Unleashing The Power Of The Nexus With Julio Ottino

Imagine a world where diverse perspectives collide, igniting groundbreaking discoveries—this is the power of the nexus. In this episode, Tony Martignetti engages with Julio Ottino, co-author of The Nexus: Augmented Thinking for a Complex World--The New Convergence of Art, Technology, and Science. Julio shares his inspiring journey through art and engineering, showcasing how interdisciplinary thinking fuels innovation and effective leadership. They discuss the significance of fostering environments that encourage diverse viewpoints and the role of education in cultivating curiosity and critical thinking. Don’t miss this enlightening conversation on the future of innovation and the power of the human mind.

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Unleashing The Power Of The Nexus With Julio Ottino

Flashpoints

It is my honor to introduce you to my guest, Julio Ottino. Julio is an academic thought leader and researcher. He's an author and an artist. He's the Institute Professor and former Dean of McCormick School of Engineering and Professor of Management and Organizations at Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. That's a mouthful. He's very busy. Julio is an internationally renowned thought leader, engineer, scientist, researcher, educator, and administrator with contributions spanning many fields.

His research work is centered on chaos theory and complex systems. He was a co-founder and director of NICO, the Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems. His initial passions were split between painting, math and engineering, and he has remained deeply interested in the intersection between art, technology, and science, connecting engineering with art, humanities, communications, medicine, and law. This is my type of person, that's for sure. I can't wait for our conversation.

As Dean of Engineering and Applied Science at Northwestern University, he founded design, entrepreneurship, energy, and sustainability initiatives, and degrees linking business, design, and computer science. He's also a fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He was listed as one of the 100 engineers of the modern era by the American Institute of Chemical Engineers.

He's been a Guggenheim Fellow and a member of the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Sciences, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He's the co-author of the book, The Nexus, one of my favorite books, along with, he's the co-author with Bruce Mau. I will tell you, definitely, if you have not read it, you will want to pick it up by the time we've finished talking. It is truly an honor and a pleasure to welcome you to the show, Julio.

Thank you so much, Tony.

We're going to have a great conversation. I've been fascinated by what you've done in the world. When I read your intro, there's so much there. You've been on quite a journey and lots of really ringing accomplishments. I think the real crux of what you're about is you've got multiple passions and you found a way to marry them up into a career that allows you to play with lots of different things. I use the word play very intentionally.

Even more now. My former assistant, Amy Pokras, told me half seriously, “Could you smile a little bit less?” I'm in heaven. I enjoy what I did before. We were able to do many things, but the transition it's like one part that was compressed before. I always managed to do something, but I had a job. I had to run a school that has departments, all the departments, computer science, biomedical engineering, civil, environmental, and even applied math. Now I can do more writing, give more talks, and act as an advisor to presidents of universities and businesses. I'm in heaven.

That's wonderful. It truly comes through in everything you do. I'm grateful that you decided to spend some time with us. We can really understand the journey that you've gone on to get here. What we do on the show is we use the idea of flashpoints. These are points in your journey that have ignited your gifts into the world. We're going to explore that with you. Have you shared some of the moments that defined these gifts in your world? We'll pause along the way and see what kind of themes are showing up. Sounds like a fun journey. Awesome. Please take it away, and we'll pause along the way to see what shows up.

I learned much afterwards. Several things that I wish I had learned before. When I was growing up, just to start when I was 3, 4 or 5 years old, if I had been in this country, I probably would have been put in some remedial program because I started writing, and now you would call it dyslexic. I started writing the right-to-left mirror image. Only much afterwards I discovered Leonardo da Vinci wrote everything mirror image. I was very pleased, but I had no idea who Leonardo da Vinci was. I was fortunate. I grew up and you don't realize this when you're young.

My father was someone who cared deeply about scholarship. He was trained as a histologist. He had a lab with microscopes, and my mother was trained as a classical artist, Boards. I remember going through her work, and eventually, she quit doing things, but I had these two things. I never thought that they were completely disjoined, but at some point, you have to decide where you're going to college, and it became clear that even though I was painting continuously, I probably wouldn't be able to make a living in that way. My father cared a lot about what would happen if he was not there.

In fact, he started in engineering, but he had to cut his career short because he had surgery and they couldn't afford to maintaining him out of the city where he was born. I picked engineering. I had this parallel life as, I wouldn't say painter. I think you become a painter when you exhibit for the first time, but what was really clear in retrospect, and again, I learned this much afterward, the world of perfection, the Dionysian world. That was the world of math. It was mutable, perfect. It's only the Apollo and war or mass and then the Dionysian world of I was enamored by Kaskar, Nietzsche, and all of those old expressionist Germans.

In fact, that separation is what allowed me to survive in Argentina. I wouldn't say this sounds too harsh, but this was the time when, with the military garment government, people disappeared right and left. It was a time of the disappear, to make it more sort of dramatic. At that point in Argentina, compulsory military service was in force. It's abolished now. It had several stages. In the beginning, Argentina was absorbing lots of people from Europe, and they wanted to put them in this melting pot. It was two years for everybody.

At the beginning, there was an Army and Navy, that's it. Eventually, became one year Army, one year Air Force and the Navy stayed two years. It was a lottery, I got a Navy. I don't know how much it lasted, it was an experiment. They will pick for the Navy part, maybe 200 people, and convert them into officers in two years. That's what happened to me. When I was there, in the middle of these, there was a revolution in the post-revolutionary government. I had this existence in two parts, the Navy thing, I ended up working in consulting, but I spent months at sea and called.

My life would have been much more boring without that part. The other part was my personal part, and it was divine two pieces, the sort of Apollonian perfection of mass, and then the Dionysian wall of my painting. I put that immediately after that was over. I got married. It was crazy. My wife was eighteen, the youngest of five. Five brothers and her. We came to the US. She had been here before. She had a brother who got a degree from the US. I thought that was enough preparation for us to go there.

The next thing that I know, I'm doing a PhD here, forgetting absolutely everything that has happened with the Navy and everything. I continued painting, but my paintings became copied and pasted. I was not trying to express the world around me, I guess. I started working on my PhD. At some point, it became clear that I could merge the visual components that I had sort of carried with me throughout my work in math and engineering. That gave a flavor to the work. First of all, it allowed me to go deeper into things. That's why it was recognized. You start collecting awards, and one vibes on the other one. Eventually, I was able to do some things that I hope will outlive me.

I want to pause for a moment here and to make a connection to what you shared so far, which I think is really remarkable. This recognition that we all tend to have these two parts, but oftentimes we have to choose, but it's a hard choice. We all realize that eventually, sometimes, you're going to have to integrate both because one part's going to feel like starting.

I know. A few weeks ago, cleaning my office at home, I found a little note and it said, “We want to thank Julio Ottino and Susan Jacoby for speaking to our fourth graders.” It said, “You spoke about Picasso and Matisse and Susan work with the students to do a painting in this style of Jackson Pollock.” I recently contacted Susan. I had not connected with her for 25 years, but she still lives next door. She's a painter, has a studio, and is doing an exhibit. I'm going to go there. The point that I'm trying to make is fourth graders.

I talk about Picasso and the evolution of something I put in the book, a series of lithographs called The Bull, going from really a bull with a very realistic look to something very simple with a few lines. When I show these to people, I ask them, “Do you think that Picasso did it this way or that way?” The fourth graders have tons of questions. I gave a talk to high school students. By high school, especially the good high schools, they try to, it's like athletes. They notice that someone is good in one thing and is 10 is 24-7. They bifurcate.

The kids who are interested in math become separated from the kids who are interested in it, and you pick one thing. The other part, unless you make an effort to keep it alive, it disappears. They make you good in one thing. That thing provides a perspective. You acquire these more and more, the more degrees you get. You go to law school to learn how to think like a lawyer. You get an MBA, why? It’s because MBAs have a way of thinking about things. The education gives you a lens through which you see the world. Unless you really make an effort, that lens will stay as is.

Education gives you a lens through which you see the world.

It will never acquire a second pair of glasses to have an amplified view of the world. I believe that at least for some people who can wear two pairs of glasses, they can uncover so much more because some of the best ideas are at these intersections. I'll give you one example. I recently read two pieces by the guy, Ted Chiang. The fellow is a very good, well-known author. He wrote a book called Arrival. They did a movie with this. He wrote a piece on AI. He, for a while, worked at Microsoft. He's a writer.

He could see the topic with eyes that the people who work only in AI cannot see. He has a broader view of things. That's absolutely essential. I wrote this book because I want to appeal to these kinds of people. I don't know how many there are; the higher you plan and the more valuable these kinds of things become in an organization. In fact, Bruce and I have prepared the outline for a Nexus leadership course, thinking the subtitle is something like rules for a world without rules. We decompose this into the essential elements you need to have to function in a world in which there is an avalanche of things.

Not long ago, the metaverse was going to conquer all our lives. In fact, we're even losing patience with AI. I think the latest grace that I can detect is this idea of digital twins. How can you keep calm in a world in which there are so many inputs and a world in which we seem to not be able to survive without inputs? Always with headphones, always watching something. What I would like to be able to teach people is what Scott Fitzgerald talks about the still. T.S. Eliot is a famous American writer living in England. T.S. Eliot had this phrase of the still point of a turning world.

How can you be in this still point? Calm where you are, chaos all around you. You can contemplate this chaos and function. I believe the only solution is to stop and think. Now, we seem to be outsourcing our ability to stop and think, and we are being disconnected by the proliferation of silent retreats. If that works for you, by all means, do it. I think for a while, the only input to your brain should be your brain itself. Otherwise, your brain cannot free-associate things. It's always responding to some external perturbation and you should just let it rest and see what connections your little brain can make. I feel really bit it.

The only important to your brain should be your brain.

I love what you're tapping into here, this idea that, like, it's almost like the lost art of thinking that we really don't allow ourselves to step back and allow ourselves to really immerse in the space of thinking about what's real for us. Often, we have those crutches.

Also, thinking on paper, I believe in sketching things, just putting things on paper in which there's no grid. Fine, you can do some of these things on tablets. I think the tactile component is, but the whole point is to reduce needless inputs. You hardly see people walking without headphones, going on bikes or checking your emails. I mean, it's insane.

I agree. I love the advancement that we've made. Technology is such a wonderful thing. It's come a long way, but we must remember that the most powerful technology is our brain and our body, too, and the intelligence we have inside us allows us to tap into that. I think part of that is using art as a way to tap into that. It's not an input. It's actually coming from inside.

We are not art, especially now, when most artists are entrepreneurs. It's hard to define what art is now, but I can tell you this. In organizing courses with students from engineering and science and artists from the Art Institute, one of the surprises that the students got in here was how much coding the artists could do. If they need something, they will learn. They know techniques before me. I think it's pretty clear. What is good about art is that it may answer questions about you, but it poses more questions.

The fact that you can operate without any constraints, seemingly without any constraints, and the question is trying to explore. I think the biggest problem people connect with people in different areas is that we equate people in those areas with the outputs of what they produce. We equate a sculpture with a finely finished piece, no matter how massive, that could be something that occupies an entire building. The important thing in communicating with people who are in other fields is to explore the process that led them to that outcome. For example, in some things, the process is erased.

Unless you ask questions with a writer, you have the finished product, and you don't have all the iterations, thinking, editing, and crossing things. Once in a while, the manuscript appears with markings by the editor, like Erna Pound, anything like The Waste Land by T.S. Elliot, or in music, maybe you see something that Beethoven wrote and then rewrote, and the markings, and this and that.

Essentially, you see the final piece. In science, you also see the final piece. Especially in math, you see something, the final thing, pure perfection, but you do not know how the idea came into being. The hurdle in this is that many people cannot explain how it affects them. Only a few can do it. It's very hard to find mathematicians who explain how they think because mathematics, as opposed to what everybody outside thinks, is not about being rational or logical; it's about intuition.

You guess something and then you prove it or not. If you guess correctly, there it is. In fact, math, you could argue, is not as much an invention as a discovery. It was then and you lifted the veil and it was there. I don't know, just to start, by Pythagoras theorem. Did we invent it or was it there? Mathematicians are split in between the Platonists who think it was there and the people who believe it's an invention. To some extent, it is interesting to think about the components of invention and discovery.

I just want to pause for a moment here because I think there's something about what you shared, which is really coming down to this essence of those who focus on the question of what got them here, why this exists, especially from a mathematical perspective, people often think about, “There it is.” There's the answer as opposed to what was the journey that got them to think that this was the thing. As you say, in the discovery piece, those who think focus on the answers are just missing. They're only focusing on the output and not necessarily all the things that led up to that, which I think is more about asking the questions.

Especially in science, you need to clean things up and pack it. You eliminate all the vestiges of the discovery part and you just present. This is how things are. That eliminates a lot of learning possibilities and inspires more curiosity in people. I think that one of the things that is a harder thing to teach, I can teach people how to be more creative or it's very hard to teach people how to be curious. Curiosity is really much more deeply embedded in your DNA, I think, than the ability. I can give you tips on how to be more creative.

You have to have that innate desire to be curious.

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Global Perspectives

There are so many directions I want to head here. One of them is just maybe, and to ask, since you have a very global point of view or view of the world on a bigger stage here, I'd like to get your opinion on do you feel like things are different in the US versus outside of the US in terms of our approach to integrating the multidisciplinary view of integrating these different parts, the arts, the sciences, or do you feel like it's generally the same across the globe? People are seeing it all the same way.

I'm having conversations at this very moment, and I have to send an email later of an incoming president of the university nation. I would like to do more of this. I have done it before. The person thinks and expresses clearly in the inauguration speech about the purpose of education. The purpose of education, in many cases, is a transmission of knowledge. That's only half of it. The other one is to inspire the desire after the inputs are gone for you to continue learning.

Education is often the transmission of knowledge, but that's only half of it. The other half is inspiring the desire for continued learning, even after the inputs are gone.

We had a conversation actually Friday night, Saturday morning for this person, about this. At least in this case, they see the advantage of going beyond the traditional approach. The way that people can weed it out before being accepted in an IIT in India or in Tokyo universities in Korea or Japan, the exams, you don't live. In fact, sometimes you're moving to mini-cities that will prepare you for this. There is a whole industry.

At least some people think that there are limitations to this approach, or given the input that you get, adding value to that input and not just these people who get admitted are amazingly good. They can learn, they can read something, they can master the techniques, and they can answer questions based on the framework that they were taught. Could it be math? Could it be something else? At least, in the case that I just mentioned, they think it's not enough. With all the chaos of education in the US, we seem to generate a stream of people who always defy stereotypes and don't believe that something should be done the way it was done before. The question is, how do you breathe more of this thing?

The Nexus

I want to shift gears a little bit because I know that education is a big part of Bruce has passion for education. I know that's a common connection that the two of you seem to have. I'd love to get into the book, but I want to start by understanding how the two of you came together and decided that this was a book.

I'll tell you, I have repeated the story many times now. Bruce was in Canada and had a show going on at the Modern Art Institute. Museum of Modern Art in Chicago. He basically took over the entire museum. In the book, if you open the last page, there is a picture of one of the rooms. I was there and I thought, “This is really impressive.” I was not so interested in the points he wanted to make or conversations that he wanted to open in the exhibit, much as the exhibit itself and how he was able to put this together with his components. Then I heard that he was living in Canada.

There were editorials in the Toronto Star that it was good that Bruce Mau was living in Canada. I discovered that he was coming to Chicago. I didn't hear much until a friend of ours told me, “By the way, do you know who moved into a house almost across yours? It was Bruce.” He ended up moving to a house almost across our town. I met him to discuss things. The first conversations were about what became one of the chapters in the book, the comparison between art, technology, and science in different categories. Bruce always counts these.

I think that there were 23 different categories. Technology was always in between, bracketed by science and art. We started talking about this, but this must have been 2008 or something like that. Very early. I was busy and he was busy. I started putting materials. For something which I have no idea, in late 2019, I started. I said, “I have enough. I try to put it together,” and then the pandemic happened. By about May 2020, I have enough that I could approach some publishers.

When MIT said, “We're interested in this.” I called Bruce and said, “I think we should do this together.” Many people think I wrote the whole thing, and Bruce included the design and images. No, it's not like that. Bruce commented on the text, the arranged things, and virtually every decision about fonts and colors and images. I can tell you that if I show you versions of the book, versions that they were pretty well together and I show you the overlap of images, maybe the overlap by a third.

For every image that we put, we left 3 or 4 out because we had a constraint. The constraint was that the book couldn't be more than 360 pages or 200 color images. Given day. We have to make decisions. It was all completely collapsed. We now have given several talks together. We probably tried to do a course together. We collaborate on several things and it has been one of them. The best thing that happened to me was finding Bruce.

I want to pause for a moment here to say that it's so amazing when you look at this process, as we were talking about earlier, is the process of getting this book together that you've learned a lot about yourself, learned a lot about the topic through collaborating with someone else. It's really amazing when you go through that journey. I'm expecting to be one of the first people to sign up for that class when you get that out into the world. Please.

No, we do not know how it will set. It may go for one client. We have done this for one client, and that client will have to have a number of people in the organization who will be able to comment on the different points. It's just to illustrate them or it could be multiple files, in which case there will be more pre-reading materials and this and it's not going to be about lecturing. You just want this to be interactive.

I also think about the idea of a lot of stuff you get left out. Sometimes, you get so connected to the things that get left out and you want to find in the life for it, ensure maybe there's a Nexus 2 coming or some kind of other collaboration.

I have been putting pieces once every two weeks, sometimes website. There is probably another book in the works that focuses more on the leadership part, but we pack a lot into that. Once in a while, I get a comment that lifts my spirits, sometimes about an obscure point of the book. There was one comment from an English barista that, in one part of the book, this is a small component. I mentioned Claude Shannon. In my view, Claude Shannon is probably as important as Newton or Galileo.

Without Claude Shannon, we would not have anything connected with digital communications. Claude Shannon had this other component in which he built what in Italian was called machine inutile, useless machines.  One of them was a box that had one button. When you press it, the hand will come from the box, and the hand will press the button and close itself. That's all that this thing did. This barrister, an English barrister, mentioned to me that there was another book that commented on this, and he was wondering if I knew it.

I did not, but it was great to see that someone would pick one component. With that coverage, we tried to pack as much as possible, including some comments I wouldn't take about AI. As I said, it was May 2020. Four years is like an infinite amount of time in how the world is moving. What we said about AI, which I said AI, if he wants to communicate with humans, has to learn how to be more empathic. I think that is still true.

In some ways, I think we have to be more empathic to communicate with AI, to basically speak to it like we want something from it that is more human. I don't know.

In this article that I mentioned about Ted Chiang, there are two pieces that he wrote for the New Yorker. The first one is that I don't know if I have the time, but it's especially good. It's very, very easy, I think. As I said, I really recently, now I don't have it. If you put Ted Chiang, New Yorker, you will be able to find it.

If you do find it, send it along and I'll include it in the notes. In the interest of time, because I know we have a lot of ground to cover. I want to make sure people are leaving with maybe just a high-level view of the premise of The Nexus. I know it from having read it multiple times, but I just want to give people a taste of what they can expect when they pick up this book.

I'll give you a kind of high-level view of things. The book has a title called The Nexus. There are lots of books and things with the title Nexus, but this is, as far as I know, the only one with the title The Nexus. There is an upper title and a subtitle. One is the new intersections of art, technology, and science, and then augmented thinking for a complex world. What happens with these new intersections of art, technology, and science is that if you are able to operate and think in terms of these three domains, at the extremes, you're going to have two different views of the world.

One that is grounded more in analysis, rationality, logic, decomposing problems, and putting them together. The other one is more metaphorical, and creative if you want an artist. No one is 100% like one side or the other, but there are many people who are 90-10. There are very few people who are bad and so here. If you start thinking about the consequences of this, one consequence that is super important. If you have the ability to have this duality of modes, we call it whole-brain thinking. We know that the brain is more complicated than left and right.

I tried to really explain the book. I know for people, the brain is more complex than this. If you are able to have these two lenses, at some point, you are going to have the use of products that are diametrically opposed to each other. They say conflict. Now, the good consequence of this. First of all, creativity emerges from a conflict of ideas. The other one is that the ability to reconcile opposites is so important in today's world and thinking. I would say a critical leadership ability. This is not as we discovered this.

This comes from philosophy and Hegel, with thesis, anti-thesis, and synthesis, but with the ability to blend things into a whole. You can also argue the idea comes from quantum mechanics because, in quantum mechanics, the world is more complex than we think. We tend to think of light of either waves or particles, but light is actually both. It's only one or the other one when you ask light to interact in some way with something. The ability to have this broad thinking, which is basically operating at intersections, is the ability to explore things at the intersection.

There are lots of ideas at intersectional domains. The idea of the Nexus is to expand your lens, the lens that you see the world with, be able to extract ideas from different domains, integrate them, and produce more of an explosion of creative output. Creativity by itself is not the answer. The second part was augmented thinking for a complex work. In the book, we put what the essence of leadership is. It says vision, communication, and execution. There are more of these, vision, communication, and execution.

If you have too much in the sense of ideas and all leads to be, leads to that, maybe you're not able to execute. In the team itself, you need to have the people who are more the right-brain thinkers and the creatives, but if you don't balance them. The idea of the Nexus applies to individuals, teams, and organizations. You need balance. You may execute too early if you are constantly driven by people who can execute.

Most of the biggest crew-ups do not happen because you solve something incorrectly that happens to have been the wrong question. You need these two things. You need to blend these skills, analytical, rational, and logical, with more creative, metaphorical, and divergent things. You need the convergent and the divergent together. The part where all of those things intersect in this space is called the nexus.

What's great about this is that it's the best argument for having diverse teams because diverse teams do better. They're able to not just look at things from the same old way but also get the formula right. They get the equation right, and they say that we have to have a vision and execution, which ultimately makes this come together and gets the whole thing done.

You need a good quarterback. You need someone who can manage the things. Yeah. That's why we think that this is essentially in leadership, especially now. Let me leave you with one big idea here. It's in the book, but I'm exploring this in more detail now. We are still in management. Our thinking is still dominated by this Newtonian view of the world. The Newtonian view of the world is that things could function like a clock. In fact, you often say, “This functions like a clock.” Where every piece fulfills a function, they all work together and produce an out.

That works well with systems that are what we call complicated. In fact, the prototypical complicated system is a clock, but it could be a nuclear submarine, or it could be the project that sends people to Mars. All the pieces have worked together perfectly. You design things and if you don’t want something to fail, you have to back it up. There are many systems that are beyond complicated. They are complex. Complex systems are systems in which the system adapts and sometimes produces outcomes that are outside the script.

Sometimes, they produce emergence. What you want in these systems is to organize them in such a way that you give the possibility of successful emergence for some things like outbursts of creativity, for example. Instead of free-clock being the paradigm for complicated systems, complex systems are more of an ecology. It's more like biology. The way that most people have been trained in management is to deal with complicated systems, but not complex systems.

Exactly. It's a great way of looking at it. We have to be more biological, like thinking like an organism.

This doesn't mean that you're just letting things grow as it may. No, you need to guide things, but if you don't allow for the possibility of emergence of ideas sooner or later, you will be out of business.

I agree.

Most organizations now acquire ideas by buying smaller companies because once the company becomes very massively large, it seems to lose these, and the question is, how do you not take it?

Impactful Books

I can talk about this all day. There's such richness to this idea, and that's why I think this book is so fantastic and I'm really looking forward to where you continue to take it. We do have to come to a close. I don't want to keep you too long, but I have one last question I have to ask. As I always ask about what are 1 or 2 books that have had an impact on you? It could be three, so please share. I'm looking forward to it.

I mentioned prior to getting these conversations that we say a new website that tries to allow people to discover books by asking authors who have written a book to name influential books that might have impacted the book that you have written. A lot of the people on this website are novelists but I had a tough time with the book. Obviously, the book that was in my mind, but I don't even think that I listed the book in the list of references, was the book Chaos by James Gleick.

I'm in that book when the book went from hardcover to softcover because I contacted him and he eliminated one figure that he had covered and put me in there. In thinking about books and influence, I think that my thinking about books and my book was not about books that have influenced the content itself, but how is it that some books appear at the right time? When the book by Glick appeared, Chaos was not yet a passport. There was enough that he could package together, and he was lucky because everything could fit between these two covers. Whenever people have written books after that, there was too much to cover.

It was chaotic.

There is time. I got lucky with a book that was technical and based on chaos. I took a year, went to Sabati, took Altec, and wrote a book there. I got lucky with the time. There was enough to say, but three years after, could have been too much that you have had difficulty in putting it together. At some point, you become the assembly point of ideas, and those ideas may then spark other ideas. I have no idea if, with this book, The Nexus, we are able to do this. It's probably too much of a dense book because people say, “I want to read it.” It's more of a book to be experienced than read because you can open it in any chapter, and you can read almost any chapter independently.

I'll throw something out there that I think is a really interesting time. I'll just say, first of all, I'm glad you brought that book Chaos into this because I read a lot of books about chaos. It's something that I'm really interested in and I've read that book before and I think it's fantastic. Some books are hard to connect with because it goes deep into science theory, which can be challenging for most.

You have to be discerning, but one thing I will say about The Nexus is that it would actually lend itself well to a documentary type of movie that would be really amazing. I'm throwing that out there right now. If you're into making movies, I think it would be really neat to see that showing up as a way for people to digest it through a movie setting because there's a lot of imagery, lots of ways to bring these complex ideas. It’s really not that complex.

That's a good comment. In fact, I have had conversations with people, including one that was going beyond movies, which was a metaverse conversation.

There you go.

The book now is not a book that you can put on.

Definitely not.

You can’t. Starting with the fact that the unit of the book is two pages, you can see how the book could be if it was on the web, and you could click and get more things. A movie is probably the way to go.

You're here to hear first. I want to start by just saying thank you so much for coming on. This was a wonderful conversation. I feel like we could go on for so much longer. I wanted to know much more about you and your journey, but I feel like we hit the tip of the iceberg, and I want to thank you for coming on.

No, thank you for allowing me the chance to go through these ideas. I love talking about this stuff.

Fantastic. I like talking about it, too. Kindred spirits there. Before I let you go, I want to make sure that people know where they can find out more about you. Obviously, your book is available all over the place. What about you? Where can people find out more about you?

My website is JulioMarioOttino.com. In the title of the book is my two names. I have two websites, one that research and then everything else. The JulioMarioOttino.com is where we put all the pieces and talks. Maybe this show will be there when you send it to me, but the whole point is what's the best way to communicate? That's why the comments or the movies are probably very good.

Wonderful. Thanks again. Thanks to the readers for coming on the journey. I know they're leaving just blown away by these ideas. I hope that they start to think about what they can integrate into their own thinking. I really hope that everyone feels inspired by this conversation.

Thank you, Tony.

Important Links

• Julio Ottino
• The Nexus
• Arrival
• Campfire Lessons for Leaders
• Chaos

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