Books to understand today’s and tomorrow’s world I am often asked for reading recommendations to better comprehend the world and its evolution. For this purpose, I find that Science Fiction books often provide insights into the future in an easily digestible and sometimes even thrilling format. So here are my 3 reading recommendations, super easy […]
Curiosity is NOT a vice You may have heard your parents tell you when you were a child that curiosity is a vice. I imagine this expression is based on the idea that curiosity leads a person to meddle in other people’s affairs, discover secrets, or pry where they shouldn’t, which can harm themselves or […]
45 Minutes with the Crackpots I would like to share with you an anecdote that happened to me… and which greatly changed my life: spending 45 minutes with the crackpots. For several years, I would spend one or two weeks per year on Belle-Île-en-Mer in Brittany. As the name suggests, Belle-Île is an island! So […]
How to Impress Bill Gates Bill Gates says he was really impressed by two “demos” in his life: the first time during the presentation of the interface with the computers which will be at the origin of Windows… And the second time was during the demo of ChatGPT last September. You may like Bill Gates […]
A new Love-Relationship? The types of relationships between humans have changed a lot over the millennia. In particular, what we can call “love”. Let’s look at how the relationships and love between human beings have evolved and can still evolve in the future First, let’s look at the past. The evolution of couple relationships can be […]
An Example of Self-Amplification: How to Use the Butterfly Effect to Your Advantage I would like to share with you an example close to my heart of self-amplification, one of the gifts of chaos, better known as the butterfly effect: how to use the butterfly effect to surround yourself with reliable and trustworthy people. The […]
Growing Up, What a Pain! Feel like you have new problems in your life? This could be good news! Do you feel like you have the same problems in your life over and over again? This could be bad news… Indeed, each progress or evolution in our life brings its share of problems to a […]
My Mission When I meet a person who asks me what I do for a living, I usually answer: My mission is to convince people who are not yet convinced that we (humans) are going through an unprecedented transition in the history of humanity. And that this transition can be good news if we understand […]
The fear of becoming an old fart I’ve always been afraid of becoming an old fart. I have always been afraid of oldfarting! That would indeed be the ultimate shame for a futurist… The warning signs The main warning signs of oldfarting are quite easily recognized and I identified them very early on: I began […]
Emergence, The Universal Property That Shapes Us and our World! Two concepts work hand in hand: chaos, the scientific theory whereby unpredictability is the only predictable reality, and complexity, the process through which adaptation leads to evolution. Specifically, whereby chaos is about the unpredictable outcomes that develop when a butterfly flaps its wings in a remote area […]
Collapse or Breakthrough? As I describe in this article, chaos “is not a mess”, there is a hidden order in chaos: what is called a strange attractor. The theories of chaos can thus help us to identify the “patterns”, the orders hidden in the events which sometimes seem to us “chaotic” or without having direction. […]
Why Has the World Become Chaotic? A question I am often asked is, “Has the world become more chaotic? ” And besides, wasn’t it already before? The world, especially the natural world, has undoubtedly always presented chaotic aspects. Meteorology is a very good example. I observe that the human world has, on the other hand, […]
The Gifts of Chaos Chaos theories offer us 3 totally new and innovative tools. These 3 tools are: The strange attractor The Butterfly Effect Fractal images Let’s take a closer look at the butterfly effect. Edward Lorenz and the Weather Forecast Edward Lorenz, a mathematician and meteorologist working at MIT in 1961, used state-of-the-art computers […]
Create or/and clarify your dreams! As I have shown in this article, to create breakthroughs and good surprises in your life rather than collapses and unpleasant surprises, the theories of chaos teach us that it is important to have a beacon in the storm, a dream, a strange attractor. This is especially true in times […]
The gifts of chaos Chaos theories offer us 3 totally new and innovative tools. These 3 tools are: The strange attractor The Butterfly Effect Fractal images Today I would like to come back to the importance of the strange attractor, the least known of the three, very useful especially in the crisis situations that we […]
The 2 Mostly Asked Questions The 2 mostly asked questions I hear during these times of COVID crisis are: Is it going to come back as before? Will it be better afterward? Let’s have a look at these 2 questions with the help of Chaos Theory. Why Chaos Theory? Why Chaos Theory? Because it is one […]
Will it get better? I have just been interviewed by Alex Hickman from Project Sovereign. We had a conversation about the COVID crisis, and how it can (or can’t) accelerate the emergence of a new world. Will our life go back to “normal”? Is it going to get better? How can we thrive in uncertainty and […]
How Do I Process Information in a Chaotic World When I give a keynote, the public can usually ask questions after my talk. Questions fall into two types: Public questions asked when the public can speak and as a microphone goes from hand to hand Questions asked privately when the talk has ended and most attendees […]
What’s Next? The Lighthouse in The Storm In a previous article, I wrote that if the COVID crisis has started as a health crisis, the real crisis, partly still to come, will be social, political, and economic. It is also, like all crises, a question of meaning, that is to say also spiritual (in the […]
The Yesbut and the Letstry. I made my first trip around the world at 26 years old… and I then traveled to many countries (note for the youngest ones: before there were in the sky what is called airplanes and we didn’t care about our carbon footprint ..) Strangely, I met in almost all the […]
Crisis, What Crisis? As a specialist in chaos, uncertainty, crises, and resilience, I have read, reflected, consulted, talked a lot about the situation following the Coronavirus SARS-CoV-2. I already shared my vision and insights with my family, extended family, and clients, and I decided to share with you my vision of the current situation as […]
The Meaning Of Life: Five Shades Of Meaning What is the meaning of life? The question may seem abstract and somehow removed. Yet, as many philosophical questions, this one has very practical effects. Depending on your answer, if you have any, you will have different ideas on what the “good life” is, what the “bad” […]
Who Are You? Where Do You Stand? A friend of mine told me an enlightening story. He was sharing a few beers with another friend of his. Suddenly, the pal asked: “who are you, where do you come from?” It was asked half-jokingly, half-seriously, as a sort of sh*t test—to borrow an Internet-spread expression. The […]
Two Ways Of Adapting To Uncertainty “What am I doing tonight?” “Is what I’m doing at work really useful?” “What is likely to happen on this or that market I have a keen interest in?” “What…?” A chaotic world is hugely characterized by uncertainty. If you start asking yourself some questions, even seemingly trivial ones […]
The Future of Cryptography and Cryptocurrencies in a previous article, Jean-Baptiste Prunel spoke about the 42 IT school, a ground-breaking school with neither classes nor teachers yet teaching through projects, trainings and the willingness to get the job done. We also spoke about Poleon.co, Jean-Baptiste’s first startup venture, which tried to track and predict a number […]
An Introduction To Chaos Engineering With Christophe Rochefolle Christophe and I have met for the first time in October 2017. He organized a meet-up on Chaos Engineering. To my delight, among the helpful reading list was my book Chaos, a User’s Guide, and Christophe was kind enough to invite me as well. He is a […]
The 42 IT School: in France’s First Nursery for IT Talents I met Jean-Baptiste Prunel at the Parisian IT school 42, on the sidelines of a conference I was invited to give there. If you haven’t heard about 42, don’t worry: the school opened only a few years ago and is still fairly new. And […]
Go-Bag: Get Ready to Leave Home in a Minute A chaotic world means more potential catastrophes and black swans at your doorstep. To be resilient, be prepared. Having a secure hideout is great, and I did the video below in my resilient home, but first, everyone doesn’t have the means to buy one, and second, […]
Come to Visit my Resilient Home In a chaotic world, fragility comes at too high a cost. If you are fragile, chances are you may get badly hurt. If another financial crisis comes in, a crisis so huge the banking system might tank, how will you pay for your expenses with a credit card and […]
Fractal Ethics This article draws from my book Chaos: a User’s Guide, chapter “The evolution of our cultures and our social relationships.” This article is the ultimate part of the “transcendental trilogy.” The two other parts allowed me to dwell on the True and the Beautiful. These three heads are more than predicates applied to […]
