of the fact that this guy saw fear, hate and desperation around every corner. He emphasizes that to his followers, they bought it and eventually drank the Kool-Aid as the term goes.
What happens is that you lose vision for anything else outside of the fear and the desperation. There’s no other place to go. There only escape again, the death of desperation. They just killed themselves because they saw no other way but the other ways existed. Our job is to make sure that the other ways are out there.
First of all, I want to thank you for reminding me that we are under a lot of stress. Therefore we need to give each other and give ourselves a break for whatever we may have done in the distant or recent past And just look within ourselves. I’d also like to thank you for joining us on Action’s Antidotes, sharing your ideas about what futurism is and how we can go about doing the best we can to create a better future and point out that idea of slowing down sometimes.
We see some other areas of the world where people slow down. We are talking about those blue zones that people talk about. The areas where people live are commonly beyond a hundred. In contrast to our declining life expectancy tend to be areas where people slow down and also from what I’ve read about them and heard their areas focus on community as you were also talking about. Slow down, focus on community, give each other a break and recognize that productivity is not the only thing valuable in this world.
One of the things that we’ve all realized over the course of the pandemic and hopefully, earlier is that one of the most valuable things we do is laugh with the people that we love or that we’re friends with and family. Laugh and share experiences with each other. That’s such an important part of the human experience that doesn’t oftentimes get featured.
You’re right about the whole aspect of us laughing together and sharing a meal. That is fundamental to all of the community, shared meals. If you can’t do anything else, take a bottle of wine and a roast over to your friend’s place and just say, “I’d like to kick up with you to share some time.” There’s a trend that’s happening out that is very cool. I’ll make this real quick. When I was growing up, they used to have what they call Blue Star Homes. Did you ever hear about those Blue Star Homes?
No, but I did grow up in the Italian American five-course family meal culture on Sundays.
I hear that, that’s the African American experience as well. There used to be this thing where people would put up a blue star in the window and it wasn’t necessarily related to the military. It was related to if you are a child, you’re walking home and you have a challenge, there’s something, this home was a refuge.
Now people are running with this new trend that it’s called The Purple Star Home. They put a purple star in the window and say, “If you want to get together for a meal, bring the kids over, have a conversation. All of these things, I am a place where you can have that refuge but you’ll have to check your politics at the door.”
That’s another area of hope, another place where we see people that are doing something about it. What I love about that also is that it’s something small. Like the small heroes that are texting their group of friends to get together, some of those other things. I don’t mean small but smaller scale, whatever. Just putting out that purple star, even if it’s once a week and saying, “We’re going to see if anyone wants to come in,” that’s an amazing area, where you can start doing something small about these issues.
Thank you for joining us at Action’s Antidotes and thank you to everyone for reading. Stay tune for more episodes, where we’re going to bring in these brave people as we were talking about, that are stepping out there and doing things about the problems. Hopefully, you’ll be inspired by one or more of these guests, all of them actually. You all have a fantastic day and have a fantastic future.
Important Links:
- Universal Basic Resources
- MIT report – article
- Unveiled – YouTube
- Chet@ChetSisk.com
About Chet Sisk
Chet W. Sisk is a futurist, entrepreneur, author, consultant, speaker and workshop developer. He helps organizations see through the crisis of the moment in order to create plans for the immediate future. Chet’s focus is on developing organizations and individuals that can thrive and succeed in a time of massive change due to climate change, technological evolution and social disruption. He is a member of the International Institute of Inspiration Economy, an organization designed to inspire economies that engage the public and inspire innovation, empowerment and possibilities.
Chet has spoken on these subjects at the United Nations in 2015. He has presented in almost 30 different countries, including South Africa, Albania, Malaysia, Nigeria, The Netherlands and Bahrain. He has taught at universities around the world including The University of Kwazulu-Natal in Durban and Pietermaritzburg, South Africa as well as at Al-Akhawayn University in Ifrane, Morocco.
Chet is also the founder and principal of Universal Basic Resources, a business incubator and consulting group focused on helping develop climate-strong companies and organizations so that they enjoy success in a climate-affected world.
Chet is a consultant for the city of Denver, Colorado, USA as it seeks ways to develop a fiduciary, logistical and social responses to potential climate change effects.
He’s written several books on personal and corporate change, he was born and raised in Waterloo, Iowa in the United States.