Coffee with the Council Podcast: Meet This Year’s Europe and Asia-Pacific Community Meeting Keynote Speaker, Dr. Bruce McCabe
Welcome to our podcast series Coffee with the Council. I’m Alicia Malone, Senior Manager of Public Relations for the PCI Security Standards Council. Today, I am so excited to bring you a sneak peek interview with PCI SSC’s Europe and Asia-Pacific Community Meeting keynote speaker, Dr. Bruce McCabe, Global Futurist. Bruce has explored emerging technologies and how innovation happens for 30 years. He began his career at IBM in 1988 and went on to hold senior roles at IBM, WordPerfect, Novell, and Gartner. In 2002, he founded S2 Intelligence, a think tank to support organizational innovation through grounded research. He served as an independent advisor to a long list of multinationals, state and federal governments, universities, and science labs. When not speaking, he writes novels about the near future. I’m delighted to have you join us today, Bruce.
Bruce McCabe: It’s my pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me, Alicia.
Alicia Malone: And I love your title of Global Futurist. So, you have to tell me, how did you claim your title, and does it mean you are able to predict the future?
Bruce McCabe: Well, it’s global because I’m crazy enough to spend a lot of time traveling. I literally travel and present on all continents except Antarctica, and use those travels to do research, to try and ground myself in what’s happening in different communities, different places and to visit labs on those travels. So, I think I can safely claim the global part.
Futurist means different things to different people. For me, it means just trying to do as good a job as possible at probing and explaining and exploring the probable futures and the possibilities in our future, particularly opportunities in our future. And it’s a lot of hard work. I mean, there’s no magic to it. It’s just, to me, a lot of hard and joyful work.
Alicia Malone: Well, we are very excited to see you on stage this fall as our keynote speaker at our Europe Community Meeting in Barcelona and also at our Asia-Pacific Community Meeting in Hanoi. At these Community Meetings, you’ll be speaking to the payments industry. So, without giving away your keynote, I’m curious if you’re going to share some insights or even predictions on where our industry is headed into the future.
Bruce McCabe: Well, definitely. That’s my job, and I hope to very much broaden people’s thinking about security through the next 25 years in particular, go out to about 2050. And I want to get people thinking much more expansively about how the world is changing and both the threats and the opportunities that that brings. So, lots of predictions, lots of technology trajectories in there. I’m going to run through some of my favorites, if you like, some of the disruptive technologies that are coming, that really do change everything about maybe home services, what we’re doing in households, new sensor technologies that both enhance and threaten security. I’ll talk about next generation satellites and some of those sorts of things. So, I’m going to go through a whole list of things that are quite disruptive that perhaps everyone in the audience doesn’t think about every day but will definitely affect your world. So yeah, lots of predictions, I promise, and lots of sort of new worlds to explore. The more I can take people on journeys they haven’t been down, that’s the real pleasure of this.
Alicia Malone: So as an international speaker, you speak on a wide variety of topics, everything from the future of artificial intelligence, the future of healthcare, the future of energy, even the future of everything. So, tell me, how do you gather your research? What is your process for determining what the future holds?
Bruce McCabe: Well, that’s really interesting because my practice has evolved over time. And I think it’s quite unique the way I do things now. And it’s certainly the way I’m most comfortable doing it. I’ve arrived at a place where I feel like it’s the best way I can do this with the highest integrity. So, I started way, way back by doing lots and lots of interviews. I had a research company interviewing mainly early adopters of technologies. So, we would be basically doing a type of futurism, if you like, by writing reports on, hey, this is what the really cutting-edge adopters are already telling us about this new technology, what it really costs, how good it really is, or maybe it’s not really good at all, it’s not meeting expectations. And so, we can make some predictions about that, and we can make some judgments about the next 10 years. So, I used to talk a lot to end users and to technology company executives as well about what was in their pipeline. The method evolved into sort of a wider range of views. But where it really took a change was, I began interviewing more scientists.
This started, there’s really a story behind it, but it started with a visit to some of IBM’s labs and I was talking to their scientists – they’re really, really hardcore researchers – and they stopped me, and they said, Bruce, you know, you’re looking at all this stuff too short term. We’re working three generations ahead of the technologists, let’s talk about that. And I suddenly realized it was so much more powerful, so much better and bigger to look longer with them. And also scientists have an interesting way of talking, you know. They’re much more objective, they’re much more prepared to talk about doubts and issues and concerns and possibilities and probabilities and they’re often much more honest. They don’t have an agenda to sell necessarily, you know? So, now my method is primarily visiting science labs. In medicine it’s mind-blowing to visit the people developing the therapies you know two generations ahead -the stuff we’ll get in 15 or 20 years. It’s really uplifting, actually. So that’s my main method now and it gives me a lot of joy. I love these people. That’s the other thing I discovered. I truly love spending time with them, and they give me a lot of energy and hope about the world.
Alicia Malone: So, I’m always curious about how people find their way into these technology-based careers. What is your story? Like, when you were a young boy, how did you figure out that you wanted to go in this direction? How did you get started in this whole realm?
Bruce McCabe: Well, I muddled my way into it. It was quite random. If I go back now with hindsight, I can see the interest was there at the very beginning because I used to buy books on how things work and like to take things apart and understand them. So, but that’s in hindsight. You know, back when I was a kid, I think I wanted to be a policeman, you know, for a long time, like a lot of young lads. And then it evolved into something else and something else. But when I got to university, I was very, very interested in science. I did science as an undergrad and then took a career in technology in a much more traditional sense. I actually worked for IBM and then for a company called WordPerfect, which is long gone now, in word processing software. And I was working for companies that sold and installed technology. And I realized I was very, very unhappy with that and I took a very sharp turn and a very big salary cut and moved into industrial research and started again.
So, it was really an understanding of who I am and what I like doing and don’t like doing. I didn’t really like selling and all of what went with it. I liked learning and exploring and so I took this huge salary cut and got into an industrial research company that looked at computer trends and digital trends and did a lot of statistical work and then it evolved from there. I ended up setting up my own company doing bespoke research, as I mentioned earlier, on early adoption and doing reports from early adopters. So, people had more grounded advice before they spent money on new technology and then it became full-time futurism. That’s what people asked for and I guess the love grew with that.
If life is a game of, you know, to me it’s kind of a game of trying to get to somewhere in your career where you’re enjoying what you’re doing and it’s really congruent to your values and that’s sort of what that journey’s been. It’s slowly been understanding who I am and making the work conform to who I am and choosing the right work. Long answer.
Alicia Malone: No, it’s a great answer. And I think you are proof that it’s never too late to change careers and to find where you belong in the world, and I think that’s great. What do you enjoy most about what you do? What inspires you? What do you find are also the biggest challenges that you encounter?
Bruce McCabe: Well, let’s take them one by one. What I enjoy most by country mile is the people. So, spending time with audiences, I’m learning from them before I present. When I tell the stories, that’s just my delivery, but there’s another joy afterwards when they all come up and want to talk about their context and share some different opinions about what I just said. So, we’re now learning together. This is joy. This is what I get out of it and what I love about it. And spending time with scientists, as I mentioned earlier, is amazing. Recently, I spent time with the people that invented Car T-cell therapy, which is curing cancers, the people that actually saved the lives of the first children with leukemia using these new therapies.
You wouldn’t believe just how amazingly uplifting it is to spend time with people who have dedicated their lives to improving the lives of others like that. So that’s where the joy is. Sorry, what was the second part of the question? But the inspiration comes from people. No question about that. The second part was challenges, wasn’t it?
Alicia Malone: Yes, you’re right on. The second part was what do you find are the biggest challenges that you encounter in this realm?
Bruce McCabe: Yeah. Well, there’s a few. I would say one of them is that sometimes people latch on to concepts. You know, there’s a zeitgeist or there’s some very good marketing out there and suddenly everyone’s talking about the metaverse. In many ways, it can be nonsense and can be very distracting. You know, so you have to try and cut through that. So, there’s forces out there in the industry of messaging and marketing, that sometimes you have to manage and cut through. That’s sort of at an operational level.
More deeply, the challenges for me at a personal level are, you know how they say to be mentally healthy you should live in the present? I’ve got a problem, right? Because I’m spending all my life thinking about the future. I mean, quite seriously though, when you’re thinking about the next 10 or 20 years, you have to think about the good and the bad. And there’s a lot of good and there’s a lot of bad. And when I’m on stage, when I put together a keynote, my role is always to look at opportunity for people. That’s how I see my role. You know, let’s bring the positives to the stage and help people see opportunities. Because that’s how we change the world. That’s how we can bring some sort of positive impact and effect. If I got up on stage and talked about the bad news for an hour, no one would ever book me again. But I do have to think about the bad and sometimes people do ask for that. They specifically will ask me to discuss some of the issues around climate, for example. I just came from the Maldives looking at sea level rise and before that I was in Sri Lanka looking at biodiversity loss in forests, because these are critical issues and some of my clients will want me to present on those. So, the personal challenge is kind of being mentally aware of some of the really, really tough challenges facing humanity and how difficult they are to solve, and I find that I have to work really hard to balance that and make sure I’m looking at positives and negatives and not getting overburdened by some of the bad news.
Alicia Malone: I was going to ask you if what you predict about the future, what you see coming, if it ever scares you. And it sounds like maybe you’ve found a way to balance that out.
Bruce McCabe: Yeah, and it does scare me sometimes. But we’re all human and one of our little follies is that we gravitate to the bad news. We are naturally defensive people. And hey, this is a security-related conference, so I think everyone’s going to understand that really well. We can see threats everywhere we look if we’re not careful, you know. So, we have to be cognizant of that and actually say, well, we need to work at balancing it because we’re human, we’ll naturally go to the concerns, and we’ll worry more than we should. The bad news is never quite as bad, you know, and the good news is never quite as good. We have to sort of try and be self-moderating that way. But yes, there are lots of things that scare me. There are a lot of things that scare me around AI right now. Not in the Skynet sense that people ask about all the time, you know, will AI end humanity in that way? But in the much more pernicious threats to humanity as AI starts to take over many, many more tasks as it becomes more emotional, attentive. If you’ve ever seen the movie Her with Scarlett Johansson and Joaquin Phoenix, you get a good sense of the real dangers coming socially with AI. That’s an outstanding metaphor for some of the dangers in our future there.
I look at a lot around energy and climate and there’s so much good news in the energy transitions taking place all over the world, in the US, everywhere. There’s really, really powerfully good news. But I worry deeply around the rate of change and whether we’re being fast enough. And I worry very much about biodiversity and loss of natural habitats.
Yes, so they’re the big things. But on the plus side, if I just spoke about healthcare every day, you know, I’d be on cloud nine. What’s coming in healthcare is unbelievable. I’m talking to so many scientists who are literally talking about ending all cancers. You know, what a conversation. I would never have dreamed to be having that conversation only a few years ago, you know. So that’s amazing. There are people who are going much further. They’re looking at how do we actually edit, use this sort of gene editing technology to take away our genetic risk of cardiovascular disease. So, that’s like half the risk factor. You know, lifestyle factors like smoking and that sort of thing, we can’t solve through medicine. They’re choices. But we can take away the genetic component. So, imagine shifting the bell curve for cardiovascular disease for humanity and that’s what they’re talking about. So, there’s so many positives too and we have to always look at both.
Alicia Malone: That’s so true. You’re going to be speaking with the payment security industry. What do you ultimately want attendees to take away from your session? How do you gauge a successful speaking engagement?
Bruce McCabe: Well, my big objective for this is I want people to think bigger. I really want to expand their thinking and their horizons around security. The title of this is “Security in an Age of Exponential Innovation”. Lots of changes are coming in the next 25 years. A great deal of change. It’s an era like we’ve never seen before. And AI is a huge driving force there.
So, as an example, if I can get people thinking much, much bigger about AI, the last couple of years, everyone’s become very focused on generative AI, and it’s really a tiny proportion of what’s coming. In fact, I would say everything you’ve ever seen in AI to date, and all of the disruptive effect of that, is still less than 1% of what’s coming. So, I want to expand their horizons a lot.
Success, to me, is I want them thinking a lot more about opportunity. So, it’s not just, gosh, it’s going to be a terribly hard 25 years through to 2050. I want them to think, my gosh, what a great place I’m in, because there are really big levers, we’re going to be able to pull as well to maybe improve the security landscape. So, I want them to think very, very big and expansively.
And success to me is when it’s really gauged afterwards, and it’s when everyone starts coming up, and wanting to ask lots and lots of questions and talk about what I just said because that tells me I’ve hit some nerves; I’ve said things they haven’t heard before and taken them places they haven’t been. So that’s my measure. So, if anyone listening to this, when you see me on stage afterwards, come up and rush up and ask me questions afterwards. You’ll make me very happy. That’s success to me. And also, that positive thinking, to get them to think expansively about opportunities. Yeah, that’s the goal.
Alicia Malone: Well, you’ve sold me on this keynote presentation. I’m very excited to hear what you have to say. And since you are on our Coffee with the Council podcast, we like to ask our guests how they take their coffee. Or if you’re not a coffee drinker, what do you prefer instead?
Bruce McCabe: I love coffee. So, I would not function without coffee. I just have to stop taking it after about 1:00 or 2:00 p.m. each day because then I’ll be up all night. I could drink it all day when I was younger. I don’t understand how this metabolism changes, but I take it with milk and never with sugar. I used to take lots of sugar and then I discovered what coffee really tastes like when I finally got rid of sugar, and I enjoy it so much more!
Alicia Malone: It does have a very good flavor all by itself. Yes, I agree. Well, thank you so much for joining us on Coffee with the Council, Bruce, and we’re really looking forward to seeing you at the Community Meetings this fall.
Bruce McCabe: Well, my pleasure Alicia. It’s been great talking to you, and I cannot wait to meet everyone in person.
Alicia Malone: And you can catch Bruce on stage as our keynote speaker at both the PCI SSC Europe Community Meeting in Barcelona, Spain, October 8th through the 10th, and our Asia-Pacific Community Meeting in Hanoi, Vietnam, November 20th to the 21st. Registration is now open on our website, and we hope to see you there.
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