Rural Futures with Dr. Connie Episode 13 Featuring Thomas Frey

Rural Futures Institute Author

10/05/2018 Added

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[00:00:00.040]Hi, it's Kaitlyn, producer of The Rural Futures podcast.
[00:00:04.610]Subscribe where you listen so you don't miss an episode
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[00:00:11.170]Thanks for listening.
[00:00:12.640](upbeat rock music)
[00:00:13.960]It's almost as if we're walking backwards into the future.
[00:00:17.620]So my job as a futurist is to help turn people around,
[00:00:20.920]give them some idea of what the future holds.
[00:00:24.000]Rural Futures, the podcast where we connect
[00:00:27.070]thought leaders and doers at the intersection
[00:00:29.660]of technology and what it means to be human.
[00:00:32.660]Every episode, we talk with entrepreneurs, researchers,
[00:00:36.010]and achievers to create impact for generations to come.
[00:00:40.120]And now, here's Doctor Connie.
[00:00:43.110]Welcome back to the Rural Futures podcast.
[00:00:45.450]I'm your host, Doctor Connie, and joining me today
[00:00:48.590]is Google's top-rated futurist, Thomas Frey.
[00:00:52.110]And I'm so excited, I'm a huge fan of his work,
[00:00:55.720]and I think you're gonna be a huge fan,
[00:00:57.179]too, after this interview.
[00:00:59.400]But I wanted to give you a little bio.
[00:01:01.269]He works as a senior futurist at the DaVinci Institute,
[00:01:04.960]a futurist think tank founded 21 years ago.
[00:01:08.260]But what's more, he also grew up on a farm
[00:01:10.930]in rural South Dakota and spent his childhood
[00:01:14.060]driving a John Deere tractor.
[00:01:15.650]Welcome to the show, Thomas.
[00:01:17.340]All right, thanks for having me on.
[00:01:19.120]Thank you.
[00:01:19.953]Tell us a little bit more about
[00:01:21.740]what it means to be a futurist.
[00:01:23.990]Yeah, that's a great question,
[00:01:25.017]'cause I think of my role as expanding
[00:01:29.410]people's understanding of what the future holds,
[00:01:32.230]and I do that primarily through technology-driven change.
[00:01:37.290]I do it through the lens of technology.
[00:01:40.500]We can predict the future in lots of different ways
[00:01:43.590]that are highly probable.
[00:01:45.850]I mean with a high degree of probability.
[00:01:47.810]Like I can predict that the building
[00:01:50.100]that you're in right now is still
[00:01:51.590]gonna be there six months from now.
[00:01:53.420]I can predict that with a high degree of probability.
[00:01:57.050]I can predict that the Earth's gonna travel around the Sun
[00:01:59.430]in roughly the same orbit even a hundred years from now.
[00:02:02.470]I can predict that with a high degree of probability.
[00:02:05.349]I can predict that 50 years from now,
[00:02:08.610]we're still gonna have the summer, winter, spring, and fall,
[00:02:11.287]we're gonna have the rising tides.
[00:02:14.910]You put a handful of seeds in the ground,
[00:02:17.480]a percentage of them are gonna sprout and spring to life.
[00:02:21.430]And I can predict so many aspects of the world around me
[00:02:26.300]that I can plan a birthday party two weeks from now
[00:02:30.870]and have a lot of assurance that I can pull it off
[00:02:33.250]because most of our future's being formed
[00:02:36.190]around slow-moving elements that we can predict
[00:02:39.470]with a high degree of probability.
[00:02:41.620]The things that are most unpredictable
[00:02:43.960]are the things like the weather,
[00:02:45.900]things like animals and people,
[00:02:48.350]and to the degree that we can get better at predicting
[00:02:51.468]kind of the actions of people,
[00:02:53.770]then that gives us a huge edge.
[00:02:57.149]And so the technology-driven change is a huge component
[00:03:00.888]of predicting how people are going
[00:03:03.560]to act and do things in the future.
[00:03:05.930]Thank you for that.
[00:03:06.880]I think that's a great description of you as a futurist.
[00:03:09.690]I'd like to dive a little bit more into you as a leader.
[00:03:12.290]So tell us a little bit more about Thomas Frey, the leader.
[00:03:16.200]I tend to experiment with a lot of things and try things,
[00:03:19.750]and I've attempted to set up lots of different businesses
[00:03:23.720]in the past and a lot of them are still
[00:03:26.928]actually in existence in some form that are out there.
[00:03:30.760]But I like to push people's thinking on different areas.
[00:03:35.570]So I try to use different techniques to push their thinking
[00:03:39.430]in one way or another, asking provocative questions,
[00:03:43.330]probing their understanding, and then establishing scenarios
[00:03:47.770]and predictions about the future that will help
[00:03:51.080]draw our thinking forward in some interesting ways.
[00:03:55.610]There's a lot of futurists out there
[00:03:58.110]that don't wanna make any predictions because invariably,
[00:04:02.509]when I make a prediction, it's gonna be wrong.
[00:04:04.980]There's some aspect of it that's just not gonna be right.
[00:04:08.440]The timing's off, or you get some details wrong,
[00:04:13.080]but the true value in a prediction is that
[00:04:16.260]it forces us to think about the future.
[00:04:18.460]It forces us to think about this time and space
[00:04:20.846]sometime in the future and that,
[00:04:23.600]then we can start drawing our own conclusions.
[00:04:26.439]Even if I would give a prediction and just totally nail it,
[00:04:31.890]I get every aspect of it right, somehow,
[00:04:35.420]when we get to that point in the future,
[00:04:37.210]it just feels different and so
[00:04:40.540]there's all kinds of pluses and minuses
[00:04:43.280]making predictions but I like to do it
[00:04:45.173]in that it begs questions in our own minds that,
[00:04:48.467]"Is this the way it's going to be," and
[00:04:50.317]"From my vantage point, how would that be
[00:04:51.957]"a little different than what he is saying?"
[00:04:54.040]A lot of times when I talk about futuring
[00:04:56.170]or even strategic foresight, I talk a lot about
[00:04:58.619]there are many possible or plausible futures.
[00:05:01.140]It's not necessarily about predicting the future,
[00:05:03.456]but I really appreciate the predictions you make,
[00:05:06.450]and you know, making a few of those myself off and on,
[00:05:10.110]again I think I feel like I need to do more of that.
[00:05:12.710]Because I think it's a bold move and like you're saying,
[00:05:15.210]it also helps people think very differently,
[00:05:17.680]but also really forces you as a futurist
[00:05:20.370]to get out there and be a thought leader in this space.
[00:05:24.830]Yeah, it challenges assumptions,
[00:05:27.530]and that's kind of the big advantage to it.
[00:05:30.580]And that's what I think my role is.
[00:05:34.390]Everybody figures out how they have to fit in society
[00:05:36.820]in some way and that's my role.
[00:05:39.010]I have something of a gift to give the world, and so my gift
[00:05:42.770]is to be something of a professional conversation starter
[00:05:47.240]around this idea of what the future holds.
[00:05:49.816](mellow electronic music)
[00:05:52.560]We know that you work with a lot of companies
[00:05:54.890]and a lot of leaders, helping them think
[00:05:56.710]about the future and plan for the future.
[00:05:59.320]So tell us a little bit about the companies and leaders
[00:06:02.400]you've worked with as a futurist.
[00:06:05.410]Yeah, I tend to do about 40 to 50 talks a year.
[00:06:11.340]I'll travel to somewhere between eight and 12 countries
[00:06:15.030]every year, and it'll be on topics
[00:06:17.760]ranging from, everything from the future of agriculture
[00:06:21.600]to the future of education, future of banking.
[00:06:25.150]I had a conversation a few days ago on giving a talk
[00:06:28.490]on the future of the beer industry, so that'll be a fun one.
[00:06:33.000]Yeah, I might wanna dive into that one at some point.
[00:06:35.507](laughter)
[00:06:38.720]Yeah, it's interesting.
[00:06:40.700]One thing that caught me off guard, I didn't realize this,
[00:06:43.350]but we always thought it would be the tobacco companies
[00:06:46.750]and the pharmaceutical companies
[00:06:48.970]that would be investing in the marijuana industry,
[00:06:52.220]but it's actually the beer industry
[00:06:54.040]that's making heavy investments right now
[00:06:56.260]up in Canada into the marijuana industry.
[00:06:59.930]And the key thing that they're interested in
[00:07:02.307]is the CBD oil and growing thousand-acre farms
[00:07:06.150]up there just to harvest the CBD oil,
[00:07:08.930]which is the by-product that is used
[00:07:11.260]in 300,000 different products right now,
[00:07:14.740]and that's something that's kind of missing
[00:07:16.790]from most of the conversations.
[00:07:18.560]But the marijuana stocks right now are becoming
[00:07:21.140]the new bitcoin, which is kind of a fun thing to watch.
[00:07:25.420]It is fun to watch and I think it's something, too,
[00:07:27.760]as we think about the future and the future of agriculture
[00:07:30.307]and the future of rural, it should
[00:07:33.430]really be part of the conversation.
[00:07:34.840]I actually keynoted Nebraska's Rural Healthcare Conference
[00:07:38.440]last week and talked about the future of rural healthcare,
[00:07:41.710]and I actually was handed a book on hemp (chuckles)
[00:07:44.860]and marijuana, and so it's exciting
[00:07:46.840]to see people talking about it here,
[00:07:49.100]but it'll really be fun to watch
[00:07:50.810]the evolution of that industry.
[00:07:52.570]About a month ago, I was over in Australia,
[00:07:55.650]speaking to the cotton farmers in Australia,
[00:07:59.410]which is a much larger industry over there than I realized.
[00:08:02.480]They specifically asked me to do research on
[00:08:06.530]are there any people doing research on 3D printing
[00:08:09.810]with cotton and the cotton farmers
[00:08:12.245]are very interested in how the cotton industry's
[00:08:15.770]starting to evolve in the future.
[00:08:17.256]It was rather fascinating, because I could find people
[00:08:20.160]experimenting with 3D printing with hemp fiber,
[00:08:23.660]with the nylons and the rayons
[00:08:25.650]and all of the synthetic fibers,
[00:08:28.240]also with bamboo fibers and so it led me to believe
[00:08:31.610]that we're getting into the fiber wars right now.
[00:08:36.050]And that anything we can feed into a 3D printer
[00:08:39.310]is going to carry a higher level of prominence
[00:08:42.217]in the future, but we may end up
[00:08:44.480]having with as many as 10,000 different products
[00:08:48.080]that we can run through a 3D printer in the very near future
[00:08:51.280]and so agriculture's gonna play a big role in that,
[00:08:54.500]but the oil industry wants to play a role in it as well,
[00:08:57.910]so that's where we're gonna get into
[00:08:59.610]these fiber wars on some level.
[00:09:02.309]Yeah, and it's really interesting to me how history
[00:09:04.320]sometimes repeats itself and enhances the future.
[00:09:08.170]I grew up in West Point, Nebraska.
[00:09:10.320]I didn't grow up on a farm, but my grandparents did,
[00:09:13.190]and my grandpa used a lot of hemp rope, and he swore by it.
[00:09:17.620]He said it was the best rope they ever had
[00:09:19.930]and it, as a fiber, has always had this unique place
[00:09:25.000]where it's very durable, it's sustainable, et cetera.
[00:09:28.130]And thinking about fibers and more sustainable futures
[00:09:33.080]using these types of fibers like hemp
[00:09:35.650]I think is an interesting conversation for agriculture,
[00:09:38.960]but also just this rural-urban interface as well,
[00:09:41.870]how we're all so interdependent on one another.
[00:09:45.450]Exactly, exactly.
[00:09:47.400]The rural communities have so many advantages.
[00:09:52.260]I mean, it's the wide open spaces.
[00:09:54.308]They can try things without irritating the neighbors.
[00:09:57.710]There's freedom of thought.
[00:09:59.210]You just don't have people breathing down
[00:10:01.220]each other's necks like you do in some areas.
[00:10:04.780]I was having a conversation this morning about the typhoon
[00:10:08.420]that hit in Hong Kong and how these apartments
[00:10:12.760]they're building there that are like 250 square feet,
[00:10:16.370]a lot of them got their windows blown out
[00:10:18.210]because of the typhoon and how durable these buildings are
[00:10:22.810]and whether or not they'll last 50 years
[00:10:25.440]or they have to be torn down before that.
[00:10:28.090]It becomes kind of an interesting question.
[00:10:30.360]The rural communities who don't have to worry
[00:10:32.270]about building things 50, 60 stories tall
[00:10:36.090]just to accommodate all of the people that wanna live there,
[00:10:39.300]you can spread out a little bit,
[00:10:40.930]you have room to grow. (chuckles)
[00:10:43.310]Absolutely, and I really appreciate
[00:10:45.310]in our pre-conversation how you talked
[00:10:47.100]about how many times our conversation globally
[00:10:50.274]has been about overpopulation,
[00:10:52.840]but perhaps it's the under-population
[00:10:55.340]that we really need to start focusing on.
[00:10:57.550]Yeah, half of all the babies born
[00:10:59.640]in the world are born in Africa.
[00:11:02.800]That's where the population is still growing.
[00:11:05.210]The medium age in Africa right now is 27.
[00:11:08.740]The country with the lowest birth rate in the world
[00:11:11.560]right now is South Korea, followed by Japan.
[00:11:14.640]Neither one of them believe in immigration.
[00:11:18.620]A couple of years ago, I gave a talk in South Korea,
[00:11:22.200]and I told them that the rate that they were going,
[00:11:25.000]that the last Korean would be born in 2300.
[00:11:29.130]The birth rate is declining so much
[00:11:30.960]it's under one person per female,
[00:11:33.900]and we need 2.1 kids per female in order
[00:11:37.080]to maintain an even population.
[00:11:39.530]So they are currently under one,
[00:11:42.200]and by 2300 at the rate that they're going,
[00:11:45.430]they'll be down to a population
[00:11:46.770]of under 50,000 for the entire country.
[00:11:49.810]So this whole supply and demand equation
[00:11:52.130]starts getting out of whack as a result of that,
[00:11:54.780]and it starts first showing up in the real estate area.
[00:11:58.780]But something will have to change,
[00:12:00.340]and we're already starting to see cracks
[00:12:02.240]in their no immigration policies.
[00:12:04.720]So we'll see how all this evolves.
[00:12:07.120]It'll be real interesting to watch.
[00:12:09.100]Yeah, one of the leaders from the United States is
[00:12:12.160]actually heading to Japan here in later 2018,
[00:12:16.620]and it's gonna be interesting to see
[00:12:18.965]a little bit more of their culture up close.
[00:12:22.640]They actually contacted the Rural Futures Institute,
[00:12:25.370]and like literally, I received an email,
[00:12:28.220]this is not verbatim, it was like,
[00:12:29.417]"Doctor Connie, what's the future of rural Japan,"
[00:12:32.060]because they're curious and (laughter)
[00:12:33.376]the country has made a national effort
[00:12:38.085]and initiative and declared it
[00:12:40.430]a national priority to focus on its rural areas,
[00:12:43.690]and redeveloping those areas because they are nervous
[00:12:46.630]about exactly what you're saying.
[00:12:48.130]Will Japan really even exist in the future?
[00:12:50.950]And in this hyper-urbanization they're experiencing,
[00:12:54.590]they've already seen the challenges associated with that,
[00:12:57.660]if they don't have a diverse population
[00:12:59.700]spread across the country, because they've had
[00:13:02.656]enough disasters in different locales
[00:13:06.300]that they understand what that means to their population.
[00:13:09.380]Yeah, I had to do a study on the difference in millennials
[00:13:14.640]in the United States and India
[00:13:17.230]and China and how they make decisions
[00:13:20.220]and that was kind of a fascinating study,
[00:13:23.010]and it's all based on the different types of technology
[00:13:26.310]that you're exposed to as you're growing up.
[00:13:28.707]You see, right now, all the young people
[00:13:31.760]in Africa are growing up and they have
[00:13:34.410]smart phones that they have access to.
[00:13:36.620]One thing that never gets talked about very much is that
[00:13:39.410]with the Internet, it's increasing our awareness
[00:13:42.170]of the world, and so when you're looking on your smart phone
[00:13:45.910]and you're much more aware of things happening
[00:13:48.850]all over the world and you look at the stuff happening
[00:13:52.860]and you say, "Wow, there's like many cool things
[00:13:55.287]"happening in the world, but it's not happening here.
[00:13:58.747]"I think I want to go there."
[00:14:01.430]And so this idea of migrating to other countries,
[00:14:06.670]of trying to move to Europe or trying to move
[00:14:11.090]to the United States, or South America,
[00:14:14.620]we're becoming a much more fluid society,
[00:14:17.616]and it's driven by this notion
[00:14:20.810]that I have control over my own destiny,
[00:14:23.940]so I can go anywhere I want to,
[00:14:26.040]and why would I want to stay here, wherever that might be?
[00:14:30.780]And so that's why we're starting to see
[00:14:32.540]all of these refugee issues around the world.
[00:14:36.100]Some of it is driven by wars and famine,
[00:14:39.360]some things like that, but other aspects of it are driven
[00:14:43.370]just by people wanting to venture out and explore the world.
[00:14:48.540]And so that's creating much other issues
[00:14:51.150]going on in the world.
[00:14:52.530]I find it interesting, sometimes in the world
[00:14:55.410]of rural development, traditionally,
[00:14:57.285]we've sent young people graduating from high school
[00:15:00.620]off to college and then we're hopeful
[00:15:02.150]that they'll return and become a professional
[00:15:04.880]in those communities and help grow the population.
[00:15:07.670]I've really been talking a lot lately
[00:15:10.070]about maybe that's not the right model.
[00:15:12.330]Maybe we need to quit (chuckles)
[00:15:14.550]expecting that or wanting that,
[00:15:15.830]and I think we have moved to this very mobile society.
[00:15:19.990]People wanna go have experiences.
[00:15:21.800]So I think it's encouraging people to go
[00:15:24.130]where they wanna go, be who they wanna be,
[00:15:26.980]but always have the invitation extended.
[00:15:29.060]Come back wherever you come from,
[00:15:31.525]and make your life here if you desire to do that.
[00:15:35.210]We can help you create that opportunity.
[00:15:38.020]The driverless technology is going to have
[00:15:41.230]such a profound effect on tentative divisions
[00:15:44.630]between rural and urban areas,
[00:15:47.370]because I think it extends out their urban areas
[00:15:51.525]in such far distances in every direction.
[00:15:54.780]If I have a job that I have to commute to in the city,
[00:15:58.420]and I don't have to do the driving,
[00:16:00.180]I don't have to fight traffic,
[00:16:01.350]I don't have to do any of that
[00:16:02.560]because the car does it all for me,
[00:16:05.350]that's a whole different way of thinking
[00:16:07.420]about a morning commute because I can stay productive,
[00:16:11.880]I can get a lot of things done inside this vehicle
[00:16:15.300]on my way to work and maybe I'll only have to go in
[00:16:18.500]two days a week, so maybe I'm willing to actually commute
[00:16:21.864]two hours each way, and then some of that extends out
[00:16:26.800]this urban community suddenly is extended out
[00:16:30.120]a couple hundred miles farther than it ever was in the past.
[00:16:33.870]That changes our perspective in so many ways.
[00:16:37.650]It changes the pricing of real estate,
[00:16:39.560]it changes where we wanna live, our houses, and all that.
[00:16:43.645]So when you start adding some multipliers to that
[00:16:47.080]as to what cities will look like in the future,
[00:16:50.500]then we start getting some really
[00:16:52.510]interesting scenarios of what could happen.
[00:16:55.040]Now we don't have any good evidence of that yet,
[00:16:57.560]and the whole driverless technology thing
[00:16:59.850]will evolve over time as it gets better and better,
[00:17:03.930]but there's certainly a lot of interesting speculation
[00:17:07.320]as to some of the possibilities.
[00:17:09.430]Yeah, personally I'm excited about that.
[00:17:11.700]I drive about an hour and a half one way,
[00:17:14.430]and I'd love to have the autonomous vehicle
[00:17:17.370]where it's kind of a spa, but also productive
[00:17:20.260]and entertaining all at the same time.
[00:17:22.900]I can only speak for me personally.
[00:17:24.210]I cannot speak on behalf of the State of Nebraska.
[00:17:27.220]We have so many commuters here
[00:17:29.270]from our rural areas into our urban centers.
[00:17:32.280]Love to see us be kind of a real testing site,
[00:17:37.040]but also an innovation bed for this type of technology
[00:17:40.800]because I think we could also provide insights
[00:17:43.240]on what those commuters might need.
[00:17:45.780]The one thing to keep in mind is that the cars we drive
[00:17:48.600]today have actually been in development for 120 years.
[00:17:53.184]And so it's taken that long to get
[00:17:56.570]to a vehicle that's this good.
[00:17:58.810]So once we move into driverless technology,
[00:18:02.620]it's gonna take quite a while to work our way
[00:18:05.090]through what I refer to as the crappy stages
[00:18:07.280]of all this emerging technology
[00:18:09.615]to get to the really good stuff.
[00:18:11.730]So we're gonna go through this awkward transition
[00:18:15.750]of having drivers in some cars and no drivers in other cars,
[00:18:20.850]and so we're gonna have things that go wrong.
[00:18:24.620]We're gonna have accidents.
[00:18:25.630]We're gonna have edge cases.
[00:18:27.290]But those are on the fringe.
[00:18:29.130]I think overall traffic is gonna get much safer.
[00:18:34.100]I mean right now we end up having 38,000 deaths every year.
[00:18:38.200]We have 12.4 million injuries in car accidents.
[00:18:42.930]We spend right at half a trillion dollars a year
[00:18:47.810]repairing people after car accidents.
[00:18:50.350]It's like one out of every six dollars
[00:18:52.200]in the healthcare industry goes
[00:18:54.350]into fixing people after car accidents.
[00:18:57.160]If we could be more like the airline industry,
[00:18:59.270]the airline industry becomes the safety metric
[00:19:01.816]for transportation because virtually nobody dies
[00:19:05.340]in airlines any more.
[00:19:06.920]And so if we can get even close to that in the car industry,
[00:19:10.680]we've just saved countless lives,
[00:19:13.055]there's nobody that can argue against that,
[00:19:16.320]but it's funny to watch all the newspaper headlines.
[00:19:19.287]"Oh, they had an accident in the driverless car world."
[00:19:22.890]Well, yeah, we're gonna have a lot of them leading up
[00:19:25.270]to the fact that we're getting to a much safer
[00:19:27.816]form of transportation some time in the future.
[00:19:31.210]I think that what you're saying is so important.
[00:19:32.850]It's not like this is just gonna happen tomorrow.
[00:19:35.110]It is gonna be a process, much like many technologies
[00:19:38.090]have been over time, so it's not something that just
[00:19:41.310]instantly happens, and I think sometimes
[00:19:43.480]when people get in conversations around
[00:19:46.030]these types of technologies, they do get a little nervous,
[00:19:49.150]and I don't blame them, but at the same time,
[00:19:52.110]these things are gonna have to
[00:19:54.605]get worked out along the way, and they will.
[00:19:55.550]Yeah, we had one of our Mastermind groups
[00:19:58.160]working on this topic of what things will be coming
[00:20:01.520]in their life in 2030 that don't exist today.
[00:20:06.920]And to put that in perspective, we're looking at,
[00:20:09.887]"Okay, what things do we have today
[00:20:12.110]that weren't around 12 years ago?"
[00:20:15.000]And so 12 years ago, in 2006,
[00:20:17.650]we didn't have any mobile apps.
[00:20:19.630]We didn't have Twitter.
[00:20:20.820]Facebook was just a tiny little company then.
[00:20:24.490]And it becomes kind of amusing to actually
[00:20:27.170]start going through all these things we just take
[00:20:29.630]for granted today that weren't even around 10, 12 years ago.
[00:20:33.435](smooth organ music)
[00:20:35.180]Welcome to Bold Voices, our segment
[00:20:37.310]with rock star students from the University of Nebraska
[00:20:40.036]who are making a difference in rural.
[00:20:43.834]Hey, podcast listeners, it's Katy,
[00:20:45.830]production specialist of the Rural Futures podcast.
[00:20:49.050]With me today is Tyann Boyer, a senior exercise science
[00:20:52.910]major at the University of Nebraska at Kearney.
[00:20:56.090]Welcome, Tyann.
[00:20:57.356]Thanks for having me, Katy.
[00:20:58.560]Yeah, it's so nice to have you on the show.
[00:21:00.810]Start by telling our listeners a little bit about yourself.
[00:21:04.070]Like you said, I'm a senior exercise science major at UMK.
[00:21:07.290]I am from Wayne, Nebraska, which is a small town
[00:21:10.130]in northeast Nebraska, about a thousand people.
[00:21:12.860]Something that I'm wanting to do with my future career
[00:21:16.105]is to go to PT school, become a physical therapist.
[00:21:20.410]A little slogan that I live by is positive infinity.
[00:21:23.170]I'm just a very positive person.
[00:21:25.480]I try to instill a little bit of that in everybody's life,
[00:21:27.417]everybody that I'm around.
[00:21:28.700]I just try to be in a good mood all the time,
[00:21:30.620]even when it doesn't seem like there is a way to,
[00:21:33.380]you try to find the little things that pick you up
[00:21:35.170]to maintain that positivity.
[00:21:37.300]Well, at RFI we really value that positivity
[00:21:39.790]that you bring to the narrative around rural communities.
[00:21:43.680]So tell me, why do you care so much about rural?
[00:21:47.400]Rural means everything to me.
[00:21:48.833]I'm from a very small town, like I said.
[00:21:51.440]I think a lot of my characteristics
[00:21:53.280]and the things that are important to me
[00:21:54.607]and the values that I have are because of the rural aspect.
[00:21:58.160]I love the closeness with rural,
[00:22:00.240]I love the know your neighbor aspect that we have,
[00:22:02.580]that I think tends to be forgotten in bigger cities,
[00:22:04.910]and that's something that has always stuck with me
[00:22:07.330]and something that I want for my kids, too.
[00:22:09.380]Now I know you got the chance to directly impact
[00:22:11.860]a rural community through RFI's Student Services Program.
[00:22:15.150]Tell me a little bit about that.
[00:22:16.740]Not only this summer, but last summer,
[00:22:18.160]I was in McCook, Nebraska, doing a serviceship,
[00:22:21.420]and we ran health and wellness camps for middle school kids.
[00:22:25.470]Fitness, nutrition, physical activity,
[00:22:28.100]and then some of the more cutting-edge stuff,
[00:22:29.740]like technology, tying that in with fitness and nutrition
[00:22:32.920]and then also aquaponics and incorporating
[00:22:35.520]sustainability aspects of that as well.
[00:22:37.610]What a cool connection between your field of study
[00:22:40.945]and the real world opportunity to impact a community.
[00:22:44.740]How else has RFI impacted
[00:22:46.190]your college career and development?
[00:22:48.313]The opportunities and the people that I've met
[00:22:49.760]and the experiences I've had.
[00:22:51.050]I would not have been able to have those
[00:22:52.840]without this serviceship, not only this summer,
[00:22:54.920]but the summer prior.
[00:22:56.000]I met so many great people from all over the state,
[00:22:58.410]so many contacts for the future,
[00:23:00.680]building those friendships and those bonds that I had
[00:23:03.160]with this year's interns and also last year's
[00:23:06.120]are something I'm gonna be able to access in the future
[00:23:08.397]and I hope that they feel that they can use me
[00:23:10.260]as a resource in the future as well.
[00:23:12.160]And I don't really think that
[00:23:13.230]there's a price you can put on that.
[00:23:15.090]I feel like that is something that is completely invaluable,
[00:23:17.860]and those friendships will continue
[00:23:20.260]to last for the rest of my life.
[00:23:22.060]Yeah, I know you've really invested in this network,
[00:23:24.490]and I truly hope that you will continue
[00:23:26.220]to reap those benefits in the future.
[00:23:28.150]Thank you so much, Tyann,
[00:23:29.320]for being our Bold Voice this week.
[00:23:31.640]Yup, thank you for having me, Katy.
[00:23:33.106](mellow soul music)
[00:23:36.460]Well, I know that part of preparing
[00:23:38.290]for the future is education.
[00:23:40.880]There's a thread of education and learning
[00:23:42.770]through all of this,
[00:23:44.200]and recently you've published an article
[00:23:46.072]that listed 52 future college degrees.
[00:23:49.860]So tell us a little bit how you see higher education
[00:23:53.420]evolving into the future as well.
[00:23:55.500]We're all looking for quicker, better,
[00:23:58.300]faster ways of getting smarter,
[00:24:00.650]and that gives me a huge advantage.
[00:24:02.940]I mean, if I can suddenly overnight,
[00:24:06.110]I can go take a couple classes
[00:24:08.040]and then I'm suddenly an expert on this new topic tomorrow,
[00:24:11.990]that gives me absolutely a huge advantage over somebody else
[00:24:15.290]that might be looking to get that job.
[00:24:17.480]We're still in a world where we're short
[00:24:20.440]18 million teachers in the world.
[00:24:23.510]23% of all kids growing up in the world
[00:24:26.000]don't go to any school whatsoever,
[00:24:28.380]and if we have to insert a teacher between us
[00:24:32.730]and everything we have to learn in the future,
[00:24:35.400]we can't possibly keep up with the demand for the future
[00:24:38.130]that's going on in business and industry.
[00:24:40.850]So how do we arrange things in ways
[00:24:43.100]that are faster, better, quicker?
[00:24:45.480]At the DaVinci Institute that I run,
[00:24:47.660]we were exploring this idea of
[00:24:49.440]what I refer to as micro-colleges.
[00:24:52.220]In 2012, we started a coding school
[00:24:55.070]where we're trying to teach people
[00:24:56.810]how to become computer programmers and 12 to 14 weeks.
[00:25:01.634]And we were the second in the country
[00:25:03.710]to actually launch that type of school in 2012,
[00:25:07.150]and then last year, there was over 550 schools
[00:25:10.330]that had cropped up around the country.
[00:25:12.460]So this a really fast mushrooming area.
[00:25:16.510]Now when I think about micro-colleges,
[00:25:19.030]I think of that as post-secondary education
[00:25:21.840]done in a short period of time.
[00:25:23.980]In the future, if we wanna teach somebody
[00:25:25.720]how to design parts for 3D printers
[00:25:27.890]or how to become a drone pilot,
[00:25:30.290]or how to become a crowdfunding expert,
[00:25:33.270]or even how to become a brewmaster in a brew pub,
[00:25:36.160]we can do those things in a short period of time,
[00:25:38.480]and we're gonna have huge demands
[00:25:40.520]for that coming up in the future.
[00:25:42.834](smooth jazz music)
[00:25:45.360]How do you see leadership evolving
[00:25:47.910]so it's meeting the needs and demands of the changing world?
[00:25:51.880]Business and industry has to find ways of being nimble
[00:25:56.096]and how to access the right people at the right time.
[00:26:00.320]Now, it's no longer possible to anticipate the business,
[00:26:04.460]the educational needs of business,
[00:26:07.000]four to five years in advance.
[00:26:09.310]So that's where education has to become nimble
[00:26:11.980]and somehow dovetail with the needs
[00:26:15.050]of business and industry and that's where
[00:26:18.980]the real struggle comes into play.
[00:26:21.074](smooth jazz music)
[00:26:23.906]Now, in putting on that futurist's hat,
[00:26:25.680]knowing that you're a thought leader in the futurist area,
[00:26:28.170]and thinking how higher education,
[00:26:30.070]other industries are going to evolve,
[00:26:33.430]how do you see the area of futuring evolving in the future?
[00:26:37.010]The fact that we don't know everything
[00:26:38.593]is what gives us our motivation.
[00:26:40.900]It gives us our drive and our energy,
[00:26:43.470]because we have the ability to change the future.
[00:26:46.764]But there are certain techniques out there
[00:26:49.770]that give us much better clues,
[00:26:51.700]much better appreciation for how the world is unfolding,
[00:26:56.160]and so as I mentioned before,
[00:26:58.090]the Internet is giving us higher levels of awareness
[00:27:01.750]than we've ever had in the past, so we're much more aware
[00:27:05.360]of things happening around the world.
[00:27:07.180]And we get to a point where we're
[00:27:08.492]frustrated if we don't know.
[00:27:11.350]Having better models, this idea
[00:27:13.590]of participatory thinking protocols,
[00:27:16.090]the ability to create frameworks for thinking
[00:27:19.710]that help give us better clues
[00:27:21.630]as to what's coming around the corner,
[00:27:24.100]we're constantly developing those.
[00:27:26.410]So we've done a few of those
[00:27:27.744]at the DaVinci Institute ourselves.
[00:27:30.210]Can you give an example of a time you've done
[00:27:33.060]other industries specifically that you've studied
[00:27:35.850]and have some information on?
[00:27:37.690]In the banking world, in 2014,
[00:27:41.310]we had the peak number of branch banks in the United States,
[00:27:45.630]a little over 94,000 branch banks in the US,
[00:27:49.350]and since we're able to do so many more things
[00:27:52.590]with our phone, we're gonna start seeing a declining number
[00:27:56.000]of branch banks in the world to the point where I think
[00:27:58.870]we're gonna start closing the real estate associated
[00:28:02.060]with banks at a rate far faster.
[00:28:04.040]We're closing about a thousand banks a year right now.
[00:28:07.020]I think that jumps up to somewhere between five
[00:28:09.960]and 10,000 in the very near future,
[00:28:12.380]and so we started looking at,
[00:28:14.747]"Okay, if these are going away,
[00:28:16.947]"what's going to replace those facilities
[00:28:20.207]"in communities and are we going to go
[00:28:22.944]"strictly without facilities," and it raises
[00:28:25.965]lots of interesting questions about that.
[00:28:28.010]We don't have all the answers just yet,
[00:28:29.510]but it's ways of driving the conversation.
[00:28:32.440]I think it is great to think about what those futures
[00:28:35.650]might look like and how technology's definitely impacting
[00:28:38.740]the future and really helping leaders think through
[00:28:41.464]their industries at this point in time.
[00:28:44.405](mellow jazz music)
[00:28:47.190]With that futurist lens on, Thomas, what parting words
[00:28:51.480]of wisdom do you wanna share with our audience?
[00:28:54.180]I think that we would all be better off
[00:28:56.940]spending a little more time exercising
[00:28:59.220]this part of the brain that thinks about the future.
[00:29:02.640]We're such a backward-looking society,
[00:29:04.690]and it's just human nature that we think that way,
[00:29:08.620]because we've all personally experienced the past.
[00:29:12.110]As we look around us, we see evidence
[00:29:13.950]of the past all around us.
[00:29:16.289]In fact, all of the information we come into contact with
[00:29:18.910]is essentially history, so the past is very knowable.
[00:29:22.010]Yet we're gonna be spending the rest of our lives
[00:29:24.360]in the future, so it's almost as if
[00:29:26.240]we're walking backwards into the future.
[00:29:28.780]So my job as a futurist is to help turn people around,
[00:29:32.110]give them some idea of what the future holds,
[00:29:34.110]and I hope maybe some of the things
[00:29:35.760]we talked about today have done that for people.
[00:29:38.840]Oh, they absolutely have, and I think
[00:29:40.320]one of my favorite quotes
[00:29:41.850]in the information you submitted was,
[00:29:44.407]"We have only taken the first step
[00:29:46.357]"in a trillion-mile journey.
[00:29:48.327]"The next few steps, in my opinion,
[00:29:50.577]"will be nothing short of spectacular."
[00:29:53.257](smooth jazz music)
[00:29:55.900]Thank you for being on the Rural Futures podcast.
[00:29:58.550]Tell our listeners where they can find you.
[00:30:01.119]Yeah, you can find more about
[00:30:02.870]what I'm doing at futuristspeaker.com.
[00:30:05.630]I have all the columns that I've written posted on there,
[00:30:09.470]a little over 400 are there right now.
[00:30:12.780]And the stuff we're doing on DaVinci Institute
[00:30:15.960]is just davinciinstitute.com, and I'd love to connect
[00:30:20.329]on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, I'm on all the social media,
[00:30:24.470]so yeah, feel free to contact me and say hi.
[00:30:29.290]Thanks for listening to Rural Futures with Doctor Connie.
[00:30:32.120]Talk with us on social media @ruralfutures.
[00:30:35.240]Next up, Doctor Howard Liu, an innovative educator,
[00:30:38.890]behavioral health workforce expert, and child psychologist
[00:30:42.120]at the University of Nebraska Medical Center.
[00:30:44.470]Doctor Liu is working tirelessly
[00:30:46.520]on mental health care access throughout rural areas
[00:30:49.140]in Nebraska and beyond.
[00:30:51.440]Frankly, it does take a little bit of a spirit
[00:30:54.240]of being a maverick, as you said earlier, to say,
[00:30:56.907]"You know what, there's some things my own profession
[00:30:59.310]has got wrong," and I'm not always gonna agree
[00:31:01.160]with our state chapter of our national organization
[00:31:03.289]because my greater duty is to the workforce of the state
[00:31:07.753]and sometimes that means some tough choices,
[00:31:10.280]but if you ever ask me, "Should we protect our turf
[00:31:13.607]"in psychiatry versus should we get some more access,"
[00:31:17.170]it's always gonna be about access.

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Rural Futures with Dr. Connie Episode 13 Featuring Thomas Frey

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