The three things I would tell anyone starting to forecast are: first, forget anything you believe you know about the topic and do thorough research from scratch. Look at what exactly is being asked. What information can you get about it? Write all the relevant points down. Not, ‘Oh, this looks like 50/50. Let's give it 50/50.’ That's a beginner's mistake.

Second, your worldview doesn't matter here. Be opportunistic. Reality is not always as we think it might be. Your emotions should be put to the side. So be opportunistic; that's the main thing.

And then, if you have the chance, listen to others. Only fools would ignore what colleagues or others say. Take as broad a spectrum of opinions as you possibly can. Look for things that are totally against your worldview and put them into the picture as well. Try to cover things from all imaginable angles.

My conversations at work were almost like one-way traffic. I was thinking one way about everything, but then looking at the forecasts that others were making made me think, ‘Wait a minute. That might not be the whole truth.’ I could go in, fact-check what I said, and realize they were right. Consequently, I had to switch my approach in work conversations. It wasn't so much that my way was the right way anymore. I had to acknowledge, ‘Wait a minute. You all are right on some points.’ It made me think more critically and accept that some of the other ideas were correct while I was wrong.

Probably the number one thing I would tell people who have no experience with forecasting is to remove your personal feelings from your forecast. If you inject too much of your own personal feelings into it, you lose the factual part of forecasting. Good forecasting is based on factual evidence. My business sense says that if I don't like something, that shouldn't affect my forecast about the success or failure of that thing. I have to take myself out of the equation, get out of the way, and think objectively about it. When I was young, that would have been very hard to do. I was rather strongly biased in my opinion: ‘I was right. Nobody else was.’ Over the years, I learned that wasn't true a good share of the time and that others were right more often than not Your thought process, your background, and who you've been influenced by shape your style of thinking. For example, climate change has wildly different perspectives: some people accept entirely that we are to blame for it and can fix it, while others believe it's a natural event that has occurred throughout history and that we can't do anything about it. If you have a strong bias in one of these directions and you're trying to forecast things related to climate change, such as 29 tornadoes in Iowa, you may have a difficult time setting aside that bias because it's a very strong one. The hardest thing is to recognize that you have these biases. To set them aside, you must first understand that you have them. This is where I think an awful lot of people fail; they think that others are biased and they know the truth and the answer.  

I have forecasted my personal financial portfolio, which has helped me understand how much I need to retire and at about what age I can do it. In terms of my professional life, I need to do more forecasting because I have been somewhat shortsighted and haven't been able to stay on the track I wanted to be on...

I'm excited about the advancement of health and medical breakthroughs that will hopefully help people live longer and healthier lives. I'm also excited about the possibility of space travel and having explorers on the moon and Mars. However, I am concerned about climate change, plastic waste, endangered animals, belligerent authoritarianism, the threat to democracy, and technology turning everybody inward and causing them to miss out on the real world.

What concerns me most is the dangers of artificial intelligence. Those scare me. That's that's a monster we don't even know… what kind of monster it will be, how powerful it might become. It will be too strong to put it into a cage once we recognize what the real troubles will be. It's an exponential thing. AI will certainly change the world within the next few decades, and I hope for the better. But that's that's what scares me. Above all else you can think about climate change. You can think about bio pathogens. You can think about atomic. What weapons, air wars, and so on. Artificial intelligence, in my opinion, has the potential to make all others worse and quickly. And so that's that's what I fear mos.

The one prediction I made that did not come true was a more pronounced increase in global emissions in 2022 and 2023. This was the one that surprised me. I saw the prior data for global emissions and plotted the average emissions growth per year in my head up until the 2020 covid year. 2020 and 2021 saw lower increases or no increase of emissions. I predicted that in 2022 and 2023 the global emissions would start following the long term trend as production and factories came back online after the Covid lull. I expected China to get back to business with increased emission rates which would have a global impact. This did not come to fruition. The growth rates for emissions in 2022 and 2023 were below the historical average. It seems China is making a more concerted effort to curb emissions and the United States, Canada, and Europe already are at peak emissions with the move to EVs and more efficient jet commercial aircraft keeping the numbers down. I learned not to underestimate the impact of policies in what are long term trends. We had the ozone layer issue that seemed dire and had a bad long term trend for the planet but it was eventually solved.