There are things that will impact all of us, regardless of what else is going on in our lives.

COVID can’t stop them. Elections can’t send them of course. World politics are no match for them. They may slow them down, but like a ball under water will eventually explode back to the surface, they’re going to happen, .

These are meta trends, they’re social, technical, psychological and human adjustments that we as humans are heralding in but don’t even know we’re doing it, till it’s done.

Every few years I publish an updated list of mega trends and in a post-covid rapidly evolving, new, frenzied world of seeming uncertainty, it’s a perfect time to look further ahead, step out of the day to day and explore the behind the scenes macro forces that will impact our world over the next decade or so.

To make sense and purpose of these 7 meta trends, listen live to Hong Kong Radio 3’s Phil Whelan and I chat our way through each of them and how they might impact our lives in the very near future (transcript below).

Transcript

Phil Whelan: [00:00:00] Morris Misel in Melbourne. How are you? Yeah, very good. Very good. Excellent. Are you prepared after your week of keynote stardom to lay down your seven points

Morris Misel: as prepared as ever

Phil Whelan: good to go well, look, see, it’s really cool. This, so today, Morris. Having done a big keynote speech, keynote speech in Sydney last week debuted his seven meta trends that will impact us over the next 20 years.

Well, it was a meta trend

Morris Misel: oh, I love that. Could you do the intro again? That was wonderful. so a meta trend, a meta trend’s something that I play with a lot. They’re the big overarching things that are going to change our world, regardless of whatever else is happening. So things that are fairly sure. Going to impact. We don’t quite know how we don’t quite know. Well, I met

Phil Whelan: Morris I’m gonna ask you all the stupid questions and get ’em outta the way.

Morris Misel: Well, not stupid questions. Meta meta means it’s really big. So it does it. It’s still going to happen, regardless of whether we have a COVID, regardless of whether we have something else happening, it may not be as fast or as deep, but these things are happening.

[00:01:00] Despite it kind of plays into another theory that I put behind this. And that’s the, when we talk about strategy or when we talk about even our lives, our day to day lives, we kind of work in three thought processes. Okay. And the first one for me is the notion that we are very much in the space of BEWI.

Okay. But twixt is kind of like when you’ve got a cold and you’ve got nothing else to think about, you know, you just concentrate on that cold. Nothing else makes sense. You know, worrying about tomorrow or yesterday, just isn’t there. Yep. But Twix is kind of where we’re stuck at the moment with COVID and rightly so these things aren’t negative, but it means it’s taking up a lot of our focus.

We don’t really think beyond that. We’re just trying to get out of today’s. You know, today’s

Phil Whelan: problem. It’s being made to take up a lot of our focus as well. I don’t know if that’s a, an element.

Morris Misel: Well, it is, but as humans, we really, I I think have to push forward as well. So that’s Bewitched the next phase for me then, or the next mindset is between and between kind of tells us it’s, you know, when we know that something’s happening ahead, [00:02:00] we don’t quite know what it is or what’s impact is, but we know it’s gonna come or we know it’s likely at some point.

Yep. And we’ve also got all this romantic stuff behind us that we think was great that we’re trying to drag. Along with us. So we’re kind of stuck between the two mm-hmm and beyond is where I play a lot. And that’s really wondering about what’s ahead and what we’re gonna do. So the meta trends to me are really pushing into the beyond space, you know, leaving the be TWIs, which is necessary in humans.

We have to get through it every day. The between the romantic notion of yesterday and the possibilities of tomorrow, but the beyond is, well, what are the things are gonna impact on us? We don’t know them in find detail. At least let’s figure out what they are so we can begin to

Phil Whelan: use them. I’m loving the labeling of this.

And I wanna Chuck in a bit of pub quiz trivia. So mega is a noun and meta yes is an adjective. So that’s why it’s meta. Did I score a point? Did I get a free pint? Oh, you

Morris Misel: did. It’s as if I knew that go on. Sorry. No, go

Phil Whelan: so Betwixt is an interesting thing. A, a period of put it simply Morris, a period of concentrating on something else or.

Morris Misel: Rumination. Well, no, it it’s really concentrating what’s in front of you. Okay. So it, it, to me, to me, it is the thing that we do as humans when, when something is big or something’s tagged up a lot of our time.

And cover’s a great example. Right. You know, I think a cold is a great example. I can give you the current great example. You know, my daughter, I think I’ve said to you before is engaged, Betwix just kind of now everything, everything has this notion of, of wedding. Everything we talk about in this family is about weddings.

We’re stuck with it. Yeah. And they’re kind of like between the phases, they. They’re not single anymore. They know they’re not married and they’re kind of looking at both sides of it. Yes. I actually used this example last week as well in the keynote and beyond, you know, they know that they’re gonna get married one day and there are things that they’re gonna have to do, find a house, you know, do all kind of things.

And they’re just beginning to think about those things. That’s tweaks between and beyond from a human characteristic.

Phil Whelan: Excellent. Excellent. All right then. So. Take us as much as [00:04:00] you can in like 10 minutes down the, down the road.

Morris Misel: So this is, this is something I put together every couple of years, you know, it changes and there’s no real time scale for me in when I do them, because it really is a matter of how quickly the world changes.

But what we’re about to talk about, I think will impact us for at least the next 10 years. So these are my seven meta trends, the first of them, and there no particular order is what I refer to as. Healthy Wellness .And we’ve talked about this a lot over the last, you know, months and years, healthy wellness is the reality that for many people, we will have the ability to live to at least a hundred.

Now kids to 120, we will live in relatively good health, but we are also learning so much more about the human body. We’re also beginning to take more controllers we saw in COVID each and every one of us had to be responsible for ourselves. Yes. We had to do things in advance of we weren’t just waiting for things to go wrong.

We were trying to prevent that’s wellness. That’s a really big shift in fundamental humanity that we now take more control over our body and our wellbeing

Phil Whelan: doctors to this day, scratch their heads as to why [00:05:00] people only come to them when they need fixing and not before. Yeah. Prefixing of course we all know that that’s a reason, but, but that’s logic.

Morris Misel:  And what we’re trying to do now is preempt all of that and say, look, we wanna keep ourselves as well as we can for as long as we can. So we don’t have to go to doctors or anybody else, not at that. Wonderful, but we wanna avoid them as long as possible. But the important thing is that we are responsible and also that we’re living to, you know, we are going to live to what I think the possibility of a hundred, hundred and 20.

And as we’ve said, many, many times Morris, a. Oh, yes, absolutely. For most, for many, many people, yes. In relatively good health. Okay. This will not, this will not be a disabling, you know, 20 or 30 years. That’s that notion of wellness. Gotcha. Remember in that space also, we’re talking mostly baby boomers and baby boomers are aging very differently from the previous generation that were called builders and builders by society.

And by medicine, by culture, by everything were very diminishing in their nature. You know, they were getting old, they were. Firmed, they needed more help. There was less intervention for them. More

Phil Whelan: help, more help earlier [00:06:00] perhaps.

Morris Misel: And because we didn’t have the medical science around it too, and it was more unusual to live longer, right?

So these baby boomers now are very different mindset. They don’t want to be in a diminishing capacity. They know they’re changing their houses. So they’re smaller, they’re doing a bit more exercise. They’re traveling a bit different. All of this comes into healthy and wellness. We’re not overstating it, but that’s that notion of let’s look ahead and wonder what’s gonna happen because our society.

Is living in that space, the

Phil Whelan: kind of thing, Morris that our parents generally speaking did none. Yeah, actually, and that wasn’t that many years ago, but they did none of these things you’re talking about. No. Right. And

Morris Misel: that wasn’t because they couldn’t, or they shouldn’t it just because society wasn’t, it wasn’t set up for it.

Yeah. And it was really a mindset. We didn’t understand the human body as well as we do now. And of course, 50 years from now will say the same thing, but we don’t, we didn’t understand the body as well. And. People didn’t live that long. You know, the average lifespan of a person was about 70 or 80 years of age. And that was only about 30 or 40 years ago. I wonder what

Phil Whelan: the [00:07:00]  I wonder what the wave is. Comparing developments of science with longevity over the years. It’s, it’s gotta have something to do with it.

Morris Misel:   And we are literally about to crack the code in ways that we haven’t done before gerontology, which is the study of aging is a relatively new medical.

Science. I mean, of course people are starting forever, but as a big burgeoning part of medicine, it’s huge now. And it’s becoming a trillion dollar industry, literally with tea trillion dollar industry. And this’s happened over the last 10 years or so. And it’s because a lot of the people that have a lot of the money now are getting into that space where they want some answers.

They want some cures, they want some remedies. And that truly is the reason that we’re seeing a lot more money spent in it, as well as our understanding of DNA. And the understanding of human mind. Yeah. The human physiology, things that we once thought we knew, we didn’t know, but we know better of now, you know, rheumatoid arthritis, there are all kinds of things that we are really starting to get Alzheimer.

That’s the biggie. . Now we don’t know how to cure it. I’m not saying that we will the next 10 years, but we [00:08:00] will have a better understanding of how to tame it, how to live with it, how to make it. Possible to continue to live a relatively good life with it. So that’s all around that healthy and wellness phase.

So when I talk to clients, when I talk to audiences about that, it really is the impacts of all of those things on them, their products, their services, and what they’re going to, to offer into tomorrow’s landscape, healthy wellness. Well,

Phil Whelan: let’s get onto number two because this is even bigger umbrella. Isn’t it?

Morris Misel: So, number two, it sounds like a strange one being human. Of course we’ve always been human, but really the last hundred and 5,200 years. And I kind of used the big umbrella of the industrial revolution when we changed the way we worked. Yeah. For many people, we came off the land, we went into a centralized city, we worked nine to five.

We kind of had a very different way of living than we did for the previous centuries or. Hundreds of years on millenniums or whatever it was now, what happened in that last 150 years was we became very much focused on being part of a [00:09:00] whole. We went to work and we gathered around a whole lot of people.

We went to school and we again gathered around a whole lot of people. Okay. Society was all about us banding together. It’s not that we’re not going to do that, but what’s changed in the last 10 years is that we have now, especially in Western society. And this is a very much a conversation of affluent.

Society, you gotta have, you gotta have money and you got, you gotta kind of know that there’s a future to play into this being human. But the reality is now that we are all more centered on ourselves now that’s not being selfish, but that’s looking at the human condition and making sure that we as individuals are well fed well housed, well watered that were well educated and also looking out for other people as well, which is a big notion that put your

Phil Whelan: own oxygen mask on. And then you can help others around you. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

Morris Misel: But what you see now with the younger generations is the, is the opposite of what I think many people complain about them. I actually see them as being more collegiate, as more caring, as more understanding, as thinking more about other people and making sure that other [00:10:00] people are, are as well resourced as they might have access to.

Phil Whelan: And this is your definition of being human then,

Morris Misel: right? Absolutely. Okay. So what we’re seeing now is. Many decisions being made across all kinds of political spheres, across economic spheres, across schools, across all kinds of places, pushing back into this individual notion. It talks in that space for me as well about the careers of tomorrow, the what we’re going to see in this being human.

I’m not careers to so much part of a larger. Group. In other words, you know, you are the accountant, but you’re working in a shoe factory and we need 16 different other types of people in that. And you are just one cog. We’re really talking about us as individuals. When we work, having skill sets that we can use between different careers between different jobs.

So it’s really about us resourcing ourselves to having good skill sets. Looking after ourselves, looking after our. People as well. So being human is a very, very different way of seeing the world. It may sound obvious, as I [00:11:00] said before, it may sound like something we’ve always done, but truly we haven’t.

The decisions have been made on a far greater level, more about a societal need. That doesn’t mean we won’t do that. It just means now it does push back down to that lower level

Phil Whelan: Where with Morris and he’s going through seven meta trends that are gonna impact us all over the next couple of decade.

And we hit number three.

Morris Misel: Number three for me is warming times. You know, it’s this notion that, of course we have caused harm to our planet, or at least we’ve sped up some of the difficulties that the planet’s having at the moment. Mm-hmm , there are all sorts of things that will come out of that. We’re seeing industries change at the moment.

We’re seeing jobs change out at the moment. We’re seeing societies and that need to cope with things that we didn’t cope before. So if. Places that are literally burning where the summer seems to come on a bit quicker, a bit hotter, and therefore they’re happy all kinds of Bush fire than to worry about before we have places where it’s colder than it was before we have shifting environments. All [00:12:00] of those of course are beginning to impact on the way we live as humans on the way we build our houses on the way we use our energy on the things that are important to us. So there are lots of conversations around. Warming times. Okay. We also need to look at physically where we are on the planet and how those physical spaces might play themselves out.

Yeah. There are conversations about, about whether we should in fact, look at islands that aren’t going to be around anymore, for instance,

Hmm. And the next one of these Phil. So bring this up to number four is what I refer to as power plays. And power plays is the shift of the shift of the decision, making the shift of the power players on this planet. It of course talks about the notion of of Russia and China and all sorts of other economies that are growing.

It also speaks of the fact that India is going to be the largest populous country within about four or five years. Yeah, it talks about for me also the notion that it’s not just countries anymore, that make impacts on the globe. [00:13:00] Also corporations and wealthy individuals or individuals that have a particular ability to be able to harness people around them, whether that’s a 13 year old who can make us understand about warming times and ways we haven’t seen before.

Mm-hmm, , there’s this whole shift in the way that power plays itself out. It was traditionally only seen to be about countries and continents. It now is beyond geography and it moves into all kinds of spaces. Do

Phil Whelan: you ever. Get into why we are seeing so much more of this power play that you’re talking about across the globe than ever before.

Well, than in a long, long time

Morris Misel: we saw we’ve always seen them. So as humans where there’s always been a power play, even if it was a local regional area. Sure. The big difference now is that we can shift geographies really quickly that we are become aware of them. So again, not to blame social media, but to speak of it as a communication tool, we now can find.

Things much quicker we can share information. We’re also more homogenous now. So we’re more like each other now than we ever were before. Okay. So lots of things that [00:14:00] were only about one area, you know, the culture, the language, what was important, those kinds of things kind of stuck to one area and now mean more to more people across the planet.

So there were lots of things which give us the ability now to play on a much larger, on a much larger landscape and think about the earth in whole as

Phil Whelan: well. I think a lot of people would probably say that number four, power plays. Have a huge, massive paradigm shifting impact

Morris Misel: on the world. It absolutely will. And we are literally at the moment where we see a lot of traditional countries with making decisions that we haven’t seen for, you know, 40, 50, 60 years or a hundred years or more. Yeah. And their decisions, which may be right for them are, are having impacts that the rest of the globe needs to come to terms with and figure out how to deal with well, power

Phil Whelan: plays does shift into number five technological independence.

Morris Misel: Which is the notion that now our technology is actually doing a lot of the thinking and a lot of the heavy lifting for us. We’re not talking about autonomy necessarily in CARSs cuz I think that’s further than [00:15:00] 10 years away. Yeah. But what we have now is, is for instance, with farming and we’ve.

Talked about this before. That was great. Where a farmer can, for instance, have a farm that uses satellite equipment to be able to understand where they should be watering, where they should be fertilizing when it’s ready to pick, and they can send a tractor out, can work 24, 7 as an example of technological independence.

Gotcha. It doesn’t require humans as much to be there to oversee the day to. Activity just to oversee what needs to be done from their

Phil Whelan: phone. That was an incredible, interesting piece. You gave us about the phone. It was a

Morris Misel: really interesting piece. And that’s, that’s an example of technological independence.

In other words, there are a whole group of other things now. Yeah. That can do what humans might once have had to take up a lot of time with.

Phil Whelan: Okay, well, the last two are the biggest, no question.

Morris Misel: Well, the last two for me are the mega verse. The mega verse is the notion that we now have a completely different world that we are building.

We’ve got the physical world that we’ve built for the last couple of billion years. Yes. We’ve got the digital world that we’ve [00:16:00] built for the last 30 years, which is our mobile phones and our technologies and finding information. And we, you know, all that kind of stuff that we take for granted that really only has been here for a split second.

What’s happening with the Mega Verse is we’re now squashing the two together into what will be called, I think the S spatial world, whereas we can now put the physical and the digital together and get all kinds of really interesting new possibilities. So for instance, a heads up display in the car, you’re looking out the windscreen, you see the physical world, you see the road, you see everything in front of you, but you also do see a digital display, which is giving you arrows, you know, to where to turn.

It’s telling you about traffic conditions to head. It’s giving you satellite, it’s giving you all sorts of things. So. Blended world is gonna become more and more ordinary over the next decade and beyond.

Phil Whelan: And number seven, as quick as you

Morris Misel: can. The universe is space where we’re spending a lot of money, time and energy at the moment where we’re thinking up new ways to have tourism, to have agriculture, to [00:17:00] have all sorts of things. And that’s in a brand new world that we haven’t lived in before and we wanted it.

Well, we do, but the reason I put it in there is because what we’ve always done, you know, from the sixties onwards is we use that technology of what might be. We begin to use it today. A lot of money, time and effort spent by cor big corporations and governments in that universe space. And we’ve reverse engineer it for today.

Phil Whelan: Well, we’ve flown through these today. He’s done a heck of a lot of work on this Morris. If people wanna read the whole nine yards, the whole detail, what do we do?

Morris Misel: so it’s MorrisFuturist.com.

Phil Whelan: Talk to you next week. Morris Misel live