The Craft of Foresight – with Florence Gaub
Danny Buerkli: My guest is Florence Gaub. Florence is a political scientist, military strategist, and futurist. She is the director of the Research Division at the NATO Defense College in Rome and author of several books, including The Future: A User’s Guide and Scenario. Florence, welcome. What makes for a good warning?
Florence Gaub: This is an excellent question. What makes for a good warning? First of all, something that is very concrete. I’ll give you the example of the pandemic. Before the pandemic happened, there were warnings here and there that a pandemic might occur, but not concrete enough to act on. You cannot act on it if it’s not concrete. If I told you, statistically, a war is becoming more likely but I can’t tell you when or where it will occur, then you cannot act on it. So first of all, be very concrete in your warning.
Secondly, show the policy options, ideally. Many researchers don’t want to do that because we’re in the business of analysing the problem — the solution should be developed by politicians. True. But politicians want you to have done a little bit of homework for them, because you’ve understood the problem, so they assume you also know how to work around it. If you don’t want to prescribe a solution, then develop two or three and say, these are avenues you could fix it with.
And lastly, a good warning manages the emotion of the people you want to reach. That is something that’s basically never taken into account. If you come to somebody’s house and say, by the way, a war is on the doorstep, or a pandemic, many people will die — bye — you leave them hanging. So as a futurist, or anybody in the business of warning, you need to understand that the person you’re talking to will probably have some kind of emotional reaction — and it’s very different depending on who you’re talking to. Take it into account before you warn them.
We actually found that. We did a workshop at the college two years ago on exactly that, and that was the main lesson. It wasn’t, oh, we need to invest more resources. It was: think more about the person you’re warning. How can you get them to actually listen to you? Because if you overwhelm them emotionally, they shut down, and then you get the Cassandra effect — blah blah blah, it’s just not happening. Those three would be my ingredients.
Danny: Does that mean that on occasion you should, for tactical reasons, misrepresent your true beliefs?
Florence: I wouldn’t call it that, because that sounds negative. I would call it salami tactic — cut it into little pieces, the same way you feed a toddler sometimes. You can’t give them everything in one go. Take climate change, for instance. If you’re advising a minister at local or national level, not at the global level, and you break it down for them — what it means for their city, their region, their country — it will be easier for them to act on it. But of course it’s a global phenomenon. So in that case, yeah, if I follow your narrative, that would be slightly misrepresenting the facts, because it’s not a local or national phenomenon. But to make it actionable, you have to pick those parts of the problem that people can act on. Yes, I think you should definitely do that.
Danny: Fair enough. What do you know about scenarios that Herman Kahn did not?
Florence: Herman Kahn is a bit of a — I don’t know how to put it. He’s a figure that towers over our discipline. He’s certainly inspirational. My advantage today is that I’m still alive and he’s not, so I know something about the twenty-first century that he doesn’t. He was definitely a standard-setter. He used the horror of nuclear war to inspire people to act against it. He’s often misunderstood — people think he was crazy, and of course the movie Dr. Strangelove was partly inspired by his personality. But he really dared, emotionally, to go into places where others were not. In his book on thermonuclear war, he really imagined: okay, if it came to a nuclear war, what would it look like? And the takeaway was, it’s so horrible — everybody thought, we absolutely have to work so that this never happens.
Some people thought he went too far with that. So one thing I know, or how I differ from him, is that I like to be constructive and positive in my scenarios — not as in “everything’s going to be fine,” but I think in addition to negative scenarios you also need positive ones. I always say the future is a football pitch: you cannot play just defense, and you cannot play just offense. You need to play both if you want to win a game. Herman Kahn was mostly a defensive player, meaning he wanted to avoid certain futures, but he left the positive future to be achieved by others. That’s where I’m different from him. But that doesn’t mean I know more or I’m better than him. We’re just different generations, and I’m glad he set the standard for the discipline in many ways.
Danny: To this point — statements about the future, scenarios, they can be performative and/or reflexive, right? They’re not just neutral statements. They can end up influencing what will happen, either because we make it so by saying it out loud, or by inducing some adversary to try to surprise us now that they know what we think about what they might do, and all the rest of it. What should — or are — institutions deliberately not saying publicly?
Florence: Other than what I’m now saying on your podcast.
Danny: Exactly.
Florence: First of all, NATO member states are democracies. And of course, even in democracies, we have classified material. But the reality is that the community of people who take part in national security conversations is so big — think-tankers, journalists, the defense committee in parliament, of course the ministers, and so forth. It’s just so big that — you could describe it as a flaw of the system, but I think it’s designed that way. Secrets in democracies are extremely hard to keep. So even though there might be certain details, certain war plans NATO has that we don’t tell the public, if you look at the public debate, the collective imagination is pretty close to what NATO also thinks about the future.
But on the other hand, being transparent doesn’t make us necessarily predictable. I’ll give you the example of Ukraine. In 2014, after the occupation of Crimea, the Europeans — the West in general — reacted pretty cautiously. Nobody actually wanted to rock the boat with Russia. And I think Putin thought, okay, in ‘22 they’re going to do the same — some declarations, “honestly concerned,” la la, and nothing’s going to happen. And then they crossed the line for us, and they were very surprised by that. But more importantly, we were surprised by it ourselves. So in that sense, a democracy also has a fair degree of unpredictability from the outside. You can read everything they’re saying and listen to the talk shows, but ultimately, precisely because so many people are part of the decision-making process, that also makes us unpredictable — but not in a way that anybody controls. We’re more like a swarm of fish, changing direction because suddenly we feel like it. That’s just the nature of our system. It can be seen as a flaw, but ultimately, if that’s the price to pay for democracy, I’d gladly pay it.
Danny: On Ukraine — this is something you’ve talked about — often the rationale for doing scenario work or futures work is preparedness. We want to be better prepared. Ukraine was arguably unprepared for the Russian attack, and yet has been proven remarkably resilient. So what is going on there? What accounts for that?
Florence: You know what I always say? In war, everything you can’t touch is as important as what you can touch. Of course, there’s an overwhelming focus on all the things you can touch when it comes to military affairs — tanks, troops, drones, airplanes. When the war started, you’ll remember there were loads of newspapers doing mappings and stacking up: okay, who has more tanks, who has more soldiers. And they thought, well, whoever has more wins. But the reality is that everything you cannot touch is as important — will to fight, morale, cohesion, strategy, forecasting, long-term thinking, creativity, innovation, ingenuity. All of these things, the Ukrainians had in huge amounts. Ultimately — yes, of course Ukraine was supported by the West — but I think when the war ends, the Ukrainians will have won because they had all of these things you can’t touch.
And the funny thing is they didn’t know they had it. If you’d asked the Ukrainians before the war started, do you think you can last more than four years? And this summer, right now, we’re saying, well, it looks like it’s slowly turning. Ukraine is winning, Russia is losing, depending on how you define it. But broadly that’s a correct assessment. We’re all marveling in NATO at the innovation capacity when it comes to drones, at the cohesion, the morale, the will to fight. And the reason the Ukrainians didn’t realize they have it is — first of all, it’s very hard to predict what happens in war. Now you’re going to say, well, you work for NATO, you do this for a living. True. But this emotional, psychological, cognitive component is super hard to predict. The hardest thing to predict in war is the human itself.
In foresight, you call this the affective forecasting bias — you’ll never really know how you’ll feel about a certain situation until you’ve actually felt it. There are multiple studies showing that if I ask you today, Danny, how will you feel when you win the lottery? You’re probably thinking, well, I’m going to feel amazing. And in reality, we know that most lottery winners become pretty depressed pretty fast. That’s just one example — there are plenty of others. But human beings are not good at predicting their own feelings, funnily enough.
Danny: It seems like — and Ukraine is not my specialty, I should say — but it seems like there’s always a risk of cargo-culting when analyzing these successes. We glom onto the surface-level attributes, the drone supply network, whatever it may be, while missing the underlying causal mechanisms, very much influenced by what you’re just saying.
Florence: That’s simply because you can see it and it’s easier to understand — you can show it on video, you can show drones. But you cannot easily describe the feeling of losing your identity and your family and where you live, and therefore putting up with terrible sacrifice, including your life and your normal life. I was asked so often at the beginning of the war by German journalists: why are the Ukrainians fighting? Why aren’t they just capitulating to go on with their daily lives? Well, it’s precisely because of that — because a lot more is at stake for them than their daily lives: their identity, their nationality, their nation. And that’s something you cannot really understand from the outside. It’s really hard to explain to somebody who hasn’t been through it.
Danny: Pierre Wack, another one of the giants of the field, had this line, which I think he cribbed from Paul Valéry, where he said errors in future studies usually result from poor observation rather than poor reasoning. What are some facts that we’re currently observing poorly?
Florence: Plenty. I’ll agree with that. What’s so interesting about thinking about the future, for me, is that at the end of the day it’s more art than science. And the art here — to paraphrase Pierre Wack — observation versus reasoning: reasoning is you explaining, you’re already interpreting. Observing is actually the harder part. Are you capable of watching? Are you noticing? A lot of people are not really good at noticing when something is new and different. I see that in my team. Some of the best people on my team, when it comes to observing something new, have a special way of looking at the world. It’s a certain mindset, made up of fundamental curiosity about the world. They expose themselves to new sources of information, they listen to weird podcasts, they travel to strange countries, and they’re just generally interested in all things that are different.
I don’t think you can bottle it. And while all human beings have the neurological capacity to think about the future, I think the greatest talent in foresight is ultimately something to do with how you look at the world, how you were brought up, how you were educated. You can learn it up to a point, but as I said — you can learn to draw, but not everybody will be a Picasso. My job as a manager of a team is to create the conditions for people to grow into it and become more confident in what they’re observing. But ultimately, there is a fair degree of magic sauce that we can’t really recreate and, unfortunately, cannot bottle.
Danny: Forecasting is a specific field, a subfield of futures studies. We can measure some things — so we have superforecasters, people who seem exceptionally good, or exceptionally well-calibrated, at forecasting things. Do you consider yourself a superforecaster?
Florence: First of all, I want to say I’m a big fan of Phil Tetlock. I’ve read all his books, I’ve been in touch with him, and I’ve learned a lot from him. We both agree it’s not foresight or forecasting — we use forecasting methods and prediction markets in our work, for foresight. So it’s a source. To qualify as a superforecaster, I would have to have kept score. And of course, I know my own mind will play the trick of telling me, yeah, remember all those great things you predicted that actually happened. So — funny that you mention it — I just commissioned a person to track all my statements about the Ukraine war since ‘22 and contrast them with reality. I don’t have the results yet, unfortunately, so I can’t tell you.
But I always say you have to keep score. You have to keep track of your own statements about the future — not to beat yourself up or to be smug about it later, but to learn. Where was I wrong? Why did I say that at the time? I used to do that when I was still in the EU. Since I joined NATO, I just haven’t had time. I know I have a certain talent, let’s put it that way — otherwise I wouldn’t be here. But I’m not sure yet if I’m a superforecaster. Let’s wait for the results. I hope she sends them to me at the end of July this year. So maybe watch my social media, because I intend to publicize it — hoping, of course, that it’s a good result.
Danny: I’m pretty sure it will be. On forecasting — I think you’ve said elsewhere that you did not, quote unquote, see Greenland coming. Why not?
Florence: Simply not looking. As context: I’m a Middle East expert by training. Originally I spent almost ten years working just on the Middle East. So I only slowly discovered the North of NATO when I came back here three years ago, and I had started thinking about the Arctic — this is also why my second book, Scenario, starts with an incident in the Arctic. But I had not really thought about Greenland. And what’s a shame about Greenland is that there is so much precedent: the United States tried to acquire Greenland several times since the nineteenth century. So in that sense it would have been easy to spot — just as the war between Iran and Israel was easy to spot in our circles. It was a gray rhino, as we call it: something people warn of repeatedly, and then eventually it happens after a series of warnings. But Greenland — I was not looking north.
This is why it’s super important that you have a diverse team, or, if you don’t have a team, that you make up for it by looking for sources everywhere. Funnily enough, in my team we don’t have anybody working on the Arctic either. I have situational awareness by virtue of my team working on Russia, on the Middle East, increasingly on Asia — but I didn’t have anybody on the Arctic. So in this case, it was simply not looking in the right place.
Danny: Fair enough. And there are plenty of places you could be looking.
Florence: Yeah. But the reason I’m so candid about things I didn’t see coming is that I really don’t think a good futurist is somebody who sees everything coming. I’m not a Madame Irma at a fair reading out horoscopes. I will get things wrong. I think I’m better than others at seeing things coming, but that does not mean I see everything coming, and I’ll make misassessments too. I wouldn’t even call them failures, because ultimately the future can go so many different ways, and my job is to break it down into more probable scenarios. That said — once the Greenland crisis started, my prediction was 70% that it would end without Greenland being occupied or acquired by the United States. I said this when I was in Davos at the time. I even said it on ZDF, on a German evening TV show. They asked, what is your assessment? And I said, 70% likelihood that this will blow over. And of course Trump mentioned it again at the NATO summit, but still we have no change. So when you look at the facts rather than what was said, my gut feeling was right.
Danny: There seems to be a bit of a tension. Dan Davies, another great author, wrote an excellent book about cybernetics and management — I did a podcast with him the other day — on Pierre Wack absolutely nailing the oil crisis, in a sense, being the great tragedy of foresight and scenarios. Because there’s an inherent tension between wanting to get the prediction right, because that is really satisfying — and in some sense that is really the useful thing to do — and on the other hand, everyone always insisting that it’s really not about predictions, it’s about expanding our minds, vaccinating ourselves against the future, and all the rest of it. But it seems hard to deny that ultimately we kind of want to get it right.
Florence: Yeah, of course. There are two types of predictions. There’s the prediction, or forecast, where you want to warn. And if you warn and nobody listens, then you were right — but you actually failed in your mission, which was to change the policy direction. Your mission is not to get it right; your mission is to help policymakers make the right choices. I had exactly this situation early in my career. I was at a NATO member state’s mission here in Rome, and I said — this was in 2012 — if nothing is done, business as usual, Libya will descend into civil war, for a host of reasons. And the ambassador totally disagreed with me and said, oh, you academics, you’re always so pessimistic. I remember walking out with huge cognitive dissonance, because I thought, I know I’m right — I know it — and yet I feel no satisfaction whatsoever, because I feel like I failed somehow. And then later I realized what I had failed at was convincing the ambassador, because that would have been my job — not being right.
Now, that type of warning is a negative. However, if you talk about something your policymakers can’t influence — let’s say I talk about Ukraine. For instance, last year I said, this year negotiations will begin. I don’t think we’ll have a peace deal, but I think they will meet. And that’s what happened. In that case, I think that’s a prediction I can legitimately be proud of — a correct assessment, without having background knowledge. I was not in touch with Ukrainians or Americans or Russians. So you have to distinguish. But yes, of course it’s super satisfying when you see things others perhaps don’t.
Here’s another example — that’s how the career started, thinking about the future. I was working here in Rome at the NATO Defense College, in the Middle East faculty, and it was 2013, let’s say April or March. I wrote an article called “Egypt: Countdown to a Coup d’État.” President Morsi was in power, and the conventional wisdom was that the military would definitely not do anything. Some people commented under it: what do you dream of at night that will never happen? And then it happened, in June — two or three months later. When that happened, of course, first I was smug about it: cool, I saw something coming that others didn’t. But then I thought — and this is the more interesting question — okay, why did I see that coming? And then try to hone that instinct, that antenna, and figure out how I can get better at it. That’s the more interesting question than patting yourself on the shoulder and saying, yay, I did so well.
Danny: The obvious follow-up is: why did you see it coming?
Florence: It was a combination of expert knowledge — I did my PhD in military sociology, and I understood how the military works, which at that time many commentators didn’t. I understood that the frustration within the Egyptian military was growing and growing. And what’s the real advantage, from an institutional perspective, when you stage a coup? It’s actually not that you get into power. It’s that the upper echelon of the military goes into politics, which means — like in a chimney — you have a pull-up: a lot of people get promoted at the same time. This becomes particularly salient if you have a promotional backlog, where many people haven’t been promoted for a while — they’ll think, yeah, this is actually a good idea. So I knew that. I also had direct contact with Egyptian officers — they didn’t say to me “we’re going to stage a coup,” but I could tell their frustration was growing. And then lastly, it was my imagination: I allowed myself to think about what would have to happen for them to decide that. And I identified persistent economic crisis — when the military decides, okay, we cannot do this any longer because the economy is suffering, then they will act. So it was a combination of expert knowledge, privileged information, and imagination.
Danny: How did you call the Ukraine negotiations — how did you come to the conclusion that we’d see peace negotiations this year?
Florence: There is literature — not super helpful, but it exists — on negotiation probability in relation to war length. We know that the probability of a peace deal is pretty high in the beginning, then it really dips down, and after about three years it goes up again. So we knew that in ‘25 we’d gone through the valley, and I said, from now on negotiations will be more probable. The other things I saw were, of course, huge pressures on both sides — on the Ukrainians by the United States, but also internal economy, etcetera. And on the Russian side, my assessment at the time was that should the United States suspend support to Ukraine, the Ukrainians would take the war to Russia. This is expert knowledge — I just know how conflict works, and I’m sometimes surprised how little journalists understand that. A conflict doesn’t disappear because you take the weapons away. That’s what my journalists thought — that if the United States withdrew the weapons, then the Ukrainians can’t fight, the war is over. Well, where were you when Rwanda happened? Desperate people will use anything. And as we’ve seen, the Ukrainians are particularly skilled at being innovative and ingenious, and they have a huge advantage: they often speak Russian and they know Russia, so for espionage and sabotage attacks it’s a lot easier for them than it would be for us. So when you put this together — I’m beginning to think out loud now — I think I’ve found my own formula. It’s always a combination of imagination, expert knowledge, and privileged access to information that leads me to my conclusions.
Danny: How much uplift — if you think of these three elements — the privileged access to information is the one that’s most unequally distributed, arguably. Some organisations on this planet hold a lot more of it than others. What’s the right way of thinking about the gradient? Obviously having some is good, having all of it is better, presumably. But what’s the marginal added value?
Florence: Of privileged access to information? When I say privileged information, I don’t necessarily mean classified information. It means I still have access to decision-makers, both within NATO and elsewhere. I’m part of an information bubble that other people are not part of, and I recognize that. It swings both ways. It can be an advantage if you know what to do with it, but it can also be dangerous when you fall into groupthink. So while you’re absorbing this information, you have to maintain your critical distance. And remember, this is just information — it’s not the truth. It’s a version of the truth. You’re holding a piece of reality, a piece of whatever some people are saying about reality, and then you have to match it with others.
I can’t give you a number, but I still think it’s probably as important as the other two — let’s say 30%. If you’re not swimming in NATO circles, then you have to find other ways to get access to information. The way researchers do that, when they’re not working for NATO but for a think tank, is they go to conferences and they travel and they interview people. This is hugely important, and it’s why it’s also a job — it’s not something you can just do on the side. People think that with the internet you could sit at your desk and Google everything. No — because especially in these circles, not everything is online. A lot of it is not online simply because nobody takes the time to tell the internet, because it’s more important that we share information to build trust. A lot of it might not be classified, but it’s sensitive. So I would always say field research is paramount to being good at this job. Travel, talk to people, but still maintain a certain distance to the information and analyze it critically.
Danny: Someone who’s done an incredible job of pulling together a lot of non-classified, possibly formerly classified information to tell a story is Annie Jacobsen, who wrote Nuclear War: A Scenario, which I believe you’ve read. It’s really worth reading, just as your books are. It tells this really minute story of how a nuclear war might unfold. What does she not get right?
Florence: Funnily enough, I’m not part of the nuclear debate deeply, so I can’t give you exactly a list of what she’s not getting right. But my boss here at the college, a Danish general, was part of the nuclear debate, and he read her book and said to me, she comes very close to getting almost everything right. Now, another researcher friend of mine told me, yeah, it’s a good book, but the way she described it probably wouldn’t happen, because the reaction chain would be different. So if I understand the two voices correctly, I’d say she got the technicalities very close to 100% right. But where it’s debatable — and that’s because we never had a scenario like this since 1945, and definitely not in a world where more than one power has nuclear weapons — then we’re in a classical foresight and scenario conundrum, where you never know: will it unfold this way or that way?
I always say to my people — because they want one scenario. In NATO, they don’t want three or four or five. They want one. Tell me what’s going to happen. No — at least two. Because this is the challenge of the future: more things can happen than will happen. One thing will happen; thousands can happen. And then you have to make a choice. As a futurist, you’re telling a story, telling a scenario. Your ambition should not be to tell all the possible futures in one go; you choose one that you think is the most pertinent or the most convincing. And then others will always say, well, I don’t agree, because my opinion swings in another direction. You have to live with that. That’s just part of the game. I also don’t think your ambition should be that everybody agrees this is the one truth. The future is a discussion space. Its role is to initiate a discussion, to help with decision-making. It’s not crucial that you get every single detail right. But when it comes to the technicality, Annie did a fantastic job.
Danny: What you’re saying also means it makes scenarios an experiential good, as it were — where the write-up is useful and important for institutional reasons, to create legitimacy and all the rest of it. But it’s hard often not to feel that the write-up is vastly less important, and vastly less influential, relative to the process, and people having been in the room. That is the thing that changes their mind. Putting a write-up in front of someone — I’ve rarely seen anyone go, oh yeah, that totally makes sense to me, I will now change the way I think about the future.
Florence: You know why? Because I always say this: the future is like a toothbrush — everybody needs their own. Ultimately, people will accept a future that they were part of, that they discussed, that they built. Intuitively, they feel that whatever they think about the future is in it. That’s why I also caution against just buying a certain future off the shelf. The United States, for instance, used to do this amazing Global Trends report, and then the Europeans would read it and go, that’s the future. No — that is the future according to the United States. So you have to write your own.
And I think you put your finger right on it. That is also why there is not one future. The future is what you think today about what can happen. So you might think one thing, I think another thing, and whatever we think about it, we have to feel we played a role in it. This is also how you recognize a positive future. How do you, Danny, know this is a utopia you’d be willing to get involved with? You can see your own role in it. This is something political parties often forget. They design this amazing future and say, okay, now vote for it. Well — I can’t see myself in it. I played no role in making it come about, so I’m going to reject it. It’s a bit of an afterthought, unfortunately. But individuals play a role in every future.
Danny: Are you up for a little game? It’s a game you’re incredibly familiar with. I’ll tell you two names and you tell me who you prefer — and we don’t have to blast through this super fast, so I’d love to hear why. We’ll start with Carl von Clausewitz or Thomas Schelling.
Florence: I’m going to go for Clausewitz, because he lived longer ago than Schelling, so I have a feeling we know less about him. Of course, I’ve read both. What’s interesting about Clausewitz is that he wrote Vom Kriege — On War — and he’s known for describing war as the continuation of politics by other means, etcetera. But when you read his diary, you realize he was actually quite a sensitive man. He was very traumatized by war, by the battles he witnessed. He was also pretty tender with his wife. So he was probably a much more interesting person than people think when they hear “old Prussian generals.” So I’d say Clausewitz.
Danny: Excellent. I’ve read On War; I have not read his diaries, but I shall right away. Samuel Huntington or Morris Janowitz?
Florence: Depends on what kind of evening I want to have. Both of them were founding fathers of military sociology, but Huntington, of course, became more famous later on for The Clash of Civilizations. And I really didn’t like The Clash of Civilizations. The book itself is not good, and I think it created a lot of damage at the time. So in the spirit of academic rigour, I’ll go for Janowitz — and then we can have a proper discussion about the professional soldier.
Danny: What did you learn from Janowitz?
Florence: I really learned that the inside of a military institution is very important to understanding how the military looks at the world. My PhD compared three cases of countries that had gone through a civil war, looking at how the institution came back together afterwards. Janowitz was very formative, very important — without his work I could probably not have done this PhD. Huntington’s book The Soldier and the State was much more about the link between the individuals working in an institution and how they relate to the state, statehood, nationhood — the more abstract concept. But Janowitz really coined the idea that the military is not just a job, it’s a vocation. Ultimately, people who sign up for the military are ready to die for their country. In that sense it’s different — but it’s still also just a job. It’s both at the same time, and it’s this tension that makes it so interesting. I did this PhD at the time for intellectual reasons, but now, working in NATO, it helps me a great deal to understand my military colleagues, because most of them are in uniform. So I think Janowitz would have been a super interesting person to talk to.
Danny: And you’ve also become an officer in the French army.
Florence: I was a reserve officer, yeah, in the French military. Janowitz also worked on the Wehrmacht, and found one of the things people still wonder about today: why does a military unit keep fighting when it can no longer win? In his conversations with German prisoners of war — some people have disputed this, but it’s still an interesting contribution — he said, ultimately, they fight for each other. They fight for the unit itself. Unit cohesion has gotten a lot more attention since then. And how do you create that cohesion — the camaraderie, the morale, the going above and beyond? Ultimately, you probably do it for the people you’re in the unit with.
Danny: Next pairing: Olivier Roy or Gilles Kepel?
Florence: I’ve met both. I have a preference for Olivier on a personality basis, but it probably also has to do with the fact that I prefer how Olivier looks at Islamism as a phenomenon. Both of them have worked on Islamism. Olivier is much more of the opinion that it’s a constructed process — it has much more to do with the conditions of radicalization — whereas Gilles Kepel is a bit more primordial: he thinks, basically, Islam is the problem. Purely from a policy point of view, Olivier is the better option for me, because he gives me more ideas of what we can do to change it. Whereas changing a whole religion — that’s just not possible. So, Olivier.
Danny: Herman Kahn or Fred Polak?
Florence: You really did your homework. I’m going to go with Herman Kahn, obviously. I would ask him: do you feel accurately portrayed in Dr. Strangelove, and was Peter Sellers the right actor to play you?
Danny: What do you think he would say?
Florence: He was probably flattered, and said no — he didn’t look like him at all. But then I’m thinking, who could have played him at the time? Actually, there are quite a few actors. Danny DeVito, I think, would have been a good choice.
Danny: Would have had the same body shape.
Florence: He was too young at the time. But if you had to make that movie again, another film with Herman Kahn, I’d say Danny DeVito.
Danny: Excellent choice. Gaston Berger or Bertrand de Jouvenel?
Florence: This is a hard one, because I want to meet both of them. I’ve met Bertrand de Jouvenel’s grandson — he’s still active with Futuribles in Paris. So would it be interesting to meet his grandfather, great-grandfather? But Gaston Berger, I think, was intellectually the more interesting of the two. They’re both French futurists, obviously. I’ll go with Gaston Berger.
Danny: How is the French futurist lineage different from, say, the Anglo-Saxon one?
Florence: It’s totally different. When we look at France’s foresight community today — Futuribles, after World War Two, was created by Bertrand de Jouvenel. It definitely put France in pole position in Europe, in continental Europe for sure, but also Europe in the larger sense, because it had an institution and very early started to build a tradition of thinking about the future in a structured, intellectual way. And this is interesting, because France was pretty much an exception. Finland started later — actually, Finland and Spain. Spain started after Franco died, creating an institute for foresight in the prime minister’s office. And Finland started in the late ’80s, because some Finnish professors went to the US, discovered strategic foresight, and basically brought it back. And then the wall came down, and they thought, oh, this is going to be a handy tool to maneuver the situation. So those three countries are, to this day, leading the way.
The UK is interesting, because it has the intellectual firepower to do this — the tradition of critical thinking, to debate, to disagree, to leave space for different options. But the UK never managed to build an institution comparable to Futuribles or the Institute for Futures Studies. In the end, you do have to have one institution that carries the torch through the dark times, because foresight always goes up and down. When it’s up — right now it’s up — everybody likes it. But when it’s down, you need one institution that preserves the know-how and continues to build the next generation. That’s probably what happened in the UK, if I had to speculate: the tradition came and went, but there was nobody as a natural heir. So today, in the UK, strategic foresight is not in the place it could be. I’d say the same for Germany — but in Germany, at least, you can argue there’s so much against us: there’s no tradition, the cultural background isn’t there. In the UK, there is. There, maybe it’s a financial issue, an institutional issue, but it’s definitely not an intellectual issue.
Danny: What you’re saying about needing the institution to carry the torch is probably true because much of it is tacit knowledge rather than perfectly codifiable knowledge — which is why you can learn from books, but a lot of it is a practice.
Florence: But also — look at Finland. Two professors go to the US and come back, and today Finland is the foresight champion in Europe. They have a futures committee in parliament, a foresight report before every election, foresight advisors in every ministry. They structured it in a way nobody else has, and everybody’s praying at the altar of Finland in the futures community. Ultimately, that’s why it’s a human network. This is where the Germans are struggling: while they have the financial means and, of course, the great desire for planning, the Germans struggle with the creative and imaginative dimension of foresight — and also, who are the people who are actually going to do it? You need a certain network of people, a community, and that takes time. You need to grow it, and, as I said, you need to give them shelter while they’re waiting for the next wave.
Danny: Next pairing: Edward Luttwak or Bruce Bueno de Mesquita?
Florence: Edward Luttwak. I love that he writes really crazy books — like Coup d’État: A Practical Handbook, for instance. He was also very influential in military sociology, but I really like those books best, or Give War a Chance — the contributions where he goes against conventional wisdom and proposes something completely different. And then people get really angry at him because they think he actually means it. He didn’t write the coup d’état handbook because he wants coups to happen; he wants to explain the causal pathways for it. We’re also in the business of capturing attention, right? As researchers, especially in the twenty-first century, the people we’re talking to are inundated with information. So how do you capture their attention? By proposing something that’s different. He did that — this was before the twenty-first century — he was way ahead of his time. He knew how to be part of the conversation. Rather than write another article or a book with a really boring title that nobody’s going to read, he knew how to get that. So he was probably a fun character to talk to.
Danny: Pierre Wack or Jim Dator?
Florence: Pierre Wack. Although — Jim Dator, come on, that’s hard. Pierre Wack, being French. I’ve read a book about him, his biography. One of the things that stuck with me was that, allegedly, his propensity for scenarios came from a visit to Asia. I can’t remember which country, but the book said something like, he picked up the storytelling idea from there, brought it back to Shell, and started working with scenarios. And I always thought, is that true? Because sometimes inspiration comes from the oddest places. Although I do think scenarios ultimately come from the Commedia dell’arte — from improvisation theater, from the Renaissance. So I’d like to ask him that question. And of course I’d like to ask him about the moment when he wrote those scenarios about the future oil crisis, and the moment when the Shell leadership wanted to dissolve his division because they thought it was useless — and then, of course, it turned out he was right.
Danny: And then, big comeback. An ultimate pairing: Didier Sornette or Nassim Nicholas Taleb?
Florence: That’s easy — Sornette. I always feel sorry for Sornette, because he wrote a much finer, much more sophisticated concept than Taleb about rare events. He developed the dragon kings — dragon because rare, king because when they happen, huge. So the pandemic, but also wars: events that are outliers, but to some degree you can actually see them coming. I think it’s a much better analysis than the black swan that Nassim Taleb wrote. The black swan, to me, is a chimera. It doesn’t really exist, in the sense that a black swan is described as an event that nobody can see coming, and when it happens, afterwards, we all pretend we saw it coming. The truth is that everybody has seen something coming. There is no event in the world where literally nobody saw it coming. It’s that that person wasn’t heard. So there’s an analytical flaw. If he revised it and said “the leadership didn’t see it coming, but others did” — but as it is, it’s just not sophisticated enough for my liking. And, of course, he also has a bit of a pompous personality, which maybe doesn’t make it easy to talk to him — although many of the people you’ve mentioned so far also have pompous personalities. But I’d say Didier Sornette would be my choice.
Danny: I will admit, freely, I think Didier Sornette is a tragedy. He seems criminally underrated, by and large. He has a lot of incredibly interesting things, and yet — I mean, he’s obviously well known, but I think he’s not quite as well known as he should be.
Florence: Yeah, and I 100% agree. Here at the college, once a year, we produce the “what if” scenarios, and they’re dragon king scenarios. We deliberately call them dragon king scenarios, because even though our audience would understand black swan faster, I really want to make his case. I agree with you — he’s criminally underrated.
Danny: Final pairing: Isaac Asimov or Tonke Dragt?
Florence: Asimov. Asimov, come on. He’s very inspirational to me, because he wrote science fiction, but he was also a futurist — I’ll even say a social scientist. So, a true polymath. Remember that word? I think it’s such an amazing word that I want to bring it back — polymath, as in somebody who has multiple talents or works in multiple fields. And I want to be a polymath too. Actually, if you, as a futurist, are not a polymath, you probably did something wrong — because to understand even a fraction of the future, you need to have your fingers in so many different pies. You need to be curious about so many different things that you’re never just one thing. Asimov is a very good example of that. I loved his Foundation trilogy, and I even liked the series they did. I don’t know if you saw Foundation on Apple TV — it’s pretty good, I will say.
Danny: Speaking of something you need a broad remit to understand — AI, inevitably. What is the best historical analogy for warfare? Electricity?
Florence: Electricity. At the moment there’s an analogy going around that we think is dangerous — that AI is like the nuclear weapon, and we can’t let it out of the bottle, because once it’s out we can never put it back. But I think AI is like electricity, in the sense that it’s a multiplier, an enabler of other things. Some of them can be really good and some can be very dangerous. But then our role is to regulate and control — just as we control that electricity is only at a certain voltage, that certain devices are protected so nobody’s dying from it. We have the choice to regulate it, and so we should. But I also see the huge potential. Everybody’s imagination, in the military, about AI is captured by nuclear weapons. But actually it’s going to be much more helpful in pretty mundane things — logistics, maintenance, picture analysis. We already saw that in Iran. People run towards the most emotional thing, which is an AI-enabled drone flying around killing people. At this moment, that doesn’t look like the likeliest — it’s just hard to implement, and maybe not necessary. But it’s going to be a huge enabler in many other ways that are also relevant for military matters, but maybe less deadly at first sight.
Danny: Right. For intelligence analysis, it seems to be a huge deal.
Florence: Huge deal. Yeah.
Danny: There’s probably some things to worry about there in terms of democratic oversight and control.
Florence: I’m not saying don’t worry about it, but I also say: don’t give away your agency. We have agency — and when I say “we,” I literally mean humanity. I’m part of the Munich Security Conference tech strategy initiative, which is on AI. We just had our first meeting in San Francisco, and — I’m reflecting the conversation from there — we said we should also talk to China about this. Because, of course, nobody — not even China, not even Russia — wants AI to make decisions about nuclear weapons. Nobody wants that. But for that, we need to start talking to each other.
Danny: Right. There’s an interesting link to foresight and predictions specifically, where Metaculus runs regular tournaments in which the human superforecasters square off against AI ones. The very best humans are now still a tiny bit better than the AI ones at current timelines. I think in six or seven months, probably, the AI ones will be better. And then the interesting question is going to be: how much better do they get? Which I think will reveal something fundamental about the nature of the universe, almost. If you throw more intelligence at it, can you get dramatically better than the very best humans? Or does it turn out that we just sort of top out?
Florence: And also, don’t forget — when it comes to war in particular, as soon as the other side knows that AI will be in the mix, looking at it, they’ll start behaving in a completely different way. There’s a huge book I’m sure you’ve read — Lawrence Freedman, The Future of War: A History. He looks at what people thought about the future of war and how accurate those ideas turned out to be. And he says, consistently we get most of it wrong: number one, because we overestimate technology; number two, because we underestimate our opponent’s capacity to adapt to that technology. So if the AI in warfare analyzes behavior, it will always look back — the AI will look at the past for pattern recognition. And so think about it: if you’re a human being and you know that, the obvious choice is, okay, now I’m going to do something completely different. To go back to the beginning of our conversation — in 2022, the Europeans suddenly acted in a way they had never acted before, and this is why we were not predictable for Russia, and probably wouldn’t be predictable for an AI either. So the journey continues. AI will solve many problems, and then we’ll have new problems to solve.
Danny: A group of people who have thought long and hard about these types of questions are the ONA — the Office of Net Assessment — inside the Pentagon, now shuttered. What should we all learn from them?
Florence: Oh, Andrew Marshall — again, one of the people. If you’d proposed dinner with him, I’d say yes, for sure, 100%. He ran the Office of Net Assessment for most of its existence, except the last ten years. The people who met him have told me he would always say: the question is more important than the answer. Just formulate the right question. Look at the right things. To me, that’s a sign of intellectual rigour and curiosity, which is ultimately the most important thing — and it’s an afterthought, because people, especially in my institution, run to the answer. They want to see: okay, here’s my problem, but what’s the answer? Rather than thinking, did I frame the problem right? Is this actually the problem, or is there another problem? And this comes back to critical thinking, creative thinking, divergent thinking, which I think we’re not teaching enough. Again, it depends on the country. The UK is an example of where critical thinking is taught pretty widely, but not in all member states. France has a tradition of critiquing, but it’s not the same as critical thinking. Germany, definitely not. So Andrew Marshall is an example of that: a critical, inquisitive mind is the number one ingredient to thinking about the future. Everything else derives from it. That’s how he ran the Office of Net Assessment for decades.
And what’s interesting about his fate is that he had ups and downs too, because the success of the Office of Net Assessment depended on his relationship with the Secretary of Defense. Some of them really appreciated him; others never engaged with him at all; others thought maybe it’s time to disband it. So there is no foresight institution that is eternally appreciated by everybody. The personal dimension especially shows you that the messenger is almost as important as the result. If you don’t get along with the person who’s going to tell you something about the future, don’t even bother — you’re not going to believe anything they say anyway.
Danny: You cannot reason someone out of something they haven’t been reasoned into. These things seem to depend a lot on trust, because it’s not as if you can rationally persuade anyone that the argument is capital-T True.
Florence: Exactly.
Danny: A couple of things I thought I’d use the opportunity to ask you, because you would know. When will we see unilateral, or permissionless, geoengineering? It feels like something that should happen, because you could just do it. And yet, as far as I know—
Florence: Unilateral — you mean just one state going ahead and doing it. It featured also in The Ministry for the Future, by Kim—
Danny: Kim Stanley Robinson.
Florence: Kim Stanley Robinson, there we go. I’ll place a bet here — call me again in five years and we’ll see if I was right. I would guess in the early thirties. 2031, about five years from now. Simply because when you have a combination of capability — somebody can do it — and a reason to do so, a potentially deadly heat wave precisely as described in the novel, I think somebody will go, you know what, I’m just going to give it a try and work on a few clouds here. So I think it’s actually closer than people think. And, as you said, the science is there. Everybody is working on it, in all different fields — in the skies, in the waters, even in the sands now: how can you change sand to absorb more CO2, and so forth. So, five years, more or less, I would say.
Danny: What explains the UAP — unidentified anomalous phenomena, aka UFO sightings — in the US?
Florence: You’ve seen the map — sightings of UFOs on planet Earth, most of them in the United States. So, possible explanations: either the aliens only care about the US, or the American population is more interested in them than anybody else. I think it’s more the latter, to be honest. There is a fascination with aliens that is particularly American. And maybe — we could take a deep dive here — maybe it has to do with a pioneer mindset, the experience of how the United States came into being, the tradition of science fiction. But it’s curious that they mostly seem to manifest themselves in the United States.
Danny: It does seem odd, or unlikely. And then again, there do seem to be some sensor readings that aren’t so easy to explain away.
Florence: One thing we should be super clear on is that, as human beings, we should be so much more humble about what we know and what we don’t know. I don’t have the dossier on this. I can’t tell you aliens do exist or don’t exist. I can tell you I haven’t seen anything that proves or disproves either — in the same way that, does God exist or not? Is there a multiverse? What happens after death? These are just the big questions. But then you have plenty of smaller questions where you can also be much more humble: why do we fall in love with this person and not another? Why do some relationships thrive and others don’t? Why do we make irrational decisions? One thing that really bothers me about this day and age is that there seems to be a really exaggerated self-confidence about our level of knowledge. I’m sure that twenty or fifty years from now, people will look at today and say, they were ridiculous to believe that — because this is the nature of science. And yes, I understand there are concerns, in the natural sciences for instance, that the rate of innovation has slowed down. In some people, that has led to the conclusion that we’ve discovered everything, there’s nothing new to discover. Not true. At the same time, we discovered the replication crisis, which means a lot of what we thought was true cannot be replicated — so actually we have to start from zero.
Danny: It was utter trash to begin with. Yeah.
Florence: Exactly. So, a bit more humility, please. Yes, maybe aliens do exist. Maybe one day we’ll understand love — kind of hope we don’t, let’s keep some magic. But I’m missing a bit of humility.
Danny: How will climate change change warfare?
Florence: Interestingly. Here again, the public imagination has been captured by images of — whatever — Africans, Asians, definitely not Europeans, always Africa or Asia running away from a drought and coming to Europe. And then there’s war because there’s not enough food and water. That is a scenario, but we don’t think it’s the likeliest one. First of all, we know that where there are droughts and other natural disasters, people don’t migrate out of the country — they migrate within it. People prefer, actually, to stay in their own country.
But climate change will still have an effect on warfare. Firstly, changes in weather and temperature: drones, for instance — we already know in Ukraine that drones don’t operate when there are storms, heavy rains, thunderstorms. We’ll have more extreme weather events, so if your whole strategy rests on drones, wait for climate change to take full effect, because they’re not going to be able to operate half the time. Radar systems, same thing. Certain regions of the world, like the Strait of Malacca, will be much more prone to storms, so it’ll be harder for the navies of the world to go through there. We also know increased water temperature means submarines are easier to detect. It depends on the oceans — I always get them confused, but faster to detect in the South China Sea, and later to detect in the North Atlantic. Either way, it’s an issue, because it changes how we look at the future of war.
And then there’s the most important thing, I’d argue — the human being. The human body, the soldiers, they cannot work normally, they cannot think normally when it’s super hot. The studies on the effects of fatigue and dehydration on decision-making are just being done, and we realized — oh, guess what, human beings are machines. When they haven’t slept well and haven’t had enough to drink, they’ll probably make a mistake. All of this is just beginning to be studied. But the military institution itself — yes, I know that in Washington some people don’t really believe in climate change, but everywhere else, the research into what this will do to war is now at warp speed, because we realize this will affect us one way or another. And we, i.e. the military, cannot do much to reduce CO2 — that’s a much bigger issue. So it will have an effect, but not in the way people think it will.
Danny: You speak a lot of different languages. How is your outlook on the future different depending on whether you’re thinking in, say, German, English, French, or Italian?
Florence: I love that question. It’s an interesting one. I’m not sure I have the answer, because in my head I jump around between the languages. Of course, when I talk to somebody, it’s in one language. But when I’m by myself, in my head, I switch back and forth between them. I even mix them together. This is why I love talking to AI, by the way — because when I talk to ChatGPT, I can mix all the words together, and he — because, I don’t know why, for me he’s a he — he always understands that. There’s a beautiful German saying that goes something like: with every language you learn, you unlock a spirit that was chained up in your soul. So I do think my personality, my outlook on the world, definitely changes depending on what language I’m thinking or speaking in.
German being so structured, I’m probably also more structured when I think in German — so to organize my thoughts, it’s good. But for creative problem-solving, I think Italian is number one, just as in real life. French, to me, is a language that really allows you to shine a light on very complex issues. “Shine a light on it” is exactly the term — it doesn’t necessarily give a solution, but it’s like a flashlight, or like a close-up mirror — you know, the makeup kind, where you go really close and see things you never wanted to see. French is a bit like that. And English, to me, is a good language because it’s fast, and sometimes you want to connect everything together — for that, English is a bit like the connector. So, in sum, for me it’s like a piano: I’m lucky to have five of them to play on and merge together. In my head, it’s all one, really.
Danny: The most important question, for the end: where do I find the best gelato in Monti?
Florence: It’s like asking where’s the best pizza — there are so many different ones. But I really like a small one on Via Cavour, right next to the tower that just collapsed. I can’t remember the name now — I’ll look it up and we’ll put it in the show notes. It’s a very small one, but it’s probably my favorite. At least, that’s where I end up going all the time.
Danny: We’ll put it in the show notes. My favorite one is the Gelateria dell’Angeletto, which is very good.
Florence: Yes, that’s also very good. That was a bigger choice.
Danny: Excellent. Florence, thank you so much. This was great fun.
Florence: Thank you, Danny. Thank you.
Danny: Thanks for listening to High Variance. You can subscribe to this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you like this podcast, please give us a rating and leave a review. It makes a big difference, particularly for newer podcasts like this one.