The Tsunami Is Coming Podcast

Welcome to this series from The Tsunami is Coming: What Keeps You Up at Night?This is a set of conversations in which experts and thought leaders name the shifts they see coming and the fractures in the status quo that haven’t yet made headlines.Ryan Howard is an MBA alum from HEC Paris with eight years in robotics behind him. He’s done what we used to call the triple jump: changed job, industry, and country in one move, from petroleum engineering in Alberta to operations to tech to robots. He wears a steel ring on his working hand. It’s a Canadian engineer’s tradition, an oath of good practice tied to a bridge that collapsed in Quebec in 1907 and killed 75 people. That ring is the frame for the whole conversation. What keeps Ryan up at night is integrity, scientific and economic, and his complaint is specific: the automation debate has quietly become a benefits-only debate.We spoke about this and many more things on leadership when you feel you’ve landed on a different planet.This was the last episode of this season, but more to come soon. If you have any thoughts, please hit reply and let me know!This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit jeremyghez.substack.com/subscribe

Welcome to this series from The Tsunami is Coming: What Keeps You Up at Night?This is a set of conversations in which experts and thought leaders name the shifts they see coming and the fractures in the status quo that haven’t yet made headlines.For eighty years, freedom of navigation looked like a feature of the physical world. You moved a ship through a strait; the strait stayed open. Then Iran closed Hormuz. The closure was not the surprise. The surprise was what came after: nothing. No coalition, no costly response, no credible plan to restore the status quo. The strait stayed closed because no one was willing or able to pay the price to reopen it.Olivier Chatain is a professor of strategy at HEC Paris. He is my colleague with whom I created the HEC Paris lab on Business and Geopolitics.His current research follows the freedom-of-navigation question into a place most people don’t look: the subsea fiber-optic cables that carry effectively all intercontinental data traffic. The legal regime is the same as for shipping. The chokepoints are the same: Bab el-Mandeb, Hormuz, Malacca, the Suez approach. The exposure is the same. What changes is what happens when someone moves against the cables instead of the ships.A closed strait is like a tap. You can turn the shipping back on, which is what makes it useful as leverage. A cut cable is physical infrastructure that took years to lay and cannot be redeployed. Once you cut it, you have no leverage left. That asymmetry sounds like good news. But it is not: Cable threats are credible only as one-shot weapons, the kind a regime reaches for when it has concluded it has nothing left to lose. Iran spent six months proving it could survive the unthinkable. Now it knows.The implication for business: Every multinational moves data between continents. Few firms know which physical routes carry it, what their contracts actually guarantee, or what happens when latency drops because a cable on the other side of the world has been severed. Google and Meta have been laying their own cables for fifteen years, because the capturing attention is their key product, and drops in latency are fatal to it. Most other firms have not yet started asking the question. Once you realize this, the harder problem is corporate governance: cable resilience is an insurance policy with no upside and no P&L story. You are asking a board to authorize spending against an extreme event that, if it doesn’t arrive, makes you the person who wasted ten million euros on a contract no one used. This is what it looks like when the world stops underwriting common goods and starts charging for them, one chokepoint at a time.This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit jeremyghez.substack.com/subscribe

Welcome to this series from The Tsunami is Coming: What Keeps You Up at Night?This is a set of conversations in which experts and thought leaders name the shifts they see coming and the fractures in the status quo that haven’t yet made headlines.Most images of Japan are not accidents: the samurai, the cherry blossoms, the geisha, the kawaii cuteness, or the pink everywhere. They are not exactly foreign impositions (at least not anymore). Increasingly, this is what Tokyo wants the world to see.Pierre-William Fregonese, a political scientist and lecturer at Kobe University, calls this self-orientalism: the moment a country stops resisting the stereotypes foreigners hold of it and starts producing them on demand. We talk about Cool Japan and its 2025 cabinet upgrade, Aratana Cool Japan: a strategy of asking the world what it expects from Japan, then delivering it.He has written two books on this feedback loop. L’Invention du rose (PUF, 2023) is on the rise of pink as Japan’s color. Japonaises. Dans l’archipel de l’injustice (PUF, 2026), co-written with Madoka Serizawa, looks at what this image does to the women who live inside it and are paying the price of the transformation.In February 2025, Prime Minister Ishiba handed Donald Trump a samurai helmet. It was theater, but it worked anyway. This is what happens when a country decides its identity is a product, and the world is the customer. This rebranding effort may be the most striking response of one country to global transactionalism pushed to the extreme we are witnessing.This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit jeremyghez.substack.com/subscribe

Welcome to this series from The Tsunami is Coming: What Keeps You Up at Night?This is a set of conversations in which experts and thought leaders name the shifts they see coming and the fractures in the status quo that haven’t yet made headlines.Anastasia Buyalskaya is a behavioral scientist and Professor of Marketing at HEC Paris. She spends most of her working life on a single question: why people make decisions they regret. Decisions that, on reflection, were suboptimal in ways they could have caught, if they had been paying attention to their own thinking.That ability of metacognition (or thinking about one’s own thinking), Anastasia argues, is the prerequisite for noticing bias at all, and she worries we’re losing it. WALL-E, she says, used to be funny. It’s getting harder to watch because it feels prescient.The mechanism she walks through is straightforward and worth tracing: Confirmation bias (the tendency to seek information that confirms what we already believe) was already one of the most consequential biases in the literature before the algorithmic age. Then news consumption became personalized. Then AI arrived, and the early evidence suggests it’s sycophantic by default. It tells you the question you just asked is a great question. It tells you you’re right. The cognitive scaffolding around modern decision-making is designed to confirm rather than challenge.So what do we do next? Train people to argue with the tools rather than be soothed by them. Get out of the house. Talk to strangers. Spend time in classrooms where disagreement is structured rather than algorithmically filtered. She makes the case for university not as credentialing but as one of the few remaining institutions where you can be in a room with people whose priors don’t match yours, and learn how to handle that without retreating.The moment I keep coming back to: it has rarely been more interesting to lead, and rarely been harder. Because uniting people across parallel realities is now the precondition for governing at all.This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit jeremyghez.substack.com/subscribe

Welcome to this series from The Tsunami is Coming: What Keeps You Up at Night?This is a set of conversations in which experts and thought leaders name the shifts they see coming and the fractures in the status quo that haven’t yet made headlines.Souheil Ben Slimane is a former mobile app developer who is now a licensed Paris tour guide. He builds his own museum tours for families, including a hand-illustrated booklet, designed with his wife and another guide, that turns the Louvre into a deciphering game playable only in person, with him.ChatGPT, he says, does a hell of a good job describing artifacts. The famous ones, anyway: Mona Lisa, Venus de Milo, and the Winged Victory of Samothrace. On pure description, the machine wins.What it can’t do is be present. After COVID, the consensus inside his profession was that virtual tours and live-streamed visits would permanently reshape demand. The opposite happened. Bookings came back stronger, and the pattern shifted in a specific direction: visitors who used to book a single guide for several tours now book five different guides for five different tours. They want to meet locals. They also want to skip the line and see rooms without crowds. Human connection, but in low-density form.The booklet is the tell. Ben deliberately built a product that can’t be played without a human officiant: kids receive a coded letter from one of Napoleon’s officers, and only the guide holds the key to decipher it. Apps were cheaper, more scalable, easier to ship. He gave them up because they didn’t teach the kids anything. The deciphering only works if someone is standing there, with you.We also get into how children see the museum differently from adults (not as masterpieces but as birds, angels, things that haven’t been named yet) and what that says about the inner child every adult still drags into the Louvre. We close on AI, where Ben makes a distinction worth keeping: the future museum will have bots that decipher your emotions and adapt to you. They will be better than him on content. Not on presence.This is that conversation.This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit jeremyghez.substack.com/subscribe

Welcome to this series from The Tsunami is Coming: What Keeps You Up at Night?This is a set of conversations in which experts and thought leaders name the shifts they see coming and the fractures in the status quo that haven’t yet made headlines.Charles-Henri Colombier is Director of Macroeconomic Analysis and Forecasting at the Rexecode Institute, based in Paris. His job is to analyze and forecast the French and global economy. And what strikes him most is how consistently the impact of demographic change gets underestimated by analysts and decision makers alike.Take Germany. Every year, 400,000 more people turn 65 than turn 20. The working-age population is shrinking fast. The result: since 2019, Germany’s cumulative GDP growth has been just 0.5%. The Germans like to talk about Schwarze Null when it comes to deficits. They’ve now achieved it in growth.In France, the number of yearly deaths has overtaken the number of yearly births, and a country that spent thirty years building policy around the fear of mass unemployment may have quietly turned the page on that era without realizing it. Meanwhile, the future of the global economy may come down to a race between the downward drag of demographics and the upward push of AI and robotics. Colombier’s assessment: the orders of magnitude may not be very different.Could immigration solve it? Economically, yes. Politically, that’s another story: even Giorgia Meloni’s Italy, ideologically hostile to immigration, is being forced to reconsider under demographic pressure. Demographics, Colombier suggests, is the one law of gravity no country can ultimately defy.This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit jeremyghez.substack.com/subscribe

Welcome to this series from The Tsunami is Coming: What Keeps You Up at Night?This is a set of conversations in which experts and thought leaders name the shifts they see coming and the fractures in the status quo that haven’t yet made headlines.Has AI transformed your organization? Look around. The same people, the same processes, the same reporting lines. AI has changed absolutely nothing.Now look again. Knowledge work that used to cost time and money is becoming free. Software that took weeks to build takes hours. The assumptions underneath everything you do have been falsified. AI has changed absolutely everything.Eirik Knudsen, professor of strategy at NHH Norwegian School of Economics, joins me to sit inside this paradox. (I recommend you check out his Substack here).We talk about why most companies are essentially handing Copilot to the elevator operator, why the real gains come from reorganizing the system rather than optimizing the role, and what happens when one group of people has fundamentally repriced the opportunity cost of their time while another group hasn’t noticed yet. We also get into what this means for hiring, for education, and for a world where everyone’s LinkedIn profile measures exactly the wrong things.This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit jeremyghez.substack.com/subscribe

Welcome to this series from The Tsunami is Coming: What Keeps You Up at Night?This is a set of conversations in which experts and thought leaders name the shifts they see coming and the fractures in the status quo that haven’t yet made headlines.Julian Schirmer is the co-founder of OAO. He works with companies like Sanofi, AXA, and Henkel on AI-driven transformation. He's half German, half French, married to a Spaniard. And he’s tired of hearing Americans say "I'm sorry you come from Europe." His starting point is brutal: McKinsey says you need 30% employee participation for a transformation to succeed. Most companies are at 2%. Below 7%, you're burning capital. We talk about why European firms keep defaulting to caution, what happens when AI adoption runs ahead of governance (BCG has 33,000 agents globally; Sanofi had 11), what an "agentic nervous system" actually looks like inside a large organization, and whether Europe's instinct for regulation (the same instinct that produced GDPR) might be an underpriced asset in a world where Silicon Valley's political alignments can shift overnight.This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit jeremyghez.substack.com/subscribe

Welcome to this series from The Tsunami is Coming: What Keeps You Up at Night?This is a set of conversations in which experts and thought leaders name the shifts they see coming and the fractures in the status quo that haven’t yet made headlines.Julien Jourdan is a professor in the Management and Human Resources Department at HEC Paris. He studies organizational scandal: not the explosion, but the long silence that precedes it. His research, conducted with Alessandro Piazza at Rice University, grew out of the Catholic Church's sexual abuse crisis in the United States. The question that drives his work: how misconduct can persist for decades without ever becoming a scandal.It turns out that in most cases, the information was already available. People knew about misconduct but didn’t speak out. Information stayed local, circulated as rumor, and never reached the threshold where it became public outrage. Julien identifies three structural reasons for this: the social cost of speaking against your own community, the absence of bridging ties that would carry information beyond closed networks, and the sheer power of the institution accused.This conversation isn’t about the Church per se, though. Julien has spoken about other scandals like Wirecard, here. We also talked about the Epstein case, a scandal that has been “happening” for over twenty years and still isn’t fully resolved. And we talked about political polarization: the possibility that in a society fractured into tribes with no shared moral framework, scandal becomes structurally impossible. Not because misconduct is hidden, but because outrage can no longer coalesce.Food for thought on a topic that we are unlikely to exhaust anytime soon.This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit jeremyghez.substack.com/subscribe

Welcome to this series from The Tsunami is Coming: What Keeps You Up at Night?This is a set of conversations in which experts and thought leaders name the shifts they see coming and the fractures in the status quo that haven’t yet made headlines.Eric Mengus is an economist at HEC Paris, a colleague, and someone I’ve had the privilege of arguing with about public policy for years. The problem, he says, isn’t the debt itself but what the debt takes away: the ability to act when the next shock arrives. Energy prices spike, and you can’t subsidize. Defense needs surge, and you can’t invest. The instrument that democracies rely on to absorb pain has been hollowed out by decades of avoiding pain.Everyone agrees on the diagnosis. The consensus isn’t the problem. In fact, the consensus is the problem: every voter, rich or poor, is convinced that fiscal consolidation will cost them specifically. A politician who runs on fixing the debt doesn’t lose one constituency. They lose all of them.Is fiscal rigor the skeleton key to Europe, as some are tempted to argue? Give the Germans what they want (i.e. fiscal discipline), and the rest follows, or so the theory goes. Eric’s response was more interesting than the claim itself.This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit jeremyghez.substack.com/subscribe