The Action Catalyst
The Upside of Disruption, with Terence Mauri (AI, Technology, Leadership, Futurism)
Tue, 04 Feb 2025
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.Mentioned in this episode:Learn more at SouthwesternConsulting.com/Coaching/StudentsSouthwestern Student Coaching
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, we're not learning anymore, we're not moving anymore, well, that's not a good place to be. You know, life is short. If we're lucky, we get about 960 months to live. It's not to make people feel scared.
It's this idea that it's never been easier to waste time and waste energy, that not taking a risk is a risk.
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Today's guest is Terence Mowry, 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 an acclaimed author. Maury's spirit heads 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. Terrence, 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 and their different paths is their roots and their beginnings.
The philosopher 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 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. I was in the middle of the day and a car driver lost control and drove a car into the store. He mounted the curb. 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. I 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 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, my values, legacy, who I was, 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&P 500 to harness the upside of disruption.
What I mean by that is, 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 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, we're risk-averse.
And then we've got this paradox of companies now demanding that we're all courageous risk-takers. And there's a big rhetoric to reality gap there. And for me, I think that accident reconfigured my relationship with risk that life is inherently risky. 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 accepting a status quo that's not healthy or does not give 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 Gallup engagement survey, I mean, that hasn't changed for decades now. The majority of the global workforce disengaged, still go to work, but have mentally quit the job. Life is short. If we're lucky, we get about 960 months to live, which is just 80 years of age.
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 reward travel in the same elevator. And sometimes we forget that actually, you know, this idea that we always overestimate the risk of trying something new. It could be a new way of working. It could be taking a career break.
It could be applying for a new job in 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 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. There's different types of disruptors out there. If we look at mega trends, for example, we've got optimized reality that's moving from doing AI to being AI. That means, for example, we're moving from IT spending as a percentage of global GDP, moving from 5% 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 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, 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? 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. For example, Hermes, the global luxury company, one of the big constraints facing the fashion industry is the idea that they're not sustainable business models. They waste a lot of money. 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 produce mycelium, which is a non-leather-based form of leather. It's like a mushroom-based type of leather, alternative to leather. And the 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 is 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 if 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 ChatGPT two months to reach 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 go into AI infrastructure, over $250 billion of VC money as well. That's going up exponentially.
So that excitement phase, we've now moved to the experimental phase. For example, T-Mobile and OpenAI have just formed a partnership for a sort of proactive AI decision-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 actually AI eventually will 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 it doesn't take much imagination to think about
where we're going with this over the next couple of years, that 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 the fastest AI today 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? A room 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 wellbeing, 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?
And 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 it's a question every leader, every manager should be thinking about right now, which is to use AI in the right way, in 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 ABI, e-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 Boreout. 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 for speed to insight, speed to innovation, speed to decision velocity, for creating new scenarios, new products, new services, new platforms, testing hypotheses. 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, when everybody has access to the same tools, the same technologies, it's more difficult to stand out, ironically. Everyone's got access, everyone's 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. There's a reason why 0.01% of people make money on Spotify or TikTok or YouTube, and that number's even going down more. We've got to be so careful. I call it the curse of sameness. I write about it a lot in the new book, The Upside of 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 this 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 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 gonna 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 comes to zero cost, everyone has access to the same incredible tools, while actually it's much more difficult to stand out.
And so that in-person human edge, that social skills, emotional intelligence, conversational listening, being fully present, these are gonna 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 that it's 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 success. And as Ryan Holiday says so eloquently, the obstacle is the way, disruption is the way.
And I'm a self-confessed failure pioneer. I failed multiple times in order to get where I am today. Multiple setbacks, multiple rejections, book rejections, client rejections. 30% of what I do is keynotes, conferences around the world. Well, often when you're chosen, you've been chosen out of like maybe five or six or eight other great speakers. So you get rejected a lot.
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 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 a good batting average. Yeah. Most of life, we're not trained to embrace rejection or misses or missed swings.
That way, we treat it as an ultimate failure, which then generally means I'm not good enough.
Yes. Yeah.
For you, where did this light switch flip? Or 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 mapped out that linear way, become obsessed with success or avoidance of failure. And that's not real life. Being stripped down and being made very vulnerable, nearly losing my life. Actually, with the wake-up call to me, 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, 90 years of age or 100, the number one regret is according to research, is a lack of courage.
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 step up, the lack of courage, the courage to think a bit bolder, the courage to say no, the courage to walk away from something that wasn't working for you, the 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 Steve Jobs or Jeff Bezos used to do very well, which is regret minimization. So 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 hitting that C-level in my company?
Whatever it is, success is very personal. But just remember, 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 I recognize that that is a stepping stone to where you want to be. It's not necessarily... 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 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 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 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 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 being 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 geotagging, facial recognition, gamification. Received over a million dollars of wealth of investment since inception. This is a great example of generations solved.
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 prohibitive. We 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.
And 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 at Singularity University has written a book recently where he really deep dives into this as well. I was in Doha, big future of tech, future of AI summit, and just some of the facts and insights coming out are so exciting. This idea that we've now got chips that can be scaled to DNA, and they can hold billions of transistors. That's actually happening.
It's not science fiction. So science fiction has become science fact. And I think you're right. If we can hold on for at least another 10 years, it's going to be one hell of a ride.
And stay tuned. We'll continue this conversation with Terrence in episode 479 of The Action Catalyst.
If you enjoy this podcast, please make sure to subscribe. And to stay updated on everything that the Action Catalyst is up to, make sure to follow us on Facebook and Instagram at Action Catalyst Podcast and on Twitter at Catalyst underscore Action. And thanks for listening.
This is your host, Adam Outland. And outside of this podcast, I'm also the leader for a division of our company, Southwestern Consulting, and our division is the Southwestern Student Coaching Program. And that division, we started back in 2020 because the desire we had was to take all these skills that we've equipped executives with for
Over a decade, I've coached executives and managers and sales professionals on the skills, the habits, the motivation, and the systems to be successful in their job and in life.
And what we realized from working with 30, 40, 50-year-olds was if we could have gotten to them when they were in ninth grade, in middle school, in high school, and equipped them with the same things we're teaching them now, the ripple effects would be huge.
And so back in 2020, we decided to formulate a coaching program for youth, equipping youth with the same types of skill development that we typically work on with adults. We just apply it to their world.
And what that looks like is teaching them the study skills, the communication skills that they can use every day in the classroom and outside the classroom, coaching them on the mindset and the motivation of someone who's a top performer. And what does that mean? It means helping a young teenager create and craft a vision for themselves Because without a vision, we perish.
But with a vision, we can be equipped with the motivation to dig into our study habits. We can see the connection between our future and the excellence that we have to form in our habits now to be successful in the long run. And we also work on the emotional intelligence.
It's how we balance our emotions and manage those emotions when they come up in a way that allows us to communicate effectively with others and to communicate with ourselves. It's about equipping young people with self-talk. That means equipping them with the language that they can use to better direct their thoughts and their mind to accomplish their goals and their aims.
And lastly, we equip them with the systems. That means for us, the tools, the time management, and the organization strategies
to not just work hard in life but to work smart and when we combine all these different areas that we work with our teens on what we find is that they form the habits early in life that allows them to achieve their goals later in life and even right now and so our passion is to equip as many young people across this world as we can and we're doing pretty good so far we've got teens in seven different countries who have been through our coaching program to date
We've worked with over 400 teens, and we would love to be able to serve you as well. Here's how it works. If you want to investigate coaching, we start with a parent consultation. That's a free call to discuss your students' particular needs and our program details.
We work with Olympic athletes all the way down to teens that are just struggling to motivate themselves to do the daily work necessary in their class. So wherever your teen is, we'll meet them where they are and get them to the next level. And that starts with a parent consultation with you. A student planning session, that's the next step.
If we agree that the value that coaching can bring matches your team, then we will move to a student planning session. It's basically a free one-on-one coaching session with your team. And that is designed to support them, but it's also designed to ask a lot of questions to help explore whether or not they want to be coached.
Because at the end of the day, they ultimately have to be the one that pulls the trigger. And then after your student planning session, we get them paired with the right coach for them. We have an amazing staff of coaches from ex-division one athletes, people who've come from the Ivy League system.
We have coaches who have come from entrepreneurial backgrounds and acting backgrounds, so we can pair them with the right fit for them. And then once they partner with their coach, they'll benefit from two coaching sessions a month to really zone in on their personal growth and their skill development.
So if you're ready to give your student the tools they need to be successful, click the link in the show notes. for more information, and to make sure you can schedule your free parent consultation today.