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Hello, welcome to our podcast, the last of our current series. And having not devoted

any programmes to Brexit over the last few weeks, we had thought we might want to tackle

it this week of all weeks, but we quickly thought better of it. So instead, on a completely

unrelated theme, we want to focus we quickly thought better of it. So instead, on a completely unrelated theme,

we want to focus on uncertainty, dealing with it, dealing with our ignorance of the future.

Now, the former US Defence Secretary Robert McNamara put it well in regard to conflict. He said,

there's a wonderful phrase, the fog of war. What the fog of war means is,

war is so complex. It's beyond the ability of the human mind to comprehend all the variables.

Well, he talked about the fog of war. There's the fog of life, the fog of commerce too,

and we seem to be living through politics, which is somewhat foggy, certainly too complex for us to

comprehend all the variables. So, dealing with uncertainty, and I am joined fortunately by three people

who make a career out of thinking about it and how best to cope with it. Let's meet them now.

And my first guest is Jeremy Bentham, who is head of Shell Scenarios. And

Jeremy, you're based in The Hague. And what is your job at Shell? Well, I'm on the leadership

team of the corporate strategy of the company. But really, I help the company make decisions about

its long-term future, recognising simply the reality that there's a lot of uncertainty there.

Right. Now, Shell are looked at as a company that's very sophisticated in this area.

I mean, you'd think oil companies obviously need to be quite sophisticated in thinking about uncertainty.

And they came up with this scenarios scheme for thinking about the future.

Should just tell us what that is?

It's interesting you refer to us as an oil company

...